Absolute Zero

At first it sounds hip. "Our community is built upon our art, expressions, and individuality." Then you see the Microsoft copyright at the bottom of the page. The 3° beta went public yesterday. It's a youth oriented group messaging service built on MSN Messenger and Microsoft's peer-to-peer client. Users can create groups of up to ten friends. Each group is represented by a custom icon on the Windows® desktop. There's group instant messaging, of course. You can also send an image to everyone in a group by dragging it to the group's icon, or send animated "winks" built into the program. The most interesting feature of Three Degrees is musicmix. Groups create shared playlists of songs which they can all listen to together. Apparently the music companies agreed to this sanitized form of music sharing. There are some great ideas in here but read Yoz Grahame's tale of installation woe before you install this toxic bit of bloatware on your PC. I know my daughter's going to want it, but personally, I think it's the work of the devil.