Infinity and Beyond

…and even fewer people care about it than when Windows 7 was announced.  The Techland blog from Fortune today talked about the new face lift given to Windows Live social networking.  Four years ago Microsoft tried its hand at social networking my releasing Windows Live “Spaces”.  Spaces was a place to blog, share your photos, and do other generic social networking things.  It was supposed to be something to drive large amounts of traffic and new users to the Windows Live platform which had recently relaunched (think MSN Messenger to “Live Messenger”).  Spaces never really caught on, just as the whole of Windows Live hasn’t ever really caught on.  

That being said, MS is going to make the new social networking service more like Facebook and have lots of status updates…which can integrated with a lot of other accounts you might have–allowing your status to be updated automagically when you write a blog post or a review or something.

I highly doubt that this service is going to take off like MS hopes.  Granted it is possible for new social network sites to take off and make it big, but at this point Facebook is so ubiquitous that I feel the switching costs for most users are too high to try and bother switching over to the Live network.  That being said, MS seems to be taking the approach of making the network more about providing status updates about what you’re doing on other sites.  This could either be really great, or fail miserably.  I suppose if they linked it to Facebook status updates it could be okay.  But this service doesn’t seem to really bring anything new or innovative to the table.  But then again…when was the last time MS did something new and innovative?

And you gotta love this: 

“For its fiscal first quarter, which ended in September, Microsoft lost $480 million from its online unit. “We have to get great at the advertising business,”  Hall said.

Hrm…they have to get great at the advertising business…isn’t that why they acquired aQuantive?  One would think that $6 billion would go a long way towards being great at something….

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A movie about Mark Z. and the founding of facebook sounds like the perfect recipe for an A&E miniseries. Now that we find out it’s being written by Aaron Sorkin (The West Wing) it might have some potential. Even of Sorkin himself admits to being new to the social networking website. “I figured a good first step in my preparation would be finding out what facebook is.”

No word on a planned release date for this Columbia Pictures film.

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I hadn’t been to collegehumor.com since well, I was in college. Then a friend who is still in school posted the link to this video on his facebook page. Naturally it showed up in my ‘News Feed’ and here it is now for your enjoyment.

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Online Scrabble knock-off Scrabulous, which serves up Scrabble games on its website, over email, and on the popular social networking site Facebook, will now be getting some competition from Electronic Arts.  EA will start offering an authorized Scrabble game on Facebook.

Scrabulous has been one of the top apps used by Facebook users when Facebook opened its platform to outside developers.  EA and Hasbro, Inc. hope to take a bite out of unlicensed versions of the game.

However, the “official game” will only be licensed in the US and Canada, meaning you won’t be able to play the game in the States with your friends overseas.  Restrictions like this to me mean the official app will have a hard time dethroning Scrabulous with its 450K daily users.

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