It's Not Just About Bookmarking
I've been meaning to blog more often, and some of the questions I'm getting about our new Social Bookmarks app have given me a good excuse to talk about the thinking behind the Social Platform.
This blog post started with some tough questions from a senior and well-respected guy within Microsoft who saw our new Social Bookmarks app for the first time today. He asked, "Who needs another bookmarking app? And why did we build a new bookmarking solution for MSDN and TechNet rather than Windows Live Favorites or Sharepoint?"
The answer is actually more about tagging than it is bookmarking. The two concepts are used almost interchangably--every social bookmarking site includes tagging, and most tagging applications are fundamentally about bookmarking.
But for the Social Platform, tagging is about much more than bookmarking.
Tagging is deeply integrated into our platform strategy, and we're using our centralized tagging and feeds service (called Discovery Services) internally to power all sorts of interesting scenarios for MSDN, TechNet and Expression. Indeed, tagging is so central to our strategy that we would be building our central tagging service even if we chose not to build a Social Bookmarks app.
For example, take the feeds that are everywhere on our sites. (Note that I didn't say "RSS Feed"--yes, all our feeds are available via RSS, but feeds are not always RSS and they're useful with or without RSS.) For example, consider the C# headlines feed on the C# DevCenter. To make a news item show up in this feed, our site managers simply define the item in Discovery Services with a title, description and URL (and some other metadata) and tag it with C#. That's it. The feed is a dynamic query for all items for that our site managers have tagged with C#.
But the real power is that every item can have multiple tags. Take, for instance, the top headline (as of tonight) on the C# DevCenter: "Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack (SP) 1 Beta Now Available". To include this same item in the .NET Framework headlines feed, our site managers need simply tag it with .NET too. This is way easier than the process they've had to follow to date, which is manually placing the item in both feeds. The new approach saves lots of work for site managers.
MSDN, TechNet and Expression are built around Centers and applications like the Library, Forums, Code Gallery, Blogs and Bookmarking. Centers are portal pages that help users to find their way around our sites. All of the content shown in a portal page are either feeds or fragments of manually authored content. And every feed and every fragment can be--you guessed it--tagged.
In addition, our platform has the idea of "related links," which is an ordered list of links that we (that is, Microsoft) define for a tag. Using this idea, we can suggest links related to a currently selected tag. For example, we would likely define C# DevCenter, C# Library, C# Forums, C# Blogs and C# Downloads as related links for the C# tag.
If you're still with me, you may be getting an idea of where I'm going: We can automatically generate portal pages using tags.
It's really expensive to manually create portal pages, so we only produce a few hundred Centers dedicated to Microsoft products, technologies and other important topics like security. So automating creation of these Centers would be a good thing because it would free up valuable people to add value in other ways.
But it gets better: While it's nice to automate something that's currently manual, the real value is that we can automatically create a portal for ANY tag. So you want to see the portal for the Ajax tag? How about the Exchange Virus Scanning API (VSAPI)? No problem...just click either of the Ajax and VSAPI tags.
Cool, eh?
Now that I've talked about how we're using tags to create dynamic feeds and portals, I should return to Social Bookmarking.
I mentioned above how our site managers create feeds simply by tagging items in Discovery Services. It turns out the exact same thing is true for Bookmarks, only users are doing the tagging rather than Microsoft employees. The added bonus is that there are millions of users and Bookmarks are Social, which means that we can infer popularity by how many users bookmark and tag a given item, and by how often a particular tag is applied to one or more items.
Our goal is to get tens of thousands of users to bookmark and tag content on our sites and elsewhere on the Internet. (To put this in perspective, there are tens of millions of visits to MSDN and TechNet every month.) Every bookmark and tag provides information that can help other users, and we can use the collective wisdom of many users to surface the content most likely to be interesting to users interested in a particular topic.
While our site managers create Microsoft-recommended feeds for official announcments and other topics we think our users will find interesting, Social Bookmarks leads to social tag clouds and feeds that are democratically organized by the community itself. My hope is that put into this context you see that Social Bookmarks represents the social aspect of our overall tagging strategy.
And this explains why we've built our own Social Bookmarks application: It's not just about bookmarking.
