Social Platform (aka Community Platform)

To better support new social experiences in applications like Forums and Social Bookmarks, we are investing in a new Social Platform, which will provide centralized services for User Profile, Recognition, and Tagging. By centralizing these services, MSDN and TechNet will put the individual customer at the center of the site (network) experience, increase discoverability of people and resources, and provide an integrated customer experience across the entire family of MSDN and TechNet applications.

For example, by using a single user profile across Forums, Bookmarking, and Code Gallery, a customer will only need to sign in once to engage with all those applications, and contributions made within each application will all be recognized in the same user profile. Likewise, a single tagging service allows us to improve discovery and navigation by providing customers with feeds of various resources (e.g., Code Samples, Centers, Library Articles, Forums Posts, Bookmarks, etc.) filtered by tag.

Currently the team is in the process of integrating various applications like Code Gallery and Library with the Social Platform.

We are committed to public APIs for the Social Platform and in the future we envision integration scenarios with other Microsoft sites as well as sites across the internet. 

In the next couple weeks I will publish our roadmap and/or prioritized list of platform features and capabilities so that you have a good idea of what is happening and the relative importance as we build out the platform.