Microsoft has made a habit recently of arriving late to the game in several tech industries: content creation, search, music, etc. Like everyone else, it's now foraying into social networking; forgive
us for being skeptical. The new company, called Wallop, Inc. is a spinoff of an intellectual property program begun last May. It will be jointly funded by Microsoft and VC firm Bay Partners. There are
very few details about the service, except that research started in 1999 and several hundred thousand users are testing the service within Microsoft. So it's not a small project. Microsoft has hired
Karl Jacob, a former Microsoft employee and an ex-Cloudmark executive, to run Wallop. Keeping mum about the project, Jacobs would only say, "we're at the beginning of what we think of as the
social-networking revolution."
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