ThreeDegrees

Yoz Grahame is thoroughly unimpressed with ThreeDegrees, Microsoft’s attempt to reinvent Instant Messaging and Peer-to-Peer file sharing for the youth market:

In case you’ve missed all the fanfare, ThreeDegrees is Microsoft’s new chat/P2P/music app that came about through the revolutionary process of asking the teenagers at which it’s aimed to help design it. The app lets users organise themselves into social groups (point and clique?). Groups are limited to a ten-member maximum, a bizarrely arbitrary limit that will hopefully be the first victim of the beta programme. Group members can chat, share pictures, play music and “wink” at each other. (”Winking” is a kind of animated emoticon broadcast to all members of the group. Wondering why you never see your teenager these days? He’s probably up in his room, winking.) As you’d expect, it’s all wrapped up in the kind of huge lurid skinnable UI that will have Alan Cooper wandering around the Redmond campus with a rifle.

More “innovation” from Microsoft, then…

[Via Boing Boing]