Looks like Microsoft have been working on a rival to Community Server. I have to admit, that it's not exactly easy to muster the enthusiasm to be all that bothered. It's going to replace CS on blogs.msdn.com and whatever's running forums.microsoft.com, apparently.
Which means it does blogs. And forums. And tagging, which looks nice, but is, well, tagging. You can create blogs and forums from tags, which is starting to get a bit more interesting, but that's still just slicing and dicing data.
And then there's Claimspace.
This is an fascinating take on reputation. You make a claim and attach it to something (using an IFrame - not sure what the xhtml folks will think of that). If people agree with your claim, they can vote for it. If they don't agree, they can vote against it. Of course, the more votes you get for that claim, the stronger the claim is. The more you use that claim, the more people can trust that what your saying is valid. A nice idea, and the fact that you can use it "anywhere on the Wild, Wild, Web" makes it a very intriguing, portable piece of the reputation puzzle of social software.
But I know another Microsoft product that's talking claims: CardSpace. One of the promises there is the user-centric identity model, where the security token can be used to pass around claims that have been vouched for by an identifying party (Microsoft.community's Claimspace?).
Now, claims in CardSpace (is the naming just a coincidence? If not, they should really sort out the capitalisation) are a URI and a value. Claimspace appears to use free text for the claim, and the value would be the votes, so there isn't a direct match. I wonder where they're going to take this.
Link to Doug Seven : Microsoft.community - RC Almost Baked
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