A few days ago (May 30th) I got my usual twice-monthly  Microsoft Technet Flash newsletter.  Usually I just skim and toss, not finding that much of interest.  But in this one I found not one, but three interesting links!  It sort of jolted me, in a way.. I really didn’t think Microsoft was doing anything really breakthrough in the social media space, I mean Live Spaces has been covered to death, and let’s not even bring up MSN.

Social Bookmarks

The big social app news from them is a social bookmarking service cleverly called TechNet Social Bookmarks.  Currently a preview (beta?), and confusingly referred to in the FAQ as MSDN Social Bookmarks, it seems to be very similar to del.icio.us.  Although they only support Internet Explorer explicitly, they say that other browsers will work if they support javascript.

They support bookmarking in the form of a javascript bookmarklet.  They have specific support for Internet Explorer and Firefox, but it has been my experience that most bookmarklets written for Firefox also work in Safari.

I am guessing that this is one of Microsoft’s first pushes to open MSDN to a wider social networking community.  How do I know?  They happen to have published an introductory video as well, linked below.

In the video, Microsoft Evangelist John Barton gives some details about this new direction and also gives two links to the Social Bookmarks application:

• technetbookmarks.com
• msdnbookmarks.com

Except for the color of the banner and the default homepage link, I’m not seeing a huge difference in these two URLs, and in fact my login works in both and my avatar appears the same.  So, I’m guessing that your private bookmarks will work in either and it’s mostly differentiated by what public bookmarks appear.

Updated Useful Microsoft Apps

Also in the newsletter were links to a couple of updated applications:

• Process Monitor 1.33 – this is a great utility for any Windows-savvy user to have in their toolkit.  It allows in-depth examination of any running processes, with a number of different sort and search options.
• Autoruns 9.2 – This has been a key tool of mine for many years.  Similar to msconfig, this will examine the registry and other places for any programs set to run on startup.  It is extremely thorough and allows you to directly disable or remove anything you might think is suspicious or useless from starting up when you log in to your PC.
  • A similar utility (but much smaller) is Mike Lin‘s Startup Control Panel.  This is a real gem and I definitely recommend it.

To be honest, the first time I found Autoruns, it was not from a Microsoft site.  So I was a little surprised to see that it came out of the MSDN labs.  In my eyes, that just gives it a big dose of legitimacy and trustworthiness that I hadn’t afforded it before!

And in fact, with a little more research, I learned that Sysinternals was acquired by Microsoft in 2006!  How did I miss that!