In what seems like an absurdly weird move on their behalf, Microsoft announced a ’social network for IT Pros’ over the weekend dubbed Aggreg8. The site is just a regular social network but aimed specifically at IT Pros and its MSDN community (for a long list of niche social networks, check out this post from July). The domains aggreg8.net and aggreg8.com were bought from Philip Roche, the creator of an RSS reader with the same name.
Aggreg8 aims to be the MySpace for people involved within the IT and computer industry. There, users can build their network, create and join ‘working groups’ (there’s one for example for Office 2007, Vista Desktop Issues, SQL Server, and PHP), and benefit from the community discussions and debates that take place. I think their tagline ‘127.0.0.1 for IT Pros” sums it up well.
I think with the growing number of broad social networks and their scattered attempts to form niche communities and groups within, the rise of such social networks will be inevitable if they’re not already. The altering thing about such services are indeed the content, community and discussions they comprise of and not the technology behind them — as a result, Aggreg8 is actually very well made. It’s managed to keep the core features of a social network while the active discussions and networking takes place.
I keep it a point to write only about interesting services and those which will be key in the next generation of web technologies, and as much of an uninnovative, cloned, cliched, and uncreative idea Aggreg8 is, it’s brilliant on Microsoft’s behalf. They’ve been actively involved in keeping together the IT community of the world, and this is a step that is very much up with its times.
[tags]Aggreg8, Microsoft, Social Networks[/tags]
