Today I discovered that my Yahoo Widget for Stickam has been approved and is now available for download from the Yahoo Widget Gallery. I did not receive any notice that it was approved. Now I just need to get my Vista Sidebar gadget for Stickam approved.
I have been invited to blog on the Microsoft web site for the ASP.NET community. I have been reading programmer blogs at work in order to pick up some tricks and keep up with changing technology. Microsoft provides this web site to encourage developer community. It is an interesting example of social networking for business. If Microsoft can create a vibrant community out of the developers that work with its frameset and platform then they will gain programmer allegiance. Programmers have always been very important to Microsoft. Web developers could just as easily use PHP and MySQL on Linux or Java and its massive framework.
However based on my experience with YouTube, I think Microsoft is going about it all wrong. I am not impressed by a collection of text blogs. Vlogging is far more effective at creating a sense of community than text blogging because you can see and hear the people you are communicating with. The sense of community is so strong at YouTube and Stickam that people actually talk about it! They have become very conscious of the fact that vlogging creates real community which they never found elsewhere on the Internet.
It is interesting that Microsoft did have an opportunity to steal the vlogging community from YouTube but they blew it. When Microsoft started their own video sharing site, Soapbox, many vloggers checked it out but ultimately rejected the site because it did not promote community. If Microsoft had designed Soapbox with better social networking features and with less emphasis on video sharing, it is possible that YouTube vloggers would have mobbed the site. However, what they could now do is integrate Soapbox into their developer communities to strengthen their market share in the IT industry.
