Interesting…tucked into an interview with Chairman Gates (when does he start wearing the cool little jackets with the upturned lapels?) is Gates riffing on integrating blogs into SharePoint and by extension, Office. So Newsgator functionality will be subsumed into the next Outlook?
It’s interesting that he sort of blends email and blogs – it’s a publishing workflow thing, really – I have a comms tool (at the moment an email program) and I choose how to publish my messages – public, to a group or an individual.
Imagine if RSS feeds behave as email – it would be interesting to see blog posts and email from the same person mixed in the same person/group-centric view (a little like Blackberry-style mixing of SMS, email and calls).
Here’s an excerpt from his interview:
Gates taking a seat in your den | Newsmakers | CNET News.com:
“And we’ve done some things in Japan and Korea that are unique blog experiments. The Spaces thing is a worldwide effort. It’s a great phenomena, and it’s sort of built on e-mail, and so we need to integrate more blogging capability into the e-mail world-and as we do the next generation of Outlook, you’ll see that. We need to integrate it more into our SharePoint, which is our collaboration Office platform, and then, as I discussed, MSN is embracing it so that instead of thinking about, ‘OK, I go to one community to do photos, one community to do social networking, one community to do this,’ we say, ‘Hey,’ off of Messenger, which has got your buddy list already, then, ‘Let’s let you do the photos and the social networking and everything-but starting in an integrated way off of Messenger.’”
(Via .)