After the 21 innovative Net2 Featured Projects quickly made their two-minute introductions this morning on day one of N2Y3, Nicholas Kardas, Senior Product Manager in the Windows Live Platform team at Microsoft, took the stage.

He gave a short presentation on web behavior and ways nonprofits could use the company's new products -- even some free offerings -- to create more interactive web experiences.

During his talk, he pointed out that customers (or visitors) go to a site, not just to consume content, but to share and discuss it.

They want to do things like:

• personalize their experiences
• have relationships with those they know or with whom they share common interests
• interact via forums, IM, and other means
• share content, work on documents, and collaborate.

After that, Kardas highlighted some new Microsoft products and resources, many of which nonprofits can use for free, to help create more interactive sites.

• Mesh: a platform for synchronizing content and sharing folders across devices. Mesh is free to use and you get 5GB of storage.
• Groove: an end-user collaboration software program that creates workspaces.
• Live Platform: developer tools to create an interactive web site and community applications.
• Sample apps and open source code
• Microsoft.com will feature a whole section for nonprofits (available this summer).

Attendees then shuffled out into the San Jose sunshine to eat BBQ, network, and compare notes.