NetGen, a Microsoft team charged with creating software to appeal to the 13-to-24 age group, has released a beta of its first product, a free instant messaging (IM) add-on with digital media features called threedegrees. Microsoft is interested in this age group because its members use their PCs in different ways and for a wider variety of functions than older users, and because they will become the mainstream consumer market over the next several years. Microsoft has also said that it views digital media as an important component in driving the next generation of consumer PC upgrades.

Originally part of the digital media business unit reporting to Will Poole, the NetGen team was created in early 2000 to create software that appeals to the so-called Internet Generation—younger users who use the Internet as their predominant social tool, rather than mainly for productivity purposes. The 12-member team is not expected to create profitable products immediately. Rather, it functions more like a market-research arm: if a particular NetGen product or feature proves to be popular (e.g., it's widely downloaded), it will find its way into other consumer products, such as the client version of Windows, Windows Media Technologies, or MSN.

Threedegrees Combines IM, Music

The first product from the NetGen team, threedegrees, is a free download that lets users create a group of up to 10 friends from their MSN Messenger contact lists, then create a permanent desktop image representing those friends. Users can right-click on the image to chat via MSN Messenger and interact via shared animations, and they can drag and drop digital pictures onto the image to allow the rest of the group to view them. A feature called musicmix allows users to create a shared playlist of up to 60 audio files (Windows Media, AVI, and MP3 formats are supported). To prevent illegal file-sharing, each audio file is played from the PC of the user who posted it and cannot be downloaded to the other PCs; when the posting user leaves, the song disappears. In addition, to discourage users from copying the music as it plays (e.g., directly from the soundcard), the audio is encoded at 64Kbps—about half the rate that would be needed to duplicate the sound quality of an audio CD.

Threedegrees requires Windows XP Service Pack 1 (SP1) and MSN Messenger 5 (the latest version), as well as a new plug-in called the Windows XP Peer-to-Peer Update that will be made available via Windows Update. The beta of threedegrees will be available for downloading the week of Feb. 24 at www.threedegrees.com.