So Microsoft now has its own version of an online community like MySpace, but with a major difference – this one is for techies only. Aggreg8 as it is called, has the tagline 127.0.0.1 for IT Pros. (Read here: what is 127.0.0.1). You can login using the MS Passport (if you have Hotmail / MSN account) and start your own group, or join one. There are groups for various development and user communities. I just logged in I could not get the time zone for India (GMT+5.5). There was already one post in the forum regarding this accompanied by the usual India bashing (Yawn) by one of the ‘Saviours of the World’.
Last week, I was invited to an online seminar on evolution and future of SourceForge. One competition to Sourceforge which was mentioned therein was Google Code. Sourceforge has a community of more than a million users and hundreds of thousands of open source projects, dead ones notwithstanding.
So MS also seems keen on tapping the developer community resource for its own ends. (read the Aggreg8 Terms of Use to understand this). MS is as usual late on this front – but we will wait and watch.