There's been a lot of recent buzz about Windows Live Fremont in various blogs and news sites including TechCrunch, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and C|NET News.com. Fremont is the code name for a social market place in the same vein as classifieds sites such as Craigslist. It seems like just yesterday when it all began...

A few months ago, Kurt started a series of meetings to pitch various folks at work about this idea he had for an online marketplace which harnessed the power of one's social networks. At the time Kurt was a PM on MSN Windows Live Messenger and he had codenamed the project "Casbah". The value proposition of 'Casbah' was straightforward. Most people are more comfortable selling or buying stuff from people they know directly or indirectly. The typical classifieds site online does a poor job of supporting this scenario. On more than one occasion, I've wanted to sell stuff when I've moved apartments which I wouldn't have minded selling to a friend or coworker. However listing the items for sale on eBay and dealing with trying to offload my stuff to strangers didn't appeal to me. 'Casbah' was optimized around casual sales between people who knew each other directly or indirectly.

I was involved in the early design meetings and although I was enthusiastic about the idea I assumed that like several other meetings about good ideas I'd sat in on at Microsoft, it would go nowhere. To my surprise, Kurt kept at it and eventually a team was put together to ship 'Casbah' which has been re-christened 'Fremont' after a neighborhood in the Seattle area which has an open market every Sunday.

Enough history, let's talk about what makes Fremont so special. About a year ago, I had my Social Software is the Platform of the Future epiphany. One key aspect of this epiphany was the realization that a lot of interesting scenarios can be enabled if the software I used knew who I cared about and who I was interested in. Powerful social applications like Flickr and del.icio.us are successful partly because of this key functionality. Windows Live Fremont does this for classifieds sites. As a user, you can make Fremont a marketplace for just your social circle. This is enabled by harnessing two social circles; your IM buddies & your email tribe. You can specify that your listings are public, only visible to your IM buddies and/or only visible to people in your email tribe (i.e. are hosted on the same email domain such as '@microsoft.com' or '@gatech.edu'). Similarly, you can specify the same on listings that you view. Basically no matter how many millions of people use the service, my college friends and I can use it as an improved version of the bulletin boards in our dorm hallways without having to deal with awkward sales situations involving people we don't know. 

Of course, this is just scratches the surface. This is part of Windows Live which means you can expect a cohesive, integrated experience with other Windows Live properties and perhaps even an API in the future. It's going to be a fun ride.

I've enjoyed working with the Fremont team so far. It's been great helping them to bring their vision to fruition.