I realized that i never posted about Wallop because the entry that i wrote got destroyed in a network snafu. Oops.

So, if you don’t know already, you should know about Wallop, a research project underway by Lili Cheng and gang. (If you don’t know about the Social Computing Group at MSR, you should – amazing people, fantastic research.)

So… Wallop. Currently, there are a lot of rumors and secrets going around about what it is. Read Wired for a debunking of some of those rumors (and a discussion of what is known). Other press curiosity comes from eWeek.

I’m not going to speculate on what they’re doing, but i will say a few things about MSR. First, they have brilliant researchers who are on top of their shit, know the theories, know the technology and have a hell of a lot of potential. Lili Cheng is no small designer. That said, MSR is not the same as Microsoft. What they create is rarely the end product that Microsoft ships. They operate based on good ideas, not necessarily good product strategies. They study people & their use, not consumer trends. Deploying a MSR research project is very different than MS deploying a new technology. Thus, it will be really interesting to see how this evolves. But also very exciting.

Also, it’s important to realize their market… think about who uses IM (and particularly MSN IM). This is a *very* different market than Friendster/Tribe/SocialText etc. is going after (and also very different than the AIM market, as they learned the hard way from their research on 3 Degrees). New markets, new lessons, new uses of social software and social networks…