File this in the “strange” category. An email tells us that Microsoft launched a new social network for IT professionals a couple of days ago called Aggreg8. The domain names aggreg8.com and aggreg8.net were sold by the previous owner just a couple of months ago for $5,000, and the existing RSS feed aggregator at that domain name has been moved to aggreg8.co.uk. The new service is clearly marked as a Microsoft product, and the FAQs say that it is being launched “in conjunction with our partner Culminis,” a not-for-profit organization focused on the IT community. See Pulse 2.0 for a more detailed review of the product. Microsoft PR almost always reaches out to press to announce new launches, but in this case they’ve been silent. This tells me it is not intended for general use yet. The service is pretty bare-bones, with little content and few members. Parts of the site, like FAQs, have inconsistent formatting and broken images. Basically, it looks like a work in progress, at best, and it compares very poorly to CNET’s TechRepublic, which recently added social networking features. This reminds us of a previous Microsoft social site for developers called The Hive, which launched in 2005. → Read More