After several months of work, changing dependancies, a couple designs, and a handful of UI attempts, we are gettign ready to release a Beta of the community platform we have been working on (Codename: Athens).Athens is made up of three pillars, Community Discovery Services, Community Membership Services, and Community Discussion Services.

Community Discovery Services enable the discoverability of useful content. One of the first forrays into this territory is by enabling social tagging and bookmarking. We have built a frontend for this service called Tagspace.

Tagspace allows you to tag and book mark web-based content. For our beta it is limited to Microsoft content, and a few select others. Over time we will open it up to enable you to tag more and more content across the Wild, Wild, Web. The original Tagspace beta, launched a few months ago, is up currently, and will be replaced by the new beta soon.

Community Discussion Services is a service platform to enable threaded discussion. We are currently building two frontends for this, Forums and Blogs, which will ultimately replace the current http://forums.microsoft.com and http://blogs.msdn.com / http://blogs.technet.com.

Source: MSDN Blogs by Doug Seven