Microsoft is not going to the social networking craze pass it by.
So get ready for the latest from the software giant in the form of a social bookmarking service aimed at developers and other members of its tech-focused communities, the Microsoft Development Network (MSDN), TechNet and Expression.
In early September, Microsoft (NADAQ: MSFT) plans to open access to those sites, making the social bookmarking application that it previewed in May generally available.
“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,” John Martin, Microsoft’s lead evangelist for servers and tools online, wrote in a blog post.
The social bookmarking app will layer in a collaborative feature to Microsoft’s tech-focused online communities, where users can participate in discussion forums and find educational resources to help them various tech projects, such as sample code, online tutorials and training videos.
Microsoft plans to introduce several new features with the September release, including a subscription service that will enable users to receive RSS feeds of specific tags or the submissions of other bookmarkers.
The upgrade will also provide an importing feature for people to sync up their other bookmarking services, such as Yahoo’s Delicious, as well as import their bookmarks from Internet Explorer browser.
Also planned is a bookmarking widget for people to place on their Web sites or blogs, enabling visitors to add the page to their social bookmarks on Microsoft’s three communities. That feature could give site owners and bloggers a traffic lift, as the bookmarked page would be published on the social feeds emanating from Microsoft’s global sites.
Finally, the September release will expand its foreign-language support. The new version will be available in Czech, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and both a simplified and traditional version of Chinese.