No, this isn't a joke! Microsoft have just launched their very own MySpace! Or as they put it, 'MySpace for IT Pros'! This is quite amazing, really quite amazing stuff. The service is brought to you by Microsoft Tech Net and Cluminis, but still has a lower Alexa rank than Profy and my very own website. No doubt, this will change with time, but there's no telling what new bangs the project will introduce into social networking. To log in to the website, you need to have a Microsoft .net passport, something I ditched well over a year ago. Hopefully, sometime in the near future, Microsoft will remove the '.net' only bit of the site and open it to all of us.
The service, named Aggreg8, like I mentioned before, is a MS version of MySpace designed for IT Professionals. What does Aggreg8 do? Well, you can create your very own profile, join a cluster or a group and create a blog, all within Aggreg8's website. The site, contrary to what I first thought on seeing the name, is not related at all to the RSS reader with the same name. Instead of going off in a huff, the creator of the Aggreg8 RSS reader has actually admitted that he sold Aggreg8.com and Aggreg8.net to Microsoft earlier this year, for a combined total of $5000.

Once you've signed in with your stupid '.net passport', you can change your login details completely, hence making the previous passport step completely useless and a total waste of time. The site itself is very bland and basic, but at least it has working messaging, profiles, tags and groups. A contact of mine Pete Cashmore actually was debating with some other professionals, whether or not Aggreg8 was intended for a public release just yet, or whether it wasn't meant to be launched right now. Who knows. On the Aggreg8.com homepage, you'll see the links of users (and their spiffy avatars) who've been most active, most befriended and top rated. There are also very mini RSS feeds for these categories. Who knows who'll actually want to subscribe to them, unless you're up there, you probably couldn't care less.

The site has a beautiful graphical design, but lacks so many features that make other social networking sites what they are today. Certainly an interesting concept and idea. I'll keep my out on this new Aggreg8, it shows promise in the long-run. via me on Profy.com. Oh, and happy Remembrance Day!

EDIT: Since this posting, two big blogs have already cited this. Emerging Earth and The Microsoft Weblog.

Wink, the Web 2.0 orientated, social search portal, has changed and developed incredibly the past year or so. From the site's humble beginnings, when they only offered a very simple search that let you tag and rate your results and order them accordingly, to the massive site it is now. The original plan was just for a simple service that let you find what you were wanted more accurately, based on the cumulative number of judgments passed by all of Wink's users, therefore narrowing search results down to the most accurate, related or reliable sources, as voted for by all of it's users. In various senses, it was pretty much like a Digg style search engine. Something that let users rate how good the content is. With Digg, the best content makes it to the homepage, Wink simply orders results accordingly, in line with users comments and opinions.

Today, Wink added yet another brand new surprise to the already thriving site. A specialized, personal search engine for Bebo, MySpace and LinkedIn. No explanation into what they are, but the LinkedIn search will be particularly useful for myself, as I use both Wink and LinkedIn on a day-to-day basis. (My LinkedIn Profile). The new search has popped up right in the People tab on the site. The Wink search performs a complete crawl of the sites, allowing people to be found, based on several factors. Real name, location, username, interests, specialties, jobs and more. You can also perform an Advanced Wink, by choosing particular things, such as what network people belong to, their gender, martial status and age.

It was just a few months ago (September if my memory serves correctly), Wink Version 2.0 launched, to emphasize the site's move into the Web 2.0 front more strongly. What happened? Well, along with a complete aesthetical remake,the site added support for Wink Collections. Essentially, this meant that those of you who wanted to, could simply create a small cluster of interesting or related links and then share them with your Wink buddies. This, many believe is what prompted Wink's sudden move into the Social Networking Search, just hours ago. Along with this, Wink also became a Social Netowork itself, with the ability to add friends, chat, etc.

Wink really has advanced and deserves credit for this. I love everything about the new, Wink 2.0 and will be keeping my eyes open for any further improvements that are made to the site over the coming months. News first provided by Mashable via me at Profy.com.

'Nov. 8 - A Japanese inventor unveils what he calls the "next generation of eco-friendly energy sources" - batteries activated by water. Susumu Suzuki, the president of Tokyo-based building material maker TSC (Total System Conductor), has invented water-activated batteries, which have an electric current as powerful as that of a standard manganese dioxide battery. Suzuki says these batteries would be cheap to produce and can be recycled several times, making them an essential tool for the future.'

And it wasn't all that long ago that people were talking about how much more efficient this metal is than that metal... Pah! Nature always wins. Surely they realised that from the tide knocking down their sand castles? Well, all I can say is that a water-powered laptop would be pretty cool! Then my fancy water cooling could boot up my PC for me! Brilliant!

During a telephone conference with reporters yesterday, outgoing Microsoft co-president Jim Allchin, while touting the new security features of Windows Vista, which was released to manufacturing yesterday, told a reporter that the system's new lockdown features are so capable and thorough that he was comfortable with his own seven-year-old son using Vista without antivirus software installed. Allchin's statement came in response to a question about his relative level of confidence that Vista would be more secure than Windows XP SP2. In response, he noted there were key security features added to Vista which could not be added to Windows XP SP2 even though, he said, his people apparently tried to do so.

"I would say that Windows XP SP2 did an amazing job, and I'm proud of what we did there. But you have to understand, we learned a lot during Windows XP SP2, and there were things that we couldn't put in that product," explained Allchin.

"I'll give you an example: It's my favorite feature within Windows Vista, it's called ASLR (Address Space [Layout] Randomization). What it does is, each Windows Vista machine is slightly different than every other Windows Vista machine. So even if there is a remote exploit on one machine, and a worm tries to jump from one machine to another, the probability of that actually succeeding is very small. And I wanted to do this in Windows XP SP2, but we couldn't figure out how to do it. So then a smart guy here came up with a solution, so we put it in Windows Vista."

After summarizing that past statement, Allchin continued, "Please don't misunderstand me: This is an escalating situation. The hackers are getting smarter, there's more at stake, and so there's just no way for us to say that some perfection has been achieved. But I can say, knowing what I know now, I feel very confident."

"I'll give you an example: My son, seven years old, runs Windows Vista, and, honestly, he doesn't have an antivirus system on his machine. His machine is locked down with parental controls, he can't download things unless it's to the places that I've said that he could do, and I'm feeling totally confident about that," he added. "That is quite a statement. I couldn't say that in Windows XP SP2."

Well, nobody has ever felt safe running a Windows OS without Anti-Virus protection. That said, Norton 2007 has been acting up for me. Pretty crappy piece of software if you ask me. I'll be more than happy to ditch them and move to a £400, if not more secure OS at the end of this month. At last. My worries are over! Well, with any luck.

Jamglue has a ridiculously good mixing community put together, which can only be destined to get even bigger and even better. What makes Jamglue all that I'm cracking it up to be? Well you can try it for yourself (highly recommended) or just take my word for it. What can you do though? Well, you can quickly and easily upload your tracks with, or without Creative Commons licensing (great for protecting your work), remix and muddle them up using a really spiffy, streamlined, straight-to-the-point web app, share them (or bits and pieces of them) with the whole Jamglue community at large and you can add a YouTube style, 'Post this to you blog' code, meaning that sharing them can be done hitch-free, in a quick and easy manner. Simply copy and paste the HTML which embeds Flash, and post it into your blog posts.

The social aspect of Jamglue rocks too, with a brilliant networking facility already up and running, allowing for completely simplified, highly refined and very accurate searching. You can choose to search by names, keywords, tags, area (using the highly useful Google, through Google Maps) or just plain old simple standard search, which let's you search through all the individual sections of the site. On user lookups / profiles, you have the ability (once logged in), to view all peoples mixes (if they choose for them to be publicly available), see what their favorites are (again, only if the user's private settings permit) and a cool messaging and commenting feature. It's pretty much like Profy. Comment on a post and, like a phpBB/IPB forum, you can send personalized instant messages through the site's in-built service. It's not bad, but has a slight lag when being used on slower connections. That said, it applies to the whole site. Those of you with decent broadband connections however, shouldn't have a real problem. via me on Profy.com.

When Fox starts to partner with the likes of Feedburner, you know that Web 2.0 is making an impact. The owners of MySpace, Fox Interactive have confirmed a widget development project at the Widgets Live conference. In addition to this, an alliance is to be formed with Feedburner, the highly successful feed creation and management program used by many top names. All of the b5media blogs, Profy, Tech.co.nr and more have their feeds powered by FeedBurner, mainly because of it’s free, it’s great and it provides accurate readership statistics to help you analyze your readers activites. Spring Widgets, the name of the widget project is a rename of TheSpringBox. Since TheSpringBox’s launch, back in the day, they really haven’t changed much in recent times. Pretty dissapointing due to the new nature of Web 2.0 as it develops daily, but that isn’t to say that it isn’t a great service! Oh no… The site offers widgets for both a desktop application and the web, including social networking Web 2.0 site, MySpace. Developers can easily crate and distribute widgets across both the web, and Windows desktop (no Apple!) platforms. The widgets gallery has been pre-filled with a clock, an NFL module (Pretty useless to all those of us outside the USA), a sports scoreboard and the RSS reader from the original version. The RSS reader is the only thing that really shouts, “Now that’s what I’m talking about!”, but needless to say, a lot of promise shines through. The widgets all work in brilliant unity on both websites and my Vista and XP desktops. By me on Profy.com.

Many speculated that when Google took over YouTube, they would be sued for masses by the music industry. Today, YouTube have been sued. Not by the music industry though, but instead by UTube.com. UTube is a manufacturer of all kinds of exciting things including ‘tube mills’ and ‘tube machinery’. UTube actually means ‘Universal Tube & Rollform Equipment Corporation of Perrysburg, Ohio’ but for obvious reasons, use the name ‘UTube’. Why are they suing? Well, records show that they registered their domain back in 1996, way before the YouTube glory days. Since YouTube’s launch, their website has seen an average monthly visitor count of 1500 rise to one in excess of 2,000,000 people. Not much of a change there, as you can imagine. No wonder it was Alexa No.1 ‘Movers & Shakers’ last week! When the website goes back online, I imagine that they’ll be doing pretty steady business! Obviously, hosting and bandwith bills have become pretty steep, and in the past month, the website has moved from 5 different service providers alone. Even today, the website is still down after being kicked by yet another service provider. Who knows how much their bills are costing them! All they’ve said is that they are suing for ‘lost customers due to downtime caused by misguided users, believing they’re going to YouTube, typing in UTube.com’. With all the GooTube media hype & Alexa publicity, interest can only have soared, and ironically, the company isn’t doing itself any favours by hitting the headlines by suing the big company. Rumours are aloft that UTube may be planning to sell the domain for a considerable sum, but the company denied such claims stating firmly that ‘The name UTube is a part of our identity’ and that they would not even consider selling it, despite the problems. Pretty mad if you ask me considering the circumstances! Read more at Profy.com...