Microsoft’s STO (Server & Tools Online) team released a new online site today called MSDN Social bookmarks.  This is a Social Bookmarking site where users can add bookmarks, tag them in various ways, share them with others, etc.  This new site is part of a greater initiative by the team to create a common social platform:

Some of the finer points of this diagram have yet to be explained, but the revamp of MSDN Forums, Codeplex, and some of the classic MSDN features we have known and loved are all part of the “bigger” picture.

I am excited about the potential impact this site can have on the Developer Community.  It should fit in nicely with the Forums, MSDN Library, and other sites.  User’s will be able to follow tags on their interested topics, sites can link to tag lists, people can follow the bookmarks of subject matter experts etc.

The concept isn’t new to most of us. We have seen Social Bookmarking sites before.  Delicious was founded in 2003 and has all of the same basic functionality.  According to wikipedia, Delicious currently has over 50 million users and sports over 150 million uniquely bookmarked Urls. I have been an avid user myself since sometime in 2005 (the same year it was purchased by Yahoo!).  Delicious underwent a huge redesign on July 31, 2008 and how has a series of add-ins for Firefox and Internet Explorer.

However, the concept of Social Bookmarking may be new to some of you. So before I go any further, I should probably define it and list some of the advantages and weak points of using a Social Bookmarking site over of just using Internet Explorer’s (IE) Favorites or Firefox’s Bookmarks.

What is Social Bookmarking:

Social Bookmarking is a method for Internet users to store, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web pages on the Internet with the help of metadata. In a social bookmarking system, users save links to web pages that they want to remember and/or share. These bookmarks are usually public, and can be saved privately, shared only with specified people or groups, shared only inside certain networks, or another combination of public and private domains. The allowed people can usually view these bookmarks chronologically, by category or tags, or via a search engine.

 (Source: Wikipedia)

Advantages:

1. Bookmarks can have a title and description.  Most application bookmarks don’t allow any addition description of the content.
2. Bookmarks can have multiple tags.  Instead of putting bookmarks in a hierarchical folder, you simply add tags to them.  You can then sort by tag.  The nice thing about this is that if you have a bookmark that spans multiple subjects, you don’t need to decide which folder it should go into and forget where you put it.
3. Bookmarks are accessible online.  If you store them in IE or Firefox, you can’t access them from another computer.
4. Bookmarks can easy be shared by others.  This is where the word “social” starts to come into play.
5. Users can follow Bookmarks based on a tag.
6. Users can follow Bookmarks created by others.

Weak Points:

1. There is no standard on tags.  Because of this things can be improperly tagged or there could be redundant tags.  Examples are PDC, PDC08, PDC2008, MicrosoftPDC, etc which could all represent Microsoft PDC 2008.
2. Spammers have used Social Bookmarking sites as another means of Search Engine Optimization (SEO).  The more times a site is bookmarked, the higher it is returned in some searches.  So some tags can be flooded with spam.
3. Some Social Bookmarking sites may not allow “private” Bookmarks.  However, even if they are private, I think that people keep their “non-work safe” bookmarks more local.

All Social Bookmarking sites share these same Advantages and Weak Points.  So why should you choose to use MSDN Social bookmarks over Delicious?  I am not going to advocate moving off Delicious just yet.  In general it is a simple design, but MSDN Social bookmarks is new, while Delicious has been out a long time.  However, Microsoft has a good track record for scalability and this site should be highly stable and will only get better. I don’t really think that MSDN Social bookmarks it out to compete directly with Delicious though.  MSDN Social bookmarks is marketed to a MUCH smaller audience.  Delicious is used by anyone and everyone to bookmark anything.  MSDN Social bookmarks are targeted primarily at Microsoft Developers for bookmarking development related resources.

Here are some of the advantages I see to using MSDN Social bookmarks on top of the simple Social Bookmarking features:

1. Its developer focused.  Bookmarks are by developers for developers about development primarily with Microsoft products.  You won’t find a lot of fluff when looking at tags for help.
2. RSS feeds for tags and users.  (Most other Social Bookmarking sites have this too).  I can see adding WCF and OSLO tags to my RSS Reader.
3. Tools to import bookmarks from Firefox, IE, and Delicious.  (http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/en-US/Tools/).  There are also tools for saving bookmarks to MSDN.
4. Single sign in via your Windows Live ID.  Say what you will about Passport, but I like having a single identity throughout my MSDN Subscription, Hotmail, Forum access, Bookmarks, etc.
5. Potential for tight integration with other MSDN content and Microsoft products.  The diagram above hints at this, but we can expect bookmarks to play an even bigger role in the MSDN developer community in the coming months.  We should probably expect to see some other announcements from the team either at PDC or by the end of the year.  I wonder if this will play into this “reputation” piece they have on the diagram. I also wonder how this will play into MSDN Stars?
6. Enable social connections by users finding like minded developers.  For instance, if I am following a WCF tag and notice someone bookmarking under that tag a lot, I may seek to get to know that person better.

You have to remember, you can still use Delicious or another site for your primary bookmarking needs if you so choose.  You can even use it for all of your development bookmarks, then use the import tools to bring them into MSDN Social bookmarks .

MSDN Social Bookmarks Overview

Finding Bookmarks

The site itself looks very much like other MSDN content:

The main page shows the most popular tags by default, but gives you the ability to find or filter on more tags. The find screen allows you to look through the tags, or just start typing to find tags that start with your criteria:

Once you have your filtered list of bookmarks youc an scan them to your heart’s content. One thing I do really like is that when you are looking at a bookmark, not only can you see how many others have bookmarked that site, but there is also a nice ajax callback to display the list to you:

It is nice that they added the “Report” flag as well.  There is nothing worse than bad or inappropriate content filling up these sites.  I hope that the moderators for the bookmarks are diligent and proactive.

Finding Users

You can also easily search and find by username.  Hopefully they will add other ways to find users.  Perhaps based on state/region/city or area of expertise:

Creating Bookmarks

The “Add Bookmark” control is very basic right now.  Hopefully they will add in some additional ajax support like what Delicious does.  If i am using a URL that is already been used, it should start to show related tags used for that URL:

I am hoping there will be some good documentation for the REST interface for adding bookmarks.  This will help the community come up with better tools.  They have added a little snippet of html that you can add to your page though to help others bookmark your site on MSDN Social bookmarks:

<script type="text/javascript"
    src="http://Services.social.microsoft.com/widgets/bookmark.jss?type=0&brand=Msdn&locale=1033"></script>

Conclusion

It will be some time before we really see how this site gets used, but I am planning on importing over some of my Delicious Bookmarks and giving this site a chance.  I am excited about some of the developer community possibilities that can be derived from this site. Overall, the site is very good for a first release.  I expect to see improvements over time. Here is what I believe the STO team needs to do to rise above the competition:

1. Build Tools. Build tools for easy integration into IE and Firefox.  These tools could be a lot like the Delicious tools, but could also include things such as IE 8 Accelerators.
2. Integration into Visual Studio.  If I am looking for a help on a topic, I should be able to easily find Bookmarks with related tags.
3. Integration into MSDN Library.  Much like Visual Studio integration, MSDN Library resources should link to bookmarks with relative tags.
4. Embrace the competition.  What would be better than to have a link on each tag page that could take you directly to Delicious to search for more tags on the subject?  This would help the developers find more resources and bridge any gap they have with Delicious.  I am sure they would want to get approval from Yahoo first before doing this though.
5. Open the API or at least provide some good documentation.  This is probably only a matter of time.  Microsoft is pretty good about documentation and they will want developers to make the post of this site.
6. Keep up with Development.  Hopefully we will continue to see great features added to this over time.  The last thing we want is yet another product that is developed, but loses a lot of its’ momentum.  There are a lot of integration and improvements that could be made over time.  I can think of a number of mini-gadgets they could build.
7. Get the site listed on social aggregators like FriendFeed and Plaxo Pulse.
8. Continue to market the site and show its value to the community.
9. Advertise the most popular bookmark feeds for people.  For instance, if someone like Scott Hanselman uses the site and starts creating a lot of bookmarks, showcase his feed for other users to follow.  This will help people find the value in following others.
10. Add Tag Clouds.  I love these things.   They give a great visual view off the data.

I encourage everyone to at least check out this site.  Please post your thoughts or comments on this here or directly to the STO team.  Microsoft has always been pretty responsive to comments and “creative” criticism.

Resources

Interview with John Martin about the changes coming to MSDN and Social Bookmarking:

http://8zucnw.bay.livefilestore.com/y1pFn6K0FOcN62M6-cyRDgSC3eLks36OEvuV75X5UgFo-GZwKy8P0LeYGplzkFhvvPp3Qn-rkNfcag/CdnDevsJohnMartin.mp3?download

Interview with PM/dev:

http://video.msn.com/video.aspx?vid=312b773d-a0a5-4e37-8a5e-af7554c647e4

How-to use MSDN Social bookmarks Video Part 1:

http://video.msn.com/video.aspx?vid=dadc2865-0aec-4f23-8d70-76a4b8f8012e

How-to use MSDN Social bookmarks Video Part 2:

http://video.msn.com/video.aspx?vid=81def583-f4f0-4b7f-8061-fc32e189bc7f

Links

John Martin’s Announcement: https://blogs.technet.com/johmar/archive/2008/09/08/now-live-social-bookmarking-v-1-0-for-microsoft-msdn-technet-and-expression-sites.aspx

Chris Slemp’s Announcement: http://blogs.msdn.com/cslemp/archive/2008/09/09/launched-social-bookmarking-v1-on-msdn-and-technet-video.aspx

Questions or comments about MSDN Social bookmarks?  Visit the Social Bookmarks Discussion Forums.

My many months of contributions to Microsoft’s MSDN message forums haven’t gone unnoticed.  It was less than a week ago that I finally achieved 5/5 stars, and yesterday I received an email thanking me for my work and asking if I would like to take on a more involved role a forum moderator.  I accepted the honor and promised to take this role seriously.  I help out on the forums because I enjoying helping others learn and learning myself in the process.  I hope that I can keep this up even more a moderator.

Moderators are granted the power to delete, edit, and merge posts.  Moderators can also mark posts as “Answers” which is probably the most important role.  Many people who ask questions, don’t mark the answers that are made.  Marking a post as answered not only gives credit to the answerer, but also causes these posts to show up with a higher rating in search engines.  This can help others who are searching the Internet for their own questions.

Please visit the MSDN Forums (or the new Forums) if you have questions about Microsoft products.  There are many different forum topics and thousands of people who can help and share insights.  While you are visiting, feel free to help out others as well.  As a  community site dedicated to helping everyone learn, it needs your involvement and support.  If you want to get more involved in the community, are seeking to test your skills, or just want to help others, this is the place for you.

Everyone has goals in their lives: some big, some small.  Many times people make goals just because the challenge is there such as beating a video game, running a marathon, or going for Olympic gold .  Early this year I laid out a number of professional goals that I wanted to accomplish this year.  Many of them I have reached, but one of them would take more work than the others, and I wasn’t sure I could hit.  I wanted to reach 5 out of 5 stars on Microsoft’s MSDN message forums.  These forums are setup by Microsoft for people in the community to ask questions about Microsoft technology.   There are a lot of people out there doing development who need assistance, but don’t know where turn.  And no one can know everything about all of Microsoft’s products, so even the most technically savvy people need help when learning something new.  The forums are a venue for asking these questions and getting response from the community. The great thing about this community site is that anyone can attempt to answer the questions even if they aren’t Microsoft employees.  This gives everyone a chance to share knowledge and learn from one another.  So I set out to help out on these forums and see if I could learn some things myself.

As with many “social” sites, there are little rewards for contributions.  MSDN Forums offers contribution points that are automatically given out based on a user’s level of activity and helpfulness on the forums.  These points turn into stars that appear under a persons name once that have reached a set number of points.  Up to 5 stars that can be earned.  I am ecstatic to report that I have finally reached the maximum level of 5 out of 5 stars.   It is quite an honor that takes an amazing amount of time to accomplish. There aren’t many out there that have reached this level yet, but there are a handful who have, and I am sure there will be many more after me.

I snapped the following screenshot after I finally broke 15,001 participation points.  I had a beer to celebrate and my wife congratulated me.  She, more than anyone, knows how many hours and evenings I have put in over the last many months helping people and gathering up these points.   I have to give her a lot of credit for letting me spend so much time on this.  I probably averaged 10 hours a week just on the forums (some weeks much more). These stars are a nice “badge of honor”, but at the end of the day, they don’t buy you anything tangible. The real joy is knowing that you are helping out others and learning in the process.

Getting 5 stars isn’t an easy task. As previously mentioned, points are accumulated for activity on the forums, and each star requires an ever increasing number of points.  According to the MSDN Forums FAQ here are how points are awarded:

And here are how many points are required to get to the next star level:

An average response to a question takes at least 2 posts.  So there is around 4 points per question average.  If the user marks your post as an answer, that turns into 14 points.  Sometimes people mark your posts as helpful and you can turn that into 19 points.  However, I have never sees posts marked as bug workarounds, or bug validations.  The annoying part of working on the forums is that about 80% of the time, the person who you helped doesn’t mark the question as answered.  This not only means that you don’t get points, but also means that this post won’t really help others in the future.  How many times have you searched for something .net related and got back a result that was on a MSDN Forum page?  I think I get back MSDN Forums pages about 99% of the time.  If these posts are marked as “answered”, then other users can work off the solutions.  Fortunately, there are quite a few Microsoft employees that help monitor the forums and do come in and help keep posts marked as “answered”.  However, they still miss around 30% of the answers.    I am only saying this so that if you start playing on forums, you know what to expect and don’t get too frustrated.

My primary reason for becoming active on the forums at first was to help me come up with blog ideas.  It is a great way to see where people are struggling with a technology and where the gap in documentation is. Early this year, I was active on over a dozen forums.  I racked up a large number of points fast, but the time commitment was too great.  Since, I have been primarily focused on Windows Communication Foundation (Wcf) right at work at speaking engagements, I  have been most active on the Wcf forum.  They keep a chart at the bottom of each forum to show the top answers for a 30 day period.

So now that I have reached this goal, what is next?  I am not going to stop my participation.  I have come to enjoy them too much, and I have found its a great way for me to learn too.  I may cut back a bit on the amount of time and so that I can concentrate on producing quality blog posts again.  Once I hit 4 stars I was got more active on the forums and put a lot of things on the back burner.  I need to regain some kind of balance in my life again now.  Who knows, one day with enough participation and patience, I might get an email asking me to become a moderator on the forums.  I am not going to hold my breath for this, but that would probably be the pinnacle of my MSDN Forums experience.

I’ll leave you with two closing pleas:

• If you know a lot about a particular Microsoft technology, I encourage you to jump on the forums and start helping others.  I am sure you will find it as rewarding as I have.  It may even help gain you some exposure.  About 30% of my blog traffic comes from links I have placed on the forums.  It important to help out others as others have helped out you.
• If you have any questions about Microsoft technology, I encourage you to also jump on the forums and start asking questions.  There are a lot of bright and eager people out there who can help you.  And if you have a Wcf question, I would love to help you out on the forums!

BTW, Nicholas Allen has a blog post about how to get help with Wcf: http://blogs.msdn.com/drnick/archive/2008/03/17/how-to-get-help-with-wcf.aspx.  In this post he specifically mentions and links to the MSDN Forums for Wcf.  Nick is currently probably the most active and prolific Wcf blogger right now.  If you are interested in Wcf and don’t subscribe to his blog, here is a link to his RSS feed: http://blogs.msdn.com/drnick/rss.xml.