The other choices included sharepoint, but at the time we started looking into this it was the last version so it didn’t seem the right choice. But the latest version actually is very scaleable and has some fascinating social networking features out of the box.

In regards to use of Passport any site we develop or sponsor is required to use it. I can actually understand the weaknesses of Passport, but objectively there is a benefit in that it allows you to have one authentication method across many sites. But the larget reason we are required to use it is for privacy.

It’s difficult to respond to comments about us utilizing content for our own use (we don’t), or the feeling that we are trying to dominate the community. Check out the working groups in there now. How many ms-competitive ones do you see(a lot)? We really are not controlling this. But having been outside of Microsoft most of my career I can understand the perception. We’ll have to disprove this with time.

We’re taking the issues you all point out one at a time and working the kinks out. Thanks for the feedback.

I understand that Community Server runs on .NET, which may explain why other MS-affiliated sites run on Community Server and not other social network platform templates like phpFox. Basically what I’m wondering is what sold you on Community Server compared to its competitors.

Are there any other .NET based platforms that you think are noteworthy?

Stuart
http://www.earnersblog.com

My comment was removed. So, it’s not only Microsoft removing their comments, as you can see.

We actually have plans in the coming weeks to roll out the functionality you refer to, seeing other posts by users. It’s really using the search, populated with a specific users id. Good to know this is useful. In fact, this area (the social networking) is likely where much of our effort will be – unless you steer us in the other direction.

In regards to the tagline, that’s actually just for fun. The intention was to have something an IT Pro would get, but the general public would be confused by. We’ll likely take it down at some point. Somebody inside the communit noted that IP v4 is old and we should be using ::1 My reply – once everyone agrees the site is non-Microsoft centric and has the functionality you desire we’ll upgrade our tagline!

Michael: Yeah, we did intend to launch it. But honestly we didn’t expect this much of a response! The intention was to roll it out so we can start getting user input on where to take it from here. I will admit, there are some kinks and we’re actively striving to kill those. We’re resolving issues that are minor like layout, or functional issues that we though made sense but the community is telling us is idiotic right away. But at the same time we want to make sure we build something that our audience wanted so we wanted to get it into their hands as fast as possible. I think we’ll put a beta tag on the banner Like any large company don’t mix up the fact that we’re not the whole company working on this. But we are a small yet scrapy group who isn’t driven by revenue but satisfaction.

I love the dialogue and will keep coming back here to get comments. And we’ll keep improving it until you all feel it’s representative of what you want in an IT focused community!

Thanks.

Also I personally really don’t think that 127.0.0.1 for IT pros is so good.
Why not rather write it out and say “home for IT pros”, “the community for IT pros”, “the IT pros network” ..
127.0.0.1 makes it a bit nosy I think.
But honestly I didn’t even note that part until Amit has mentioned it – so most others won’t either.

The goal – I’m on the IT Pro audience marketing team. Our objective is satisfaction, we survey the IT audience twice a year, and in our surveys lack of support for IT Pro community was a big issue. So this is 1.0 (ok, let’s call it beta) on working to solve this. We were told by those we surveyed (a lot of people btw) that the IT audience doesn’t get community support online from Microsoft. But from a personal perspective, I think there are 100’s of community sites, it’s just they are all for developers not for the IT audience.

Functionality – yeah, we do have a ways to go but it’s functional and it’s going to keep getting better. We’re still building, but I think we have to lay a basic foundation. Initial focus was on the working group concept. We heard that IT Pros differ from developers in their need to have more trusted networks. So we enabled the ability to create private working groups. And we tried to simplify the way you work with forums. Postings are made from one interface, you can add RSS feeds into the group and take the content out. Now we’re building on top of that and we want you, the IT audience, to tell us what to build. Hardware for sale forums so you can buy / sell used racks? IT Managers, we’re aiming to help you too since there isn’t much at all out there for that role and not all IT jobs are technical. Social networking, I’ve been in this industry for a fair bit of time (and little of it in Microsoft) and networking is extremely important. Especially in an industry with so much project work. We’re going to keep building there.

The number of groups is actually the number created by the current members. We’re not creating those, you are. And talking to yourself as of right now means talking to 16,000 registered members most of whom registered in the last five days. Also, check out how many Linux user groups there are. If you want to talk about Linux then go ahead! Seriously, it’s your community.

The goal is to make this specific to IT. So yeah, we could go open a form inside Live Spaces. But how would we support social networking specific to this community? How would we allow private groups where you can share scripts? This isn’t a new community platform, it’s a community intended for IT. That’s why our tagline makes sense to you, but I’m confident if you don’t know what it means you likely shouldn’t be there.

The platform – The site is actually built on Community Server, but we’ve made some significant enhancements so it’s not just a set of fixed forums. We looked at Sharepoint but the last version didn’t support our needs. This new release might but we’re not re-platforming for a while.

Comments, good, bad, ugly and even a positive one welcome – michward@microsoft.com Help us define what this should be so you can make it yours.

We also have a forum inside Aggreg8 for posting comments: http://aggreg8....es/default.aspx

Thanks!

Microsoft on Friday launched what it bills as a social networking site for IT professionals, called Aggreg8. The company aims for the site to become a MySpace-like forum for developers to share scripts, tools, or best practices, or even to just connect…

Still, Microsoft is trying to brand this as a MySpace for IT folks. That’s probably not the best way to market this — particularly since the MySpace feature set isn’t there. SharePoint, in my opinion (which is what the site is built on) is not ready as an Internet-facing solution.

But their social network still sucks.

- Jawad (Shuzak)

“127.0.0.1 is the standard IP address used for a loopback network connection.
This means that if you try to connect to 127.0.0.1, you are immediately looped back to your own machine.
Convincing newbie’s to connect to 127.0.0.1 is a frequent joke on the Internet.”

Found that on some website when I searched for the IP address on their logo