Microsoft Live Labs rolls out list-sharing tool

Microsoft's Live Labs -- the team that brought us PhotoSynth (photo manipulation/melding) and SeaDragon (smooth-browsing) technology previews -- has introduced another offering to its roster: Listas.

Listas is a list-sharing tool. According to a description of the technology on the Live Labs Web site, Listas "allows you to quickly and easily edit lists, share them with others for reading or wiki-style editing, and discover the public lists of other users. We encourage you to try using it for meeting notes, bookmarks, shopping lists, to plan a night out, or whatever other creative ways you can think of."

Live Labs is the combined Microsoft Research-MSN incubation unit headed by Gary Flake. Microsoft launched Live Labs in January 2006 with the charter of helping the company bring experimental Internet technologies more quickly to market. (Do incubations count as being available to market?)

Live Labs isn't the only entity inside Microsoft experimenting with shared bookmarking/lists. Microsoft also has been testing a social-bookmarking tool, known as TagSpace. And there's also a Microsoft Research project -- TagBooster -- which is focused on ranking and suggesting tags. (Thanks to ActiveWin.com for the TagBooster link.)

I'm not a social bookmarker. In fact, I'm actually pretty anti-collaboration in general. I guess that's why Microsoft's big unified communications announcements this week left me yearning for the days before vendors tried to foist "always-on" presence capabilities on us.

What about you? Are you jazzed about social tagging/bookmarking and/or any other collaborative technologies in particular coming down the pike?