Microsoft Threedegrees

» see threedegrees.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

threedegrees was a microsoft product aimed at american teenagers in 2003 and i was a turkish nineteen-year-old that year, so the orbit overlap was small. but anyway. i was running msn messenger 6 over a ttnet adsl line in ankara on a windows xp install, and threedegrees was technically available to anyone with the same combination. it just was not advertised outside the us teen market. the install path was a microsoft.com download that required a passport account, plus an opt-in invitation list. for whatever reason the product never crossed into the turkish msn messenger ecosystem in any visible way.

what threedegrees was at the layer the user saw: an msn messenger add-on for a small fixed group of buddies, capped at ten people, presented as a private chat room with shared photos and animated winks. the music-streaming feature was the headline pitch in early coverage. all members of the group could listen to the same windows media playlist in sync, with one host controlling the queue. in practice the music feature shipped only as a limited beta before microsoft pulled it under pressure from labels who refused to license non-purchased mp3 streaming across endpoints.

the project came out of an internal microsoft startup called netgen, run by tammy savage with a team of recent college graduates working from a downtown seattle office instead of redmond. steven levy wrote them up for newsweek on february 24 2003 under the title "microsoft gets a clue from its kiddie corps". that profile was the threedegrees moment in the english-language press. for some reason it never quite translated into mainstream teen adoption. by the time msn messenger 7 launched in april 2005, most threedegrees features had been folded into the messenger client itself, and the standalone brand quietly fell off the download page.

~ the record ~

~ what netgen was trying ~

the netgen team was an experiment in letting microsoft ship a youth-targeted product without the redmond review cycle. tammy savage pitched it as a way to design for college-age users by hiring college-age users. the office was off-campus and the dress code was relaxed, with the deliverable framed as a single working product instead of a roadmap. the choice to build on a custom ipv6 stack rather than the standard messenger protocol was meant to let threedegrees pioneer p2p features that the main messenger team could later adopt.

the bet on shared music inside a private chat group was a real 2003 idea, two years before youtube and three years before spotify. it depended on the labels agreeing to license non-purchased file streaming inside a friend group, which they declined to do once the napster and audiogalaxy cases were still fresh in the rights-holder memory. in those days the synchronous-listening category had to wait another decade for turntable.fm and groove music sessions to find a working answer.

~ how it ended ~

threedegrees never had a public shutdown announcement. the project drifted through 2004 with no major release, and by spring 2005 the netgen team had been reorganized into the broader msn messenger group at redmond. msn messenger 7 in april 2005 absorbed the picture-sharing and animated-wink features without crediting threedegrees. the standalone client kept resolving for a few more months. by mid 2005 the threedegrees.com download had been retired and the brand removed from microsoft consumer marketing.

tammy savage left microsoft shortly after the reorg. the netgen idea of an off-campus youth-target studio inside microsoft did not survive into the next product cycle. for whatever reason microsoft never tried that org structure again. the steven levy newsweek profile remains the most-cited account of threedegrees because it captured the few months in 2003 when microsoft seemed willing to admit it had no idea how college students used chat clients in practice.

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