We're pleased to announce the availability of our V1 release of MSDN Social, TechNet Social, and Expression Social. These new sites, which have been available in preview since May 2008, make it easy for Microsoft's enormous technical community to help each other discover the best resources on any topic from across the web.

As we discussed in our peek into the launch a few weeks ago, we've improved the social bookmarking application to address both feedback we heard, and things that we just didn't have time to do the first time around.

I interviewed the PM and the lead developer for social bookmarking. Watch the interview to hear us discuss what's new, how they expect the app to be used, and what they're looking forward to working on next. (6:48)

I've also created two how-to videos to help you get the most out of social bookmarking:

MSDN & TechNet Social Bookmarking: How To, Part 1

MSDN & TechNet Social Bookmarking: How To, Part 2

Here's a complete list of what's available in this release:

• Organize your bookmarks online. Online bookmarking is useful even if you don't care about everyone else's contributions. You can store your bookmarks online so they're available from any computer, and organize them by more flexible tags instead of in folders.
• Discover popular resources on any topic. For example, the hot Hyper-V topic now has a filterable, living database of the most popular links related to Hyper-V. A new feature for this release is an RSS feed for any view of bookmarks. Here's the feed for new Hyper-V bookmarks. If you find a great site on this or any other topic, use the bookmarklet to tag it with the topic name (e.g. "hyperv" and/or "deployment"). As everyone jumps in to contribute, we'll collectively build a living database of the best links on technical topics from across the web. As of the launch, 40% of our bookmarks are not on Microsoft domains.
• Find users and subscribe to their feed. For example, take a look at Mike Gannotti's list of Sharepoint bookmarks… would it be a good idea to follow what Mike is bookmarking? Just go to Mike's profile page and subscribe to the feed of all his bookmarks and forums posts. A good way to find users like you is to use the "saved by X people" dropdown next to a bookmark that interests you, and clicking on their user name to reach their profile page.
• Feeds of bookmarks from experts are now appearing in a number MSDN Dev Centers and TechNet Tech Centers. See John Martin's post from last week for details on how our new social features are getting baked into the sites.
• Show off your expertise. The redesigned profile page brings your profile and your contributions together in one place. Here's mine.
• Import your favorites from Internet Explorer or Firefox, or import your bookmarks from Delicious. You can do this on the Tools page.
• Add a bookmarking widget to your blog so that others can save your pages to MSDN/TechNet. You can see my widget on the right side of my blog. Find the code for adding the widget on the Tools page. (Note, this is only available in English until October.)
• Available in 12 languages (English, French, German, Spanish, Brazilian-Portuguese, Russian, Japanese, Korean, Traditional and Simplified Chinese, Italian, and Czech): When you save bookmarks using a localized bookmarking site, that bookmark is only visible on the localized site. This allows a regional community to build their own unique database of language-specific bookmarks.

As always, we are eager to hear your feedback. Chime in here on our blogs or in the forums.