Way back in February 2004, Lili Cheng and Sean Kelly from Microsoft Research gave a talk on social networking at O'Reilly's ETech 04 conference in San Diego. There was also a little "do" in the hotel where we could try one of the group's two-year-old projects, which was called Wallop. (Other topics of casual conversation were Howard Dean's campaign and moving from Firebird to this new Firefox browser.) That year, it had roughly 200 users active enough to upload at least some content.
The most amusing thing about it was that Wallop used Adobe's Flash whereas Google's Orkut was built using Microsoft.net technology.
Well, as we know, Microsoft did get into social networking in a big way: it launched the hugely successful Spaces system, now called Live Spaces.
Wallop was just an experimental sandbox project, but it didn't die. A guy called Karl Jacob saw Wallop, hired the main developer, Sean Kelly, set up Wallop Technology Inc and pulled in $10 million in venture capital funding. Wallop launched a beta version of Wallop at the Demo Fall conference in San Diego yesterday. (There's a press release.) Yes, it's still Flash-based.
Apparently this is big news -- "about 748" hits in Google News. Unfortunately, some of these stories are misleading. Anything that says "Microsoft launches Wallop" is patently wrong. Anyone who says this is Microsoft getting into social networking is an idiot. (It did that with Spaces.) As usual, Slashdot provides a prime example of clueless stupidity with Microsoft Launches Social Network.
But you can understand the problem. Microsoft didn't think Wallop was worth launching, but unless you highlight the Microsoft connection, there's not really much of a story, is there?
