Rumors about Microsoft's Wallop have been greatly exaggerated, mostly due to the blogging community's inability to penetrate the site's invitation-only front door.
Speculation about Wallop began immediately following the company's low-key announcement at last month's Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles that it was working on a tool that incorporates blogging and social-networking capabilities. Some observers surmised it was a blogging tool for the 2006 launch of Microsoft's Longhorn operating system. Others suggested it was knowledge-management software, à la Lotus Notes, slated for the second quarter of 2004.
In fact, Wallop is Microsoft's venture into the red-hot social-networking arena, using the common Microsoft tack of piecing together existing technologies and packaging them for the novice user. Those technologies include Friendster-style social-networking capabilities, super-simplistic blogging tools, moblogging, wikis and RSS feeds, all based on Microsoft's Instant Messenger functionality.
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