News 

The site is expected to be officially unveiled at the upcoming TechEd conference, although screenshots, reproduced above, have already been posted on a Microsoft blog.

"Next week, we will release a preview version of Social Bookmarks for both MSDN and TechNet and showcase it at TechEd North America the following week," says John Martin, lead evangelist for server and tools online in a blog post.

The service will allow users to bookmark their favourite links and tag them to make them searchable by other users.

As well as providing a service for users, such a site could generate advertising revenue for the company, as well as collecting tag data which could be used to make web searches more accurate.

Microsoft launched a beta version of a similar social bookmarking service called TagSpace in 2007, which it claimed would gather data to "enrich and enliven" the company's other websites.

However, the website proved unstable or unusable for many Firefox users and is currently down.