So Microsoft are jumping the blogging and social networking bandwagons with Wallop. Rumour has been rife as, like gmail, it's invite only. Today Scoble was giving out invites (he is, himself, a one man Microsoft community). I snagged one.

Worry number 1, I had given a tagged mail address, scoble@, which became my login. I was branded now, a giant scoble tattoo on my ass. I managed to get it lasered off though.

One of the problems of being a geek and writing your own blog code is that it rapidly becomes a pain in the ass to update or add functionality to. There was a time when writing a valid XML file was a good enough way for me to add content, now I want to use wbloggar instead, I just can't find the time to get the XML:RPC code setup, or an email to blog gateway. Wallop is not aimed at geeks it's aimed at people like my wife, social people who don't have time to blog, people that talk to their friends, swap photos, you know, people who can interact. Like I say her, not me. Wallop makes it all easy, just click and type. Or upload a bunch of photos. You don't have to worry about RSS (although you can set it to pull in an RSS feed from your own blog - it just doesn't want to pull in mine, even though it is valid.)

The community part will be its make or break though. Wired reports it will plug into Messenger. Image a blog which highlights new entries from your friends, based on how much you talk to them. Ignore people and they'll be at the back of your reading queue. Cool.

So will the invites become the next cool thing? gmail managed to market themselves like that, are MS trying it too?