Microsoft Launch Social Bookmarking Service for IT Professionals

There is a preview version only, but the release version will come soon, I think it looks very promising. Here is a quote from their blog: Microsoft is opening up the MSDN, TechNet, and Expression sites to the community, so that technical professionals can better connect with each other, share knowledge, and succeed. Tagging - and especially social bookmarking - are essential ingredients for making this happen.

Back in May, just before TechEd North America, we released a preview version of our new social bookmarking app for MSDN, for TechNet, and for Expression. Since then, thousands of technical professionals from around the world have begun using it to save their web favorites online, share them with others, see what other technical pros are favoriting, and connect with others. We also got a lot of great feedback on the app itself (thank you!) and I'm happy to say that in early September, we plan on releasing a full version of the app - v 1.0. Here are some new things to look for:

• Subscribe to Tags or People: Find a tag you want to follow? Or a fellow bookmarker that bookmarks really good stuff? With the new app, it will be easy to get an RSS subscription for that tag or person (as in, click the orange button).
• Browse & Find Users: Search or browse to find people by their display name (e.g., mine is "johmar") and other criteria.
• Import Tools: Recognizing that a lot of people already have favorites saved in their browsers or in other social bookmarking sites, the new app will provide a tool for importing your favorites from Microsoft Internet Explorer and from Delicious.
• Bookmarking Widget: If you have your own blog or other website, our new bookmarking widget will make it easy for people to bookmark your pages directly to their social bookmarks on MSDN, TechNet, or Expression. You'll get traffic from Microsoft when your bookmarked page is published in "social feeds" on our global sites.

Availability in 12 Languages: With the September release, the social bookmarking application will be available in Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), Czech, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish. http://blogs.technet.com/johmar/archive/2008/08/21/preview-full-release-of-social-bookmarking-on-msdn-and-technet.aspx

I seem to be among the first to add their bookmarking widget to my blog. Actually, I have to create this widget on my own, because their widgets will be shipped with the 1.0 version only. Here is the code of my widget:

<a
  href="http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/bookmarks/en-US/action/Create/s/E/?url=___URL___&ttl=___TITLE___"
>
  Bookmark on MSDN
</a>

I think everyone should try it. Just navigate your browser to - http://social.microsoft.com/bookmarks/