Microsoft Watch: “Four former Microsoft executives have banded together to form a new company that is developing social-networking software and Web services that will build on top of .Net and Microsoft’s forthcoming Longhorn Windows operating system.” The principals behind Graw Group include Jeremy Jaech and Ted Johnson, the co-founders of Visio. Dennis Tevlin and Peter Mullen are the other two members of the group.

Today’s New York Times tackles the question whether people will pay to get friends. The article missed a couple important points about social networks beyond the typical sales, dating, or job lead. Social networks also determine product purchases, such as a book or DVD, and can enable a secondary market for exchange of such goods on a sale or loan basis. Some large companies like Microsoft have intranets and mailing lists that cover topics similar to Tribe.net‘s tribes or Orkut‘s communities. There are also internal book recommendations and the sale of second-hand goods. Unsolicited e-mail is a hot topic and social networks provide an easy to obtain safe sender affiliation. If you take the determination of relationship strength used by Spoke and combine it with a hosted service such as Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail, or Google’s rumored offering you have a new spam filter customized to each user. I already receive unsolicited messages on Orkut advertising various things, but these messages are usually sent to a broad list instead of friend-of-a-friend. The thought that Match.com and Monster will integrate features into their offering and win the social networking came seems to ignore the “not overly trying” aspect that made Friendster a success. Friendster grew because a member of a group of friends joined and invited all of his or her friend so they were not in cyberspace isolation. No one had to admit they wanted something more in love, or a new job, they came along and performed in front of a comfortable audience: established friends. Social networking will excel when these informal networks are established and there is an opportunity to branch out and explore different interests you may have. It may be legal advice, love, lust, or a new baseball team, but users will be more comfortable establishing an identity and expanding it within their own comfort levels and controlling the publicity of their actions.

A laundry room operator in Boston, Mac-Gray, has started installing a Web based tracking system for users of its washing machine facilities. You can monitor the minutes left on a cycle, see who is waiting to use a particular machine, and check usage data for an entire building’s facilities.

Randy Cohen, Ethicist for the New York Times magazine, says it is ethical to use an open WiFi network for casual Internet usage. Time Warner Cable disagrees and encourages you to personally sign up for their services.

Last night I attended the birthday party of Orkut Buyukkokten, which he cleverly double billed as an Orkut launch party so Google would pay for everyone. We were downstairs at suite one8one for most of the night. Interesting mix of people, including some Tribe.net crashers. The video projectors at the club were playing content licensed under Creative Commons. Suite one8one had no beer on tap and served me Guinness in a can: an act of sacrilege to an Irishman. This was my first social networks gathering. It was interesting to try to figure out how you may be connected through friends of friends to the person I was talking to. Some people had Hiptop devices and other geeky things and they introduced themselves and queried their network for me right away. The music was an interesting mix. I think I heard 50 Cent mixed into The Safety Dance.

Stephen Wolfram is offering A New Kind of Science online for free. Wired wrote a long article in June 2002 about the book and the years of isolationist thinking that went into its creation.

Tonight I attended an event featuring Eric Rudder of Microsoft. The Commonwealth Club of California gave Eric an award for being a person who will shape the upcoming century. I sat in the second row with my Tablet PC and have the whole hour recorded, if only I can clean up the sound from my built-in mic. It was interesting to hear Eric speak about software engineering as a profession in its infancy and therefore very prone to making mistakes. Brown’s computer science department will celebrate its 25th anniversary this year. Ten years ago computer science degrees were still not common and it was hard to imagine the usage of things like networking today. Eric was involved in the OS/2 and eventually the Windows networking groups when he first started working for Microsoft in the early 90s. He mentioned that Windows 3.11 was the first networked OS and was created by 7 guys with an idea about connecting data. Compare that to the thousands of people working on Longhorn and you can see how software is just starting to evolve. I asked Eric why Microsoft has stayed out of the social networking and personal publishing arena, two of the hot topics of the past 12 months. It seems to me that both have the potential to generate a lot of server sales as well as services. I also asked why he only has two blog entries. Eric responded that he has too many other things to do that would benefit the community more than a blog entry. He oversees microsoft.com and helped created RSS feeds over the past year. He has been working to open up MSDN to third party tools. He wanted to post some blog entries to let his employees know that it is okay to blog and there is no company position against the practice. I asked again about social networking software such as the emergence of friend-of-a-friend networks and how they might be used to define trusted communities to assist in problems such as spam. He said he was familiar with the format (I assume he was referring to FOAF instead of hosted networks like Friendster or Orkut) but had not really looked into it and thought it better left to groups such as MSN. Longhorn was mentioned twice. Once as a solution to some security problems and a new way of thinking of relationships (WinFS) and again as Microsoft preparing to beat Linux on the server. Overall I was not too impressed. I had just listened to a senior VP in charge of “evangelizing the extended Microsoft platform” and I was less impressed with Microsoft than before. The employees of Intel, IBM, and some journalists in the audience I spoke with afterwards agreed. The perception was that Microsoft seems to be slipping in innovation and the fact that Longhorn keeps getting pushed back will help the rest of the world look to other platform choices.

Chris Pratley writes about bug fixing within Microsoft and how Watson, a software reporting tool, has changed their debugging process. He follows up with a second post about attention to detail and how hardware obscurities sometimes lead to buggy software.