Microsoft seeks more social networking involvement

soc net1 Microsoft seeks more social networking involvement Unsatisfied with their corporate involvement in social networking, Microsoft has created a brand new research group intended to take the company to social places that they have never gone before.

The new group will be known as Future Social Experiences (FUSE) and will be of a fairly high profile in Redmond, being managed by Microsoft General Manager Lili Cheng and overseen by Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie. FUSE was announced internally via email last week written by Ozzie, and is expected to start work immediately. The group is tasked with looking into how the company can extend Microsoft’s current reach into social networking, according to a PCWorld story.

Ozzie’s email about the new project contains few details, concentrating instead on the broad concepts that will guide the new research group. From his viewpoint, social networking is is about changing how people use computers, including (of course) our computer’s operating system, especially if it is windows. FUSE, then, will concentrate on those products “where ‘social’ meets sharing; where ‘social’ meets real-time; where ‘social’ meets media; where ‘social’ meets search; where ‘social’ meets the cloud plus three screens [PC, mobile device, television and online] and a world of devices.” Sounds like a big order.

Roughly parsed from corporate-speak, that also sounds like Microsoft has no intention of getting into competition with Facebook or Twitter. Instead, it sound more like the Redmond software company is looking into ways to integrate social networking into their core products, such as Windows and Office. They have already begun to do similar things in other areas, such as their Sharepoint Workspace collaboration system and their Office 2010’s Web apps. FUSE is a way to bring other new functionality to Windows and other Microsoft software, especially as they relate to social networking.

This may all turn out to be another whim on the part of His Dorkiness Steve Ballmer. On the other hand, it could move Microsoft product functionality in an entirely new direction, one which is popular with a large and growing group of users, social networking aficionados. Microsoft could be on to something here, with a way to tie its core products to the realm of social networking, where so many of the younger and savvier users of the Web spend so much time.

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Posted by Sana Iqbal on Oct 15th, 2009 and filed under Others Stuff, Technolgy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response by filling following comment form or trackback to this entry from your site