Microsoft Nuggets: Social media meets micro documentation

The Microsoft social-media project formerly codenamed Tulalip is just one of many social-media experiments and incubations at Microsoft.

Another is Microsoft Nuggets, a presentation about which I found recently thanks to a tip from Francisco Martin Garcia (@fmartin_garcia).

Nuggets -- which is using a tag line of "Civilizing Tribal Knowledge" -- is a "micro-documentation social hub." It looks like TweetDeck, customized so that users can follow threads on specific bugs and issues. The high-level vision for Nuggets is to "complement component specsby capturing tribal and fine-grained knowledge," according to the PowerPoint.

It's not clear from anything in the presentation as to whether Nuggets is just an early-stage internal incubation or something closer to being productized. The two author names on the Nuggets PowerPoint intro page, Andre Furtado and Roberto Sonnino,  both appear to be students with .Net knowledge and Microsoft Imagine Cup experience under their belts.

However, the slide deck does include a Microsoft.com mailing address for the Nuggets project. (I wasn't allowed to send mail to it, due to security policies on Microsoft's end. I tried.) But more interestingly, it also listed Nuggets as a Microsoft CodeBox project.

I didn't know much about CodeBox before I started digging around. It turns out CodeBox is a sister site to Microsoft's CodePlex source repository site.

CodeBox dates back to 2007 and is an online software development environment used inside Microsoft to enable engineers to create, host and manage collaborative projects. CodeBox was developed by the Enterprise Social Computing team within Microsoft's Engineering Excellence team. The original idea behind CodeBox was to use the open-source collaborative development/maintenance model for non-open-source projects inside Microsoft. ("CodeBox: Bringing the Open Source Approach In-House" is a tagline on a PDF about Codebox that I downloaded from Microsoft's Download site.)

Microsoft has used CodeBox to develop and maintain hundreds of internal projects, according to the documentation, including Pex (a program for automating test generation for .Net applications); various Office Labs incubation projects; and various Microsoft IT initiatives.

I've sent an email to an allowable Microsoft address to ask for more details on Nuggets. In the interim, anyone have more information or opinions to share about the project as described?

Update: A Microsoft spokesperson said the company has nothing more to share on Nuggets at this time.