As Joshua wrote in his blog we had lunch with Dave Winer this afternoon. We talked about the kind of stuff you'd have expected; RSS, ATOM and "social software". An interesting person at lunch was Lili Cheng who's the Group Manager of the Social Computing Group in Microsoft Research*. She was very interested in the technologies around blogging and thought “social software“ could become a big deal if handled correctly. Her group is behind Wallop and I asked if she'd be able to wrangle an invitation so I could check it out. Given my previous negative impressions of Social Software I'm curious to see what the folks at MSR have come up with. She seemed aware of the limitations of the current crop of “social software” that her hip with some members of the blogging crowd so I'd like to see what she thinks they do differently. I think a fun little experiment would be seeing what it would be like to integrate some interaction with “social software“ like Wallop into RSS Bandit. Too bad my free time is so limited.

* So MSFT has a Social Computing Group and Google has Orkut? If I worked at Friendster it would seem the exit strategy is clear, try to get bought by Yahoo! before the VC funds dry up.