Microsoft's Kid Mobs.
Thanks to a bundle of bizdev chutzpah with a great name, Tammy Savage, Microsoft is developing something that may actually seem cool to 16-year-olds of all ages. Steven Levy describes the evolution of Threedegrees, a p2p smartmobbish application brewed by Microsoft's NetGen Lab, which is really a bunch of college just-graduates living in a big house, Real World style, helping Microsoft figure out how people who've grown up in a networked world want to take communication to the next level. Threedegrees, the result of this jam session, allows users to from mobs - er, ad hoc posses - of up to ten persons, with the theoretical possibility that they will "perform shared tasks," as the Jupiter analyst quoted in CNet's story says. Right, tasks... play tunes, chug virtual beer, that sort of thing. As Levy describes it, this is Microsoft's first anti-production tool... when a beta was added to servers within Microsoft, "productivity took a nose dive." Cory Doctorow says "...the project sounds kind of neat, until you realize that it's got an assload of DRM built into it and, in the end, does less than Napster did." (Thanks, Phred!) [Smart Mobs]
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