According to Microsoft Evangalist John Martin, the company is set to release a product called “Social Bookmarks” this week. The product sounds a whole lot like del.icio.us, and will initially be deployed on MSDN and TechNet, so look for it to be mostly hardcore techie bookmarks for now. Features include bookmarking (presumably via a bookmarklet), tagging, and a web-based account where your bookmarks are stored.
As Doug Caverly notes, the product doesn’t sound especially revolutionary. But, when one of the Web giants jumps into a saturated area, it’s all about scale, and that’s something Microsoft obviously brings to the table. That said, Yahoo has done little to take Del.icio.us mainstream since acquiring the original social bookmarking tool (Stan noted the new version of del.icio.us has supposedly been in the works for more than a year), highlighting both the opportunity for Microsoft and the perils of trying to quickly innovate on relatively simple web apps within huge software companies.