Earlier this morning, Jeff Kunins posted the announcement that Messenger Connect is out of beta and available worldwide. Key excerpts from his post include

Today, we are pleased to announce that Messenger Connect is out of beta and available worldwide. We’ve gotten a great response so far: leading sharing syndicators ShareThis, AddThis, Gigya, and AddToThis have already made the Windows Live sharing badge available on more than 1 million websites (check it out now on Bing).
…
Over 2500 developers gave us great feedback during the beta, helping us to refine and improve this release of Messenger Connect. Below is a quick summary, but for all the details check out this post from Angus on the Windows Live for Developers blog. Our focus with the release of Messenger Connect was to make it easier for partners to adopt, without compromising user privacy.

• Easier to check out –We made it faster and simpler for partners to try out Messenger Connect and determine if it would be useful for their sites. For example: you can try out the real time chat control without needing to write any code.
  
• Easier to adopt and integrate– We reduced the effort needed for sites to implement Messenger Connect usefully and powerfully by providing new tools and sample code for ActivityStrea.ms template selectors and more.
  

A number of folks worked really hard behind the scenes to get us to this point and I’m glad to see what we’ve shipped today. I haven’t announced this on my blog yet but I recently took over as the Lead Program Manager responsible for our Messenger Connect and related platform efforts in Windows Live. If you’ve been a regular reader of my blog it shouldn’t be a surprise that I’ve decided to make working on building open web platforms my day job and not just a hobby I was interested in.

As Angus Logan says in his follow up blog post on the Windows Live for Developers blog; this is just the beginning. We’d love to get feedback from the community of developers on what we’ve released and the feedback we’ve gotten thus far has been immensely helpful. You can find us at http://dev.live.com/forums

PS: Since someone asked on Twitter, you can find out more about Messenger Connect by reading What is Messenger Connect?

Now Playing: Waka Flocka Flame - No Hands (featuring Roscoe Dash and Wale)

 

One of the challenging things about working on large scale services that lots of people use every day is that they get attached to their experience with the site and enjoy the familiarity. A consequence of this is that there is a large population of users for whom any change whether good or bad is met with resistance. 

One of the things that you end up learning when building a product is that if you’re afraid that a lot of people may complain about the changes you’ve made to the product they use every day then you’ll end up never making any changes.

Now Playing: 50 Cent - It Is What It Is

 

Many moons ago when we were planning the set of social features we would build into the next version of Windows Live, we were very mindful of the fact that our customers are inundated with lots of social networking sites and what people need are tools to manage their relationships across many services not yet another social networking site. As some of those features have now rolled out to the general public in the form of betas, I’ve been keeping an eye on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter to see what regular people and techies think about what we’ve shipped.

What the Techies are Saying

Yesterday, Omar wrote a post on the Engineering Windows Live blog titled All Your Contacts in One Place where he talked about the work we’ve done in creating a single place where users can view and communicate with not only their Windows Live friends but also their contacts across multiple services including Facebook, MySpace and soon LinkedIn. Chris Messina posted the following in response to the story

I’ve talked about the work we’ve done around bringing customer value with the news feed that is integrated into the new Hotmail experience including how we’ve blended email into the news feed experience in recent posts. So I was pleased to see the following tweet from Jesse Stay

Thanks Jesse

Facebook Users on Windows Live

I regularly perform Facebook searches to see what people who are using the Windows Live Essentials beta think about the investments we’ve made in bringing social networking to the desktop in a big way. Here’s a sampling of some of the feedback I’ve found

You get the idea.

Twitter Users on Windows Live

I performed the same sorts of searches on Twitter and found similar feedback. Here are a few of my favorites

It’s really exciting to see so many people validating the design choices we made and enjoying the product that we’ve spent the last couple of months building. The outpouring of positive feedback has been really humbling and has me jazzed up to build even more things that make people happier as they connect with the people they care about using our products.

Thank you to everyone who has tried out the various betas.

Now Playing: Eminem - Love The Way You Lie (featuring Rihanna)

 

One of the things I’ve noticed while working on Windows Live is that it helps to think about communications tools such as email, IM and social media sites as being parts of a continuum as opposed to being rigidly defined product categories. They are all ways we share our thoughts, ideas and interesting things we’ve online with others where the main difference is really how public or private the communication channel is and how synchronous we want the conversation to be. Once you start looking at communications tools this way it starts opening the door to asking how we can bring some of these experiences closer together.

Over on the Windows Live blog there have been a number of good blog posts on this topic. Piero Sierra wrote in the blog post Sharing 2.0

Our data is everywhere

People store their stuff across the web, their PCs and their mobile phones, leading to fragmented access and fragmented sharing. Take the example of photo-sharing. A study we ran in September 2009 showed that people stored their photos across up to 15 different types of technologies. Here are the major ones:

It would be nice, not only to have everything in one location, but also to be able to access all this stuff and share from wherever you may be, especially from mobile phones and PCs that you may not own.

We're putting it all out there

It seems like our appetite for using technology to connect with each other is bottomless, whether it be directed communications with the people we love (email, IM), sharing with groups of friends (email, social networking), or full-on public broadcasting (blogs, micro-blogs, photo & video dedicated sites, etc.)

Whenever a new medium emerges, it doesn’t replace the previous ones – it adds to it. That is, people today are sending email and IM and updating their status on social networks and uploading photos everywhere. They're sharing their thoughts and their memories to stay in touch with each other. Sharing and consuming shared data has become the primary internet activity for many of our customers, right up there with shopping and reading news.

With regards to email and sharing specifically, there’s another good blog post on this topic by Dick Craddock titled Email in a World of Social Networking where he wrote

Recently, we surveyed 2,000 people in the US, where nearly 10 million additional people have started to use Hotmail actively over the last year. Our goal was to refresh our understanding of how people use their personal email accounts, particularly in this day of heavy usage of social networks for communications. We surveyed people who use AOL, Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo! Mail – 500 people for each service. Here’s a bit of what they shared with us.

• You’re still very attached to your personal email accounts. We asked the survey group which communication method they would choose if they were allowed to keep only one to communicate with friends and family. Of the choices – email, texting, IM, or the ability to post to their favorite social network – most people told us they’d choose email over all of the other communication methods and tools.     
• Email is today’s tool of choice for managing and sharing documents, interacting with businesses, tracking online activities, receiving and responding to social networking alerts, communicating with friends and family, dating, and so on. Your inbox is your job search strategy room, your filing cabinet, your to-do list, and your social center
• Email is your online photo album, too. People send and receive over 1.5 billion photos each month on Hotmail alone, and email is still the most popular way to share photos.

One of the things that became clear from us from this data is that there’s a good overlap in the kinds of activities that go on in email and what we see in social networks. Some of your friends share photos with you by posting them to Flickr while others send emails with photos as attachments. Sometimes you find out about new comments on photos you posted to Facebook by going to http://www.facebook.com and other times you discover this because you got a notification email. Either way, there’s a lot of overlap in the actual problem being solved although the technology may differ.

So what are we doing to simplify things in Windows Live’s Wave 4 release? Glad you asked.  

Emails with Photo Attachments and Messenger Social

One of the goals we set out with for Wave 4 was to ensure that people should be able to keep up with what their friends are sharing with them no matter where their friends are. This is the motivation behind the integrations we’ve done with popular social networks like MySpace and Facebook. However as you can tell from the blog posts mentioned above, email is also an important way for your friends to share updates and media with you. What we’ve done in this release is to bring in emails that are used for sharing photos from your contacts into the Messenger Social feed across all experiences where it is displayed.

On the web:

On the desktop:

 

Emails from your Social Networks and Messenger Social

The goal of the Messenger Social feed is to keep you up to date on what your friends are doing. One of the things your friends do is comment on the stuff you post on various social networks. Invariably you get a mail about these comments and we thought to ourselves that these email updates are just as valid to show in your feed as the comments attached to people’s updates that are typically in the feed. Thanks to diligent work of the Hotmail folks who built a bunch of excellent technology around recognizing and categorizing emails from social networks, you now get updates such as

in the Messenger Social feed.

What Do Customers Think of the Blending of Email Content in a Social News Feed?

Since Messenger is still in beta and Hotmail has just begun to roll out not a lot of people (relatively given over 350 million users) have seen this feature yet. Anecdotally, I’ve heard lots of positive feedback about this feature from a bunch of beta users but my favorite is the following comment taken from the reviews of the Windows Live Messenger iPhone app from the Apple App Store(comment #33).

Now Playing: Waka Flocka Flame - Oh Lets Do It (remix) (feat. Gucci Mane, P. Diddy & Rick Ross)

 

One of my favorite things we built in Wave 4 of Windows Live is now available. You can now download Windows Live for the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad from the US app store. You can also get it from the France, UK and Canadian app stores. The app kicks serious butt and I use it every day.

The official spiel is as follows

Windows Live Messenger for iPhone and iPod Touch is the best way to connect with the people that matter most and keep up with the things they are doing across the web. Use your iPhone to instant message your friends list, view and comment on your friends’ photos and status updates from Windows Live, Facebook, and MySpace, and at a glance, see what your Messenger friends are sharing from Flickr, YouTube, and many other social and photo sharing sites. Make sure to visit http://profile.live.com/Services today and setup Windows Live to bring in your social networks. Messenger is simply the best way to connect with your closest friends.

Chat:
Instant message with your Windows Live Messenger and Y! Messenger contacts on the go so you’re always connected to the people that matter most. You can even receive IM notifications when your app is closed so you never miss a message.

Social:
Windows Live Messenger gives you one place to view the updates your Messenger friends are sharing from social networks like Facebook, Flickr, MySpace and more, helping you cut through the clutter on the go.

Photos:
Upload photos right from your phone to share your favorite moments with the people that matter most. Create albums, add captions, and let your friends and family comment on your photos.

Hotmail:
Access your Hotmail account without leaving the app to read, reply to, and compose emails. Get email notifications within the application so you know when you have new messages.

For me, push notifications when I get new IMs is the killer feature. I used to think IM was dead on smartphones until I used this app and realized that the problem was really lack of an IM client with push notifications. If you use Windows Live Messenger, you need to cop this app today. If you need further convincing here are some pretty pictures

Now Playing: Snap - The Power

 

Over the past year or so, I’ve been part of the team working on building the next version of the social news feed on Windows Live. Yesterday, the next iteration of this feature was made broadly available on http://home.live.com and http://profile.live.com. As I look back at the work we’ve done there are a number of things I love about the philosophy behind what we’ve built and the actual features we’ve implemented.

The above screenshot shows the header for Messenger Social feed on the Windows Live home page and captures a number of it’s key concepts.

Highlights from your Favorite People

One of the key problems we want to address with this release is the conflicting feelings of information overload from getting a flood of minutiae on a daily basis from people you’d barely consider acquaintances and the feeling of not seeing enough stuff from the people you actually care about because they are being drowned out by other less important people. The way we’ve approached this problem is described on the Messenger Preview site and excerpted below

Because most people today use a variety of social networks and content sharing sites, with different sets of friends and acquaintances dispersed throughout these disparate networks, it can be challenging — and exhausting — to visit different websites and create different accounts just to keep abreast of your friends’ updates. But it isn’t just about bringing all that data together. What’s really valuable is helping you filter through the clutter and get to those updates you really care about — the ones from those people who you communicate with most frequently. There are a lot of intelligent algorithms and machine learning that can help in this, but we’ve found one of the best ways is to simply ask people. So, Windows Live Messenger will come right to the source — YOU — and ask you to specify your favorites:

The Highlights filter shows the most interesting recent content from your social network and strives to ensure you are kept up to date with updates from your favorites even if they aren’t posting a mile a minute like some of your more active social networking friends.

 

The screenshot above captures what this means in practice. Since Omar is one of my favorites, his updates show up ahead of updates from Mint.com even though his are several hours older than those from the Mint fan page. We learned from experience that although a number of people find the Highlights filter to be a valuable way to cut through the clutter and view the most interesting updates from their social network, there are also times when we have time to kill and don’t mind swimming in the full stream. For those times, we also have a Recent filter which provides the classic reverse chronological view of a stream of updates from your social network.

People-centric not Service-centric

The fundamental idea behind social software is that it enables people to connect with other people. When we first shipped the feed in Wave 3, it was a key part of our design philosophy that we would bring together updates from multiple services into a single experience that emphasized your friends not the services where the data was coming from. One consequence of this is that updates from multiple services are shown in a single stream as shown in the screenshot from the previous section. We don’t provide tabs for multiple services because at the end of the day, what’s important to me is seeing what my friends said today not what my Windows Live friends said versus what my Facebook friends said. Instead our filters enable users to decide how they want to see updates from all of their friends as opposed to making service-centric distinctions.

Another nice touch is that once I’ve connected a service such as Facebook to Windows Live (more on that below) when I see an update from a friend in my feed, not only do I have the options of communicating with him or viewing his data on Windows Live but also communicating with him via that service as well. 

and when I click “Send a message (Facebook)” above, it actually takes me to Facebook to send Omar a message via their messaging feature.

Bi-Directional Connections to Where your Friends are

In our previous release, we had a feature called Web Activities which enabled users to share the activities they performed on other sites such as Facebook, Flickr, MySpace and others with their friends on Windows Live. A consistent bit of feedback we got was that people wanted our integration with other sites to be much deeper. They wanted to be able see what their friends where doing regardless of what network they were on and interact with their content. They also wanted to be able to share content with their friends regardless of what network they were on as well. In short, our customers wanted interoperability, not just data portability. With our current release we have obliged in spades…

When you first interact with the Messenger Social experience we ask you to connect your favorite services to Windows Live so you can see what your friends are up to all over the Web and share what you’re doing on other sites with your friends on Windows Live. If you got the prompt above when visiting http://home.live.com and clicked through to Facebook, you’d see the following options to create bidirectional data flows between Facebook and Windows Live.

As I mentioned before, this isn’t about “portability” and asking your friends to leave Facebook for Windows Live. Instead it is about allowing both sites to interoperate in a way that enables Windows Live users to stay in touch with their friends without either set of users having to switch services. Of course, Facebook isn’t the only social networking service we interoperate with in this manner as you can tell from the following screen shot

 

With these connections made, I not only get to see what my friends are doing across MySpace and Facebook from within Windows Live but can also broadcast my thoughts to them from within Windows Live as well.

Shortly after our features were made available yesterday I created the following status update

which caused that update to be shared to both my Messenger friends and my Facebook friends (see the handy iconography in the bottom right). You can see the results from both sites below

On Facebook	On Windows Live

There’s more good stuff in the release as stuff rolls out across Windows Live and I’ll be writing more about what we’ve built in the coming weeks. Thanks for reading.

Now Playing: Usher - OMG (featuring Will.I.Am)

 

Earlier this morning, Ori Amiga posted Messenger across the Web on the Inside Windows Live blog. Key excerpts from his blog post include

Earlier today, John Richards and Angus Logan took the stage at The Next Web Conference in Amsterdam where they announced Messenger Connect – a new way for partners and developers to connect with Messenger. Messenger Connect allows web, Windows and mobile app developers to create compelling social experiences on their websites and apps by providing them with social promotion and distribution via Messenger.

…

Messenger Connect

Messenger Connect brings the individual APIs we’ve had for a long time (Windows Live ID, Contacts API, Messenger Web Toolkit, etc.) together in a single API that's based on industry standards and specifications (OAuth WRAP, ActivityStrea.ms, PortableContacts) and adds a number of new scenarios.

The new Messenger Connect provides our developer partners with three big things:

• Instantly create a user profile and social graph: Messenger user profile and social graph information allows our shared customers to easily sign-in and access their friends list and profile information. This allows our partners to more rapidly personalize their experiences, provides a ready-made social graph for customers to interact with, and provides a channel to easily invite additional friends to join in.
• Drive engagement directly through chat indirectly through social distribution: By enabling both real-time instant messaging conversations (chat) and feed-based sharing options for customers on their site, developers can drive additional engagement and usage of their experiences by connecting to the over 320 million Messenger customers worldwide.
• Designing for easy integration in your technical environment: We are delivering an API service that will expose a RESTful interface, and we’ll wrap those in a range of libraries (including JavaScript, .NET, and others). Websites and apps will be able to choose the right integration type for their specific scenario. Some websites prefer to keep everything at the presentation tier, and use JavaScript libraries when the user is present. Others may prefer to do server-side integration, so they can call the RESTful endpoints from back-end processes. We're aiming to provide the same set of capabilities across the API service and the libraries that we offer.

I’m really proud of the work that’s gone into building Messenger Connect. Although I was in some of the early discussions around it, I ducked out early to focus on the platform behind the new social view in Messenger and didn’t have much insight into the day to day of building the product. However I’ve got to say I love the way the project has turned out. I suspect a lot of web developers will as well.

Kudos to Ori and the rest of the team.

Now Playing: Ludacris - My Chick Bad (featuring Nicki Minaj)

 

Over on the Inside Windows Live blog there’s a new post titled Preview of the new Windows Live Messenger which talks about a key part of what I’ve been working on over the past year or so. Interesting tidbits from the blog post include

Today in a speech at the Universidade de São Paulo in Brazil, Steve Ballmer is sharing a preview of the new Windows Live Messenger. In this post we want to talk more about our philosophy and approach for this new version.
...

Staying in touch with close friends

Most people today visit at least one social network and dozens of content sharing sites, get email with photos and social notifications, and of course, maintain accounts in numerous places with different sets of friends and content. So we focused on connecting Messenger to the social networks you already use, and prioritizing the most important updates so you can quickly see what your favorite people are doing, wherever they’re doing it.

We know your close friends share using email, IM, and social networks. So we brought all of those together into a single view. The status from your Facebook friends who don’t use Messenger? Check. The photos your mom sent you as plain old e-mail attachments? Check. The Office docs you’re collaborating on with friends in SkyDrive? Check. And the stuff your favorite Messenger friends are doing on hundreds of sites they choose to share from? Check.

And since simple “aggregation” can make things worse instead of better, we focused on prioritizing the people that matter most to you, so you don’t miss the handful of important updates from your closest friends and family just because your college and work “friends” are broadcasting their whole life every minute of the day. Just tag your favorite people, and we optimize your feed for the stuff those people are doing. Of course, it’s not 100% exclusive to your favorites – the most interesting things from your other friends like photos, videos, and links (especially the ones being commented on a lot) are there too. This makes us a great companion to the services you already love like Facebook, Flickr, MySpace, LinkedIn and more – and when you have time to go beyond those most important updates, diving deeper into those sites is just a click away.

Lastly, we recognized that we could connect your social updates to the power of the Windows PC and really bring it to life. So we took advantage of the latest advances in hardware and graphics to give you a modern social experience. This means that Messenger brings beautiful high-resolution views of the photos, videos, and links that your friends are sharing, right to your desktop. View their Facebook albums, gorgeously presented so that they're fun to browse through and easy to comment on. Messenger is also the simplest way to update your status and instantly post it to other sharing sites you use. You can even bring your photo albums right into high-definition video chats with your friends.

Here’s a picture of the new social view for Messenger:

This is a pretty exciting day for the team and I’ll be scouring the web looking to read what people think about what we’re building. If you want to learn more about the new version of Messenger, you can visit messengerpreview.com 

Later in the year, I’ll see what I can do about writing a post on the Inside Windows Live blog about the philosophy and technology that underlies this experience. Let me know in the comments what you would like to learn more about in such a post. 

Now Playing: DJ Khalid - All I Do Is Win (featuring Ludacris, Snoop Dogg, Rick Ross, and T-Pain)

 

On the MSN blog there's a new blog post entitled The New MSN Homepage Unveiled which states

Today is an exciting day for our team at MSN because we unveiled the most significant redesign our MSN.com homepage has seen in over a decade. We spent thousands of hours talking with customers; testing hundreds of ideas; experimenting around the world and carefully evaluating what our users want, and don’t want - to deliver a homepage that is designed to be the best homepage on the Web. We hope you’ll agree.
…
So, we started from scratch to cut the clutter on our homepage and reduced the amount of links by 50%. There’s also a simplified navigation across news, entertainment, sports, money, and lifestyle that lets you drill into information topics that interest you, without being overwhelming. Local information from your neighborhood is important to you and so is high quality, in-line video – so we offer both, right on the homepage. And, you told us you want the latest information not only from your favorite sources, but also from your friends, and the breadth of the Web – so we now offer convenient access to Facebook, Twitter, & Windows Live services and the most powerful search experience on the Web from Bing, empowering you to make more informed, faster decisions. And this is just the beginning - keep visiting our blog for more MSN news in the coming weeks.

This is a really exciting release for my team on Windows Live since we're responsible for the underlying platform that powers the display of what activities your friends have been performing across Windows Live. Working with the MSN home page team was a good experience and its great to see that the tens of millions of people who visit the MSN home page regularly will now get to experience our work. Kudos to the MSN team on a very nice release.

You can try out the new home page for yourself at http://preview.msn.com

Now Playing: Jay-Z - Reminder

 

I’ve been busy with work and spending time with my son so I haven’t been as diligent as I should be with the blog. Until my time management skills get better, here are some thoughts from a guest post I wrote recently for the Live Services blog.

Dare Obasanjo here, from the Live Services Program Management team. I'd like to talk a bit about the work we are doing to increase interoperability across the "Social Web."

The term The Social Web has been increasingly used to describe the rise of the Web as a way for people to interact, communicate and share with each other using the World Wide Web. Experiences that were once solitary such as reading news or browsing one's photo albums have now been made more social by sites such as Digg and Flickr. With so many Web sites offering social functionality, it has become increasingly important for people to be able to not only be able to connect and share with their friends on a single Web site but also to take these relationships and activities with them wherever they go on the Web.

With the recent update to Windows Live, we are continuing with the vision of enabling our 500 million customers to share and connect with the people they care about regardless of what services they use. Our customers can now invite their contacts from MySpace (the largest U.S. social networking site) and Hi5 to join them on Windows Live in a safe manner without having to resort to using the the password anti-pattern. These sites join Facebook and LinkedIn as social networks from which people can import their social graph or friend list into Windows Live.

In addition to interoperating with social networks to bridge relationships across the Web, we are also always working on enabling customers to share the content they are find interesting or activities they are participating in from all over the Web with their friends who use Windows Live services like Hotmail and Messenger. Customers of Windows Live can now add activities from over thirty different online services to their Windows Live profile including social networking sites like Facebook, photo sharing sites like Smugmug & Photobucket, social music sites like last.fm & Pandora, social bookmarking sites like Digg & Stumbleupon and much more.

We are also happy to announce today that in the coming months, MySpace customers will be able to share activities and updates from MySpace with their Windows Live network.

Below is a screenshot of some of the updates you might find on my profile on Windows Live 

These recent announcements bring us one step closer to a Social Web where interoperability is the norm instead of the exception. One of the most exciting things about our recent release is how much of the behind-the-scene integration is done using community driven technologies such as the Atom syndication format, Atom Activity Extensions, OAuth, and Portable Contacts. These community driven technologies are moving to ensure that the Social Web is a web of interconnected and interoperable web sites, not a set of competing walled gardens desperately clutching to customer data in an attempt to invent Lock-In 2.0 

As we look towards the future, I believe that the aforementioned standards around contact exchange, social activity streams and authorization are just the first steps. When we look at all the capabilities across the Web landscape it is clear that there are scenarios that are still completely broken due to lack of interoperability across various social websites. You can expect more from Windows Live when it comes to interoperability and the Social Web.

Just watch this space.

Now Playing: Eminem - We Made You

 

<a href="http://video.msn.com/?playlist=videoByUuids:uuids:533e05d2-9f12-4a86-bdda-efd0455fcd36&amp;showPlaylist=true" target="_new" title="Kylie uses Windows Live Photo Gallery">Video: Kylie uses Windows Live Photo Gallery</a>

Now Playing: Cranberries - Linger

 

From the blog post on the Office Live team blog entitled Looking ahead and bringing you even more we learn

Today, I wanted to share with you some exciting news about Office Live: To simplify and improve the customer experience around our Live services, we’ve made the decision to converge Windows Live and Office Live into an integrated set of services at one single destination. We think that just makes a ton of sense and goes a long way toward giving you a simpler, richer, better service that allows you to do more with one account.

Every day, more and more people are signing up for Office Live Workspace and Office Live Small Business (4 million of you so far!), as well as Windows Live (460 million to date!).

Secondly there’s the MSDN forum post entitled Working Together: Live Mesh and Windows Live by the Live Mesh team which informs us that

For some time now, many of you have expressed interest in seeing some sort of combination of Live Mesh and other Microsoft services. In order to further explore these ideas we would like to ask you to share with us the scenario(s) that you have in mind. 

What combination(s) are you interested in, and why? Whatever your interests, whatever problem you’re trying to solve or scenario you want to enable, we’d like to hear the details – and the more specific you can be, the better.

We know you have ideas – this is the place to share them!

Thank you,

The Live Mesh Team

I love it when things come together this way. There's been a lot of choice in Web-based storage solutions offered by Microsoft and some would argue that it's been too much choice. It will be good to how the cross pollination of ideas ends up working out between these various products over the coming months and years.

If you are interested in developer or end user scenarios around Web-based storage I recommend chiming in on the MSDN forum post linked above. It's your chance to give your feedback to Microsoft and help influence the direction of the most innovative technology product of the past year. 

Now Playing: Amy Winehouse - You Know I'm No Good

 

Angus Logan has the scoop

I’m in San Francisco at the 2008 Crunchie Awards and after ~ 350k votes were cast Ray Ozzie and David Treadwell accepted the award for Best Technology Innovation/Achievement on behalf of the Live Mesh team.

The Crunchies are an annual competition co-hosted by GigaOm, VentureBeat, Silicon Alley Insider, and TechCrunch which culminates in an award the most compelling startup, internet and technology innovations.

Kudos to the Live Mesh folks on getting this award. I can't wait to see what 2009 brings for this product.

PS: I noticed from the TechCrunch post that Facebook Connect was the runner up. I have to give an extra special shout out to my friend Mike for being a key figure behind two of the most innovative technology products of 2008. Nice work man.

 

Since we released the latest version of the Windows Live what's new feed which shows what's been going on with your social network at http://home.live.com, we've gotten repeated asks to provide a Windows Vista gadget so people can keep up with their social circle directly from their desktop.

You asked, and now we've delivered. Get it from here.

What I love most about this gadget is that a huge chunk of the work to get this out the door was done by our summer interns from 2008. I love how interns can be around for a short time but provide a ton of bang for the buck while they are here. Hope you enjoy the gadget as much as I have.

Now Playing: Akon, Lil Wayne & Young Jeezy - I'm So Paid

 

One of the features we recently shipped in Windows Live is the ability to link your Windows Live profile to your Flickr account so that whenever you add photos to Flickr they show up on your profile and in the What's New list of members of your network in Windows Live. Below are the steps to adding your Flickr photos to your Windows Live profile.

1. Go to your Windows Live profile at http://profile.live.com and locate the link to your Web Activities on the bottom left

2. Click the link to add Web Activities which should take you to http://profile.live.com/WebActivities/ shown below. Locate Flickr on that page.

3.) Click on the "Add" link for Flickr which should take you to http://profile.live.com/WebActivities/Add.aspx?appid=1073750531 shown below

4.) Click on the link to sign-in to Flickr. This should take you to the Flickr sign-in page shown below (if you aren't signed in)

 

5.) After signing in, you will need to grant Windows Live access to your Flickr photo stream. Click the "OK I'll Allow It" button shown below

6.) You should then be redirected to Windows Live where you can complete the final step and link both accounts. In addition, you can decide who should able to view your Flickr photos on your Windows Live profile as shown below

 

7.) After pushing the "Add" button you should end up back on your profile with your Flickr information now visible on it.

A.) People in your network can now see your Flickr updates in various Windows Live applications including Windows Live Messenger as shown below

 

PS: The same basic set of steps work for adding activities from Twitter, Pandora, StumbleUpon, Flixster, PhotoBucket, Yelp, iLike, blogs hosted on Wordpress.com, or from any RSS/Atom feed to your Windows Live profile. Based on announcements at CES yesterday, you'll soon be able to add your activities from Facebook to Windows Live as well.

Now Playing: DMX - Party Up (Up in Here)

 

Reading depressing layoff related blog posts like George Oates's Not quite what I had in mind and the Valley Wag's Laid-off Yahoos packing heat for Jerry Yang? reminded me that I've been meaning to post about open positions on our team for a while.

The team I work for is responsible for the "social graph", "news feed" and online presence platforms that power various Windows Live experiences. You can see some of our recent efforts in action by downloading Windows Live Essentials (beta) or visiting my profile on Windows Live and browsing around. If you are interested in building world class software that is used by hundreds of millions of people and the following job descriptions interest you then send me your resume 

Software Design Engineer (Developer)

The Windows Live Messenger service is the backbone of one of world’s leading instant messaging services. The service enables hundreds of millions of users to communicate efficiently using text, voice, video and real-time status updates. This high-profile business is growing to accommodate mobile devices, social networking, web applications and other new areas.
We are seeking a developer with a fondness and talent for working on large-scale fault-tolerant distributed systems. The job involves working on the back-end components that maintain user state and route messages and notifications. In addition to improving the systems performance and resiliency, our team will tackle hard new problems such as
- Supporting new ways of addressing users (personas or aliases)
- Extending user state to support offline presence and presence views
- Creating a generic notification service
- implementing effective request throttling and load-balancing across datacenters.

Software Design Engineer/Test (Tester)

Looking for your next big challenge? How about building the next version of the world’s largest IM and social network platform?
We are looking for a great SDET with solid design, problem solving skills and exceptional track record to help build the next version of Windows Live Messenger and Social Network platform. The Messenger network is already one of the largest social networks on the planet, delivering BILLIONS of messages a day for HUNDREDS of MILLIONS of users world-wide.
The SDET role involves working on these next-generation services and proving they can be delivered to the massive scale required, with the quality our users have come to expect. Particular focus areas for this role are scalability, performance and reliability:
Scalability - building software systems to take each piece of hardware to its limits, identifying bottlenecks, removing them and pushing harder; while also, proving the system can grow linearly, as hardware is added. (…think 1,000s of machines).
Performance - ensuring consistently fast response times across the system by smoothly managing peak traffic -- which averages in the 10s of millions of simultaneous online connections.
Reliability - building online services that remain reliable under stress which the operations team is able to easily monitor, troubleshoot, and repair; enabling the aggressive up time requirements we aim for.

Email your resume to dareo@msft.com (replace msft with microsoft) if the above job descriptions sound like they are a good fit for you. If you have any questions about what working here is like, you can send me an email and I'll either follow up via email or my blog to answer any questions of general interest [within reason].

Now Playing: Rascal Flatts - Fast Cars and Freedom

 

One feature that you will not find in Windows Live's What's New list, which shows a feed of a the activities from user's social network, is inline comments. A number of sites that provide users with activity feeds from their social network such as Facebook and Friendfeed allow comments to be made directly on news items in the feed. These comments end up showing up as part of the activity feed that are visible to anyone who can view the feed item.

When Rob and I were deciding upon the key functionality of the What's New feed for the current release of Windows Live, we voted against inline comments for two reasons.

The key reason is that we want the feed to be about what your people in your network are doing and not what people you don't know are doing or saying. However with the Facebook feed I often have lengthy threads from people I don't know in my feed taking up valuable space above the fold. For example,

 

In the above screenshot, I find it rather awkward that a huge chunk of my feed is being taken up by comments from people I don't know who are from Randy's network. Besides the social awkwardness it creates there is another issue with the above screenshot. Given that there is limited real estate for showing your feed it seems counter productive for it to be dominated by comments from people you don't know which are never as interesting as actual feed items.

For the second reason, let's look at a screenshot of an activity feed from FriendFeed

in the above screenshot there are 24 comments on the feed item representing Robert Scoble's blog post. These are 24 comments that could have been posted on his blog but aren't. The more sites Robert imports his blog feed into, the more it fractures and steals away the conversation from his blog post. This is in addition to the fact that there is some confusion as to where people should leave comments on his blog post. I've had people get confused about whether to respond to my posts as a comment on my blog, in Friendfeed or on Facebook and it didn't seem helpful for us to add yet another decision point to the mix.

For these reasons, we don't have inline commenting in the What's New list in Windows Live. This isn't to say this is an irreversible decision. It has been pointed out that for feed items that don't have their own comment threads (e.g. status messages) it might be useful to have inline commenting. In addition, I'm sure there are some people who believe that the benefits of inline commenting outweigh the drawbacks that we've mentioned above. I'd love to hear what users of Windows Live think about the above decision and thought process behind it. Let me know in the comments. 

PS: If you are interested in more behind the scenes looks at some of the big and small decisions around the What's New feature in Windows Live, you should read Rob Dolin's ongoing series of posts entitled Series: What New in Windows Live “What’s New” and Why.

Now Playing: Guns N' Roses - Chinese Democracy

 

The place to find the most recent comments on your photos, blog posts, profile, files and shared favorites is http://profile.live.com/recentcomments.

If you are like me and prefer to navigate from a central place like http://home.live.com, the screenshot below shows where to find the link to recent comments on that page

Now Playing: Rihanna - Rehab (Album Version)

 

Giving users complete control of their online experience has always been a core tenet of Windows Live and this hasn't changed with the What's New list feature in Windows Live. This feature enables users to view an activity feed of what members of their social network are doing AND to provide an activity feed of what the user has done recently. You can see an example of the latter on my Windows Live profile.

Listed below are the various ways we keep users in control of their online experience related to this feature.

In Control of What You See

By default a user sees activities from members of their network and from groups they are in. However users can opt out of getting activities from any member of their network or from any group they are in without breaking their relationship with that user or group. In addition, users can also opt out of getting activities of a specific type (e.g. friend additions or Twitter updates) from members of their network.

We provide two entry points for managing what updates you get from your network. First of all, users can manage updates from a particular user or update type by hovering over the item in the dashboard and clicking on the gear icon. The users, groups and applications that are currently blocked can be viewed on the What's New settings page at http://profile.live.com/whatsnewsettings. This is what that page looks like for me at the current time. 

As you can see from the above screenshot, I haven't hidden any update types from my What's New list. I did add the "Paintballers" group to my list of hidden groups though. Although I like getting paintballing events in my calendar, I'm not interested in discussions or photos about paintball on a regular basis.

In Control of What Others See About You

Some times, users may want to retract updates that have gone out to their social network. For example, a reference to inappropriate content that may offend people in their social network or pictures of streaking or similar nude pranks which inadvertently go out to the wrong people. For this reason, we give users the ability to delete such items from their profile which immediately deletes it from the what's new lists of their friends as shown below

It should also be noted that each update type typically has a permission associated with it. This means that a user can control who has access to a particular photo album, their shared favorites or even their Twitter stream (as shown below). That way you can still broadcast updates to your friends on Windows Live without worrying that you are accidentally sharing inappropriate content with your boss or coworkers.

In addition there is an options page where users can completely opt out of broadcasting updates from Windows Live to members of their social network.  For example, I know someone who'd rather not have it broadcasted whenever he changes his status message in Messenger since he believes they should ephemeral thoughts and not captured for posterity. This options page also allows configuring updates from other web sites that are being aggregated on the user's profile. The What's New with you settings page can be found at http://profile.live.com/WhatsNewWithYouSettings.

A screenshot of the settings page is shown below

Conclusion

So you can see when it comes to activity feeds in Windows Live, our mantra is to keep users in control. Let me know what you think of our approach in the comments.

Now Playing: Kanye West - See You In My Nightmares (feat. Lil Wayne)

 

So I've been constantly refreshing Twitter search for "Windows Live" and so far the comments on our latest release have been super positive. Here is a sampling of tweets from the last two hours

slaguzman: @WindowsLiveWire I really like the new version of Windows Live! Keep up the good work.

paulsterling: new windows live looks really good - nice!

Bashmohandes: Windows Live Wave 3 is AWESOME !!!

benriga: New Windows Live is looking pretty sweet. It's come a long way with the new wave.

niceguyscott: The new windows live experience is doap.

MikeGalos: OK. After an hour. Windows Live Wave 3 is very, very cool.

Anchelspain: Loving the new and improved version of the Windows Live services. Mail, social network, blogging, picture uploading... everything's great!

sharepointing: I am liking the "Social Networking" refresh at Windows Live

Elepsis: The new Windows Live services are starting to roll out. They're looking pretty awesome. :)

joshpowell: The new Windows Live services are pretty cool. I'm adding in web services such as Twitter, Flickr, etc. to a central feed.

baxiabhishek: Sweet! Windows Live Wave 3 is rolled out for my account. Awesome!

Ingdawg: @majornelson Windows Live Home is awesome. Love how everything is in one place.

ScottTrepanier: Uploading photos to the new Windows Live...I love it.

Excited and proud doesn't even begin to cover what it feels like to get this release out there.

  Now Playing: Amy Winehouse - Love Is A Losing Game

 

As some of you know, last year I worked on the platform behind the What's New page on Windows Live Spaces which provides the similar functionality to the News Feed on Facebook.  That was just our first run at the feature and almost immediately after our release there was some great feedback from various corners. The most complete feedback I found online came from Jamie Thomson who wrote about the Spaces home page and gave the following suggestions

There's a lot of potential for this activity list given that it could capture any activity people commit using their Live ID. Every live property has the potential for being able to post activity on here so one day we may see notifications of:

• change of messenger status
• posting of photos on Live Space
• addition of gadgets to Live Space
• items placed for sale on Expo
• questions asked or answered on QnA
• collection shared from Live Maps
• video posted on MSN video
• changes to XBox gamer card
• changes to Zune Social (after it launches)
• items posted to the Live Gallery
• an event being planned
• purchased a song from Zune marketplace
• posts in MSN groups (soon to be Live Groups)
• posts to online forums (forums.microsoft.com)
• downloads of public files from Skydrive

Its all pretty good but let's be honest, this is basically a clone of of what Facebook already have. Given Facebook's popularity though Microsoft didn't really have a choice but to copy them. If Microsoft really want to differentiate themselves in this arena then one option would be to provide avenues for interacting with other online services such as Flickr, Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce,  etc... This list could then become an aggregator for all online activity and that's a pretty compelling scenario. One really quick win in this area would be to capture any blog entry that is posted from Live Writer, regardless of whether it is posted to Live Spaces or not.

Turning the idea on its head...it would be cool to be able to publish the activity list on other sites such as MySpace, Bebo and (them again) Facebook.

It isn’t often that you can get such complete feedback from one of your customers and then turn around and say you implemented every feature they asked for. From the list of 15 suggested activities to add to the feed above, I’d say about half either now show up in the feed today or will soon show up. The rest won’t either because the service is being deprecated (e.g. Live Expo being wound down) or we explicitly decided that notifications on that change didn’t seem particularly relevant (e.g. notifications when someone you know downloads a file off of SkyDrive).

Besides the features Jamie asked for we added one more that seems obvious in hindsight; an Atom feed of the updates from your social network so you can keep up to date with your social network from your favorite feed reader. Thanks to this feature we satisfied another recent request from Jamie and there is now a Vista gadget that can be used to consume your What's New feed directly from your desktop. Both the gadget and Atom feed feature were the results of dev work by our 2008 summer interns. As I mentioned on Twitter a few months ago I suspect many of my readers will appreciate their output.

We also enable our users to aggregate their online activity in a single place and then share it with their friends. For example, if you go to my Windows Live profile you’ll see that I’ve aggregated my activities from Twitter, Pandora, StumbleUpon,and my personal weblog onto my Windows Live profile which will then show up on the What’s New page of my friends in Windows Live. Activities can be aggregated from a number of other sites including Flickr, Flixster, PhotoBucket, Yelp, iLike, blogs hosted on Wordpress.com and a bunch of other sites with more to come in the future. Of course, you can just import a regular old RSS or Atom feed as well. 

Although this functionality started out as a feature of Windows Live Spaces, it soon became clear that this feature really should be a “Windows Live” feature. This means it is deeply integrated into all of the major Windows Live products including desktop applications like Windows Live Messenger and the Windows Live Toolbar. Also there are a ton of revamped Windows Live web experiences that pivot around the What's New list such as the Home, Photos, Groups and the Profile pages.

Now for the back story.

At the end of last year, the main problem it seemed we had to tackle was making it easier for other Windows Live and/or Microsoft product teams to plug into the What's New feed on Windows Live Spaces. However the list of teams interested in the feed continued to grow as did the number of feature requests we got the more we talked to people about it. Once we saw all the new requirements for the feature at the beginning of this year and started doing the math on what it would take to support on the order of hundreds of millions people using this feature and handling billions of transactions a day it quickly became clear we had to redesign from scratch. In the words of Frederick Brooks, build one to throw away – you will anyway. It has been a grueling but fun year getting the platform out and it feels great to see millions of people enjoying our handiwork. This should explain my interest in Twitter’s scaling problems earlier this year since a micro blogging service with a model of followers and an open API is in the same problem space as providing a news feed that supports activity aggregation on a social networking site. Building a system to support over 280 million Hotmail users, 260 million Messenger users and around 120 million Spaces users from scratch has been a helluva thing. We've definitely pulled all of the scaling tricks out of the bag including my favorite trio of Dark Launches, Gradual Ramps and Isolation.

Much love to everyone who made this happen; Hammad, Brad B, Austin, Derrick, Peter, Paul, Badriddine, John, and Kyle. You guys were a killer dev & test team (the interns included). We also had great support from our leads Mike P, Inder & Diego. Our ops folks were incredible, I owe you all a big hug; Srdjan, Curtis, David G (deserter!!! *smile* ),  Scott R, Keith, William, Eric, Ziad, Teri, Michael, and Edet. Props to Kerstin, Sharad, Suresh, Alpesh and everyone else who made the aggregation experience shine on the platform end. Thanks to all the UX folks who touched or were touched by this feature including Miriam, David L, Jeff, Lavinder, Douc, Hua, Stacey, Vlad, Alton, Chad, Edgar, Colin, Jennifer, Omar, Mike, Shu, Michelle, Chris, Jason, Scott S, Chuck, Ben, Khalid, Deepa, Rob (my partner in crime – we worked on this so closely I have him on speed dial on my cell phone) and a ton of other folks on the Windows Live Experience team,  you guys rock. And finally thanks to all the management folks that were super supportive; Ramesh, Russ, Chris, Tread, Ben and Debra. Without you guys none of this would have happened.

Damn, I love working here.

PS: Brandon, I hope you like this release. 

PPS: By the way, we're hiring and are looking for a few good operations folks, developers and testers who wouldn't mind spending their days building services that are used by tens of millions of people every single day.  Send me your resume if interested.

 Now Playing: Ice Cube - Gangsta Rap Made Me Do It 

 

Disclaimer: What follows are my personal impressions from investigating the community technology preview version of the Live Framwork (LiveFX). It is not meant to be an official description of the project from Microsoft, you can find that here.

At Microsoft's recent Professional Developer Conference, a new set of Web services called Live Framework (aka LiveFX) was unveiled. As I've spent the past year working on platforms for user experiences in Windows Live, I actually haven't been keeping up to date with what's going on in developer API land when it comes to programming against our services. So I decided to check out the Live Framework website and find out exactly what was announced.

What is it?

Although the main website is somewhat light on details, I eventually gleaned enough information from the Live Framework SDK documentation on MSDN to conclude that LiveFX consists of the following pieces

1. A Resource Model: A set of RESTful APIs for interacting with Live Mesh and Windows Live data.
2. Libraries: A set of libraries for the .NET Framework, Silverlight and Javascript for accessing the REST APIs.
3. The Live Operating Environment: A local web server that implements #1 above so it can be programmed against using #2 above.

The Scary Architecture Diagram

This diagram tries to capture all the ideas in LiveFX in a single image. I found it somewhat overwhelming and after learning more about LiveFX I consider it to be a rather poor way of conveying across its key concepts.  It doesn't help that this diagram is somewhat aspirational given that some key pieces of the diagram are missing from the current technology preview. 

The Resource Model

Live Mesh and Windows Live data is exposed by LiveFX as a set of resources identified by URIs which can be interacted with via the Atom Publishing Protocol (RFC 5023). Relationships between resources are exposed as hyperlinks between resources. The hierarchical data model currently exposed in the CTP is shown in the diagram below taken from the MSDN documentation.

It should be noted that although AtomPub is the primary protocol for interacting with resources in LiveFX, multiple serialization formats can be used to retrieve data from the service including Atom, RSS, Plain Old XML (POX), JSON or even binary XML.

Since LiveFX is a fully compliant implementation of the Atom Publishing Protocol, one can browse to the service document of a user's Mesh or other top level resource and traverse links to various Atom collections and feeds in the hierarchy. Below is a screenshot of the LiveFX resource browser showing the service document for a user's Mesh with the links to various child collections exposed as hyperlinks.

Besides supporting multiple serialization formats, there are a number of other features of LiveFX that separate it from a vanilla implementation of the Atom Publishing Protocol.

• Synchronization via FeedSync: Mesh resources in LiveFX can be synchronized using FeedSync (formerly Simple Sharing Extensions). FeedSync is a family of extensions to RSS and Atom that enables bidirectional synchronization of XML feeds and the resources they reference. However synchronization in LiveFX is based on a client/server model instead of a peer-to-peer model which means that instead of the server subscribing to changes from the client and vice versa, clients subscribe to changes from the server and then inform the server when they make a change. More information about how LiveFX implements FeedSync can be found here.

• Query Model and Linq to REST: LiveFX supports the same URI query parameters for paging, sorting, filtering and inline expansion of linked resources as other Microsoft cloud-based data APIs including ADO.NET Data Services (formerly Astoria), SQL Server Data Services and Windows Azure Storage services. One of the benefits of this consistency is that the ADO.NET client libraries can be used to perform Linq queries over the LiveFX data types using a technology that has been colloquially described as Linq to REST. For example, the following C# Linq query actually executes HTTP GET requests using the $filter parameter under the covers.

  MeshObject GetMeshObjectByTitle(string title)
         {
             MeshObject meshObject = (from mo in mesh.CreateQuery<MeshObject>()
                                      where mo.Resource.Title == title
                                      select mo).FirstOrDefault<MeshObject>();
  
             return meshObject;
         }

  The HTTP request this makes over the wire is

  GET https://user-ctp.windows.net/V0.1/Mesh/MeshObjects/{meshObjectID}/DataFeeds/?$filter=(Title eq ‘WhateverWasPassedIn’)

• Batch Requests via Resource Scripts: LiveFX supports batching using a construct known as resource scripts. Using resource scripts a developer can submit a single request which contains multiple create, retrieve, update and delete operations at once. A resource script consists of a control flow statement which can contain one or more control flow statements, web operation statements, synchronization statements, data flow constructs and data flow statements.  You can find out more about resource scripts by reading the document About Live Framework Resource Scripts on the LiveFX developer site.

• Resource Introspection via OPTIONS: One problem that commonly occurs in REST APIs is determining which operations a resource supports. Some protocols like OpenSocial specify a mechanism where HTTP responses should indicate which parameters are not supported. The problem with this approach is that the client has to first make an HTTP request then have it fail before determining if the feature is supported. LiveFX supports the HTTP OPTIONS verb on every resource. By performing the following HTTP request

  OPTIONS https:// user-ctp.windows.net/V0.1/{UserID}/Mesh/MeshObjects/{meshObjectID}

  a client can retrieve an introspection metadata document which describes what query parameters and serialization formats the resource supports. The $metadata query parameter can also be used to retrieve the introspection metadata document. This enables clients using libraries that don't support making HTTP OPTIONS requests to also be able to retrieve introspection metadata.

• Support for Portable Contacts: By specifying the parameter $type=portable when requesting contact data, the results will be returned in the Portable Contacts schema format as either JSON or Plain Old XML. 

The Libraries

Like most major Web vendors who have exposed REST APIs, Microsoft has provided client libraries to make interacting with the LiveFX service more natural for developers who aren't comfortable programming directly against HTTP. The following client libraries are provided

• A generic AtomPub client library for the .NET Framework. Learn more about programming with it here.
• A .NET Framework library which provides a high-level object model for interacting with the LiveFX service. More details here.
• A Javascript library which provides a high-level object model for interacting with the LiveFX service. Programming samples can be found here.

The Live Operating Environment

The Live Operating Environment refers to two things. The first is the Web platform upon which the LiveFX REST APIs are implemented. The second is a  local cache which runs on your PC or other device which exposes the same REST interface as the LiveFX Web service. This is somewhat similar to Google Gears except that the database is accessed RESTfully instead of via a SQL API.

The intent of the local version of the Live Operating Environment is to enable developers to be able to build apps that target the desktop or the Web without having to change their programming model. All that needs to be altered is changing the base URI from https://user-ctp.windows.net to http://localhost:2048 when accessing LiveFX resources. Everything else works exactly the same.

The Bottom Line

As the title of this blog post states there is a lot of similarity in concept between LiveFX and Google's Data APIs (GData). Like GData, LiveFX provides a consistent set of AtomPub based APIs for accessing resources from a particular vendor's online services along with a set of client libraries that wrap these RESTful APIs. And just like GData, there are Microsoft-specific extensions to the Atom syndication format and custom query parameters for sorting, filtering and paging.  LiveFX also supports batching like GData, however from my perspective adding batching to a Web service seems like an attempt to reinvent distributed transactions. This is a bad idea given the flaws of distributed transactions that are well discussed in Pat Helland's excellent paper Life beyond Distributed Transactions: An Apostate's Opinion. 

A number of LiveFX's additional features such as synchronization and resource introspection which have no analog in GData are fairly interesting and I wouldn't be surprised to see these ideas get further traction in the industry. On the flip side, the client-side Live Operating Environment is a technology whose benefits elude me. I admit it is kind of cool but I can't see its utility.

Now Playing: John Legend - Green Light (feat. Andre 3000)

 

About a year ago I wrote up a definition of a social operating system in my post The Difference between a Social Network Site, a Social Graph Application and a Social OS which I think is worth revisiting today. In that post I defined a Social OS as

Social Operating System: These are a subset of social networking sites. In fact, the only application in this category today is Facebook.  Before you use your computer, you have to boot your operating system and every interaction with your PC goes through the OS. However instead of interacting directly with the OS, most of the time you interact with applications written on top of the OS. Similarly a Social OS is the primary application you use for interacting with your social circles on the Web. All your social interactions whether they be hanging out, chatting, playing games, watching movies, listening to music, engaging in private gossip or public conversations occurs within this context. This flexibilty is enabled by the fact that the Social OS is a platform that enables one to build various social graph applications on top of it.

In retrospect, the fundamental flaw with this definition is that it encourages services that want to become social operating systems to aspire to become walled gardens. The problem with walled gardens on the Web is that they shortchange users. This is because the Web is about sharing and communicating with people from all over the world while walled gardens are about limiting you to interacting with people (and content) that are part of a particular online service or Web site. Thus walled gardens limit their users.

Jeremy Zawodny had a great post about this entitled There is no Web Operating System (or WebOS) where he wrote

Luckily, two of my coworkers caught on to what I was saying and managed to help put it into context a bit. First off was Matt McAlister (who runs YDN, the group I work in). In The Business of Network Effects he does a good job of explaining how businesses and services in a network are fundamentally different from those which are isolated islands.

Recalling a brief conversation we had a couple weeks ago, he says:

Jeremy Zawodny shed light on this concept for me using building construction analogies.

He noted that my building contractor doesn't exclusively buy Makita or DeWalt or Ryobi tools, though some tools make more sense in bundles. He buys the tool that is best for the job and what he needs.

My contractor doesn't employ plumbers, roofers and electricians himself. Rather he maintains a network of favorite providers who will serve different needs on different jobs.

He provides value to me as an experienced distribution and aggregation point, but I am not exclusively tied to using him for everything I want to do with my house, either.

Similarly, the Internet market is a network of services. The trick to understanding what the business model looks like is figuring out how to open and connect services in ways that add value to the business.

Bingo.

The web is a marketplace of services, just like the "real world" is. Everyone is free to choose from all the available services when building or doing whatever it is they do. The web just happens to be a far more efficient marketplace than the real world for many things. And it happens to run on computers that each need an operating system.

But nobody ever talks about a "Wall Street Operating System" or a "Small Business Operating System" do they? Why not?

Ian Kennedy followed up to Matt's post with The Web as a Loose Federation of Contractors in which he says:

I like Jeremy's illustration - an OS gives you the impression of an integrated stack which leads to strategies which favor things like user lock-in to guarantee performance and consistency of experience. If you think of the web as a loose collections of services that work together on discreet projects, then you start to think of value in other ways such as making your meta-data as portable and accessible as possible so it can be accessed over and over again in many different contexts.

Bingo again.

No matter how popular a particular website becomes it will not be the only service used by its customers. So it follows that no matter how popular a social networking site becomes, it will not be the only social networking service used by its customers or their friends. Thus a true Social Operating System shouldn't be about creating a prettier walled garden than your competitors but instead about making sure you can bring together all of a user's social experiences together regardless of whether they are on your site or on those of a competing service. If I use Twitter and my wife doesn't, I'd like her to know what I'm doing via the service even though she isn't a Twitter user. If my friends use Yelp to recommend restaurants in the area, I'd like to find out about the restaurants even though I'm not a Yelp user. And so on.

With the latest release of Windows Live, we're working towards bringing this vision one step closer to reality. You can read more about it in the official announcement and the accompanying blog post. I guess the statement "life without walls" also applies to Windows Live.

Now Playing: T-Pain - Chopped N Skrewed (Feat. Ludacris)

 

From the Microsoft press release Microsoft Introduces Updated Windows Live Service we learn

REDMOND, Wash. — Nov. 12, 2008 — Microsoft Corp. today announced the next generation of Windows Live, an integrated set of online services that make it easier and more fun for consumers to communicate and share with the people they care about most. The new generation of Windows Live includes updated experiences for photo sharing, e-mail, instant messaging, as well as integration with multiple third-party sites. The release also includes Windows Live Essentials, free downloadable software that enhances consumers’ Windows experience by helping them simplify and enjoy digital content scattered across their PC, phone and on Web sites. For more information about windows live go to http://www.windowslive.com.

Consumers today are creating online content and sharing it in many places across the Web. To help make is simple for the more than 460 million Windows Live customers to keep their friends up to date, Microsoft is collaborating with leading companies including Flickr, LinkedIn Corp., Pandora Media Inc., Photobucket Inc., Twitter, WordPress and Yelp Inc. to integrate activities on third-party sites into Windows Live through a new profile and What’s New feed. The new Windows Live also gives consumers the added convenience of having a central place to organize and manage information.

It's really exciting to know that hundreds of millions of people will soon be able to take advantage of what we've been thinking about and working on over the past year. I plan to hold my tongue until everyone can play with the new version themselves. For now I'll leave some links and screenshots from various blogs showing our baby off.

From TechCrunch: Sweeping Changes At Live.com: It’s A Social Network!

From Windows Live Wire:Windows Live – Keeping your life in sync

 

From Mary Jo Foley on All About Microsoft: Windows Live Wave 3: Microsoft’s kinder and simpler consumer services strategy?

From Kara Swisher on BoomTown: Microsoft Officially Facebooks, Oops, Socializes Windows Live Internet Services

Now Playing: Terence Trent D'Arby - Sign Your Name

 

Disclaimer: What follows are my personal impressions from using the beta version of Windows Azure. It is not meant to be an official description of the project from Microsoft, you can find that here. 

Earlier this week I scored an invite to try out the beta version of Windows Azure which is a new hosted services (aka cloud computing) platform from Microsoft. Since there's been a ridiculous amount of press about the project I was interested in actually trying it out by developing and deploying some code using this platform and sharing my experiences with others.

What is it?

Before talking about a cloud computing platform, it is useful to agree on definitions of the term cloud computing. Tim O'Reilly has an excellent post entitled Web 2.0 and Cloud Computing where he breaks the technologies typically described as cloud computing into three broad categories

1. Utility Computing: In this approach, a vendor provides access to virtual server instances where each instance runs a traditional server operating system such as Linux or Windows Server. Computation and storage resources are metered and the customer can "scale infinitely" by simply creating new server instances. The most popular example of this approach is Amazon EC2.
2. Platform as a Service: In this approach, a vendor abstracts away the notion of accessing traditional LAMP or WISC stacks from their customers and instead provides an environment for running programs written using a particular platform. In addition, data storage is provided via a custom storage layer and API instead of traditional relational database access. The most popular example of this approach is Google App Engine.
3. Cloud-based end user applications: This typically refers to Web-based applications that have previously been provided as desktop or server based applications. Examples include Google Docs, Salesforce and Hotmail. Technically every Web application falls under this category, however the term often isn't used that inclusively.

With these definitions clearly stated it is easier to talk about what Windows Azure is and is not. Windows Azure is currently #2; a Platform as a Service offering. Although there have been numerous references to Amazon's offerings both by Microsoft and bloggers covering the Azure announcements, Windows Azure is not a utility computing offering [as defined above].

There has definitely been some confusion about this as evidenced by Dave Winer's post Microsoft's cloud strategy? and commentary from other sources.

Getting Started

To try out Azure you need to be running Windows Server 2008 or Windows Vista with a bunch of prerequisites you can get from running the Microsoft Web Platform installer. Once you have the various prerequisites installed (SQL Server, IIS 7, .NET Framework 3.5, etc) you should then grab the Windows Azure SDK. Users of Visual Studio will also benefit from grabbing the Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio.

After this process, you should be able to fire up Visual Studio and see the option to create a Cloud Service if you go to File->New->Project.

Building Cloud-based Applications with Azure

The diagram below taken from the Windows Azure SDK shows the key participants in a typical Windows Azure service

The work units that make up a Windows Azure hosted service can have one of two roles. A Web role is an application that listens for and responds to Web requests while a Worker role is a background processing task which acts autonomously but cannot be accessed over the Web. A Windows Azure application can have multiple instances of Web and Worker roles that make up the service. For example, if I was developing a Web-based RSS reader I would need a worker role for polling feeds and Web role for displaying the UI that the user interacts with. Both Web and Worker roles are .NET applications that can be developed locally and then deployed on Microsoft's servers when they are ready to go.

Azure applications have access to a storage layer that provides the following three storage services

• Blob Storage: This is used for storing binary data. A user account can have one or more containers which in turn can contain one or more blobs of binary data. Containers cannot be nested so one cannot create hierarchical folder structures. However Azure allows applications to work around this by (i) allowing applications to query containers based on substring matching on prefixes and (ii) delimiters such as '\' and other path characters are valid blob names. So I can create blobs with names like 'mypics\wife.jpg' and 'mypics\son.jpg' in the media container and then query for blobs beginning with 'mypics\' thus simulating a folder hierarchy somewhat. 

• Queue Service: This is a straightforward message queuing service. A user account can have one or more queues from which they can add items to the end of each queue and remove items from the front. Items have a maximum time-to-live of 7 days within the queue. When an item is retrieved from the queue, an associated 'pop receipt' is provided. The item is then hidden from other client applications until some interval (by default 30 seconds) has passed after which the item becomes visible. The item can be deleted from the queue during that interval if the pop receipt from when it was retrieved is provided as part of the DELETE operation.  The queue service is valuable as a way for Web roles to talk to Worker roles and vice versa.

• Table Storage: This exposes a subset of the capabilities of the ADO.NET Data Services Framework (aka Astoria). In general, this is a schema-less table based model similar to Google's BigTable and Amazon's SimpleDB. The data model consists of tables and entities (aka rows). Each entity has a primary key made of two parts {PartitionKey, RowKey}, a last modified timestamp and an arbitrary number of user-defined properties. Properties can be one of several primitive types including integer, strings, doubles, long integers, GUIDs, booleans and binary. Like Astoria, the Table Storage service supports performing LINQ queries on rows but only supports the FROM, WHERE and TAKE operators. Other differences from Astoria are that it doesn't support batch operations nor is it possible to retrieve individual properties from an entity without retrieving the entire entity.

These storage services are accessible to any HTTP client and not just Azure applications. 

Deploying Cloud-based Applications with Azure

The following diagram taken from the Windows Azure SDK shows the development lifecycle of an Windows Azure application

 

The SDK ships with a development fabric which enables you to deploy an Azure an application locally via IIS 7.0 and development storage which uses SQL Server Express as a storage layer which mimics the Windows Azure storage services.

As the diagram shows above, once the application is tested locally it can be deployed entirely or in part on Microsoft's storage and cloud computation services.

The Azure Services Platform: Windows Azure + Microsoft's Family of REST Web Services

In addition to Windows Azure, Microsoft also announced the Azure Services Platform which is a variety of Web APIs and Web Services that can be used in combination with Windows Azure (or by themselves) to build cloud-based applications. Each of these Web services is worthy of its own post (or whitepaper and O'Reilly animal book) but I'll limit myself to one sentence descriptions for now.

• Live Services: A set of REST APIs for consumer-centric data types (e.g. calendar, profile, etc) and scenarios (communication, presence, sync, etc). You can see the set of APIs in the Live Framework poster and keep up with the goings on by following the Live Services blogs.

• Microsoft SQL Services: Relational database in the cloud accessible via REST APIs. You can learn more from the SSDS developer center and keep up with the goings on by following the SQL Server Data Services team blog.

• Microsoft .NET Services: Three fairly different services for now; hosted access control, hosted workflow engine and a service bus in the cloud. Boring enterprise stuff. :) 

• Microsoft Sharepoint Services: I couldn't figure out if anything concrete was announced here or whether stuff was pre-announced (i.e. actual announcement to come at a later date).

• Microsoft Dynamics CRM Services: Ditto.

From the above list, I find the Live Services piece (access to user data in a uniform way) and the SQL Services (hosted storage) most interesting. I will likely revisit them in more depth at a later date.

The Bottom Line

From my perspective, Windows Azure is easiest viewed as a competitor to Google App Engine. As comparisons go, Azure already brings a number of features to the table that aren't even on the Google App Engine road map. The key important feature is the ability to run background tasks instead of just being limited to writing applications that respond to Web requests. This limitation of App Engine means you can't write any application that does any serious background computation like a search engine, email service, or RSS reader on Google App Engine. So Azure can run an entire class of applications that are simply not possible on Google App Engine.

The second key feature is that by supporting the .NET Framework, developers theoretically get a plethora of languages to choose from including Ruby (IronRuby), Python (IronPython), F#, VB.NET and C#. In practice, the Azure SDK only supports creating cloud applications using C# and VB.NET out of the box. However I can't think of any reason why it shouldn't be able to support development with other .NET enabled languages like IronPython. On the flipside, App Engine only supports Python and the timeline for it supporting other languages [and exactly which other languages] is still To Be Determined.

Finally, App Engine has a number of scalability limitations both from a data storage and a query performance perspective. Azure definitely does better than App Engine on a number of these axes. For example, App Engine has a 1MB limit per file while Azure has a 64MB limit on individual blobs and also allows you to split a blob into blocks of 4MB each. Similarly, I've been watching SQL Server Data Services (SSDS) for a while and I haven't seen or heard complaints about query performance.

Azure makes it possible for me to reuse my existing skills as a .NET developer who is savvy with using RESTful APIs to build cloud based applications without having to worry about scalability concerns (e.g. database sharding, replication strategies, server failover, etc). In addition, it puts pressure on competitors to step up to the plate and deliver. However you look at it, this is a massive WIN for Web developers.

The two small things I'd love to see addressed are first class support for IronPython and some clarity on the difference between SSDS and Windows Azure Storage services. Hopefully we can avoid a LINQ to Entities vs. LINQ to SQL-style situation in the future.

Postscript: Food for Thought

It would be interesting to read [or write] further thoughts on the pros and cons of Platform as a Service offerings when compared to Utility Computing offerings. In a previous discussion on my blog there was some consensus that utility computing approaches are more resistant to vendor lock-in than platform as a service approaches since it is easier to find multiple vendors who are providing virtual servers with LAMP/WISC hosting than it will be to find multiple vendors providing the exact same proprietary cloud APIs as Google, Amazon or Microsoft. However it would be informative to look at the topic from more angles, for instance what is the cost/benefit tradeoff of using SimpleDB/BigTable/SSDS for data access instead of MySQL running on multiple virtual hosts? With my paternity leave ending today, I doubt I'll have time to go over these topics in depth but I'd appreciate reading any such analysis.

Now Playing: The Game - Money

 

The second most interesting announcement out of PDC this morning is that Windows Live ID is becoming an OpenID Provider. The information below explains how to try it out and give feedback to the team responsible.

Try It Now. Tell Us What You Think

We want you to try the Windows Live ID OpenID Provider CTP release, let us know your feedback, and tell us about any problems you find.

To prepare:

1. Go to https://login.live-int.com and use the sign-up button to set up a Windows Live ID test account in the INT environment.
2. Go to https://login.live-int.com/beta/ManageOpenID.srf to set up your OpenID test alias.

Then:

• Users - At any Web site that supports OpenID 2.0, type openid.live-INT.com in the OpenID login box to sign in to that site by means of your Windows Live ID OpenID alias.
• Library developers - Test your libraries against the Windows Live ID OP endpoint and let us know of any problems you find.
• Web site owners - Test signing in to your site by using a Windows Live ID OpenID alias and let us know of any problems you find.
• You can send us feedback at:
• E-mail - openidfb@microsoft.com

This is awesome news. I've been interested in Windows Live supporting OpenID for a while and I'm glad to see that we've taken the plunge. Please try it out and send the team your feedback.

I've tried it out already and sent some initial feedback. In general, my feedback was on applying the lessons from the Yahoo! OpenID Usability Study since it looks like our implementation has some of the same usability issues that inspired Jeff Atwood's rants about Yahoo's OpenID implementation. Since it is still a Community Technology Preview, I'm sure the user experience will improve as feedback trickles in.

Kudos to Jorgen Thelin and the rest of the folks on the Identity Services team for getting this out. Great work, guys.

UPDATE: Angus Logan posted a comment with a link to the following screencast of the current user experience when using Windows Live ID as an OpenID provider experience

Now Playing: Christina Aguilera - Keeps Gettin' Better

 

Just because you aren't attending Microsoft's Professional Developer Conference doesn't mean you can't follow the announcements. The most exciting announcement so far [from my perspective] has been Windows Azure which is described as follows from the official site

The Azure™ Services Platform (Azure) is an internet-scale cloud services platform hosted in Microsoft data centers, which provides an operating system and a set of developer services that can be used individually or together. Azure’s flexible and interoperable platform can be used to build new applications to run from the cloud or enhance existing applications with cloud-based capabilities. Its open architecture gives developers the choice to build web applications, applications running on connected devices, PCs, servers, or hybrid solutions offering the best of online and on-premises.

Azure reduces the need for up-front technology purchases, and it enables developers to quickly and easily create applications running in the cloud by using their existing skills with the Microsoft Visual Studio development environment and the Microsoft .NET Framework. In addition to managed code languages supported by .NET, Azure will support more programming languages and development environments in the near future. Azure simplifies maintaining and operating applications by providing on-demand compute and storage to host, scale, and manage web and connected applications. Infrastructure management is automated with a platform that is designed for high availability and dynamic scaling to match usage needs with the option of a pay-as-you-go pricing model. Azure provides an open, standards-based and interoperable environment with support for multiple internet protocols, including HTTP, REST, SOAP, and XML.

It will be interesting to read what developers make of this announcement and what kind of apps start getting built on this platform. I'll also be on the look out for any in depth discussions on the platform, there is lots to chew on in this announcement.

For a quick overview of what Azure means to developers, take a look at Azure for Business and Azure for Web Developers. 

Now Playing: Guns N' Roses - Welcome to the Jungle

 

A few days ago, Omar Shahine wrote about the new features of Windows Live Calendar in a post entitled Windows Live Calendar gets To Dos where he writes

At long last, we have shipped To Dos. It’s been a long time since I worked on Windows Live Calendar and we were talking about building To Dos. The best part about To Dos is that they work with Shared Calendars. In other words, if you and your spouse have a “Family Calendar” you can now create and manage a shared task list… something Google Calendar still doesn’t have.

With the new release of Windows Live Calendar and the new Beta releases of the Windows Live Suite there is a ton of great end to end Calendar functionality.

1. Outlook Connector to sync all your Windows Live Calendars to Outlook, including your Birthday Calendar for all your Contacts.
2. Windows Live Mail now with Calendar Sync will also sync all your Windows Live Calendars
3. Shared Calendars that you can create, share and manage with other Windows Live Users
4. Calendar Subscriptions to public internet calendars that you can subscribe and sync to all the products above.

And of course now To Dos. Dare should be happy about this. He’ll need it when the baby comes .

One thing has been frustrating me for months is that there was no easy way to incorporate shared calendaring into my wife and I's workflow even though we both used calendaring products from Microsoft. Typically my wife would add an item to her calendar (in Windows Calendar) and then have to literally tell me about the appointment at which point I'd either enter it into my Windows Mobile phone which would synchronize it with Outlook + Exchange or I'd fire up my laptop and enter it directly into Outlook. The big problem with this "approach" is when she tells me about something and I don't immediately enter it into my phone (e.g. when i don't want to be inappropriate at our midwife appointments) in which case I forget and end up being late or missing shared appointments.

This has all changed with the usage of two free products from Microsoft. The first is the newest version of Windows Live Mail (Wave 3 beta) which now has a built in calendar with synchronizes with Windows Live Calendar which my wife now uses. The second is Microsoft Office Outlook Connector which allows you to synchronize email with Windows Live Hotmail and calendars from Windows Live Calendar directly into Outlook which I use at work.

Besides installing both pieces of software the only setup step needed was for my wife to share her calendar with me from Windows Live Calendar. Now that my wife has begun her maternity leave in preparation for the birth of our son, I'm glad I can fire up Outlook and see what's going on with her during my work day. For example, looking in my Outlook calendar for tomorrow shows an appointment I'd almost forgotten

That would have been embarrassing.

Now Playing: Stevie Wonder - I Was Made To Love Her

 

Darren Neimke a post entitled The “What’s New” feature in Live Messenger where he gives some feedback on a new feature of Windows Live Messenger which shows updates from the user's social network at the bottom of the Messenger window in a slideshow/carousel. Although I don't work on the Windows Live Messenger team, I did work on the platform that powers this feature and I am intimately familiar with how it works. So here are his questions and my answers

The new beta for Windows Live Messenger has given us an interesting new featured called “What’s new” which displays updates from your friends at the bottom of the Messenger application.  As you can see from the promotional image for this feature, it displays Who, What, and When information from your friends updates.

I really like the idea behind this feature and watching “What’s new” updates has already led me to information that I might previously have missed.  I would say that in the current beta, some parts appear not to be working correctly.

I'm glad to see that bringing activity streams down to the desktop client has led Darren to find out information about his social network that he would have otherwise missed. Serendipitous discovery is what this feature is about and its great to see people getting value out of it within the first few days of using the feature.

Since this is a beta some features may not seem to work correctly either because we haven't gotten around to implementing them or because we would like user feedback on how people expect the features to work.

The actual feature as it is installed on my machine does not seem to display the “When” part of the information as you can see from the following image:

Actually the "When" part of the activity is available in the beta. By default the "What's New" carousel is in collapsed mode but you can expand it by clicking on the divider that separates the "What's New" carousel from the contact list as shown below.

STEP 1: Hover over divider

STEP 2: Click to expand

 

As you can see from the screenshot above, the expanded view takes a lot of real estate from the contact list which is why the default is the collapsed mode. We did have some concerns that users wouldn't discover that they could expand the carousel which seems to have been borne out by Darren's assumption that the feature wasn't there.

Another issue with the status update shown above is that the link that is displayed does not take me to the post that Jamie commented on.  Instead, it takes me to Jamie’s profile page.  Probably not what I’d be interested in seeing here as I’d be much more interested in reading the post and the comment that Jamie made.

Another feature which doesn’t appear to have been implemented as yet is a “Post a note” link.  Currently this appears as a non-clickable piece of text.

The fact that various links don't work in the "What's New" is a known issue. You can expect that these links should work in subsequent releases.

I haven’t really seen much discussion or documentation about the “What’s new” feature as yet to see what events get added and whether there is an SDK behind all of this. 

I’m interested in seeing where this feature goes as it appears to have a lot of promise.  Overall, I think that the current UX is lacking in some way – most popular applications that display feeds tend to show more than just a single entry.  I’m also wondering whether it would make sense to see some sort of provider model that would allow me to publish updates into the feed somehow.

Jamie Thomson has a blog post on the new notification types in the What's New feed where he references the original list from Rob Dolin who's actually responsible for PMing the content of the feed. There are also comments from other Windows Live users discussing the kind of updates they've seen in the feed thus far. I assume Rob is waiting until Wave 3 is final before writing a post on the various update types that show up in the feed. However it should be noted that part of the platform work our team did in this release was to make the process of adding new update types to the feed easier. Thus even if Rob Dolin does post a list of the current update types in the What's New feed, that list could change in a matter of days, weeks or months. 

I've thought a little bit about what a public API for interacting with the What's New feed should be like but I'm currently not sold on whether we should have one and if so what capabilities it should expose. I'd be interested in hearing more from people who would be interested in such an SDK.

Now Playing: The Game - Money

 

Chris Jones has a blog post entitled Building Windows Live where he talks about the what all of us on Windows Live have been working on over the past year. He writes

We have spent the last year working on our next major wave of releases for Windows Live. This wave is part of our ongoing work to build a great set of communication and sharing experiences that help keep your life in sync. This wave includes significant updates to our software applications for your Windows PC, and in the next few hours, we will release public betas of the latest version of the Windows Live suite of PC applications, including Messenger, Mail, Photo Gallery, Movie Maker, Writer, Toolbar, and Family Safety. You’ll find new features across the products and most notably, Windows Live Messenger has been almost entirely redesigned. I’m sure many of you will have questions, and, over the coming weeks, we’ll have individuals from the engineering team share more about what we have built and why we made the investments we made. Our intent is to post regularly to this blog, and if there are topics you think we should cover, please leave a comment or send me an e-mail at chris.jones@microsoft.com.

It seems the download links were found early by those intrepid correspondents over at LiveSide and a number of people have already started trying the new versions out. The download URLs are http://g.live.com/1rebeta3/en/wlsetup-web.exe and http://g.live.com/1rebeta3/en/wlsetup-all.exe depending on whether you want to download a subset of the Windows Live desktop applications or all of them.

I probably won't be blogging in detail about what I've worked on over the past few months until the products are out of beta but I will leave with this screenshot from Darren Neimke's post Loving the new Live Beta’s.

I'm sure you can guess which of the features called out above I worked on.

PS: My favorite thing about the new wave of Windows Live products is that the world now has a seamless calendar sharing solution that works. If Omar doesn't write something similar first, I'll probably throw a blog up about how my wife and I plan to use Outlook + Outlook Connector and Windows Live Mail + Windows Live Calendar to share our schedules so I no longer miss birth center appointments. :)

Now Playing: DJ Khaled - Go Hard (Feat. Kanye West & T-Pain)

 

David Treadwell has a blog post on the Windows Live Developer blog entitled David Treadwell on New and Updated Windows Live Platform Services where he previews some of the announcements that folks will get to dig into at MIX 08. There are a lot of items of note in his post but there is some stuff that stands out that I felt was worth calling out.

Windows Live Messenger Library (new to beta) – “Develop your own IM experience”

We are also opening up the Windows Live Messenger network for third-party web sites to reach the 300 million+ Windows Live Messenger users. The library is a JavaScript client API, so the user experience is primarily defined by the third party. When a third party integrates the Windows Live Messenger Library into their site they can define the look & feel to create their own IM experience. Unlike the existing third party wrappers for the MSN Protocol (the underlying protocol for Windows Live Messenger) the Windows Live Messenger Library securely authenticates users, therefore their Windows Live ID credentials are safe.

A couple of months ago we announced the Windows Live Messenger IM Control which enables you to embed an AJAX instant messaging window on any webpage so people can start IM conversations with you. I have one placed at http://carnage4life.spaces.live.com and it’s cool to have random readers of my blog start up conversations with me in the middle of my work day or at home via the IM control.

The team who delivered this has been hard at work and now they’ve built a library that enables any developer to build similar experiences on top of the Windows Live Messenger network. Completely customized IM integration is now available for anyone that wants it.  Sweet. Kudos to Keiji, Steve Gordon, Siebe and everyone else who had something to do with this for getting it out the door.

An interesting tidbit is that the library was developed in Script#. Three cheers for code generation.

Contacts API (progressed to Beta) – “Bring your friends”

Our goal is to help developers keep users at the center of their experience by letting them control their data and contact portability, while keeping their personal information private. A big step forward in that effort is today’s release to beta of Windows Live Contacts API. Web developers can use this API in production to enable their customers to transfer and share their contacts lists in a secure, trustworthy way (i.e., no more screen scraping)—a great step on the road toward data portability. (For more on Microsoft’s view on data portability, check out Inder Sethi’s video.) By creating an optimized mode for invitations, it allows users to share only the minimum amount of information required to invite friends to a site, this includes firstname / lastname / preferred email address. The Contacts API uses the new Windows Live ID Delegated Authentication framework; you can find out more here.

A lot of the hubbub around “data portability” has really been about exporting contact lists. Those of us working on the Contacts platform at Windows Live realize that there is a great demand for users to be able to access their social graph data securely from non-Microsoft services.  

The Windows Live Contacts API provides a way for Windows Live users to give an application permission to access their contact list in Windows Live (i.e. Hotmail address book/Live Messenger buddy list) without giving the application their username and password. It is our plan to kill the password anti-pattern when it comes to Windows Live services. If you are a developer of an application or Web site that screen scrapes Hotmail contacts, I’d suggest taking a look at this API instead of continuing in this unsavory practice.

Atom Publishing Protocol (AtomPub) as the future direction

Microsoft is making a large investment in unifying our developer platform protocols for services on the open, standards-based Atom format (RFC 4287) and the Atom Publishing Protocol (RFC 5023). At MIX we are enabling several new Live services with AtomPub endpoints which enable any HTTP-aware application to easily consume Atom feeds of photos and for unstructured application storage (see below for more details). Or you can use any Atom-aware public tools or libraries, such as .NET WCF Syndication to read or write these cloud service-based feeds.

In addition, these same protocols and the same services are now ADO.NET Data Services (formerly known as “ Project Astoria”) compatible. This means we now support LINQ queries from .NET code directly against our service endpoints, leveraging a large amount of existing knowledge and tooling shared with on-premise SQL deployments.

The first question that probably pops into the mind of regular readers of my blog is, “What happened to Web3S and all that talk about AtomPub not being a general purpose editing format for the Web?”. The fact is when we listened to the community of Web developers the feedback was overwhelmingly clear that people would prefer if we worked together with the community to make AtomPub work for the scenarios we felt it wasn’t suited for than Microsoft creating a competing proprietary protocol.

We listened and now here we are. If you are interested in the technical details of how Microsoft plans to use AtomPub and how we’ve dealt with the various issues we originally had with the protocol. I suggest subscribing to the Astoria team’s blog and check out the various posts on this topic by Pablo Castro. There’s a good post by Pablo discussing how Astoria describes relations between elements in AtomPub and suggests a mechanism for doing inline expansion of links. I’ll be providing my thoughts on each of Pablo’s posts and the responses as I find time during the coming weeks.

Windows Live Photo API (CTP Refresh with AtomPub end point)

The Windows Live Photo API allows users to securely grant permission (via Delegated Authentication) for a third party web site to create/read/update/delete on their photos store in Windows Live. The Photo API refresh has several things which make it easier and faster for third parties to implement.

• Third party web sites can you link/refer to images directly from the web browser so they no longer need to proxy images, and effectively save on image bandwidth bills.
• A new AtomPub end point which makes it even easier to integrate.

At the current time, I can’t find the AtomPub endpoint but that’s probably because the documentation hasn’t been refreshed. Moving the API to AtomPub is one of the consequences of the decision to standardize on AtomPub for Web services provided by Windows Live. Although I was part of the original decision to expose the API using WebDAV, I like the fact that all of our APIs will utilize a standard protocol and can take advantage of the breadth of Atom and AtomPub libraries that exist on various platforms.

I need to track down the AtomPub end point so I can compare and contrast it to the WebDAV version to see what we’ve gained and/or lost in the translation. Stay tuned.

Now playing: Jay-Z - Can't Knock the Hustle

 

Over the past week, two Windows Live teams have shipped some good news to their users. The Windows Live SkyDrive team addressed the two most often raised issues with their service with the announcements in their post Welcome to the bigger, better, faster SkyDrive! which reads

You've made two things clear since our first release: You want more space; and you want SkyDrive where you are. Today we're giving you both. You now have five times the space you had before — that’s 5GB of free online storage for your favorite documents, pictures, and other files.

 

 

SkyDrive is also available now in 38 countries/regions. In addition to Great Britain, India, and the U.S., we’re live in Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Denmark, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Finland, France, Guatemala, Honduras, Italy, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Norway, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Puerto Rico, Portugal, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, and Turkey.

 

Wow, Windows Live is just drowning our customers with free storage. Thats 5GB in SkyDrive and 5GB for Hotmail.  

The Windows Live Spaces team also shipped some sweetness to their customers as well. This feature is a little nearer to my heart since it relies on Contact platform APIs I worked on a little while ago. The feature is described by Michelle in on the their team blog in a post entitled More information on Friends in common which states

In the friends module on another person’s space, there is a new area that highlights friends you have in common.  Right away you can see the number of people you both know and the profile pictures of some of those friends. 

Want to see the rest of your mutual friends?  Click on In common and you’re taken to a full page view that shows all of your friends as well as separate lists of friends in common and friends that you don't have in common.  This way you can also discover new people that you might know in real life, but are not connected with on Windows Live.

                                                

 

Finding friends in common is also especially important when planning an event on Windows Live Events.  Who wants to go to a party when none of your friends are going?  On the Guest list area of every event, you can now quickly see how many of your friends have also been invited to the event.  Just click on See who’s going and see whether or not your friends are planning to go.

Showing mutual friends as shown above is one of those small features that makes a big impact on the user experience. Nice work Michelle and Shu on getting this out the door.

Now playing: Iconz - I Represent

 

It's a testament to how busy I've been at work focusing on the Contacts platform that I missed an announcement by Angus Logan a few months ago that there had been an alpha release of a REST API for accessing photos on Windows Live Spaces.  The MSDN page for the API describes the API as

Welcome to the Alpha release of the Windows Live Spaces Photos API. The Windows Live Spaces Photo API allows Web sites to view and update Windows Live Spaces photo albums using the WebDAV protocol. Web sites can incorporate the following functionality:

• Upload or download photos.
• Create, edit, or delete photo albums.
• Request a list of a user's albums, photos, or comments.
• Edit or delete content for an existing entry.
• Query the content in an existing entry.

This news is of particular interest to me since this API is the fruits of my labor that was first hinted at in my post A Flickr-like API for MSN Spaces? from a little over two years ago. At the time, I was responsible for the public APIs for MSN Windows Live Spaces and had just finished working on the the MetaWeblog API for Windows Live Spaces.

The biggest design problem we faced at the time was how to give applications the ability to access a user's personal data which required the user to be authenticated without having dozens of hastily written applications collecting people's usernames and passwords. In general, if we were just a blogging site it may not have been a big deal (e.g. the Twitter API requires that you give your username & password to random apps which may or may not be trustworthy).  However we were part of MSN Windows Live which meant that we had to ensure that users credentials were safeguarded and we didn't end up training users on how to be phished by entering their Passport Windows Live ID credentials into random applications and Web sites.

To get around this problem with our implementation of the MetaWeblog API, I came up with a scheme where users had to use a special username and password when accessing their Windows Live Spaces blog via the API. This was a quick & dirty hack which had plenty of long term problems with it. For one, users had to go through the process of "enabling API access" before they could use blogging tools or other Metaweblog API clients with the service. Another problem was that the problem still wasn't solved for other Windows Live services that wanted to enable APIs. Should each API have its own username and password? That would be quite confusing and overwhelming for users. Should they re-use our API specific username and password? In that case we would be back to square one by exposing an important set of user credentials to random applications.

The right solution eventually decided upon was to come up with a delegated authentication model where a user grants application permission to act on his or her behalf without having to share credentials with the application. This is the model followed by the Windows Live Contacts API, the Facebook API, Google AuthSub, Yahoo! BBAuth, the Flickr API and a number of other services on the Web that provide APIs to access a user's private data.

Besides that decision, there was also the question of what form the API should take. Should we embrace & extend the MetaWeblog API with extensions for managing photos & media? Should we propose a proprietary API based on SOAP or REST? Adopt someone else's proprietary API (e.g. the Flickr API)? At the end, I pushed for completely RESTful and completely standards based. Thus we built the API on WebDAV (RFC 2518).

WebDAV seemed like a great fit for a lot of reasons.

• Photo albums map quite well to collections which are often modeled as folders by WebDAV clients. 
• Support for WebDAV already baked into a lot of client applications on numerous platforms
• It is RESTful which is important when building a protocol for the Web
• Proprietary metadata could easily be represented as WebDAV properties
• Support for granular updates of properties via PROPPATCH

The last one turns out to be pretty important as it is an issue today with everyone's favorite REST protocol du jour. More on that topic in my following post. 

Now Playing: Lil Jon & The Eastside Boyz - Put Yo Hood Up (remix) (feat. Jadakiss, Petey Pablo & Chyna White)

 

According to the blog post entitled on Microsoft Joins DataPortability.org on dev.live.com we learn

Today Microsoft is announcing that it has joined DataPortability.org, a group committed to advancing the conversation about the portability, security and privacy of individuals’ information online.  There are important security and privacy issues to solve as the internet evolves, and we are committed to being an integral part of the industry conversation on behalf of our users.

The decision to join DataPortability.org is an outgrowth of a deeper theme that technology and the internet should be deployed to help people be at the center of their online worlds, a theme that has begun to permeate our products and services over the past few years. We believe the logical evolution of the internet is to enable the removal of barriers to provide integrated, seamless experiences, but to do so in a manner that ensures that users retain full control over the security and privacy of their information.

Windows Live is focused on providing tools and a platform to enable these types of seamless experiences.  Windows Live has more than 420 million active Live IDs that work across our services and across partner sites. 

I’m sure some folks are wondering exactly what this means. Even though I was close to the decision making around this, I believe it is still too early to tell. Personally, I share Marc Canter’s skepticism about Dataportability.org given that so far there’s been a lot of hype but no real meat.

However we have real problems to solve as an industry. The lack of interoperability between various social software applications is troubling given that the Internet (especially the Web) got to be a success today by embracing interoperability instead of being about walled gardens fighting over who can build the prettiest gilded cage for their prisoners customers. The fact that when interoperability happens, it is in back room deals (e.g. Google OpenSocial, Microsoft’s conversations with startups, etc) instead of being open to all using standard and unencumbered protocols is similarly troubling. Even worse, insecure practices that expose social software users to privacy violations have become commonplace due to the lack of a common framework for interoperability.

As far as I can tell, Dataportability.org seems like a good forum for various social software vendors to start talking about how we can get to a world where there is actual interoperability between social software applications. I’d like to see real meat fall out of this effort not fluff. One of the representatives Microsoft has chosen is the dev lead from the product team I am on (Inder Sethi) which implies we want technical discussion of protocols and technologies not just feel good jive. We’ll also be sending a product planning/marketing type as well (John Richards) to make sure the end user perspective is also being covered. You can assume that even though I am not on the working group in person, I will be there in spirit since I communicate with both John and Inder on a regular basis.  

I’ll also be at the O’Reilly offices during Super Bowl weekend attending the O’Reilly Social Graph FOO Camp which I hope will be another avenue to sit together with technical decision makers from the various major social software vendors and talk about how we can move this issue forward as an industry.

Now playing: Bone Thugs 'N Harmony - If I Could Teach The World

 

I was reading the blog post entitled The hard side of Mister Softie from Josh Quittner of Fortune magazine which ends with the following excerpt

Hall said that Microsoft’s main concern, and the reason it sent out Big Foot letters in the first place, was security. “If you look at what a number of sites are doing, they’re asking for your Hotmail login info, They’re storing your identity, which is not a best practices [approach] for anyone’s data from a security standpoint. We want to make sure our data is kept between our users and our servers.”

The thrust of the term sheets, he said, was to create a process whereby Hotmail and other Windows Live data could be shared securely with third parties. Added Hall: “There are models for federation where you can trust other services—and that’s what we’re trying to do with our partners.”

Thats what doesn’t make sense to me. If this is such a security problem, why do Google and Yahoo let their users take their contacts with them?

Besides the obvious observation that folks at Google & Yahoo! probably don’t think it’s a good idea for random fly-by-night social networking services to be collecting  usernames and password from users of their services (see posts like Spock sign-up flow demonstrates how to scare users away... from Jeremy Zawodny of Yahoo!), I am amused by the “if the geniuses at Google and Yahoo! think it’s OK, who are the Microsoft morons to think different” sentiment exposed by that statement.

Maybe I’m getting snarky in my old age.

Now playing: Red Hot Chili Peppers - Torture Me

 

In his blog post entitled Joining Microsoft Live Labs Greg Linden writes

I am starting at Microsoft Live Labs next week.

Live Labs is an applied research group affiliated with Microsoft Research and MSN. The group has the enjoyable goal of not only trying to solve hard problems with broad impact, but also getting useful research work out the door and into products so it can help as many people as possible as quickly as possible.

Live Labs is lead by Gary Flake, the former head of Yahoo Research. It is a fairly new group, formed only two years ago. Gary wrote a manifesto that has more information about Live Labs.

when I found out Greg was shutting down Findory I thought myself that he’d be a great hire for Microsoft especially since he already lived in the area. It seems someone else though the same thing and now Greg has been assimilated. Congratulations, Greg.

I seem to be bumping into more and more people who are either working for or with Live Labs. Besides Justin Rudd who I just referred to the team, there’s Mike Deem and Erik Meijer, two people I know from my days on the XML team. I wonder what Gary Flake is cooking up in those swanky offices in Bellevue that has so many smart folks gravitating to his group?

Now playing: Kool & The Gang - Celebration

 

Paul Buchheit, creator of Gmail now the founder of FriendFeed, has a blog post entitled Should Gmail, Yahoo, and Hotmail block Facebook? where he writes

Apparently Facebook will ban you (or at least Robert Scoble) if you attempt to extract your friend's email addresses from the service. Automated access is a difficult issue for any web service, so I won't argue with their decision -- it's their service and they own you. However, when I signed up for Facebook I gave them my Gmail address and password, using their find friends feature:
...
So the question is, should Gmail, Yahoo, and Hotmail block Facebook (or close the accounts of anyone who uses Facebook's "friend finder") for violating their Terms of Use?

I don't want to single out Facebook here since pretty much every "Web 2.0" website with social features is very in-your-face about asking for your credentials from your email provider and then screen scraping your contact's email addresses. I just signed up for Twitter and the user interface makes it cumbersome to even start using the service after creating an account without giving up your email username and password.

I think there are two questions here. The first is whether users should be able to extract their data [including social graph data] from one service and import it into another. I personally believe the answer is Yes and this philosophy underlies what we've been working on at Windows Live and specifically the team I'm on which is responsible for the social graph contacts platform.

The next question is whether screen scraping is the way to get this data? I think the answer is definitely not. The first problem with this approach is that when I give some random "Web 2.0" social network my email username and password, I’m not only giving them access to my address book but also access to

• my blog posts and all my photos (http://spaces.live.com)
• my travel history (http://www.expedia.com)
• my search history (http://www.google.com/psearch)
• my personal email (http://www.hotmail.com)
• my medical information (http://www.healthvault.com)
• my business documents (http://www.officelive.com)
• my personal documents (http://docs.google.com)
• my purchase history (https://checkout.google.com)
• and so on…

This seems like a lot of valuable data to trust  to some fly by night "Web 2.0"  service that can't seem to hire a full time sys admin or a full rack in a data center let alone know how to properly safeguard my personal information.

Another problem with this approach is that it encourages users to give up their usernames and passwords when prompted by any random Web site which increases incidences of phishing. Some have gone as far as calling this approach an anti-pattern that is kryptonite to the Open Web.

Finally, there is no way to identify the application that is accessing data on the user's behalf if it turns out to be a malicious application. For example, if you read articles like Are you getting Quechup spammed you'll note that there's been more than one incident where a "Web 2.0" company turned out to either be spamming users via the email addresses they had harvested in this manner or straight up just resold the email addresses to spammers. Have you ever wondered how much spam you get because someone who has your email address blithely gave up your email credentials to some social network site who in turn used a Web service that is run by spammers to retrieve your contact details?

So if I think that user's should be able to get out their data yet screen scraping isn't the way, what should we do? At Windows Live, we believe the right approach is to provide user-centric APIs which allow users to grant and revoke permission to third party applications to access their personal data. For the specific case of social graph data, we've provided an ALPHA Windows Live Contacts API which is intended to meet exactly this scenario. The approach taken by this API and similar patterns (e.g. using OAuth) solves all three concerns I've raised above.

Now given what I've written above, do you think Hotmail should actively block or hinder screen scraping applications used to obtain the email addresses of a user's contacts?

 

I’ve read a number of stories this week that highlight that interoperability between social networking sites will be a “top ask” in 2008 (as we say at Microsoft). Earlier this week I read the Wired article Should Web Giants Let Startups Use the Information They Have About You? which does a good job of telling both sides of the story when it comes to startups screen scraping importing user data such as social graphs (i.e. friend and contact lists) from more successful sites as a way to bootstrap their social networks. The Wired article is a good read if you want to hear all sides of the story when it comes to the issue of sharing user social data between sites.

Yesterday, I saw Social Network Aggregation, Killer App in 2008? which points out the problem that users often belong to multiple social networks at once and that bridging between them is key. However I disagree with the premise that this points to need for a “Social Network Aggregator” category of applications. I personally believe that the list of 20 or so Social Network Aggregators on Mashable are all companies that would cease to exist if the industry got off it’s behind and worked towards actual interoperability between social networking sites.

Today, I saw saw Facebook disabled Robert Scoble’s account. After reading Robert’s account of the incident, I completely agree with Facebook.

Why Robert Scoble is Wrong and Facebook is Right

Here’s what Robert Scoble wrote about the incident

My account has been “disabled” for breaking Facebook’s Terms of Use. I was running a script that got them to keep me from accessing my account
…
I am working with a company to move my social graph to other places and that isn’t allowable under Facebook’s terms of service. Here’s the email I received:

+++++

Hello,

Our systems indicate that you’ve been highly active on Facebook lately and viewing pages at a quick enough rate that we suspect you may be running an automated script. This kind of Activity would be a violation of our Terms of Use and potentially of federal and state laws.

As a result, your account has been disabled. Please reply to this email with a description of your recent activity on Facebook. In addition, please confirm with us that in the future you will not scrape or otherwise attempt to obtain in any manner information from our website except as permitted by our Terms of Use, and that you will immediately delete and not use in any manner any such information you may have previously obtained.

The first thing to note is that Facebook allows you to extract your social graph data from their site using the Facebook platform. In fact, right now whenever I get an email from someone on my Facebook friend list in Outlook or I get a phone call from them, I see the picture from their Facebook profile. I did this using OutSync which is an application that utilizes the Facebook platform to merge data from my contacts in Outlook/Exchange with my Facebook contacts.

So if Facebook allows you to extract information about your Facebook friends via their APIs, why would Robert Scoble need to run a screen scraping script? The fact is that the information returned by the Facebook API about a user contains no contact information (no email address, no IM screen names, no telephone numbers, no street address). Thus if you are trying to “grow virally” by spamming the Facebook friend list of one of your new users about the benefits of your brand new Web 2.0 site then you have to screen scrape Facebook.  However there is the additional wrinkle that unlike address books in Web email applications Robert Scoble did not enter any of this contact information about his friends. With this in mind, it is hard for Robert Scoble to argue that the data is “his” to extract from Facebook. In addition, as a Facebook user I consider it a feature that Facebook makes it hard for my personal data to be harvested in this way. Secondly, since Robert’s script was screen scraping it means that it had to hit the site five thousand times (once for each of his contacts) to fetch all of Robert’s friends personally idenitifiable information (PII).  Given that eBay won a court injunction against Bidder’s Edge for running 100,000 queries a day, it isn’t hard to imagine that the kind of screen scraping script that Robert is using would be considered malicious even by a court of law.

I should note that Facebook is being a bit hypocritical here since they do screen scrape other sites to get the email addresses of the contacts of new users. This is why I’ve called them the Social Graph Roach Motel in the recent past. 

O’Reilly Social Graph FOO Camp

This past weekend I got an email from Tim O'Reilly, David Recordon, and Scott Kveton inviting me to a Friends of O’Reilly Camp (aka FOO Camp) dedicated to “social graph” problems. I’m still trying to figure out if I can make it based on my schedule and whether I’m really the best person to be representing Microsoft at such an event given that I’m a technical person and “social graph problems” for the most part are not technical issues.

Regardless of whether I am able to attend or not, there were some topics I wanted to recommend should be added to a list of “red herring” topics that shouldn’t be discussed until the important issues have been hashed out.

• Google OpenSocial: This was an example of unfortunate branding. Google should really have called this “Google OpenWidgets” or “Google Gadgets for your Domain” since the goal was competing with Facebook’s widget platform not actually opening up social networks. Since widget platforms aren’t a “social graph problem” it doesn’t seem fruitful the spend time discussing this when there are bigger fish to fry.

• Social Network Portability: When startups talk about “social network portability” it’s usually a euphemism for collecting a person’s username and password for another site, retrieving their contact/friend list and spamming those people about their hot new Web 2.0 startup. As a user of the Web, making it easier to receive spam from startups isn’t something I think should be done let alone a “problem” that needs solving. I understand that lots of people will disagree with this [even at Microsoft] but I’m convinced that this is not the real problem facing the majority of users of social networking sites on the the Web today.  

What I Want When It Comes to Social Network Interoperability

Having I’ve said what I don’t think is important to discuss when it comes to “social graph problems”, it would be rude not to provide an example fof what I think would be fruitful discussion. I wrote the problem I think we should be solving as an industry a while back in a post entitled A Proposal for Social Network Interoperability via OpenID which is excerpted below

I have a Facebook profile while my fiancée wife has a MySpace profile. Since I’m now an active user of Facebook, I’d like her to be able to be part of my activities on the site such as being able to view my photos, read my wall posts and leave wall posts of her own. I could ask her to create a Facebook account, but I already asked her to create a profile on Windows Live Spaces so we could be friends on that service and quite frankly I don’t think she’ll find it reasonable if I keep asking her to jump from social network to social network because I happen to try out a lot of these services as part of my day job. So how can this problem be solved in the general case? 

This is a genuine user problem which the established players have little incentive to fix. The data portability folks want to make it easy for you to jump from service to service. I want to make it easy for users of one service to talk to people on another service. Can you imagine if email interoperability was achieved by making it easy for Gmail users to export their contacts to Yahoo! mail instead of it being that Gmail users can send email to Yahoo! Mail users and vice versa?

Think about that.

Now playing: DJ Drama - The Art Of Storytellin' Part 4 (Feat. Outkast And Marsha Ambrosius)

 

Recently I’ve read a number of negative posts about the Facebook Beacon which highlight how easy it is for a company to completely misjudge the privacy implications and ramifications of certain features in social software applications.

Charlene Li, a Principal Analyst at Forrester Research who specializing in social software trends and marketing, writes in her blog post Close encounter with Facebook Beacon  

I put a lot of trust in sites like Facebook to do the right thing when it comes to privacy. After all, the only stuff that gets out into the public is the stuff that I actually put in. Until now.

Earlier this week, I bought a coffee table on Overstock.com. When I next logged into Facebook and saw this at the top of my newsfeed:

I was pretty surprised to see this, because I received no notification while I was on Overstock.com that they had the Facebook Beacon installed on the site. If they had, I would have turned it off.

I used my personal email address to buy the coffee table, so I was puzzled why and how this "personal" activity was being associated with my "public" Facebook profile.

David Treadwell, a corporate vice president of Windows Live, writes in his blog post entitled Blockbuster, you're fired

Yesterday evening, I decided to add a few movies to my Blockbuster queue. Upon adding movies, I was surprised to see toasts from Facebook showing up on the Blockbuster site indicating that something was being added to my Facebook news feed. When I finished adding movies, I went to Facebook to see what was going on. I was then quite surprised to learn that Blockbuster and Facebook were conspiring to broadcast my movie selections to my Facebook friends.

I am not normally uptight about privacy issues, but you guys really crossed the line on this one:

• I had never told either Blockbuster or Facebook that you should share my movie selections with friends.
• Neither of you asked me if you could take this action. You just went ahead and did it, assuming that I would not mind.
• This sharing of information about me without my informed consent about the mechanism of sharing is absolutely unacceptable to me.

You can find similar complaints all over the Web from similarly Web savvy folks who you typically don’t see griping about privacy issues. In all of the complaints raised, the underlying theme is that Facebook violated the principle of putting the user in control of their user experience.

As someone who works on a competing service I have to give the folks on Facebook credit for shipping the Facebook Beacon so quickly. I assumed something like that was still about six months away from being on their radar. I do give them poor marks when it comes to how this feature has been rolled out. There are several problems with how this feature has been rolled out when it comes to how it affects their users.

1. Linking identities and data sharing without user permission: One of the thinks people have found creepy about this feature is that they are automatically discovered to be Facebook users on sites that they have not told they use Facebook. In Charlene’s case, she actually uses different email addresses to log in on both sites which must have seemed even doubly weird to her at first. As Ethan Zuckerman points out in his post Facebook changes the norms for web purchasing and privacy this completely upturns user expectations of how privacy on the Web works especially when it comes to cookies.  

   It's a genuine concern that Facebook has opened a Pandora's box when you consider what could happen if it is deemed socially acceptable for Web sites to use cookies to actively identify users across sites as opposed to the passive way it is done today. I’m sure the folks at Google would be excited about this since thanks to AdSense and DoubleClick, they  probably have cookies on every computer on the Web that has cookies turned enabled in the Web browser. Today it’s Facebook, tomorrow Amazon and eBay are posting your purchase history to every OpenSocial enabled web site courtesy of the cookies from these sites or from Google ads on your machine.

2. No global opt-out: There is no way to turn off this feature. The best you get is that when a site tries to publish an update to your news feed and mini-feed, you get an entry for the site added to your Privacy Settings for External Websites page on Facebook. I guess it never occured to Mark Zuckerburg and Justin Rosenstein that not sharing my purchase history with Facebook is a valid privacy option. Why do I have to police this list and refer back to it every couple of days to figure out if some new Web site is now publishing my private data to Facebook without my permission? 

   I expect that kind of myopia and hubris from the Googles and Microsofts of the world not Facebook. Wow, the honeymoon lasted shorter than I expected.

I suspect that Facebook will loathe fixing both issues. The first issue can’t really be solved by having partner sites provide an opt-in mechanism because there is the valid concern that (i) people won’t opt-in to the feature and (ii) the experience and messaging will vary too much from site to site for users to have a consistent set of expectations. This then points to Facebook having an opt-in page for partner sites that is part of the Facebook settings page for this feature but that may start getting away from the add 3 lines of code to reach millions of users sales pitch which they have going. Adding a global opt-out button is also similarly fraught with down side for Facebook.

At this point, they’ll have to do something. I’ll be impressed if they address both issues. Anything less is simply not good enough.

PS: The technically inclined folks in the audience should take a look at Jay Goldman’s excellent Deconstruction of the Facebook Beacon Javascript. Found via Sam Ruby.

Now playing: Eightball & MJG - Relax & Take Notes (feat. Project Pat & Notorious B.I.G.)

 

When I first saw the Meebo Me widget, I thought it was one of the coolest things I’d ever seen on the Web. I immediately went to chat with some folks on our team and the response was that they were already way ahead of me. After a bunch of hard work, I’m glad to say that you can now embed the world’s most popular IM client into any Web page [including your blog or favorite social networking site] and let anyone who’s visiting that page chat with you while you’re online.

More details can be found in Casey’s post on the Windows Live Messenger team’s blog entitled Who wants IMs from the web? I do! I do! where she writes

The Windows Live™ Messenger IM Control lets people on the Web reach you in Messenger by showing your Messenger status on your web site, blog, or social networking profile. The Windows Live™ Messenger IM Control runs in the browser and lets site visitors message you without installing Messenger first. The IM Control is supported in IE6, IE7, and Firefox 2.0 on Windows and Firefox 2.0 on Mac OS. The IM Control is supported in 32 languages.

This is a nice addition to the IM button functionality announced in Ali's post.  An important difference between the two is that the new Windows Live™ Messenger IM Control allows people to send you IMs without installing Windows Live™ Messenger, and the IM button requires that they have it installed and are logged in.

I’ve already thrown it up on my Windows Live Space at http://carnage4life.spaces.live.com so anyone who wants to chat with me in real time can holla at me without having to install any bits.  I expect it won’t be long before someone figures out how to port it to the Facebook platform which is something I’d love to see. I’d do it myself but I have RSS Bandit feature planning to work on in my free time.

To prevent IM spam (aka SPIM), there is a Human Interactive Proof (HIP) challenge before a conversation can be initiated from the Web. For users concerned about privacy and wondering if anyone can just copy & paste some HTML, change some values and then spam you from the Web…rest assured this has been considered. In order for your online presence to be detected or IM conversations begun from the Web, you first have to turn on this feature. Safe defaults and making sure our users are always in control of their Web experience is key. 

So what are you waiting for? Come over and say hello.    

Now playing: Jodeci - Come & Talk To Me

 

There's been a bunch of activity in the Windows Live world this week. The first bit of news is that a service I've been wanting us to ship for a while is now in public beta, Windows Live Calendar. You can learn more about it in the blog post titled Make some plans with the new Windows Live Calendar beta! on the Windows Live Hotmail team's blog which states

In the past few years, we’ve been investing heavily in building the best web e-mail offering. But part of the team has also been intently focused on delivering the next-generation web calendar: Windows Live Calendar. It’s been a long time coming and we’ve been pretty hush-hush about it. Today, we’re finally ready to invite the world to try the new Windows Live Calendar beta!
...

Stay coordinated with friends and family

If you have a family, you know how difficult it is to coordinate schedules between spouses and kids’ activities. If you’re a student, you know how consuming it is to find time to meet for school projects with your classmates. By sharing schedules on Windows Live Calendar, we take the chore out of coordination.

· Share as much or as little of your calendar with free/busy, read-only, or read/write permissions.

· Send friends a view-only secret link to your calendar so they don’t need to sign in with a Windows Live ID.

You can also make your calendar public, so if you’re running a business or an organization that is keen on promoting events, you can make it easy for people to find out what’s going on.

Get reminded

Sometimes we forget our commitments so Windows Live Calendar delivers you reminders through e-mail, Windows Live Messenger, or an SMS message on your mobile phone. You can also wake up to your upcoming schedule by including an RSS feed of your calendar on your favorite home page like Live.com, or My.MSN.com. Because Windows Live Calendar supports the iCal standard, you can add any ICS-based calendar you find on the Internet so you don’t miss out on your favorite sports games, movie openings or upcoming holidays. To start, try our holiday calendar list or go to the iCalShare site.

I've been using it quite a bit already and I have to say there's all sorts of AJAXy goodness in the product which is also described in the blog post. The bit in red font above is something I started of working with the Calendar team on until I switched projects and Ali took it over. Congratulations to the Calendar folks. I know they've been wanting to get this out for a while. Kudos on a great beta.

The next bit of Windows Live news is that you can now get a @live.com email address by going to http://get.live.com/getlive/overview or http://www.windowslive.com/freshstart.html . The latter page informs readers

Here's the deal—if you currently have an e-mail address with Hotmail.com or MSN.com or a Microsoft Passport, you already have a Windows Live™ ID. Now you have a choice:

• Keep your old account and continue to enjoy all of your favorite Windows Live services.

OR

• Get a new Windows Live ID (i.e., example@live.com) and take advantage of your fresh start!

The page goes on to explain how to switch email addresses but still keep all your information and contacts in Windows Live Hotmail and Windows Live Messenger. The always up to date folks at LiveSide have a comprehensive list of all the @live.xx domains that are available to choose from. So what are you waiting for? Get yours, I already got mine.

The final bit of news is that the next generation of Windows Live services and desktop products is finally here. All the Windows Live desktop applications and non-beta Web properties have been refreshed. You can learn more at http://www.windowslive.com or from the press release Microsoft’s Windows Live Free Online Services Available Now.

I personally like some of the favorable press this release has garnered in press such as Mary J Foley's article Microsoft’s Windows Live finally starting to come into its own which is excerpted below

Until recently, Microsoft has floundered badly when trying to explain exactly what Windows Live is and how Live services and Live software complement Windows. Last year, the Windows Live team was unveiling new services at a breakneck pace, but doing nothing to put them in context or explain when/how Microsoft planned to take them final.

Now Microsoft is starting to talk about different groupings of Windows Live services and software. It is positioning the Windows Live Client Suite as what users should install on their home PCs. Home.live.com is the starting point for users who want to “anywhere access” to their Windows Live services. Mobile.Live.com is the home for Microsoft’s growing family of Live services for mobile phones and PDAs. For those with smartphones, another option is a client-style suite of Live services for mobile devices (like what Nokia is providing now on certain Windows Mobile phone models).

In the new Windows Live world order, the Windows Live taxonomy looks something like this:

Windows Live Client Suite (single installer and updater; client-based software with a services extension)
...
Windows Live Web Suite (service only)
...
Microsoft still has quite a way to go to make its Windows Live story truly intuitive and understandable by non-Microsoft-watchers. But compared to where the company was even a year ago, the Live team has come a long way.

Nice. That's a pretty big compliment coming from a skeptic like Mary J. :)

With all the releases, it's now time for my favorite part. Figuring out what we're going to ship next. Stay tuned.

 

In a post entitled Checkmate? MySpace, Bebo and SixApart To Join Google OpenSocial (confirmed) Mike Arrington writes

Google may have just come out of nowhere and checkmated Facebook in the social networking power struggle.

…

Update (12:30 PST): On a press call with Google now. This was embargoed for 5:30 pm PST but they’ve moved the time up to 12:30 PST (now). Press release will go out later this evening. My notes:

On the call, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said “we’ve been working with MySpace for more than a year in secret on this” (likely corresponding to their advertising deal announced a year ago).

MySpace says their new platform efforts will be entirely focused on OpenSocial.

The press release names Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo, and XING as current OpenSocial partners.

We’re seeing a Flixster application on MySpace now through the OpenSocial APIs. Flixster says it took them less than a day to create this. I’ll add screen shots below.

Here’s the big question - Will Facebook now be forced to join OpenSocial? Google says they are talking to “everyone.” This is a major strategic decision for Facebook, and they may have little choice but to join this coalition.

Bebo has also joined OpenSocial.

I'm confused as to how Mike Arrington considers this a checkmate by Google. At the end of the day, this announcement is simply that folks like Slide and RockYou don't have to maintain multiple code bases for their widgets on various popular social networking sites. In addition, it brings the widget/gadget platform on these sites to a similar level to the Facebook platform. Of course, it won’t be on the same level unless it meets all the criteria from my post on how developers should evaluate the MySpace platform. Which is unlikely since besides MySpace, none of those sites have the userbase or engagement of Facebook users nor does any of them have the same kind of viral properties in distributing applications that Facebook platform has built-in. 

At the end of the day, will we see widget developers like the folks at iLike, Slide or Scrabulous leave the Facebook platform because of these announcements? Unlikely.

Will we see a mass migration from Facebook to MySpace or Orkut because you can now add Flixster or Scrabulous to your profile on these sites? Probably not.

So how is this a checkmate again?

OpenSocial simply keeps Facebook’s competitors in the game. It is more like a successful kingside castle than a checkmate.

Now playing: Backstreet Boys - Incomplete

 

There’s nothing like a successful company with a near monopoly to force the software industry to come up with standards. Or in this case, as in many others, force it’s competitors to band together and call what they are doing the standard because more than one vendor supports it.

From TechCrunch’s article Details Revealed: Google OpenSocial(To Launch Thursday we learn

Google wants to create an easy way for developers to create an application that works on all social networks. And if they pull it off, they’ll be in the center, controlling the network.

What They’re Launching

OpenSocial is a set of three common APIs, defined by Google with input from partners, that allow developers to access core functions and information at social networks:

• Profile Information (user data)
• Friends Information (social graph)
• Activities (things that happen, News Feed type stuff)

Hosts agree to accept the API calls and return appropriate data. Google won’t try to provide universal API coverage for special use cases, instead focusing on the most common uses. Specialized functions/data can be accessed from the hosts directly via their own APIs.

Unlike Facebook, OpenSocial does not have its own markup language (Facebook requires use of FBML for security reasons, but it also makes code unusable outside of Facebook). Instead, developers use normal javascript and html (and can embed Flash elements). The benefit of the Google approach is that developers can use much of their existing front end code and simply tailor it slightly for OpenSocial, so creating applications is even easier than on Facebook.

Similar details are available from folks like Om Malik and Marc Andreesen. 

This is a brilliant move. I’ve blogged on multiple occassions that the disparate widget platforms in social networking sites is a burden for widget developers and will lead to a “winner takes all” situation because no one wants to support umpteen different platforms. If enough momentum gains around OpenSocial, then three things will happen

• Widget developers will start to favor coding to OpenSocial because it supports multiple sites as well as targeting the Facebook platform  
• Eventually Facebook platform developers will start asking Zuckerburg and company to support OpenSocial so they only need to worry about one code base (kinda, it won’t be that easy)  
• Other companies with proprietary widget platforms or plans to create one will bow down to the tide and adopt OpenSocial

Of course, this requires a popular social networking site with a wide audience (e.g. MySpace) to adopt the platform before we see this kind of traction.

However this is the only thing Google could have done that makes any sense. Building a clone of the Facebook platform like some social networking sites planned would have been dumb because that would be the tail wagging the dog. Similarly building a competing proprietary platform would also have been dumb due to the winner takes all problem I mentioned earlier.

This is the only move that has a chance of actually giving their anti-Facebook platform a chance of being successful.

I wonder how my coworkers in Windows Live are going to take this news?

Now playing: 50 Cent - All Of Me (Feat. Mary J Blige) (Prod by Jake One)

 

Via Greg Linden I found the the summary of a recent survey 1,001 US adults conducted by Kelton Research. The summary was posted on Search Engine Land in an article entitled Report: 7 Out Of 10 Americans Experience 'Search Engine Fatigue' which states

The report discusses user frustration with clutter and the content of search results:

When asked to name their #1 complaint about the process, 25 percent cited a deluge of results, 24 percent cited a predominance of commercial (paid) listings, 18.8 percent blamed the search engine’s inability to understand their keywords (forcing them to try again), and 18.6 percent were most frustrated by disorganized/random results.

There was also a desire among many users that search engines be able to "read their minds":

Kelton asked survey respondents whether they wished that search engines like Google could, in effect, read their minds, delivering the results they were actually looking for. . . That capability is something that 78 percent of all survey-takers “wished” for, including 86.2 percent of 18-34 year-olds and 85 percent of those under 18.

That sounds like an argument for search personalization.

Search personalization is just one of the many ways to deal with end user frustrations with search results. For example, no amount of search personalization will be as effective as statistical analysis to discover and automatically fix mispellings in search queries (e.g. all the misspellings of britney spears Google has to deal with). Without spelling correction, a user will leave frustrated because they get few or no results when in truth they typed a misspelling into the search box.

The folks on the Live Search team have a first in a series of blog posts about how they tackle the problem of determining a user’s intent from their search queries entitled “Do what I mean, not what I say!” [Part 1 of 2]. It contains the following excerpt

We've been working on returning the very best search results for your intent, not just for the particular search terms that you happen to have chosen as a vehicle to transmit that intent.  There's an important difference there and it's been our focus for quite some time.

…

AutoSpell Correction

The first example of this is our new AutoSpell feature.

If we are absolutely, completely, totally, "no doubt about it" confident you misspelled one of your search terms, we automatically deliver a page that includes spell-corrected results, rather than a page of misspelled results accompanied by a "Did you mean _______?" link at the top.

For example, there's this pizza place near Microsoft called Pagliacci Pizza that is fantastic.  The problem is that I can never remember the correct spelling of the place.  My misspelled attempts are usually something along the lines of Pagliaci Pizza, Pagliaccis Pizza, or Paggliacci Pizza...

…

Stemming 

Another improvement in the "Do what I mean, not what I say" category is stemming.  Stemming means matching on the "stem" (or root) of the word rather than the exact word.

For example, users told us that the search half price book Redmond returned horrible results.  Searching for half price books Redmond produced much better results.   In our new release of Live Search, searches for half price book Redmond automatically include results with books in them as well.

Our team knew that tackling stemming would give us the improvements we needed for searches like these.  But we had to be careful, because you can't just stem all the time-you have to be smart about it.  An example of this is the word cable.  When you search for "cable," you could be looking for information on cable TV providers.  When you search for "cables", you could be looking for power, telephone, or network cables. 

These are just two techniques beyond just personalization which gives users better satisfaction with their search results and the impression that the search engine is “reading their mind”.

The main problem I have with personalization is that you need to give the search engine a private, personal information amount of information before it has tangible effects on search results. In the recent past, Marissa Mayer has pointed out that user studies have shown that location is the only significant factor which impacts perception of the relevance of search results when it comes to personalization. I suspect that true personalization will come from doing things like analysing my profile or my social graph friends list instead of the approach popularized by Google Personalized Search where previous search queries are analyzed.

Of course, we live in an era when 10% of the Internet population doesn’t see anything wrong with brain implants to connect them to the Web so maybe I’m being paranoid when I worry that the next major leap in search engine relevance will only occur after we allow search engines to spy on us.

Now playing: Busta Rhymes - I Know What You Want (feat. Mariah Carey)

 

The folks at LiveSide have a blog post entitled Windows Live Spaces at a crossroads: will the US catch up to the world? which contains some interesting charts from ComScore. Specifically they call out the difference in the worldwide reach of various social networking services versus the North American reach. The relevant excerpt from the post is

As expected, MySpace is in a runaway lead, Facebook is coming on strong, Blogger is hanging in there, and Spaces pretty much brings up the rear.  If you read the blogs and follow Techmeme, TechCrunch, and Scoble, these numbers aren't anything surprising.

But take a look at the Worldwide numbers, and a somewhat different story emerges.

Social Networking Sites - Worldwide: Unique visitors per month (000)

While Facebook is growing steadily worldwide, here the numbers tell a far different story.  Windows Live Spaces is battling it out with Blogger and MySpace for the top spot.  Just for reference, we can see that the Worldwide usage of Social Networking sites is growing steadily:

You might quibble with the title of this blog post but it is hard to argue that Blogger is a social networking site by any definition of the term. When it comes to reach, no social networking site impacts as many users as Windows Live Spaces.

Of course, unique users aren’t the only metric Web sites are judged against and I’m sure there are many out there who will be quick to point out other charts that show our user engagement is lower than average which is a fair point. Personally, I suspect that the inclusion of the improved What’s New page will increase user engagement in a measurable way. It might just be me but I find myself visiting my What’s New page several times a day, in fact more often than I visit my Facebook news feed.

According to Facebook, the addition of the News Feed increased their page views by 70% in the first few months. I wonder if we’ll see a similar jump in the ComScore charts for Windows Live Spaces in a few months or whether FB’s results were an abberration. Only time will tell.

Now playing: Raekwon - Guillotine (Swordz) (feat. Ghostface Killah, Inspectah Deck & GZA/Genius)

 

For a while, I’ve been jealous of the Flickr API Explorer and the Facebook API Test console. So I started building one for the Windows Live Contacts API last week only to find out that there was already one out there which hadn’t been sufficiently publicized.

If you’re a developer interested in seeing what the Windows Live Contacts API offers and already have a Windows Live ID (formerly Passport account) then mosey on down to the the Live Data Interactive SDK page. Once you get there, click on the link that says Click to Request Permission , scroll down and hit [Give Access] to give the page access to your Windows Live address book. Once redirected, click “Work with Contacts” and then you can create, retrieve, update and delete people from your Hotmail and Messenger contact lists using a simple RESTful protocol with direct access to the XML responses. 

Below is a screenshot of me retrieving my Messenger contact using the interactive SDK.

Now playing: Baby Bash - Cyclone (feat. T-Pain)

 

It looks like my favorite team in Windows Live scored another hit with their recent release. You can see it for yourself by going to http://maps.live.com. The product team has a huge list of the new changes in their post Live Search Maps v2 is out! Gemini Launches which list a number of significant features including

• generic directions to a specific location (e.g. if coming from I-5 North vs. if coming from I-5 South) without a specific starting point. I believe this is formally called 1–click directions.
• the ability to have the directions route around bad traffic
• the ability to import GeoRSS, GPX and KML files as collections
• increased metadata about businesses from partner companies like InfoUSA, CitySearch, and Gayot.

Surprisingly, my favorite features of the new release don’t seem to have been mentioned. The removal of dual search boxes along with some of the other user interface niceties such as suggesting “Work” or “Home” when a user attempts to save a location are just great.

There was also a bug in the driving directions to my house from Redmond which was also fixed in this release. I never even got around to mentioning it to the team. Now that’s what I call service.  

Now playing: Lil Wayne - Go DJ (Remix) (feat. Slim Thug & Mannie Fresh)

 

Mary Jo Foley has a delightful post entitled Are all ‘open’ Web platforms created equal? where she wonders why there is more hype around the Facebook platform, Google’s muched hyped attempt to counter it on November 5th and other efforts that Anil Dash has accurately described as the new Blackbird as opposed to open API efforts from Microsoft. She posits two theories which are excerpted below

Who isn’t mentioned in any of these conversations? Microsoft. Is it because Microsoft hasn’t opened up its various Windows Live APIs to other developers? Nope. Microsoft announced in late April its plans for opening up and providing licensing terms for several of its key Windows Live APIs, including Windows Live Contacts, Windows Live Spaces Photo Control and Windows Live Data Protocols.

So why is Microsoft seemingly irrelevant to the conversation, when it comes to opening up its Web platform? There are a few different theories.

“I think the excitement about the Facebook platform stems from the fact that it addresses the problem of building publicity and distribution for a new application. Any developer can create an application for Facebook, and the social network will help propagate that application, exposing it to new users,” said Matt Rosoff, an analyst with Directions on Microsoft.

…

Microsoft, for its part, believes it is offering Web platform APIs the way that developers want, making them available under different business terms and permitting third parties to customize them inside their own sites, according to George Moore, General Manager of Windows Live. But Moore also acknowledges Microsoft has a different outlook in terms of which data it exposes via its APIs.

“Facebook gives you access to your social-graph (social-networking) data. We don’t do that. We have a gallery that allows users to extend Live Spaces,” Moore said.

Moore declined to comment on when or if Microsoft planned to allow developers to tap directly into user’s social-graph data like Facebook has done.

I see GeorgeM all the time, so I doubt he’ll mind if I clarify his statement above since it gives the wrong impression of our efforts given the context in which it was placed. If we go back to the definition of a social graph it’s clear that what is important is that it is a graph of user relationships not one that is tied to a particular site or service. From that perspective the Windows Live Contacts API which provides a RESTful interface to the contents of a user’s Windows Live address book complete with the list of tags/relationship types the user has applied to these contacts (e.g. “Family”, “Friends”, “Coworkers”, etc) as well as which of these contacts are the user’s buddies in Windows Live Messenger is a social graph API. 

On the other hand, this API does not give you access to the user’s Spaces friends list.  My assumption is that Mary Jo’s questions were specific to social networking sites which is why George gave that misleading answer. In addition, Yaron is fond of pointing out to me that the API is in alpha so there is still a lot that can change from now until we stamp it as v1. Until then, I’ll also decline to comment on any future plans.

As for the claim made by Matt Rosoff, I tend to agree with his assertion that the viral propagation of applications via the Facebook’s social graph is attractive to developers. However this attractiveness comes with the price of both the users and developers being locked in Facebook’s trunk.

I personally believe that the Web is the platform and this philosophy shines through in the API efforts at Microsoft. It may be that this is not as attractive to developers today as it should be but eventually the Web will win. Everyone who has fought the Web has lost. Facebook will not be an exception.

Now playing: Tony Yayo - I Know You Dont Love Me (feat. G-Unit)

 

Erick Schonfeld from TechCrunch writes in his post Windows Live SkyDrive Doubles Storage to 1GB, Still Can’t Keep Up With Gmail that

Microsoft doubled the online storage consumers can get for free in Windows Live SkyDrive. It’s hard to get excited about that when Gmail is already giving me 2.9 GB of storage, with more on the way—4GB by the end of the month, and 6GB by early January, according to one estimate.

You’d think that someone who works as a pseudo-journalist on a popular technology website would be able to tell the difference between an email service and a file storage service. You’d think he’d want to compare apples to apples and compare GMail’s 2.9 GB of Storage with Windows Live Hotmail’s 5 Gigabytes of Storage or compare the capabuilities of Microsoft’s SkyDrive with Google’s GDrive. 

Except Google hasn’t figured out how to ship GDrive for over 5 years so it would be an apples to vaporware comparison. 

Much love to my SkyDrive peeps on their new release. The champagne and ice cream yesterday was much appreciated. You can learn more about their release from the post Updates to Windows Live SkyDrive! on their team blog.  

Now playing: Foo Fighters - My Hero

 

Two things I worked on over the past year or so shipped today. The first is Windows Live Events. You can learn more about in the post entitled Introducing Windows Live Events and new Windows Live Spaces updates by Chris Keating and Jay Fluegel which reads

Easily create a great-looking website for your next event
To offer you more ways to connect and share memories with the people you care about most, the team that brought you Spaces would love to hear your feedback on Windows Live Events, our new, free social event planning service.  With Events you can easily:

• Plan that next baby shower, birthday party, or family reunion
• Create a great-looking event invitation and website using one of over 100 fantastic templates
• Invite anyone with an e-mail address and track who’s coming
• Make your event unique with familiar customization features - choosing a friendly web address (like http://kates1stbirthday.events.live.com), using custom colors, fonts, and background images, or adding modules and Windows Live web gadgets
• Let guests and organizers share photos and stories before and after the event

Click on Events from the new navigation and then click Create event to get started!

My contribution to this release was working on modifying aspects of our contacts and storage platform to understand the concept of groups of users that can be treated as a single entity [especially with regards to joint ownership of objects, sharing and access control lists] instead of being centered on a single user. I expect that Windows Live Events will be just the first of many ways in which this capability will manifest itself across Windows Live.

Unfortunately, I didn't work on the final stage of getting the platform ready for the product to ship. Instead I went on to work on my next feature that shipped today while Ali took over working on the platform support for Windows Live Events including cleaning up my design hacks doing a better job of future proofing the design than I did. Mad props to Bob Bauman, Mike Newman, Jason Antonelli, John Kountz, Lalit Jina, Neel Malik, Mike Torres and everyone else who worked on this release across Windows Live. You guys rock.

The second thing I was a part of building which shipped today is the updated “What’s New” page in Windows Live Spaces which is also described in detail in the aforementioned post by Chris Keating and Jay Fluegel . Before you say anything, Yes, its re-design has been influenced by the Facebook News Feed feature. Below is a screen shot of the old design of the page from the previous release

and now contrast that with the new version of the page

I'm pretty jazzed about getting to work on this feature since it is something I've wanted do for a quite some time. A few years ago, I remember talking to Maya about building a “friends page” similar to the Live Journal friends page in MSN Spaces and at the time the response was that I was requesting that we merge the functionality of an RSS reader with a blogging/social networking site which was at cross purposes. In hindsight, I realize that although the idea was a good one, the implementation I was suggesting was kind of hokey. Then Facebook shipped the News Feed and it all clicked.

I worked with a lot of great folks on this feature. Paul Ming, Deepa Chandramouli, Rob Dolin, Vanesa Polo Dominguez, Jack Liu, Eric Melillo and a bunch of others who I may have failed to mention but still deserve lots of praise. This feature was the most fun I've had working in Windows Live. Not only did I get a deeper appreciation of designing for scalability but I also got to see what it is like to be responsible for components on the live site. All I need now is a pager and I'm good to go. :)

I'd be remiss in my duties if I didn't point out that in the second screen shot, the first item on the What's New page is less than 5 minutes old. If you use other systems that have similar features, you may have noticed a much longer delay than a few minutes from posting to showing up in your news feed. As the saying goes, a lot of effort went into making this look effortless.

I also noticed some initial feedback on this feature in the blog post by Jamie Thomson entitled new spaces home page where he writes

There's a lot of potential for this activity list given that it could capture any activity people commit using their Live ID. Every live property has the potential for being able to post activity on here so one day we may see notifications of:

• change of messenger status
• posting of photos on Live Space
• addition of gadgets to Live Space
• items placed for sale on Expo
• questions asked or answered on QnA
• collection shared from Live Maps
• video posted on MSN video
• changes to XBox gamer card
• changes to Zune Social (after it launches)
• items posted to the Live Gallery
• an event being planned
• purchased a song from Zune marketplace
• posts in MSN groups (soon to be Live Groups)
• posts to online forums (forums.microsoft.com)
• downloads of public files from Skydrive

Its all pretty good but let's be honest, this is basically a clone of of what Facebook already have. Given Facebook's popularity though Microsoft didn't really have a choice but to copy them. If Microsoft really want to differentiate themselves in this arena then one option would be to provide avenues for interacting with other online services such as Flickr, Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce,  etc... This list could then become an aggregator for all online activity and that's a pretty compelling scenario. One really quick win in this area would be to capture any blog entry that is posted from Live Writer, regardless of whether it is posted to Live Spaces or not.

Posting of photos already shows up on the "what's new" page. Downloads of files will likely never show up for privacy reasons, I'm sure you can guess why it may not be wise to broadcast what files you were downloading from shared folders to all your IM buddies and the people friends list if you think about it a little. As for the rest of the request, thanks for the feedback. We'll keep it in mind for future releases. 

PS: If you work for a Microsoft property that would like to show up on the "what's new" page, host it or just wanna plain chat about the feature then give me a shout if interested in the platform or holler at Rob if it's about the user experience.

 

I’ve mentioned in previous posts that various folks at Microsoft have come to grips with the fact that RESTful Web services are the best way to expose data sources on the Web. One problem I’ve voiced is that we may forget that REST is about uniform interfaces and end up with half a dozen different Microsoft protocols for doing essentially the same thing.  This seemed to be the case when you consider Project Astoria and Web3S, both of which are designed for creating, retrieving, updating and deleting relational or not so relational data via a uniform interface over the Web. I’ve written about both projects in the past, see Google Base Data API vs. Astoria: Two Approaches to SQL-like Queries in a RESTful Protocol and Web3S: A RESTful Protocol for Accessing Windows Live Services if you’d like an overview of both technologies. 

However, thanks to enterprising folks like Yaron and Pablo on both sides there is a much better story coming from Microsoft with regards to RESTful protocols which should please even the Atom contingent.  The details are in Pablo’s post Astoria Design: payload formats which contains lots of juicy nuggets.

Let’s begin.

Pablo writes

The goal of Astoria is to make data available to loosely coupled systems for querying and manipulation. In order to do that we need to use protocols that define the interaction model between the producer and the consumer of that data, and of course we have to serialize the data in some form that all the involved parties understand. So protocols and formats are an important topic in our design process.
…
Multiple formats, one protocol (almost)

For the most part there is a single “protocol”, and by that I mean the set of HTTP headers for requests and responses, as well as the overall interaction model. In certain cases in order to make a format really look natural to clients we do need to introduce a format-specific protocol element, but we try to keep those to a minimum.

Also, any added protocol elements on top of HTTP need to be done so that unsophisticated agents can ignore a lot of that, do “plain HTTP” and still get by for the most part.
…
Now, with the almost-single protocol in place, the question comes to which formats should we do. Right now we’re thinking ATOM/APP, Web3S, and JSON. We need to define the basic requirements for any format used in Astoria, and then map those to each format we want to support. That’s what comes next.

What this means in practice is that Astoria defines the protocol semantics while Web3S will define the data format specific semantics. Even more interesting is that services that utilize Astoria will be able to take advantage of any client applications or libraries that support the Atom Publishing Protocol as long as they aren’t in reality tied to a proprietary implementation of APP such as GData (e.g. Windows Live Writer).

Pablo’s post goes on to talk about the data model used by Astoria and how it is mapped to Atom, JSON and Web3S respectively. He also calls for feedback from the community, so if you are interested in Microsoft’s implementation of RESTful protocols either as a developer customer or an interested observer…let Pablo know in the comments to his blog. There are lots of folks at Microsoft who’d love to hear what y’all have to say.

Before I forget, Pablo did have this to day about their RDF support.

What happened with RDF?

The May 2007 CTP also included support for RDF. While we got positive comments about the fact we supported it, we didn’t see any early user actually using it and we haven’t seen a particular popular scenario where RDF was a must-have. So we are thinking that we may not include RDF as a format in the first release of Astoria, and focus on the other 3 formats (which are already a bunch from the development/testing perspective).

My personal take is that while I understand how RDF fits in the picture of the semantic web and related tools, the semantic web goes well beyond a particular format. The point is to have well-defined, derivable semantics from services. I believe that Astoria does this independently of the format being used.

For some reason, I'm not surprised about this decision. I do wonder if dropping RDF will actually bring to light some closet RDF supporters who'd love to see supported in Astoria?

Now playing: N.W.A. - Appetite For Destruction

 

Chris Jones has a blog post on the Windows Live Wire blog entitled Test drive the new Windows Live suite where he writes

You’ve probably already read about some changes we’re making to Windows Live, and have seen some of your services change over the past few weeks. Starting now, you can test out the new suite of Windows Live software at http://get.live.com/wl/all. 

Windows Live makes it easy to store and manage your communications and information, and share what’s going on in your life with the people who mean the most to you. Many of you have already tried out new versions of our web services – Windows Live Hotmail, Windows Live Spaces, Windows Live SkyDrive beta, and the new Windows Live Home page beta. These have been designed to work together with a common navigation, so it is easy to switch between your e-mail, your space, your files, and your photos—from any browser.

Today we’re releasing beta versions of a new generation of Windows Live software designed for your Windows PC that makes it easier than ever to get connected to Windows Live or other services. This suite of software includes e-mail (Windows Live Mail), photo sharing (Windows Live Photo Gallery), a great publishing tool that lets you post directly to your blog (Windows Live Writer), parental controls (Windows Live OneCare Family Safety), a new version of Windows Live Messenger (8.5), and more.

As you can tell, Windows Live is coming together and there is growing clarity around the brand. All the talk of being a “suite” and unified installers struck me as anachronisms from an executive team that came from the world of Office and Windows but now that I’ve begun to see some of the fruits of their labor it looks like a good thing. An integrated set of desktop and Web apps that play well together makes a lot of sense.

I’ve also surprised myself by liking the more consistent UI across [some of] the various Windows Live sites but would like to see us do more integration of the Web applications. For example, the integration between SkyDrive and Windows Live Spaces is cool  but it seems we are last out of the gate with integration between IM and email (unlike Yahoo! Mail and GMail). I’d also like to see a couple more Windows Live services being available from http://home.live.com and sharing the same consistent UI such as Windows Live Expo and Live QnA. I guess I’m hard to please.  :)  Kudos to all the folks that worked on the current releases.  

The unified installer is one of those things that seems weird but after using it I wonder why we didn’t provide one sooner. It’s pretty convenient to be able to grab the latest Windows Live apps at a single go. It’s definitely worth trying out especially if you haven’t tried out Windows Live Photo Gallery or Windows Live Mail yet. So what are you waiting for? Get it now.

Now playing: Three 6 Mafia - Most Known Unknown Hits

 

David Berlind has a blog post entitled If ‘you’ build OpenID, will ‘they’ come? where he writes

In case you missed it last week, Microsoft is taking another swing at the idea of single sign-on technologies. Its first, Passport, failed miserably. Called Windows Live ID (following in the footsteps of everything else “Windows Live”), I guess you could call this “Son of Passport” or “Passport: The Sequel.” The question is (for Microsoft as much as anyone else), down the road, will we have “Passport The Thirteenth”?
…
When I saw the announcement, the first thought that went through my mind was whether or not Microsoft’s WLID service would also “double” as an OpenID node. OpenID is another single sign-on specification that has been gaining traction in open circles (no suprise there) and the number of OpenID nodes (providers of OpenID-based authentication) is growing.
…
In light of the WLID announcement from Microsoft and given the discussions that the Redmond company’s chief identity architect Kim Cameron and I have had (see After Passport, Microsoft is rethinking identity) about where Microsoft has to go to be more of an open player on the identity front, I tried to track him down to get an update on why WLID and OpenID don’t appear to be interoperable (I could be wrong on this).

Somewhere along the line, people have gotten the mistaken impression that the Windows Live ID Web Authentication SDK is about single sign-on. It isn’t. The primary reason for opening up our authentication system is to let non-Microsoft sites build and host widgets that access a user’s data stored within Windows Live or MSN services. This is spelled out in the recent blog posting about the release on the Windows Live ID team blog which is excerpted below

The benefits of incorporating Windows Live ID into your Web site include:

 

·         The ability to use Windows Live gadgets, APIs and controls to incorporate authenticated Windows Live services into your site.

For example, the recently announced collaboration between Windows Live and Bebo requires a way for Windows Live users on Bebo to authenticate themselves and utilize Windows Live services from the Bebo site. That’s what the Windows Live ID Web Authentication SDK is meant to enable.

Although the technological approaches are similar, the goal is completely different from that of OpenID which is meant to be a single sign-on system. 

Now playing: Mase - Return Of The Murda

 

This morning there were a number of news stories about collaboration between Windows Live and Bebo. These news stories didn’t tell the whole story. Articles such as C|Net’s Bebo's new instant messaging is Microsoft-flavored and TechCrunch’s Windows Live Messaging Comes to Bebo give the impression that the announcement was about instant messaging. However there was much more to the announcement. The agreement between Windows Live and Bebo spans two areas; social network portability and interop between Web-based IM and Windows Live Messenger. 

1. Social Network Portability: As I’ve mentioned before a common practice among social networking sites is to ask users for their log-in credentials for their email accounts so that the social networking sites can screen scrape the HTML for the address book and import the user’s contact list into the social networking site. There are a number of problems with this approach, the main one being that the user is simply moving data from one silo to another without being able to get their contact list back from the social network and into their email client. There’s also the problem that this approach makes users more susceptible to phishing since it encourages them to enter their log-in credentials on random sites.  Finally, the user isn’t in control of how much data is pulled from their address book by the social network or how often it is pulled.

   The agreement between Windows Live and Bebo enables users to utilize a single contact list across both sites. Their friends in Bebo will be available as their contacts in Windows Live and vice versa. This integration will be facilitated by the Windows Live Contacts API which implements a user-centric access control model where the user grants applications permission to access and otherwise manipulate their contact list.

2. Web-based IM and Windows Live Messenger interoperability: Users of Bebo that are also Windows Live Messenger users can opt in to getting notifications from Bebo as alerts in their desktop IM client. In addition, these users can add an “IM Me” button to their profile which allows people browsing their profile on the Web to initiate an IM conversation with them using a Microsoft-provided Web IM widget on the Bebo website which communicates with the Windows Live Messenger client on the profile owner’s desktop.

   The above scenarios were demoed at this year's MIX '07 conference during the session Broaden Your Market with Windows Live. The current plan is for the APIs for interacting with the Windows Live Messenger service and the IM widgets that can be embedded within a non-Microsoft website that power this scenario to be available via http://dev.live.com in the near future.

At the end of the day, it is all about putting users in control. We don’t believe that a user’s social graph should be trapped in a roach motel of our creation. Instead users should be able to export their contact lists from our service on their own terms and should be able to grow their social graph within Windows Live without having to exclusively use our services.

It’s your data, not ours. If you want it, you can have it. Hopefully, the rest of the industry comes around to this sort of thinking sooner rather than later.

Stay tuned, there’s more to come.

Now playing: Gucci Mane - So Icy (feat. Young Jeezy)

 

If you go to http://dev.live.com/liveid you’ll see links to Windows Live ID for Web Authentication and Client Authentication which enable developers to build Web or desktop applications that can be used to authenticate users via Windows Live ID. The desktop SDK are still in alpha but the Web APIs have hit v1. You can get the details from the Windows Live ID team blog post entitled Windows Live ID Web Authentication SDK for Developers Is Released which states  

Windows Live ID Web Authentication allows sites who want to integrate with the Windows Live services and platform. We are releasing a set of tools that make this integration easier than ever.  

Web Authentication works by sending your users to the Windows Live ID sign-in page by means of a specially formatted link. The service then directs them back to your Web site along with a unique, site-specific identifier that you can use to manage personalized content, assign user rights, and perform other tasks for the authenticated user. Sign-in and account management is performed by Windows Live ID, so you don't have to worry about implementing these details.

Included with the Web Authentication software development kit (SDK) are QuickStart sample applications in the ASP.NET, Java, Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby programming languages. You can get the sample applications for this SDK from the Web Authentication download page>on Microsoft.com.

As one of the folks who's been championing opening up our authentication platform to Web developers, this is good news. I'm not particularly sold on using Windows Live ID as a single sign-on instead of sites managing their own identities but I do think that now that we allow non-Microsoft applications (e.g. mashups, widgets, etc) to act on behalf of Windows Live users via this SDK, there'll be a burst of new APIs coming out of Windows Live that will allow developers build applications that manipulate a user's data stored within Windows Live services.

Opening up our platform will definitely be good for users and will be good for the Web as well. Kudos, to the Windows Live ID folks for getting this out.

Now playing: Nappy Roots - Po' Folks

 

It seems like I was just blogging about Windows Live Hotmail coming out of beta and it looks like there is already a substantial update to the service being rolled out. From the Windows Live Hotmail team’s blog post entitled August: Hotmail will soon bring you more of your requests, better performance we learn

We went out of beta in May, and we’re already releasing something new. Today, these new features will begin to roll our gradually to all our customers over the next few weeks, so if you don’t immediately see them, be patient, they’re coming!

…

More storage! Just when you were wondering how you’d ever fill up 2 or 4 GB of mail, we’ve given you more storage. Free users will get 5 GB and paid users will get 10 GB of Hotmail storage.

…

Contacts de-duplication: Do you have five different entries for the same person in your Contacts? Yeah, me too, but not anymore. We’re the first webmail service to roll out “contacts de-duplication”. If you get a message from “Steve Kafka” and click “add contact” but there’s already a Steve Kafka, we’ll let you know and let you add Steve’s other e-mail address to your existing “Steve Kafka” contact entry. We’re just trying to be smarter to make your life easier and faster. There’s also a wizard you can run to clean up your existing duplicate contacts.

…

Accepting meeting requests: If you receive a meeting request, such as one sent from Outlook, you can now click “accept” and have it added to your Calendar. This had existed for years in MSN Hotmail, and we’re adding it to Windows Live Hotmail now.

…

You can turn off the Today page (if you want to). If you’d rather see your inbox immediately upon login, you have the option to turn off the page of MSN news (called the Today page). The choice is yours. 

A nice combination of new features and pet peeves fixed with this release. The contacts duplication issue is particularly annoying and one I’ve wanted to see fixed for quite a while.

So far we’ve seen updates Spaces, SkyDrive, and now Mail within the past month. The summer of Windows Live is on here and so far it’s looking pretty good. I wonder what else Windows Live has up it’s sleeve?

Now playing: P. Diddy - That's Crazy (remix) (feat. Black Rob, Missy Elliott, Snoop Dogg & G-Dep)

 

The speculation on LiveSide was right. Windows Live Folders is now Windows Live SkyDrive. You can catch the announcement on the product team's blog post Introducing Windows Live SkyDrive! which states

It’s been a month and a half since our first release, and today we’re making three major announcements!

First, we’re happy to announce our new name:



Second, we’ve been listening intently to your feedback and suggestions, and based directly on that feedback, we’re excited to bring you our next release, featuring:

• An upgraded look and feel — new graphics to go along with your new features!
• "Also on SkyDrive" — easily get back to the SkyDrives you’ve recently visited
• Thumbnail images — we heard you loud and clear, and now you can see thumbnails of your image files
• Drag and drop your files — sick of our five-at-a-time upload limit? Drag and drop your files right onto your SkyDrive
• Embed your stuff anywhere — with just a few clicks, post your files and folders anywhere you can post html

Third, we’re excited to introduce SkyDrive in two additional regions: UK and India.

It's great to see this getting out to the general public. It's been pretty sweet watching this come together over the past year. I worked on some of the storage and permissioning platform aspects of this last year and I was quite impressed by a lot of the former members of the Microsoft Max who are now working on this product.

We definitely have a winner here.  Check it out.

UPDATE: Someone asked for a video or screencast of the site in action. There's one on the Window's Vista team blog. It is embedded below

Demo: Windows Live SkyDrive

Now playing: 50 Cent - Outta Control (remix) (feat. Mobb Deep)

 

From the blog post on the Windows Live Search team's blog entitled Three new features in Live Search Images we learn

We know you love searching for people with our image search engine—we’ve worked hard to make it easy and fun. Now we’ve made it even better. Today we shipped three new features that help you find faces, portraits and black and white images. Try these links to see them in action: 

1. without the new features – jimi hendrix
2. with new face filtering on – jimi hendrix filter:face
3. with new portrait filtering on – jimi hendrix filter:portrait
4. with new black and white filtering on – jimi hendrix filter:bw

The feature works pretty well as long as you enclose the name of the person in quotes and use the image search tab. For example, check out the queries

• "don box" filter:face,
•  "robert scoble" filter:face,
•  "olusegun obasanjo" filter:face, 
• "dave winer" filter:face,
  
• "danah boyd" filter:face,
  
• "kanye west" filter:face,
  
• "justin timberlake" filter:face,
• "vint cerf" filter:face
• "richard stallman" filter:face

Very Impressive. The addition of side panel showing "Related People" is also a very nice touch. This is one of the coolest additions to a search engine I've seen this year. I actually lost track of time while browsing faces when I first tried out the feature. Kudos to the Live Search folks.

PS: It seems I've been totally spoiled by Google's Universal Search because I originally performed my searches on the "Web" tab and thought it was a bug when I didn't get any results. I've already forgotten that there was a time when you had to go to each topic specific tab and search for what you want instead of typing your results in a single box and having the search engine figure out if it was a web search, image search, video search or whatever. I can't wait until every search engine has an equivalent feature.

 

There have been a number of updates to Windows Live Spaces over the past few months that have moved to emphasize using the site to communicate and connect with people as opposed to personal publishing. When Windows Live Spaces was launched about three years ago, it's sweet spot was as a way for users to publish blog posts, photos, lists of their favorite music or books and other forms of personal expression. Over the past few years, experience has thought us as an industry that providing a platform for our users to communicate and connect with each other is more valuable to them than simply providing a personal publishing platform. With that in mind, the product team has been working at a rapid clip to add more features to the site that enable people to connect and communicate with each other.

From the blog post entitled Stay in touch with friends and meet new people with Guestbook and Messaging on Spaces on the Windows Live Spaces team blog we learn

Spaces has always been a great place to express yourself and share the stuff you care about with your friends or the world at large, but there haven’t been that many options to communicate with people through your space. There are lots of ways to passively connect you’re your friends –Windows Live Messenger gleam integration, the Friends feature, and the What’s New feature which has now been incorporated into the Spaces Home, but in this release we really focused on giving you active ways to communicate with your friends and the people who visit your space through our new Guestbook and Messaging features. We know you’ve been asking for these features for a long time (particularly the Guestbook!), and we’re glad that we can finally deliver them
...
Guestbook
The Guestbook is a brand new module that you can add to your Space through the Customize menu or by clicking the “+” sign on a Guestbook in someone else’s space...Once you add the Guestbook module to your space (new spaces have it by default) you can add a custom greeting, which can include formatting, images, and even videos:..Visitors to your space can then leave and view comments in your guestbook (they can use images, video, and formatting too):
...
Messaging
Where the Guestbook is a great place for public communication the new Messaging feature is a great way to meet people on spaces or use it to stay in touch with your Spaces Friends. With Spaces messaging you can send private messages to your spaces friends or other spaces users without revealing you email address to others or having to using an outside e-mail service...You can access your messaging inbox from the Spaces Home by clicking on the “Messages” link:

On your messages page you can view and delete messages you’ve received and sent, and you can reply to these messages:

There are lots of ways you can initiate a new conversation through Spaces messaging. If you are visiting a cool space you can click send a message from the visitor tools on that person’s space:

You can also click the “Send a message” link at the bottom of a blog post to send that person a message referring to the post:

That was from two months ago. Last week there were fresh updates to the service which was announced in the post entitled Just released: Three months of new updates to Windows Live Spaces that stated

As of this evening, we finished rolling out the latest version of Spaces. Whether you or your friends are checking out what your Messenger contacts have been up to, organizing your lists, navigating around your space, or setting up a space, the latest Spaces release has a lot of new features.
...
Spaces home page updates 
We've made some slight changes to the design of your Spaces home page so it's even easier to see what your Messenger contacts are doing with their spaces.   We've also added birthday reminders!

To see birthday notifications, first share your contact information and then subscribe to a contact's information.  You can subscribe to contact information through Spaces, Messenger, or Hotmail.

• Spaces:  Roll over a person's profile picture and in the preview window, click on the “Receive contact updates” link
• Messenger:  Right-click a contact, click “Edit contact”, and check “Subscribe to updates for this contact”
• Hotmail:  Click Contacts in the lower lefthand corner, “Edit contact”, and check “Receive contact updates from this person”

If your contacts have entered their birthday information, you'll see their upcoming birthdays on your Spaces home-page, and you'll be able to send them an electronic greeting card from MSN Greetings powered by American Greetings  (currently only available in the US market).

The What’s New feature is what I've been spending my time on recently and I'm glad to see it getting more visibility in the user experience especially since as Mike Torres said, there is some more goodness coming soon to this feature. :) 
 

From the Virtual Earth team's blog post entitled Mobile Search V2 released - Improved Navigation, Cache, Movie Searching, GPS, Traffic reporting and more! we learn

The Mobile Search team has released V2 of the rich client application for Windows Mobile, as well as a major update to the browser based interface. Whether you have a J2ME (Java) phone, Windows Mobile phone, or any other device with a mobile browser, Live Search has you covered with maps, directions and business search.
...

• Movie Showtimes:  Want to see a movie but don’t know what’s playing?   Get Movie Showtimes near you and be on your way! 
• More Local Data with Reviews:  Want to go out for dinner but not sure which restaurant to pick?  Let your fellow restaurant goers help you out – make a decision based on user ratings.
• Maps:  View Mobile Virtual Earth maps wherever you are.  For improved performance, pop in your storage card to enable the large cache option. Street maps, Aerial and Hybrid are supported.
• Directions: Lost?  Get found with better support for GPS integration and improved turn-by-turn navigation.  We’ll even prompt you to auto-reroute if you get lost! 

I use this all the time and it is now my favorite Windows Live application. It's a sign that we've come a long way that I now consider printing out driving directions from the Web to be "old school".

I've been using Yahoo's mobile service for movie times but now it looks like I be needing it any more. Sweet. What are you waiting for? Head over to http://wls.live.com and install it on your phone today.

 

Disclaimer: This is my opinion. It does not reflect the intentions, strategies, plans or stated goals of my employer

Ever since the last Microsoft reorg where it's Web products were spread out across 3 Vice Presidents I've puzzled about why the company would want to fragment its product direction in such a competitive space instead of having a single person responsible for its online strategy.

Today, I was reading an interview with Chris Jones, the corporate vice president of Windows Live Experience Program Management entitled Windows Live Moves Into Next Phase with Renewed Focus on Software + Services and a lightbulb went off in my head. The relevant bits are excerpted below

PressPass: What else is Microsoft announcing today?

Jones: Today we’re also releasing a couple of exciting new services from Windows Live into managed beta testing: Windows Live Photo Gallery beta and Windows Live Folders beta.

Windows Live Photo Gallery is an upgrade to Windows Vista’s Windows Photo Gallery, offered at no charge, and enables both Windows Vista and Windows XP SP2 customers to share, edit, organize and print photos and digital home videos... We’re also releasing Windows Live Folders into managed beta today, which will provide customers with 500 megabytes of online storage at no charge.
...
We’re excited about these services and we see today’s releases as yet another important step on the path toward the next generation of Windows Live, building on top of the momentum of other interesting beta releases we’ve shared recently such as Windows Live Mail beta, Windows Live Messenger beta and Windows Live Writer beta....soon we’ll begin to offer a single installer which will give customers the option of an all-in-one download for the full Windows Live suite of services instead of the separate installation experience you see today. It’s going to be an exciting area to watch, and there’s a lot more to come.

PressPass: You talk a lot about a “software plus services” strategy. What does that mean and how does it apply to what you’re talking about today?

Jones: It’s become a buzz word of sorts in the industry, but it’s a strategy we truly believe in. The fact that we’re committed to delivering software plus services means we’re focused on building rich experiences on top of your Windows PC; services like those offered through Windows Live.

All the items in red font refer to Windows desktop applications in one way or the other. At this point it now made sense to me why there were three VPs running different bits of Microsoft's online products and why one of them was also the VP that owned Windows. The last reorg seems to have divided Microsoft's major tasks in the online space across the various VPs in the following manner

• Satya Nadella: Running the search + search ads business (i.e. primarily competing with Google search and AdWords)

• Steve Berkowitz: Running the content + display ads business (i.e. primarily competing with Yahoo!'s content and display ad offerings)

• Steven Sinofsky and Chris Jones: Adding value to the Windows platform using online services (i.e. building something similar to iLife + .Mac for Windows users). 

From that perspective, the reorgs make a lot more sense now. The goals and businesses are different enough that having people singularly focused on each of those tasks makes more sense than having one person worry about such disparate [and perhaps conflicting] goals. The interesting question to me is what does it mean for Microsoft's Web-based Windows Live properties like Windows Live Hotmail, Windows Live Favorites and Windows Live Spaces if Microsoft is going to be emphasizing the Windows in Windows Live? I guess we've already seen announcements some announcements from the mail side like Windows Live Mail and the Microsoft Office Outlook Connector now being free.

Another interesting question is where  Ray Ozzie fits in all this.

 

I had hoped to avoid talking about RESTful Web services for a couple of weeks but Yaron Goland's latest blog post APP and Dare, the sitting duck deserves a mention.  In his post, Yaron  talks concretely about some of the thinking that has gone on at Windows Live and other parts of Microsoft around building a RESTful protocol for accessing and manipulating data stores on the Web. He writes

I'll try to explain what's actually going on at Live. I know what's going on because my job for little over the last year has been to work with Live groups designing our platform strategy.
...
Most of the services in Live land follow a very similar design pattern, what I originally called S3C which stood for Structured data, with some kind of Schema (in the general sense, I don't mean XML Schema), with some kind of Search and usually manipulated with operations that look rather CRUD like. So it seemed fairly natural to figure out how to unify access to those services with a single protocol.
...
So with this in mind we first went to APP. It's the hottest thing around. Yahoo, Google, etc. everyone loves it. And as Dare pointed out in his last article Microsoft has adopted it and will continue to adopt it where it makes sense. There was only one problem - we couldn't make APP work in any sane way for our scenarios. In fact, after looking around for a bit, we couldn't find any protocol that really did what we needed. Because my boss hated the name S3C we renamed the spec Web3S and that's the name we published it under. The very first section of the spec explains our requirements. I also published a FAQ that explains the design rationale for Web3S. And sure enough, the very first question, 2.1, explains why we didn't use ATOM.
...
Why not just modify APP?
We considered this option but the changes needed to make APP work for our scenarios were so fundamental that it wasn't clear if the resulting protocol would still be APP. The core of ATOM is the feed/entry model. But that model is what causes us our problems. If we change the data model are we still dealing with the same protocol? I also have to admit that I was deathly afraid of the political implications of Microsoft messing around with APP. I suspect Mr. Bray's comments would be taken as a pleasant walk in the park compared to the kind of pummeling Microsoft would receive if it touched one hair on APP's head.

In his post, Yaron talks about two of the key limitations we saw with the Atom Publishing Protocol (i.e. lack of support for hierarchies and lack of support for granular updates to fields) and responds to the various suggestions about how one can workaround these problems in APP. As he states in the conclusion of his post we are very wary of suggestions to "embrace and extend" Web standards given the amount of negative press the company has gotten about that over the years. It seems better for the industry if we build a protocol that works for our needs and publish documentation about how it works so any interested party can interoperate with us than if we claim we support a Web standard when in truth it only "works with Microsoft" because it has been extended in incompatible ways.

Dealing with Hierarchy

Here's what Yaron had to say with regards to the discussion around APP's lack of explicit support for hierarchies

The idea that you put a link in the ATOM feed to the actual object. This isn't a bad idea if the goal was to publish notices about data. E.g. if I wanted to have a feed that published information about changes to my address book then having a link to the actual address book data in the APP entries is fine and dandy. But if the goal is to directly manipulate the address book's contents then having to first download the feed, pull out the URLs for the entries and then retrieve each and every one of those URLs in separate requests in order to pull together all the address book data is unacceptable from both an implementation simplicity and performance perspective. We need a way where by someone can get all the content in the address book at once. Also, each of our contacts, for example, are actually quite large trees. So the problem recurses. We need a way to get all the data in one contact at a go without having to necessarily pull down the entire address book. At the next level we need a way to get all the phone numbers for a single contact without having to download the entire contact and so on.

Yaron is really calling out two issues here. The first is that if you have a data type that doesn't map well as a piece of authored content then it is better represented as its own content type that is linked from an atom:entry than trying to treat an atom:entry with its requirement of author, summary and title fields as a good way to represent all types of data. The second issue is the lack of explicit support for hierarchies. This situation is an example of how something that seems entirely reasonable in one scenario can be problematic in another. If you are editing blog posts, it probably isn't that much of a burden to first retrieve an Atom feed of all your recent blog posts, locate the link to the one you want to edit then retrieve it for editing. In addition, since a blog post is authored content, the most relevant information about the post can be summarized in the atom:entry. On the other hand, if you want to retrieve your list of IM buddies so you can view their online status or get people in your friend's list to see their recent status updates, it isn't pretty to fetch a feed of your contacts then have to retrieve each contact one by one after locating the links to their representations in the Atom feed. Secondly, you may just want to address part of the data instead of instead of retrieving or accessing an entire user object if you just want their status message or online status.

Below are specification excerpts showing how two RESTful protocols from Microsoft address these issues.

How Web3S Does It

The naming of elements and level of hierarchy in an XML document that is accessible via Web3S can be arbitrarily complex as long as it satisfies some structural constraints as specified in The Web3S Resource Infoset. The constraints include no mixed content and that multiple instances of an element with the same name as children of a node must be identified by a Web3S:ID element (e.g. multiple entries under a feed are identified by ID). Thus the representation of a Facebook user returned by the users.getInfo method in the Facebook REST API should be a valid Web3S document [except that the concentration element would have to be changed from having string content to having two element children, a Web3S:ID that can be used to address each concentration directly and another containing the current textual content].

The most important part of being able to properly represent hierarchies is that different levels of the hierarchy can be directly accessed. From the Web3S documentation section entitled Addressing Web3S Information Items in HTTP

In order to enable maximum flexibility Element Information Items (EIIs) are directly exposed as HTTP resources. That is, each EII can be addressed as a HTTP resource and manipulated with the usual methods...

<articles>
 <article>
  <Web3S:ID>8383</Web3S:ID>
  <title>Manual of Surgery Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition.</title>
  <authors>
   <author>
    <Web3S:ID>23455</Web3S:ID>
    <firstname>Alexander</firstname>
    <lastname>Miles</lastname>    
   </author>
   <author>
    <Web3S:ID>88828</Web3S:ID>
    <firstname>Alexis</firstname>
    <lastname>Thomson</lastname>    
   </author>
  </authors>
 </article>
</articles>

If the non-Web3S prefix path is http://example.net/stuff/morestuff then we could address the lastname EII in Alexander Miles’s entry as http://example.net/stuff/morestuff/net.examples.articles/net.example.article(8383)/net.example.authors/net.example.author(23455)/org.example.lastname.

 Although String Information Items (SIIs) are modeled as resources they currently do not have their own URLs and therefore are addressed only in the context of EIIs. E.g. the value of an SII would be set by setting the value of its parent EII.

XML heads may balk at requiring IDs to differentiate elements with the same name at the same scope or level of hierarchy instead of using positional indexes like XPath does. The problem with is that assumes that the XML document order is significant in the underlying data store which may likely not be the case.

Supporting Granular Updates

Here's what Yaron had to say on the topic of supporting granular updates and the various suggestions that came up with regards to preventing the lost update problem in APP.

APP's approach to this problem is to have the client download all the content, change the stuff they understand and then upload all the content including stuff they don't understand.
...
On a practical level though the 'download then upload what you don't understand' approach is complicated. To make it work at all one has to use optimistic concurrency. For example, let's say I just want to change the first name of a contact and I want to use last update wins semantics. E.g. I don't want to use optimistic concurrency. But when I download the contact I get a first name and a last name. I don't care about the last name. I just want to change the first name. But since I don't have merge semantics I am forced to upload the entire record including both first name and last name. If someone changed the last name on the contact after I downloaded but before I uploaded I don't want to lose that change since I only want to change the first name. So I am forced to get an etag and then do an if-match and if the if-match fails then I have to download again and try again with a new etag. Besides creating race conditions I have to take on a whole bunch of extra complexity when all I wanted in the first place was just to do a 'last update wins' update of the first name.
...
A number of folks seem to agree that merge makes sense but they suggested that instead of using PUT we should use PATCH. Currently we use PUT with a specific content type (application/Web3S+xml). If you execute a PUT against a Web3S resources with that specific content-type then we will interpret the content using merge semantics. In other words by default PUT has replacement semantics unless you use our specific content-type on a Web3S resource. Should we use PATCH? I don't think so but I'm flexible on the topic.

This is one place where a number of APP experts such as Bill de hÓra and James Snell seem to agree that the current semantics in APP are insufficient. There also seems to be some consensus that it is too early to standardize a technology for partial updates of XML on the Web without lots more implementation experience. I also agree with that sentiment. So having it out of APP for now probably isn't a bad thing.

Currently I'm still torn on whether Web3S's use of PUT for submitting partial updates is kosher or whether it is more appropriate to invent  a new HTTP method called PATCH. There was a thread about this on the rest-discuss mailing list and for the most part it seems people felt that applying merge semantics on PUT requests for a specific media type is valid if the server understands that those are the semantics of that type. 

How Web3S Does It

From the Web3S documentation section entitled Application/Web3S+xml with Merge Semantics

On its own the Application/Web3S+xml content type is used to represent a Web3S infoset. But the semantics of that infoset can change depending on what method it is used with.

In the case of PUT the semantics of the Application/Web3S+xml request body are “merge the infoset information in the Application/Web3S+xml request with the infoset of the EII identified in the request-URI.” This section defines how Application/Web3S+xml is to be handled specifically in the case of PUT or any other context in which the Web3S infoset in the Application/Web3S+xml serialization is to be merged with some existing Web3S infoset.

For example, imagine that the source contains:

 <whatever>
  <Web3S:ID>234</Web3S:ID>
  <yo>
   <Web3S:ID>efghi</Web3S:ID>
   <avalue />
   <somethingElse>YO!!!</somethingElse>
  </yo>
 </whatever>

Now imagine that the destination, before the merge, contains:

 <whatever>
  <nobodyhome />
 </whatever> 

In this example the only successful outcome of the merge would have to be:

 <whatever>
  <Web3S:ID>234</Web3S:ID>
  <yo>
   <Web3S:ID>efghi</Web3S:ID>
   <avalue />
   <somethingElse>YO!!!</somethingElse>
  </yo>
  <nobodyhome />
 </whatever>

In other words, not only would all of the source’s contents have to be copied over but the full names (E.g. EII names and IDs) must also be copied over exactly.

This an early draft of the spec so there are a lot of rules that aren't explicitly spelled out but now you should get the gist of how Web3S works. If you have any questions, direct them to Yaron not to me. I'm just an interested observer when it comes to Web3S. Yaron is the person to talk to if you want to make things happen. :)

In a couple of days I'll take a look at how Project Astoria deals with the same problems in a curiously similar fashion. Until then you can make do with Leonard Richardson's excellent review of Project Astoria. Until next time.

 

Omar Shahine has a blog post entitled Hotmail + Outlook = Sweet where he writes

At long last... experience Hotmail inside of Outlook.

What used to be a subscription only offering is now available to anyone that wants it. While Outlook used to have the ability to talk to Hotmail via DAV it was flaky and 2 years ago we no longer offered it to new users of the service.

Well the new Outlook Connector has a few notable features that you didn't get with the old DAV support:

1. uses DeltaSync, a Microsoft developed HTTP based protocol that sync's data based on change sequence numbers. This means that the server is stateful about the client. Whenever the client connects to Hotmail, the server tells the clients of any changes that happened since the last time the client connected. This is super efficient and allows us to offer the service to many users at substantially lower overhead than stateless protocols. This is the same protocol utilized by Windows Live Mail. It's similar in nature to exchange Cached Mode or AirSync, the mobile sync stack used by Windows Mobile Devices.
2. Sync of Address Book. Your Messenger/Hotmail contacts get stored in Outlook.
3. Sync of Calendar (currently premium only)
4. Sync of allow/block lists for safety/spam

I've been using the Microsoft Office Outlook Connector for a few years now and have always preferred it to the Web interface for accessing my email on Hotmail. It's great that this functionality is now free for anyone who owns a copy of Microsoft Outlook instead of being a subscription service.

PS: Omar mentioning Hotmail and Microsoft Outlook's use WebDAV reminds me that there have been other times in recent memory when using RESTful Web protocols swept Microsoft. Without reading old MSDN articles like Communicating XML Data over the Web with WebDAV when Microsoft Office, Microsoft Exchange and Internet Information Services (IIS) it's easy to forget that Microsoft almost ended up standardizing on WebDAV as the primary protocol for reading and writing Microsoft data sources on the Web. Of course, then SOAP and WS-* happened. :)

 

One of the accusations made by Tim Bray in his post I’ve Seen This Movie is that my recent  posts about the Atom Publishing Protocol are part of some sinister plot by Microsoft to not support it in our blogging clients. That's really ironic considering that Microsoft is probably the only company that has shipped two blogging clients that support APP.

Don't take my word for it. In his blog post entitled Microsoft is not sabotaging APP (probably) Joe Cheng of the Windows Live Writer team writes

1. Microsoft has already shipped a general purpose APP client (Word 2007) and GData implementation (Windows Live Writer). These are the two main blogging tools that Microsoft has to offer, and while I can’t speak for the Word team, the Writer team is serious about supporting Atom going forward.
2. These two clients also already post to most blogs, not just Spaces. In particular, Writer works hard to integrate seamlessly with even clearly buggy blog services. I don’t know anyone who works as hard as we do at this.
3. ...
4. Spaces may not support APP, but it does support MetaWeblog which Microsoft has a lot less influence over than APP (since MW is controlled by Dave Winer, not by an official standards body). Consider that many of its main competitors, including MySpace, Vox, and almost all overseas social networking sites, have poor or nonexistent support for any APIs.

The reasoning behind Windows Live Spaces supporting the MetaWeblog API and not the Atom Publishing Protocol are detailed in my blog posts What Blog Posting APIs are supported by MSN Spaces? and Update on Blog Posting APIs and MSN Spaces which I made over two years ago when we were going through the decision process for what the API story should be for Windows Live Spaces. For those who don't have time to read both posts, it basically came down to choosing a mature de facto standard (i.e. the MetaWeblog API) instead of (i) creating a proprietary protocol which better our needs or (ii) taking a bet on the Atom Publishing Protocol spec which was a moving target in 2004 and is still a moving target today in 2007.

I hope this clears up any questions about Microsoft and APP. I'm pretty much done talking about this particular topic for the next couple of weeks.

PS: You can download Windows Live Writer from here and you can buy Office 2007 wherever great software is sold.

 

A couple of months ago, I was asked to be part of a recruiting video for Microsoft Online Business Group (i.e. Windows Live and MSN). The site with the video is now up. It's http://www.whywillyouworkhere.com. As I expected, I sound like a dork. And as usual I was repping G-Unit. I probably should have worn something geeky like what I have on today, a a Super Mario Bros. 1up T-shirt. :)

 

Mike Torres has the scoop in his blog post Windows Live betas - Writer, Messenger, Mail where he writes

Three applications I use on a daily basis just got updated today:

• Windows Live Writer.  The world's best client blogging tool (works with Spaces!)
• Windows Live Messenger.  The world's most popular instant messaging program (and integrated with Spaces!)
• Windows Live Mail.  The world's easiest to use email program (and you can even blog to Spaces!)

All three of them are rock-solid in terms of stability (of course, they're still betas!) and come highly recommended by yours truly.

There are also a couple of blog posts on the various Windows Live team blogs about the betas. The Windows Live Hotmail team writes about the newly renamed "Windows Live Mail" in the post New beta software to access your Hotmail offline, the Windows Live Writer team has a blog post letting us know Windows Live Writer Beta 2 Now Available, and finally the Windows Live Messenger team runs down the changes in their latest release in the post Messenger 8.5 Beta1 released.

Like Mike I've been using the betas for a while and they are all rock solid. Check 'em out and let the product teams know what you think.

 

From the announcement on the Gamerscore blog entitled Windows Live Messenger Comes to Xbox LIVE, Uniting Friends and Families on the TV, PC and Mobile Phone we learn

Beginning May 9th, Xbox LIVE, the most interactive gaming and social network available, is once again expanding with the arrival of Windows Live Messenger on Xbox 360. This new feature, available as part of the Xbox 360 Spring Update, will connect people across Xbox 360 consoles, Windows PCs and Windows Mobile devices. Xbox LIVE members will be able to socialize with people on their unified friends list, including their contacts from the more than 260 million Windows Live Messengers across the world. With Instant Messenger, Xbox LIVE members will have the ability to:

• Chat via instant messenger with up to 20 contacts in a single conversation, and have up to six different conversations at the same time with people on PCs, mobile phones and other Xbox 360 consoles.
• Instant message while playing games, listening to music or watching movies or TV shows downloaded from Xbox LIVE Marketplace.
• View at a glance if friends on Windows Live Messenger have gamertags and add them to a unified friends list.

Folks on my team have been working on this integration for a while and I was even roped in a couple of times. I'm glad to see it finally in the hands of our users. This is a nice bit of synergy from Windows Live and XBox Live.

After I blogged about this announcement the first time around, Andrew who is both an XBox Live and Windows Live messenger user voiced some privacy concerns in his post One of my Many Irrational fears... where he wrote

My problem with the new Spring update for the XBox 360 lies in the Windows Live Messenger integration. It's been commented elsewhere that your contacts will be able to see what games you're playing, your gamertag, etc.

Well I have people, parent, family, whatever that I do not want seeing what I am playing at any one point in the day - this is why I didn't enable the ability to show what I was listening to on my Windows Media Player when that became available.

In fact, I quite like the thought that I can do whatever the hell I want in my leisure time without everyone being notified of it.
...
In fact you will find a comment from me regarding my displeasure on this on Dare's blog (no response), I did post it to Ozymandias' blog (disappeared), and Gamerscoreblog (no response).

These are three of the more accessible blogs from people who are involved in this decision and none of them has decided it was worth responding to my questions. Specifically I do ask if there will be an opt out - something that the Live Messenger team gave people in regards to Windows Spaces - as Dare mentioned.

Andrew has raised a valid concern and immediately after I saw his post I talked to the PM who worked on the feature to see if there was a way to opt out of the feature. I got the answer and I've been waiting until the Spring XBox Live update was out before talking about it in detail. Now that it is out, I can address how to opt out of this feature if you have privacy concerns about it: 

The feature is enabled by default once you opt-in to link your .NET Passport account/Windows Live ID with your XBox Live account. To disable the feature after you have linked your IDs, you need to turn off the option to automatically sign-in to Messenger when logged into XBox Live. The steps to do this from XBox Live are

1. click on profile
2. click on 'auto sign in'
3. there is an xbox and a messenger section. Click disable on the messenger option

Voila, and that's it. Your leisure time privacy is preserved.

 

From the Microsoft press release Microsoft Launches Windows Live Hotmail Worldwide we learn

REDMOND, Wash. — May 6, 2007 — Microsoft Corp. today announced that Windows Live™ Hotmail^®, the successor to MSN^®
...
As Windows Live Hotmail begins rolling out on May 7 and continues over the coming days, consumers will be able to visit http://www.hotmail.com to sign up for a new Windows Live Hotmail account. Current MSN Hotmail customers can also update their existing account to Windows Live Hotmail by logging into their account and clicking on the green Join Windows Live Hotmail button.
...
Hotmail, is launching globally in 36 languages. The most significant upgrade for Hotmail since it pioneered the webmail industry in 1996,

• Outlook Connector. Available later this month in 11 languages worldwide, the new Microsoft Office Outlook Connector beta will enable people to view and manage their Windows Live Hotmail account from Outlook for free, with full contact, e-mail and e-mail folder synchronization.

Congrats to Omar Shahine, Reeves Little and the rest of the Hotmail crew for getting this release out the door. This has represented man-years of work from the team and lots of us across Windows Live. Also, free access to Hotmail for Outlook users has been long overdue. I'm glad we've finally given this feature to our users. Kudos all around.

You can read more about the release from Omar in his post And We've Shipped and from the Windows Live Hotmail team's blog post It's Here and the Fun Has Only Just Begun

PS: Liveside has some news about the other Windows Live mail product in their post Windows Live Hotmail launches; "Windows Live Mail" to succeed Outlook Express and Windows Mail

 

The blog post entitled Released: Contacts API, Windows Live Data Protocols on the Windows Live Dev blog states

Today we have a few more things for you, starting with this . . .

To date, access to Windows Live Contacts has been exclusively through our Contacts Control, but now we also offer an API for Contacts as well. The Windows Live Contacts API is a RESTful API that works on Address Book objects. The Contacts API offers a more granular control over the user experience than the control, and allows users to grant and revoke permission to their data on a site-by-site basis. Windows Live Data provides the protocols to manage the permissioning process.

Try them out and let us know what you think in our forum.

The Windows Live Data service provides a framework for applications to request and receive access to a user's data stored in Windows Live. An overview of the process is available in the documentation on Requesting Permission to Access Users' Windows Live Data.

The Windows Live Contacts API is a RESTful Web service created by my team for accessing a user's Hotmail contacts. How we use HTTP verbs is described in the documentation Getting Started with Windows Live Contacts API. You'll probably catch me talking about my contributions to future versions of the API in coming months.

 

I'm not attending MIX '07 but it looks like we're announcing some good stuff this week. because the stuff I've been working on isn't ready to be announced yet but my coworkers have dropped some cool announcements. Today we announced Silverlight Streaming by Windows Live. To understand this announcement you first have to understand what Silverlight actually is.

From http://www.silverlight.net we learn

Microsoft® Silverlight™ is a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of .NET based media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web. Silverlight offers a flexible programming model that supports AJAX, VB, C#, Python, and Ruby, and integrates with existing Web applications. Silverlight supports fast, cost-effective delivery of high-quality video to all major browsers running on the Mac OS or Windows.

If that is still too complex for you; you can consider Silverlight as being akin to the Flash platform but built with the .NET platform with all the attendant benefits (i.e. development with Visual Studio and access to a ton of languages). Now we know what Silverlight is, what exactly is Silverlight Streaming by Windows Live? Glad you asked.

From the blog post entitled New! Silverlight Streaming Service on the Windows Live Dev blog we learn about http://dev.live.com/silverlight which states

Microsoft® Silverlight™ Streaming by Windows Live™ is a companion service for Silverlight that makes it easier for developers and designers to deliver and scale rich media as part of their Silverlight applications.  The service offers web designers and developers a free and convenient solution for hosting and streaming cross-platform, cross-browser media experiences and rich interactive applications that run on Windows™ and Mac..
...
Microsoft® Silverlight™ Streaming by Windows Live™ can be used either directly from the administration web site or via a REST API. The API allows you to upload, update, delete, and invoke Silverlight applications using the Silverlight Streaming service. Click here to view the complete API reference.
...
While the product is in pre-release, storage and delivery is free up to 4 GB, with outbound streaming up to DVD quality (700 Kbps). As we move out of Beta, developers/designers will have continued use of the service with up to 1 million minutes of free video streaming at 700 Kpbs per site per month. Unlimited streaming will also be available for free with advertising, or with payment of a nominal fee for the service for use without advertising.

Not only is Microsoft giving developers a platform for building Rich Internet Applications (RIA) but it is also giving developers free streaming media hosting if they plan to use the platform to build a media sharing service. This is an interesting new wrinkle in the competition between Web application platforms. The response from Microsoft's competitors will definitely be interesting. I wonder if we'll see a partnership between Adobe/Macromedia and Amazon to bundle free usage of Amazon's S3 service if you are building applications with Flex or Apollo?

 

From the Microsoft press release entitled we learn Instant Messaging Comes to Xbox 360, Expanding the Largest Social Network on Television

Beginning the week of May 7, 2007, the Xbox 360 Spring Update will provide Xbox 360 owners worldwide with access to Windows Live Messenger features, broadening the communication options on the Xbox LIVE social network. Members of the 6 million-strong Xbox LIVE community currently send more than 2 million text and voice messages a day and can now use Windows Live Messenger to text chat with up to six people on their contact list at one time, while playing games, listening to music or watching movies. Text chat adds to the variety of options friends and families already have to communicate with on Xbox LIVE, including voice and video chat.

Current relationships on Windows Live Messenger and Xbox LIVE will be unified on Xbox 360 and users will see at a glance if their existing friends on Windows Live Messenger have gamertags, instantly expanding the breadth of connected experiences they can share online.

Although I didn't directly work on this feature, I sat in a couple of meetings with the XBox folks a few months ago to brief them on how to integrate with certain parts of Windows Live Messenger and I'm glad to see that the ball kept rolling and we're bringing this functionality to our users. Being aware of other's online presence and being able to communicate with them from any device or application is a worthy goal.

Sitting here in Abuja, Nigeria using Windows Live Messenger to send text messages to my girlfriend's cell phone in Seattle, Washington while she gets ready for work brings into sharp relief the importance of bridging communication forms and online presence in applications across several contexts.

 

The combination of my messed up internal clock and the fact that it seems there is now a wireless LAN at the villa means that I am up blogging when I should be sleeping. The Web geek blog buzz today is the announcement contained in the blog post entitled Map-making: So easy a caveman could do it on the Official Google blog which states

That's why we're announcing My Maps, a new feature that makes it quick and easy to create your own custom Google Maps just by pointing and clicking. You can add placemarks, draw lines and shapes, and embed text, photos and videos -- all using a simple drag and drop interface. Your map automatically gets a public URL that you can share with your friends and family, or you can also publish your map for inclusion in Google Maps search results. We'll continue to show organic local search results with red pushpins; user-generated results will have blue pushpins. The user-created results include KML as well as maps made through My Maps.

To give you a better idea of what kind of maps you can make, here are some examples that Googlers created after we released the feature internally. (We ran a contest and gave a Nintendo Wii to the best map-maker.)

• America's Highway: Oral Histories of Route 66: A glimpse into life on the legendary (and now-decommissioned) highway, and what drivers will find there today
• Around Japan in 28 Days: Catalogs a trip across Japan that can be done in 3 weeks

As usual the reactions from the blog pundits are equal parts surprising and unsurprising to me. The unsurprising bit is that I didn't find anyone who compared this to the collections feature of MSN Virtual Earth Windows Live Local Live Search Maps Live Maps which can be viewed at http://collections.live.com. I'm sure when the "Web 2.0" pundits eventually discover we have this feature it will be claimed we copied it from Google. :)

On the other hand what I did find surprising were blog posts like Google Launches MyMaps - Platial Gets Screwed and My Maps at Google: Is Google Doing a Microsoft? from Pete Cashmore and Paul Kedrosky which complained that Google was killing "social mapping" startups like Platial and Frappr with this move. Ignoring that "social mapping" seems like a silly product category in the first place, I wonder what exactly is wrong with this move. Some startups point out consumer demand for certain features from online mapping sites (i.e. missing features) and the consumer mapping sites add the features.

Is the expectation that companies shouldn't be able to improve their products once startups start trying to build a business out of the fact that their product is missing features? I've never understood that reasoning. Paul Kedrosky specifically calls this "pulling a Microsoft". I wonder...do users really want their computers to ship without a Web browser or a media player? Do users really want to go to one site to get maps and another to add annotations to these maps? Adding features to products is good for users and we shouldn't be trying to artificially limit products because some startups are trying to build a business out of a feature. If startups like  Platial and Frappr are actually adding value then they'll survive. If they don't, then they probably didn't have much of a business to begin with.  

PS: I understand that the philosophy of anti-trust law in Europe is about preventing unfair competition whereas in the U.S. it is about preventing harm to consumers. Thus depending on where you are from these questions will strike a different chord with you.

 

The Australian iTWire has a rather biased and misinformed article entitled Official: Microsoft ‘bribes’ companies to use Live Search which contains the following excerpt

Microsoft’s new program is called “Microsoft Service Credits for Web Search” and has been unveiled by John Batelle’s ‘SearchBlog’. The money on offer is significant, especially when multiplied across thousands of PCs. The deal means that companies can earn between US $2 and US $10 per computer on an annual basis, plus a US $25,000 “enrollment credit” which is a nice big wad of cash that will likely need a large-ish, strong and sturdy brown paper bag to hold securely while being passed under the table.  

For companies that have thousands of computers, this could translate into anywhere from US $100,000 to $200,000 per year, which is money that could be put to good use in the IT department or elsewhere in the company.
...
Former Microsoft employee and blogger Robert Scoble who served as the online face of Microsoft during his three years at the company is not impressed with Microsoft’s moves in deciding to offer companies money to use search.  His arguments are quite valid and boil down to Microsoft really needing to create better products, rather than needing to pay companies to get more traction for Windows Live. After all, Scoble isn’t the first to observe that Google doesn’t need to pay anyone to use its search services – people use them voluntarily because of the quality of the results

The amount of bias in this article is pretty amazing considering that Microsoft is primarily reacting to industry practices created by the Google [which have also been adopted by Yahoo!]. Let me count the ways Google bribes companies and individuals to use their search engine

1. Google pays AdSense publishers for each user they convince to install Firefox with the Google Toolbar installed. Details are in the documentation for the AdSense Referrals Feature. Speculation on Slashdot was that they pay $1 per user who switches to Firefox + Google Toolbar.

2. Google paid Dell $1 billion dollars to ensure that Google products are preinstalled in all the computers they sell and the default search engine/home page is set to Google. Details of this deal were even published in iTWire.

3. Google paid Adobe an undisclosed amount to bundle Google Toolbar [which converts your default search engine in your browser to theirs] with all Adobe products.

4. Google entered a distribution deal with Sun Microsystems to bundle Google Toolbar [which converts your default search engine in your browser to theirs] with all new installations of the Java runtime.

5. Google products which converts your default search engine in your browser to theirs are bundled with the Winzip archiving utility. Financial details of the deal were undisclosed.

6. Google is the default search engine for both the Opera and Firefox browsers. Both vendors get a cut of the search revenue generated from user searches which runs in the millions of dollars.

I could go on but my girlfriend just told me it's time for breakfast and I'm already in trouble for blogging on a Sunday morning. However the above links should be enough to debunk the inaccurate statements in the iTWire article. I guess iTWire's "journalism" is further validation of the saying that you should never let the facts get in the way of a good flame.

 

Whenever I talk to folks at work about branding and some of our products I usually get two kinds of responses. On the one hand, there are those who think branding is important and we could be doing a better job. Then there are others who believe we should focus on shipping quality products and the rest will fall into place. The second position is somewhat hard to argue with because I end up sounding like I advocate that marketing is more important than shipping quality products. Luckily, I now have two real world examples of the importance of getting branding right for your software even if you do have a quality product.

EXHIBIT A: Topix.net

In a blog post entitled Kafka-esque! Rich Skrenta writes

I'm in the Wall Street Journal today, with a story about our purchase of Topix.com for $1M and the SEO issues related to moving the domain.
...
Back in 2003 when we were looking for a name, we came across Topix.net. The name 'topix' really fit what we were trying to do, it was a heck of a lot better than the other names we'd come up with. It turned out we could buy the name from a South Korean squatter for $800. So we took it.  Of course I knew we were breaking one of the rules of domain names, which is never get anything besides the .com. But I thought that advice might be outmoded.
...
Surely, the advice that you had to have a .com wasn't as relevant anymore?

Well, we got our answer when our very first press story came out. This was in March 2004 when we got a front page business section launch story in the Mercury News. They gave us sweet coverage since we were the only startup to come out of palo alto in months (this was just as the dot-com crash was beginning to thaw). Unfortunately, while the article clearly spelled "Topix.net", the caption under our photo -- the most visible part of the story after the headline -- called us Topix.com. Someone had transcribed the name and mistakenly changed the .net to .com, out of habit, I suppose.

Since that time we've built up quite a bit of usage, and much of it return visitors who have bookmarked one of our pages, or become active in our local forums. But still, we continued to have issues where someone will assume a .com ending for the name. Mail gets sent to the wrong address, links to us are wrong, stories incorrectly mention our URL.

Beyond that, as part of some frank self-evaluations we were doing around our site and how we could make it better, and the brand stronger, we ran some user surveys and focus groups. "What do you think of the name?" was one of the questions we asked. The news was good & bad; people actually really liked the name 'topix', but the '.net' was a serious turn-off. It confused users, it made the name seem technical rather than friendly, and it communicated to the world that "we didn't own our own name."

EXHIBIT B: Democracy Player

In a blog post entitled A name change Nicholas Reville writes

This is some big news for us. We are planning to change the name of Democracy Player.

We chose the name ‘Democracy’ almost two years ago when we were first setting up PCF. We knew it was an ambitious name, but we thought that it made a clear statement about how important it is that an open internet TV platform is for our culture.
...
And, even though I’m about to explain why we need to change it, I’m glad we’ve had this name for the past year. It’s funny that a name like ‘Democracy’ can become a name for software– I think it turned out to be less odd than we expected. When people hear a name, they tend to accept it. And it helped us assert our mission clearly: free, open, and dedicated to democratizing video online. I think conveying that mission so strongly was crucial for us.

But the name also confused a huge number of potential users. In all our debates about whether you could call something ‘Democracy’ and how people would react to the name, we hadn’t realized that so many people would simply assume that the software was for politicians and videos about politics. We hear this response over and over, and it’s a real limitation to our user base.

So we’re changing the name to Miro.

 

From the blog post entitled The i'm Initiative and new secret emoticon on the Windows Live Messenger team's blog we learn

Not everyone has the financial ability to give money to the causes they care about. That is where the i'm Initiative steps in - it enables Windows Live Messenger users to make a difference by directing a portion of Messenger's advertising revenue to a cause of their choosing.
...
Wonderful! How does it work?

1. Use Messenger 8.1
2. Add the i'm emoticon to your display name by entering the code of the cause you would like to support 
3. Send and receive IMs
4. A portion of the advertising revenue generated by your usage of Messenger will be donated to your cause. So the more IMs you send and receive the more money will be donated to your cause.

How does Messenger even generate revenue\money anyway?

Windows Live Messenger is a free service to users. We do include advertisements in the client that help pay for the service and our salaries. With the i'm Initiative you get to decide where a portion of the revenue goes.

The list of codes to create the emoticon are listed in the blog post. I'm using *9mil in my IM handle. This trend of tying charitable donations to the usage of Windows Live services is interesting. It's kinda cool for our users to feel like they are contributing to the betterment of the world simply by using our software the same way they have every day. Good stuff.

 

Mary Jo Foley has a blog post entitled Ballmer’s list: Microsoft’s CEO shares his top nine Microsoft growth picks where she writes

Ballmer's guaranteed nine growth spots:

1. Windows client revenues from OEMs (PC makers and system builders)

2. "Desktop value" revenues derived from corporations (big enough to have an IT department). This sounded like Office revenues

3. Server revenues — Windows Server, database, security products. Ballmer said he sees this as an arena where Microsoft has a good opportunity to grow its business vis-a-vis Linux

4. "Mature desktops" — i.e., add-on revenues in corporations where there's already some penetration of Windows and Office. Client-access licenses are a key growth driver here.

5. Emerging market savings — especially due to Genuine Advantage Initiative anti-piracy crackdown campaigns/mechanisms

6. Advertising — especially via adCenter, Microsoft's online ad system — and the properties fueled by it

7. Xbox, particularly in dollars derived from Xbox Live, attached hardware and attached software

8. Sales of Office to small businesses and consumers

9. Windows Mobile operating system sales to cell-phone and PDA makers

...
I was surprised that Windows Live — supposedly one of Microsoft's most important strategic efforts — didn't make either of Ballmer's lists. Ballmer did mention services, but talked about it more from a platform perspective, than as a bunch of individual point products.

Am I the only one who's wondering why Mary Jo Foley didn't realize that #6 refers to Windows Live?

 

The intrepid investigators over at LiveSide seem to have stumbled upon a Digg-like site created by Microsoft called MSN Reporter. From their post MSN enter social news arena with Digg competitor - MSN Reporter we learn

As an ongoing part of MSN's efforts to increase the amount of user generated content on its network, the Dutch MSN team has created MSN Reporter, a social news site similar to the likes of digg and reddit. Available in beta since October 2006, currently MSN Reporter has launched only in three markets, Netherlands, Belgium and Norway.

Allowing users to share and rate news on the site, it has a simple interface, much like the Digg of old. It also has Windows Live integration, with Alerts, add to Live.com and with a BlogIt! option sending posts straight to Windows Live Spaces. With buttons that says "Kicken!" and "Dumpen!" who doesn't feel the urge to participate?

So far there has been considerable interest in the new service, with reportedly 500,000 and 800,000 users visting the site in the 1st and 2nd months respectively.  With articles getting upto 10,000 votes and 1,000 comments, this is a on a completely different level to most existing social news sites.

This is a pleasent surprise. I've been wanting Microsoft to do a Digg-like site for a while but gave up on it after I stopped being able to figure out whether I should be pitching the idea to folks at MSN or Windows Live. It looks like the folks at MSN have not only taken the initiative and built a social news site but it seems to be capitalizing on the popularity of the MSN brand in Europe given some of those stats above.

PS: In other Windows Live MSN news LiveSide is claiming that Windows Live Wifi Suite will rebrand to MSN. They even post a link to http://hotspot.msn.com which is still Windows Live branded at the moment. It looks like they even scooped the product team's blog. I'm not sure if this is just a rumor or a leak since I have no insight into what goes on at MSN but it would make sense if the LiveSide story is true. . 

 

I've been using Live Search for Mobile for the past 24 hours and it is hot, hot, hot. I was in the car just now and wanted to call the Metropolitan Grill to confirm our dinner reservations. Usually this involves calling 411, talking to some lame voice recognition system and then repeating myself to a human while getting charged mucho dinero for this "service". With Live Search for Mobile, it was dead easy to select "Seattle, Washington" from the canned list of metropolitan areas, type my search term ("metropolitan grill") and then call the number in the search results.

I thought this was cool but was going to criticize the product for only supporting major metropolitan areas but it seems I was mistaken. There is a comprehensive list of the major cities in every U.S. state. For Washington state they have local listings from Aberdeen to Yakima. Crazy.

Seriously, if you have a Windows Mobile or J2ME phone, you should go to http://wls.live.com. This is the coolest download I've gotten from my phone since Smartphlow. Kudos to team for creating such a useful product. It's rare for me to blog about one of our product announcements and follow it up with another blog post so soon afterwards but this product is that good.  

 

From the press release Microsoft Announces Three New Windows Live Products for Mobile Devices we learn

Today at 3GSM World Congress 2007, Microsoft Corp. announced three new Windows Live™ for mobile services that provide search and communications capabilities to help people access their world of relationships, information and interests from their mobile device. Now available in the United States and the United Kingdom, Live Search for Windows Mobile^® and Live Search for Java provide customers with advanced local search and mapping capabilities on their mobile device. In conjunction with the availability of Windows Mobile 6, Microsoft also introduced Windows Live for Windows Mobile — a rich set of Windows Live services including e-mail, instant messaging and search — uniquely designed to work with Windows Mobile powered devices.

You can download the search clients for Java or Windows Mobile phones by going to http://mobile.search.live.com/ from your desktop or http://wls.live.com/ from your phone. I downloaded the client app onto my Cingular 3125 and it is quite snazzy. Traffic and local business search in my phone, all for free. My only gripe is that there doesn't seem to be GPS integration in the local results presented which may be a limitation of my phone as opposed to the software.

It looks like you can only get Windows Live for Mobile with integration with Windows Live Spaces, Windows Live Hotmail and Windows Live Messenger when you get a new Windows Mobile phone with Windows Mobile 6.0 or can figure out how to upgrade your phone's OS. In the meantime, you can drool over the features at official website for Windows Live™ for Windows Mobile®.

 

Via the LiveSide post entitled Live.com to get social - share your own pages I noticed that we've finally shipped Live.com collections. The official description of the feature is excerpted below

Collections are Live.com pages of gadgets and feeds created and shared by users. Add your favorite Collections to your own Live.com page, or share one of your Live.com pages with the community.

This is a pretty sweet feature because it allows people to build 'templates' which others can use. For example, I can create a Live.com page which has  subscriptions to TechCrunch, Mashable, Read/Write Web and http://del.icio.us/tags/web20 as well as a couple of relevant gadgets then share that with coworkers who are interested in subscribing to the latest goings on in the Web 2.0 blogs. Much better than sharing OPML files, isn't it?

There is more about this feature and others in the Windows Live Gallery team's blog post entitled Another release goes out the door!. So far, it seems that user-created Live.com collections haven't yet been enabled although you can try out some of the collections that have been published by Microsoft. If you are interested in when this feature will be enabled for all Live.com users to share their customized and pimped out homepages with others, then head over to the Gallery and Live.com team blogs with your questions. 

 

Richard Sim over on the Hotmail/Windows Live Mail team's blog has posted an entry entitled We Heard You Loud and Clear which states

To do this, we started from scratch and built a whole new service from the ground up – and we called this Windows Live Mail. As we brought users onboard to this new service and had them kick the tires, we learned quickly that users loved it. We knew we were onto a good thing. We also found that many users were extremely loyal to the Hotmail brand and perceived the beta as an upgrade to Hotmail. In fact, our most loyal users have been very happy with Hotmail for years and while they loved the improvements in the beta, some were a bit confused by name change. 
 
As we prepare to launch the final version of our new web mail service, we recognize the importance of ensuring that our 260+ million existing customers come over to the new service smoothly and without confusion. By adopting the name “Windows Live Hotmail”, we believe we’re bringing together the best of both worlds – new and old. We’re able to offer the great new technology that Windows Live has to offer while also bringing the emotional connection many existing and loyal users have with Hotmail.

I'm glad to see that a lot of the unwise decisions around branding that originally infested Windows Live are beginning to fade. First Windows Live Local switched to Windows Live Maps. Now Windows Live Mail is Windows Live Hotmail, which builds on a brand that is about a decade old instead of throwing it away.

What we need now is a campaign to rename Windows Live Mail desktop to something less unwieldy which also respects our brand with lots of mindshare. Perhaps Windows Live Outlook Express? :)  

 

I'm a little late in blogging this but last week the Windows Live SDK silently launched. What's in the SDK? All of this goodness

• Microsoft adCenter API.
• Windows Live Search Web Service API .
• Messenger Activity SDK.
• Windows Live Messenger Add-In API.
• Windows Live Spaces MetaWeblog API.
• Virtual Earth Map Control SDK, Version 4.0.
• Windows Live Alerts SDK.
• Windows Live Custom Domains SDK.
• Windows Live Expo (Beta) API.
• Windows Live ID Service.
• Windows Live Toolbar Custom Button SDK.
• Windows Live Writer SDK.

Kudos to Jim Gordon, Kevin Ledley, Koji and all the others who pulled together to get this out. I actually did some work on this as well. I updated the documentation on the Windows Live Spaces MetaWeblog API to account for the very recently announced Windows Live ID 1.0 Client SDK. Finally, non-Microsoft applications can talk to Windows Live and MSN services that require Passport Windows Live ID authentication without having to sell their souls to the B0rg cube. Now we just ask for a pound of flesh. ;)

Seriously though, I'd been watching Yahoo! and Google's forays with BBAuth and Google Account Authentication with some jealousy so it is with a lot of gladness that I welcome this move. If you are an application developer that is interested in building an application that accesses user data from Windows Live services then download the Windows Live ID Client SDK 1.0 alpha release and share your feedback with the Live ID folks on the Windows Live ID development forum. Authentication is a fundamental building block of any API story that we have with regards to accessing and manipulating user data so it is important that we get it right and get feedback from developers out there.

Let us know what you think.

 

From the blog post entitled Check out what we just added to Windows Live Spaces! on the Windows Live Spaces team's blog we learn

Videos, videos and more videos

You asked for it, we created it!  We’ve built more rich media capabilities into Windows Live Spaces so it’s easier for you to display your favorite videos on Spaces.  You can now embed videos directly into your Spaces blog entries.  Adding a visual element to your blogs can help you tell your story.  

For a long time, Windows Live Spaces has prevented users from embedding videos from video sharing sites like YouTube and MSN Soapbox because it didn't allow users to use object tags in their blog content. However it is now commonplace for users to embed Flash objects in their blog posts and even though there were security concerns, user demand has trumped them and the blogging landscape has changed.

I'm glad Windows Live Spaces now enables this but it does point to an interesting problem for me as a developer on RSS Bandit. Currently, we disable displaying embedded objects in content by default. Has the time come to change that rule? I know I changed my security settings in RSS Bandit so I can watch embedded YouTube on blogs months ago and even had to fix some bugs where it seems were a bit overzealous in blocking ActiveX controls.

It seems enabling ActiveX/Flash and Javascript in your browser are becoming mandatory if you actually want to browse the Web thanks to "Web 2.0".

 

From the blog post entitled Use Live Search and We'll Donate to Team Seattle and Ninemillion.org on the Live Search team's blog we learn

The Live Search team recently launched two new programs to help children in need, and we would love you to help us out. The good news is that all you have to do to help us is try Live Search on one of our “click for the cause” sites, and each search you do will add more money to Microsoft’s donation.

The two organizations we are working with in these programs are  ninemillion.org and Team Seattle. Ninemillion.org is a United Nations led campaign providing education and sports programs for nine million refugee youth around the world

...

Ninemillion.org - click4thecause.live.com

Live Search is a global business, so we wanted a way to help kids all over the world who are in need. Supporting Ninemillion.org and their mission to help 9 million refugees really stood out as a great way to make a impact.  Each search at click4thecause.live.com results in a financial donation from Microsoft to provide help with education programs to the refugee kids around the globe. More info on ninemillion.org’s work with these youth can be found at their Windows Live Spaces blog.

In addition to the money raised from the searches, Microsoft is also donating online advertising and editorial space across MSN and microsoft.com to raise awareness of the relief effort.

I'm not one to ask my readers to use our services but in this case I'm making an exception. Please check out http://click4thecause.live.com to learn more about ninemillion.org and perform some searches.

Thanks for your time.

 

Danny Thorpe has a blog post entitled Windows Live Contacts Control Shows Online Presence where he writes

This month's rev of the Windows Live Contacts Control adds a new "tile" view that displays the photos of your Windows Live IM contacts in the control, and makes starting an IM session with them a simple one-click operation.  The top part of this screenshot shows the new tile view.  The bottom part is another instance of the contacts control in list view mode.

This widget can be embedded on a page and used to enable Windows Live/MSN users to view or otherwise Windows Live Messenger buddies or Hotmail contacts. I've been following the development of this widget since the project started and it is definitely getting interesting.

 

Danny Sullivan over at Search Engine Land has a post entitled comScore: Google Wins Again & IE7 Doesn't Stop Microsoft's Slide where he writes

It's that time again -- search popular stats for last month are coming out. Actually, Hitwise sent me their figures earlier this month but I'm diving in with the comScore figures that just came out. The main real news is despite the Internet Explorer 7 launch, Microsoft's Live continues to show a drop in usage.

What is puzzling to me is that people thought that the release of IE 7 would cause a increase in search share for Microsoft's search engine and a decline in competitors. The fact is that built-in search boxes within the browser encourage people to treat search as a feature of the browser instead of a site they visit. That means that the defaults built into the browser/operating system are important. But what exactly is the default search engine on most PCs running IE 7? I don't have any hard numbers but here's some data from my post about this entitled Competing with Google is Like the War in Iraq which stated

The combination of the proliferation of search toolbars and a new generation of Web browsers with built-in search boxes (e.g. IE 7 and Firefox) have reduced the need for users to actually go to websites to perform a search. This means that it is now very important to be the search engine that is used when a user enters a search directly from their browser. Guess which search engine is the one used by your browser if you

1. Are you a user of the Firefox browser?
2. Are you a user of the Opera browser?
3. Are you a user of IE 7 and have installed Adobe Acrobat?
4. Are you a user of IE 7 and have installed the Java runtime?
5. Are you a user of IE 7 and have installed the WinZip archive utility?
6. Are you using a newly purchased Dell computer?
7. Are you a user of the Google Toolbar?

Yes, the answer is Google in every case. So even if you are an Internet n00b who hasn't made up their mind about which search engine to choose, there is a large chance that the default search engine you end up using thanks to recent innovations in IE 7 and Firefox will be Google.

If anything, browsers like Firefox and IE 7 make it harder for users to switch from Google not easier because it gets them away from the notion of visiting websites to perform searches and instead they just accept whatever default the browser provides.

 

It's a new year and time for another brand new Windows Live service to show up in beta. This time it's the Windows Live for TV Beta which is described as follows

What it is
Windows Live™ for TV Beta is a rich, graphically-driven interface designed for people who use Windows Live Spaces and Messenger and Live Call on large-screen monitors and TVs. We're still in the early stages of this beta, so many of the features might not work properly yet. That's why we really need your feedback! This beta is in limited release, so you must request access to the trial group. After you’re in the beta, come back to this page and let us know what you think.

You can also find out more about the product on the team's blog at http://wlfortv.spaces.live.com which includes the following screenshot

Hey, I think I can see me in that screen shot. :)

 

Earlier today I noticed a link from Mike Torres to a press release from ComScore Media Metrix entitled The Score: Blogs Gain Favor Worldwide which states

In recent years blogs have garnered significant media coverage in the United States for their ability to reach a wide audience. With more than one-third of the online population in the United States visiting blogs within a given month, it is clear that the category has become mainstream. An analysis of blog penetration by country in North America and Western Europe shows that the popularity of blogs is a worldwide phenomenon.
...

• Windows Live Spaces is the favorite blog site among the majority of countries studied, with 37 percent of all Canadians visiting the site in October 2006. Blogger.com had the highest penetration in the United States (12.4 percent) and Germany (9.7 percent), while the same was true for Skyblog in France (27.4 percent).

Interesting statistics although I wonder whether ComScore is including social networking sites like Bebo and MySpace in its reckoning. Based on how ComScore usually scores things my assumption is that they are going by number of unique users instead of page views which is where heavily trafficked social networking sites like Bebo and MySpace reign supreme.

 

I've had a number of people mention the article about Steve Berkowitz and MSN/Windows Live in the New York Times entitled Looking for a Gambit to Win at Google's Game which contains a bunch of choice negative quotes about our products supposedly from Steve Berkowitz. The article starts of without pulling punches as you can see from the following excerpt

The pressure is on for Mr. Berkowitz to gain control of Microsoft’s online unit, which by most measures has drifted dangerously off course. Over the last year, its online properties have lost users in the United States. The billions of dollars the company has spent building its own search engine have yet to pay off. And amid a booming Internet market, Microsoft’s online unit is losing money.

Google, meanwhile, is growing, prospering, and moving increasingly onto Microsoft’s turf.

Microsoft lost its way, Mr. Berkowitz says, because it became too enamored with software wizardry, like its new three-dimensional map service, and failed to make a search engine people liked to use.

“A lot of decisions were driven by technology; they were not driven by the consumer,” he said. “It isn’t always the best technology that wins. It is the best experience.”
...
Mr. Berkowitz does not defend the brand choice he inherited.

“I don’t know if Live is the right name,” he said, saying he had not decided what to do about it. But before he gets around to deciding whether to change the brand, he wants to make Microsoft’s search engine itself more appealing to consumers.

What he did decide was to keep the MSN name afloat, too, as it is well known and its various services have 430 million users around the world. He promoted Joanne K. Bradford, Microsoft’s head of advertising sales, to oversee and revive the MSN portal.

Definitely some harsh words attributed to our corporate VP which has led some Windows Live watchers to wonder whether the brand is going to be tossed. I'm going to ignore the obvious flame bait of seeing an article claiming that one of our corporate vice presidents criticized what is probably the only best of breed online service we provide (i.e. http://maps.live.com) and just focus on an implicit yet incorrect assumption carried throughout the article. The assumption is that Steve Berkowitz runs Windows Live.

I've commented on our org chart before but here is a refresher course for the reporters and bloggers out there that feel compelled to write about Windows Live and MSN. If you go back to the press release after our last major reorg Microsoft Realigns Platforms & Services Division for Greater Growth and Agility you'll notice that it beaks out Microsoft's internet business into the following three pieces

Windows and Windows Live Group
With Sinofsky in charge, the Windows and Windows Live Group will have engineering teams focused on delivering Windows and engineering teams focused on delivering the Windows Live experiences. Sinofsky will work closely with Microsoft CTO Ray Ozzie and Blake Irving to support Microsoft’s services strategy across the division and company.
Windows Live Platform Group
Blake Irving will lead the newly formed Windows Live Platform Group, which unites a number of MSN teams that have been building platform services and capabilities for Microsoft’s online offerings. This group provides the back-end infrastructure services, platform capabilities and global operational support for services being created in Windows Live, Office Live, and other Microsoft and third-party applications that use the Live platform. This includes the advertising and monetization platforms that support all Live service offerings.
Online Business Group
The new Online Business Group includes advertising sales, business development and marketing for Live Platforms, Windows Live and MSN — including MSN.com, MSNTV and MSN Internet Access. David Cole, senior vice president, will lead this group until his successor is named before his leave of absence at the end of April. [Dare - Steve Berkowitz is the replacement]

As you can see from the above press release you'll note that Steve Berkowitz owns the sales, marketing and business aspects of Windows Live but not the products themselves. Steven Sinofsky and his subordinates, specifically Chris Jones and Christopher Payne, are responsible for Windows Live. Although Steve Berkowitz is probably the right guy to talk to about the marketing and branding of Windows Live, he probably isn't the right person to talk to about the future of Windows Live products like search (holla at Christopher Payne) or email/IM/blogging (talk to Chris Jones).

I find it interesting to see articles like NY Times: Will Berkowitz keep Windows Live? because I think although things are confusing now with two poorly differentiated and overlapping brands, it would send out the wrong signal to the the market, our competitors and our customers if we decided to go back to the MSN brand for all our online services. What do you think? 

 

From the blog post on the Windows Live Search team's blog entitled Search on the Go with Live Search for Mobile Beta we learn

we’re proud to announce three new ways to search on the go:

Mobile Software – Download an application to your phone for local search, maps, driving directions, and live traffic information in a faster, richer and more interactive user interface. It's the best way to search from your phone.

 

Mobile Browsing - Access maps and directions directly on your phone’s browser. Simply enter mobile.live.com/search into your phone’s address bar and select Map. Choose from the scopes of Local, Web, Map, News and Spaces and get Live Search from your mobile device.

Text Messages (SMS) - If you don’t have a data plan, you can simply send a text message to 95483 (WLIVE) with a query like “Toys Chicago, IL” or “Coffee 90210” and you’ll immediately receive a text message reply with the nearest business listings with address and phone numbers.

This is a pretty sweet release and I can't wait to get it on my AudioVox SMT 5600. So far, the release has been favorably reviewed by those that have tried it including Gizmodo which has an article entitled Windows Live Search For Mobile vs. Google Maps Mobile which ends on the following note

If you're using a Windows Mobile phone, we'd definitely recommend you try out Windows Live Search. The Java-based Google Maps is just too buggy and slow, not to mention clunky, to be useful to us.

Not bad, eh? I thought Google was the king of innovative search products. :) Speaking of innovation and Microsoft, there is a debate between Robert Scoble and Dave Winer in a recent Wall Street Journal article Is Microsoft Driving Innovation Or Playing Catch-Up With Rivals? which has both bloggers going head to head on whether Microsoft is innovative or not. Interesting read.

 

Erik Selberg, a developer on the Windows Live Search team, has a blog post entitled General disarray at The Big 3 where he writes

given the recent trends in query share. I’ll summarize for those who don’t want to read to the bottom of Danny’s post:

Greg’s take:

Ouchie. As Danny says, “[Not] a pretty picture for Microsoft … They haven’t held share. It’s drop, drop, drop.”

It really is remarkable how badly Microsoft is doing against Google. I never would have thought that, nearly four years after they started their “Underdog” project to build a Google-killer, Microsoft would not only be badly behind in search, but also actually losing market share.

Well, what did anyone really expect?

Let’s put some things into context. First, all of the above is brutally, painfully true. Google hired smart, self-starters who are into big risk / big reward.
...
Yahoo is just in a rough place. They’ve got Google dominating, and they’ve got us coming up from behind.
...
And then there’s us at Microsoft bringing up the rear with declining query share. Well… yeah. While our management set the goal of having relevance that beat Google after 2 years (then 3, and I believe 4 now…) it’s not realistic to think that it can be done quickly. If you ask Google, Yahoo, or the fine SEOs at WebMasterWorld or other such places, they’ll all say that Live Search has increased in quality over the years so that it’s much closer to Yahoo and Google. Not yet better, but no longer laughable. And yeah, we’ve done our own share of copying feature parity, and we’re starting to do a few things that cause Google and Yahoo to do the same (ok, noODP is a small feature, but it’s a start!).

Here’s the honest truth… Microsoft will continue to lose share until it can make Live.com something people chose versus just the IE default. That will happen when the average person starts to see Live.com as a bit better than Google. Right now, Google wins on brand (people like them a lot) and quality, so it’s to be expected that existing Yahoo / Live customers will migrate to Google than vice-versa and new customers will pick Google more than Live or Yahoo. Google is making people focus on features, which should tell people that they’re worried about how we’re catching up, and are going to put more people on their core products to keep and extend their lead. So it’s going to be a tough, tough battle for Microsoft to get there…

As I read Erik's post, one phrase kept repeating itself in my head over and over again; "Stay the Course...Stay the Course...Stay the Course". I find it amazing that people like Erik still think that competing with Google is about being a bit better than their search engine or having relevance that beats theirs in a few years. Competing with Google's search engine is no longer about search results quality, it is about brand and distribution. This is why even though the search engine that powers MSN Search or Windows Live Search has gotten better and better Microsoft's share of search engine market has dropped almost 50% since it announced that it would launch its own search engine to compete with Google's. Competition with Google really should focus on addressing both of these points.

Brand

The verb 'google' is now in the Mirriam Webster dictionary. That is the power of brand. Anyone who regularly uses the Internet be they young or old thinks Google is synonymous with search.

Anecdote: My girlfriend once told her kids we were takin them to the zoo and her seven year old jumped on computer and went straight to http://www.google.com to fiind out what animals she'd see that day. 

Distribution

The combination of the proliferation of search toolbars and a new generation of Web browsers with built-in search boxes (e.g. IE 7 and Firefox) have reduced the need for users to actually go to websites to perform a search. This means that it is now very important to be the search engine that is used when a user enters a search directly from their browser. Guess which search engine is the one used by your browser if you

1. Are you a user of the Firefox browser?
2. Are you a user of the Opera browser?
3. Are you a user of IE 7 and have installed Adobe Acrobat?
4. Are you a user of IE 7 and have installed the Java runtime?
5. Are you a user of IE 7 and have installed the WinZip archive utility?
6. Are you using a newly purchased Dell computer?
7. Are you a user of the Google Toolbar?

Yes, the answer is Google in every case. So even if you are an Internet n00b who hasn't made up their mind about which search engine to choose, there is a large chance that the default search engine you end up using thanks to recent innovations in IE 7 and Firefox will be Google.
 

From the blog post entitled 1GB storage allocation for free Hotmail accounts is live! on the Hotmail Windows Live Mail team's blog we learn

1GB storage allocation for free Hotmail accounts is live! If you are new to Hotmail, then your account is created automatically with 1GB storage allocation. All existing accounts are at 1GB. To see that you would need sign out and sign in again. The storage meter bar in our classic UI would show 1000 as the max number. If your account is migrated to Windows Live Mail then your storage allocation is 2GB.

This is great news for the hundreds of millions of people with Hotmail accounts. Kudos to the mail team on making this switch.

 

If you are a 'Web 2.0' watcher by now you've seen the hubbub over the Peanut Butter Manifesto memo which is an Yahoo! internal memo authored by Brad Garlinghouse, a senior VP at the company. The memo is a rant against the typical list of woes that face big companies (e.g. the contradiction of being spread too thin yet having too many people, duplicative products and misaligned goals across the company). What I've found most interesting hasn't been the memo but instead the responses to it.

For example, in a blog post entitled Yahoo’s Brad Garlinghouse Makes His Power Move Mike Arrington views the memo as a clever attempt at an internal coup by Brad Garlinghouse. However even more interesting is the following comment in response to Arrington's post by someone named gullova which is excerpted below

Yahoo continues to get whipped by Google because its leaders can not get the product and engineering teams to focus on the right projects.

Witness Panama (the new ad system). Yahoo has been talking about Panama since early 2004. Yet the product they are launching is barely what Google had 2 years ago.

They threw hundreds of people at Panama, hurting other projects along the way, yet ultimately they are building the wrong product. Panama is far too focused he needs of search advertisers, which makes little sense since Yahoo’s search share has been shrinking since the day they dropped Google and launched their own search engine.

Had Panama instead been about display advertising, Yahoo could have at minimum increased monetization on Yahoo, which lets remind ourselves is still the largest site on the web and which they could monetize at 0% TAC (so its all gravy to the bottom line).

Yahoo is full of guys like Brad who can articulate themselves well and give great presentations. The problem is that the engineering team doesn’t listen to them, and the executive team doesn’t make them listen.

If they really want to get listened to, they should just shut down Panama and run Google ads instead. Its not a stretch to say they’d probably make more money.

The last sentence is the kicker for me. What if instead of competing with Google by funding its own search engine and advertising product, Microsoft partnered with Google like AOL has done? One of the pros of doing this are that it would free up a huge commitment of resources in competing with an industry leader that is years ahead of Microsoft to then focus on building applications that grow its audience directly which is then left to Google to monetize. Another possible pro is that the average revenue per user (ARPU) may go up with Google AdSense + AdWords being used to monetize Windows Live and MSN audiences as opposed to Microsoft's offerings. However a couple of minutes searching online doesn't given enough public data to determine whether this would be the case or not.

The cons are many. The first is that Microsoft would be seen to be admitting defeat if it switched to using Google's monetization engine although from a purely business perspective this isn't a significant con. Another con is that Microsoft would be enriching a competitor who is targetting one of its cash cows for obsolesence. See Google Docs & Spreadsheets, the JotSpot purchase and Google Apps for your Domain which are all attempts at attacking the success of Microsoft Office and related products like Microsoft Exchange. In this case, Microsoft would be guilty of being penny wise and pound foolish. The final con and perhaps the biggest problem with Microsoft going with the Google monetization engine is that it makes Microsoft entirely dependent on a single customer/supplier [who was also a rival] for a majority of the revenue from its online businesses.

When I started this post I tried to keep an open mind about the idea but by the time I finished writing it was clear that this is a bad idea. Funny how that happens.

 

In recent times whenever people compare the quality of search engines they usually focus on the 'relevance' of the search engine results. Over at MSN Windows Live we've taken this seriously and there have been numerous reports over the past year or two about how much our search engine relevance has been increasing. However I've recently been wondering whether 'relevance' is really all that relevant today and there are other factors that I consider more important than whether the most relevant web pages are returned for my web search. Below are examples from Google and Live Search to illustrate my point

1. Search for "Marvel Ultimate Alliance" on Google
   

   Note the options to 'Refine Search results' that gives you links to queries for screenshots, cheats and reviews along with finding the most relevant web site that matches the query.

2. Search for G-Unit in Live Search
   

   Note the 'Related Searches', list of Top Downloads for the rap group and a link to the G-Unit page on Rhapsody along with finding the most relevant web site that matches the query.

3. Search for "skate king bellevue" on Yahoo!, Google and Live Search, all of which not only bring up the most relevant website that matches the query but also the business's phone number and address on a map as well.

What I'm getting at is that relevant search results is on the way to being a commodity. Yahoo! search, Google search and Live search all give me pretty relevant search results most of the time. We are at the stage in the world of web search where what will keep a search engine on top or make it rise to prominence if it isn't on top is how much more it does beyond just finding relevant web pages.

This isn't a startling revelation and I'm sure all the folks working at the major search engines already realize this but it was a new insight to me. :)

 

It looks like there has been an update to Windows Live Spaces with some obvious new features such as The What's New page and some not so obvious features such as fixing the fact that gadgets on Windows Live Spaces cannot save user preferences.

What does that mean for users of Windows Live Spaces? For one it means that my Embedded Video Gadget, Flickr gagdet and Photo Album browser gadget now all work in Windows Live Spaces. I'm going to be a gadget writing fool this weekend. Job #1 will be adding support for embedding SoapBox videos in my Embedded Video Gadget. The next will be porting some of the cool gadgets I saw at Widgets Live and getting them into Windows Live Gallery. 

By the way, you can see my gadgets in action at http://carnage4life.spaces.live.com. The video gadget should be playing the White & Nerdy video from YouTube and the Flickr gadget should be showing pictures from Mike Torres's public photo sets.

Update: The Windows Live Spaces team has blogged about the recent changes in their blog post entitled What’s new in Windows Live Spaces.
 

From the press release entitled Microsoft Adds 3-D City Models to Live Search we learn

REDMOND, Wash. — Nov. 6, 2006 — Microsoft Corp. today announced U.S. availability of Virtual Earth™ 3D, a new online mapping interface that is part of the Live Search offering, providing consumers with a three-dimensional experience to search, browse and explore the real world online.

When people visit Live Search (http://live.com), type a query into the search box and click the “Maps” tab, they get their search results in a map context that offers the option to explore the area using two-dimensional views (aerial and bird’s-eye) or three dimensional models with Virtual Earth 3D. This new technology compiles photographic images of cities and terrain to generate textured, photorealistic 3-D models with engineering level accuracy.

Again the VE team proves why they are my favorite team at Windows Live. The team has also blogged about the changes in their blog post entitled Spaceland is Live! which includes a screenshots. This is hot. I'm off to a launch party in a few hours here in SF and I can't wait to high five some of the folks behind this feat of technological sweetness. 

 

The Windows Live Search team has a blog post entitled Add Search to Your Site with the Live Search Box which states

Today, we’re proud to announce the launch of the Live Search Box, to bring the power of search to your Web site or blog through a coo widget. 

When the user enters a query, the search box dynamically builds a floating <DIV> on your page to display the search results. You can customize the query in the first tab to search your site, your macro or anything else, while the second tab will return general web search results. The floating <DIV> will position itself appropriately, whether you decide to place the box on the left, right, top, or bottom of your Web site.

The search box also comes in a pure-HTML flavor:

Just a few days ago I wrote about Google Custom Search Engine, Live Search Macros and Yahoo! Search Builder. At the time I pointed out that although Windows Live was ahead of the game in enabling users to customize their personal search experience search macros, we didn't offer a good story for adding a custom search box to your website or building your own search engine on top of ours. Now we do.

I'm going to switch the search box on my weblog later today and give it a whirl. The built in search provided by dasBlog is quite slow and it would be great if I could offload this functionality to Live Search. Mad props to the Live Search folks for providing this functionality.

 

From the Microsoft Max team blog post entitled Thank you: the Max project has concluded we learn

Thank you for participating in the beta of Microsoft Codename Max. Over the past year, you’ve sent us tons of fantastic feedback that we’ve incorporated not only into Max, but into the platform layer with the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and the Windows Communication Foundation (WCF).

Thanks to your participation, we were able to accomplish the goals of the Max project—to get customer feedback on new ways to approach software and services. If you’re interested in seeing where we go with these ideas, keep your eye on Windows Live.

Starting today, we will be disabling all downloads from our website. In the next week, we will be shutting down the Max services and our team forums. At that time, you will no longer be able to sign in to Max or share lists of photos with your friends.

The Max folks built some very cool user interfaces which received a number of favorable  reviews. They are now going to be pouring their efforts into Windows Live applications which means there are some beautiful looking Windows Live applications coming our way in the future.

 

I haven't really been blogging much about Windows Live over the past few weeks mainly because none of what I've wanted to write seems like it was worth an entire post. Below is a brain dump of most of the items I've wanted to blog about and haven't for whatever reasons.

• One of the ideas I'm dabbling with now is how reputation and trust play into social networks particularly in the context of Windows Live. A couple of the things I've been considering are how to define reputation in the varous contexts we have in Windows Live and then how to represent it to users. So far, I've been looking across the various Windows Live services and seeing what they have in place today. When I first looked at a user profile in Windows Live QnA, I thought it was kind of weird that people have 3 reputation values attached to them; their Reputation which is on a five star rating system, their QnA Score and their Level. I read the explanation of scoring and the reputation system which makes sense but seemed to me to be somewhat complicated. I brought this up with Betsy Aoki who works on the team and she pointed out that this isn't much different from the XBox gamer card and people seem to understand that. I dunno, that still feels fairly complicated to me. Also, I'm not sure if the paradigm that seems to work for a video game reputation system translates well to other contexts (e.g. buyer/seller reputation in Windows Live Expo). What do you think? 

• I heard we've released a beta of Windows Live Barcode which sounds like a pretty cool service. Unfortunately I couldn't get it to work in either IE 7 (beta 3) or Firefox 1.5. I suspect that this wasn't ready to beta but was discovered by some clever sleuths. Unfortunate.
  

• I think I finally understand why the business folks would rather call the service Windows Live Local instead of Windows Live Maps. It's an attempt to indicate what the preferred user behavior should be. A maps website isn't very lucrative from a business perspective because when someone is looking for a map it means they know where they are going and ads won't be interesting to them. On the other hand, when someone goes to a local search website they are likely looking for a business near them and ads are very relevant at that point. Now I get it. However I still think we should rename the service to Windows Live Maps. :)

• Speaking of Windows Live Maps Local, the team is once again taking feature requests for the next version of the product. My #1 feature would be the ability to overlay movie theater locations and movie times on a map. My #2 feature would be simplifying the UI and making it easier to (a) get a permalink to a map and (b) navigate to my collections. Let the team know what you think. A lot of the improvements in this version of the product came out of direct user feedback.
  

• Mary Jo Foley has an article entitled Microsoft earns a mixed report card for its year-old Live initiative which gives some perspective from Microsoft outsiders on the entire "Live" initiative. As usual the #1 complaint seems to be that our consumer branding story is still very confusing with the existence of both MSN services and Windows Live services living side-by-side. Maybe we'll do better with regards to this on our second birthday.

• The Windows Live Expo team have posted some information updates to the Expo API. It looks like the API now allows you to do searches using any combination of City, State or Zip Code which fixes my main problem with the API. Thanks Samir. :)

• The Windows Live Messenger 8.1 beta is now available. Learn more about it in Nicole's post Messenger 8.1 Beta says: Hello World. Nothing major in this release, just a couple of nice touches such as improvements to the Contact Card and being able to use the same display picture across multiple machines instead of the picture being tied to your PC. The Messenger team continues to be my second favorite Windows Live team*. Keep on rocking.

*My favorite Windows Live team is the Windows Live Local crew.
 

In the past few months there have been a couple of announcements from the big search engines such as Yahoo! and Live Search on the topic of enabling people to build their own custom search engines. Google has finally showed up at the party with their own offering which was unveiled today. Below are my thoughts on their offering versus that of Windows Live.

Google Co-op

In his blog post entitled Review: Custom Search Engine Matt Cutts of Google writes

Google just announced something that I’m really jazzed about: Google Custom Search Engine. Several people mentioned that Google’s Accessible Search was built by using Google Co-op under the hood. Co-op has opened much of that power up to the public, so that anyone can build a custom search engine.

Most custom search engines (whether it be Google’s free sitesearch or Yahoo! Search Builder) only let you select one site to search, or you can offer websearch. Even Rollyo only lets you search over 25 sites.

This new offering lets you easily add hundreds (thousands?) of urls. You can search over ONLY the sites you choose, or (my favorite) you can apply a boost to the sites you choose, with regular websearch as a backfill. That’s really nice, because if your chosen urls talk about a subject, you’ll often get matches from those urls, but if the user types something completely unrelated, you’ll still get web results back. So it’s a true custom search engine, not just an engine restricted to showing matches from some domains.

You can also choose to exclude results from different sites. As far as I can tell, this happens in pretty close to real-time, even for complex url patterns. For example, I added the pattern “google.com/*” and started to get results from the Google directory, so I excluded “google.com/Top/*” and the Google directory results went away immediately.

There is also a screenshot included in Mike Arrington's post at TechCrunch entitled Google Co-op Launches which is excerpted below

This isn’t new - Rollyo, Eurekster and Yahoo already have similar products. But Google is also offering, as an option, to bundle the service with Google Adsense ads and share revenue with websites that embed the custom search engine into their site. Only Eurekster currently shares revenue with users. Yahoo’s product, which got a lot of press at launch, has barely been mentioned in the nearly three months since then.

I didn't even realize that Yahoo! had an offering in this space until reading the TechCrunch entry. This doesn't seem to have gotten that much blogosphere love.

Live Search Macros

The Windows Live Search team wrote about the changes to the Search Macros feature originally announced in March in their blog post entitled Create your own search engine (an update to Live Search Macros) which states

Search Macros are personalized search engines for any topic area of interest.  You can create them, use them, share them with friends or discover macros created by the community on Windows Live Gallery.

I’d like to use this post to give you a basic overview of using and creating macros.  We’ll use future posts to dive into more of the nitty gritty on specific macros features.

Finding and using macros

Users of the first Macros release told us that using a macro was difficult and not very user friendly.  In this release, every macro now has its own homepage and human readable URL.  This makes them much easier to use, bookmark, and send to friends over email or IM.  For example, check out the homepage for the Reference Sites Search Engine macro (at http://search.live.com/macros/livesearch/reference):
...
Enter a search term on this page and press Enter. You’ll be taken to the main Live Search page to see your results.
...
On the results page you'll see that the macro’s name appears in the search bar at the top of the screen.  This enables you to switch back and forth between Web, Images, Local, QnA and your favorite macros.

Here are some macros to try:

•   Search top reference site on the Web with the Reference Sites Search Engine
•   Search all content on the Microsoft Developer Network with the MSDN Search Engine
•   Search all of the latest video game information with the Video Games Search Engine

You can also find many more in the Windows Live Gallery!

Andy Edmonds from the Live Search team has written a couple of blog posts about the cool things you can do with search macros such as Search Macros Recap: DiggRank and the Power of Trusted Networks

Macros are often compared to Rollyo or other site bundling search offerings, but I hope the blog post describing LinkFromDomain, LinkDomain, and featuring other operators, sets the record straight.  Defining a set of sites to search is cool, and an idea well due to be commonly available. To be fair, Rollyo's UI and integration is slick, but  Micah Alpern hacked up a search of his blog, the blogs he linked to, or the web at large with a Google API hack back in 2003!

Using the link domain operators, you can go well beyond a simple set of sites.  You can:

• keep a living list of the sites that link to you and search them
• keep a living list of the sites you link to and search them
• do the same for a set of trusted sites

Access to other advanced syntax differentiates further from simple site search amalgamations.  Heck, Scoble pontificated about a search engine that excluded blogs that participate in pay per post.  While I didn't figure out a way to focus this on only those PPP bloggers who don't disclose their interest, I think it's impressive that the basics can be done at all.  It's called macro:andyed.realBloggers, and uses -inbody:counttrackula.com to exclude sites that use the PPP tracking script (I think!) and hasfeed: to restrict to blogs (or other pages with syndication).

Super Hubs: DiggRank
The promise of personal networks of trust in information retrieval is not fully realized by the macros offering, but it's an important step in the right direction.  For super-hubs, like Digg or Delicious, linkFromDomain captures some really interesting human attentional residue.

Let me introduce macro:andyed.DiggRank. Try it for:

• coffee
• George Bush
• midterm elections

The Bottom Line

I tried out both services as well as Yahoo! Search Builder and they all seem to have some room for improvement. Both Google & Yahoo! have primarily built a way to add a custom search box for your site. Windows Live Search is primarily about adding your own customized search results to your search engine of choice. I think both scenarios should be covered by all the services. I think Live Search should give me the option of adding a search box on my blog that is powered by a search macro I wrote. Similarly, I'd like to be able to perform custom searches from the Google or Yahoo! search UI without having to remember how to get to http://google.com/coop/cse/ or http://builder.search.yahoo.com/. I have to agree with Sergey Brin here, Features, Not Products. This is yet another Google service that I have to perform a Google search for before I can find it and use it (others are Google Music Search and Google Blog Search).

One thing I do like about Google and Yahoo!'s options is that they provide a more user friendly UI for creating complex searches than Live Search which provides you with direct access to the search operators. This is more powerful and desirable to geeks like me but it is not very user friendly for the non-geek. A checkbox with 'prefer search results from these sites' is preferable to crafting a search query with "prefer:http://www.25hoursaday.com AND prefer:http://www.rssbandit.org".

The management page for Google Co-op needs a lot of work. It is sparse in the typical Google way but it also doesn't seem coherent nor does it give you enough information about what you can or should be doing. The management page for Yahoo! Search Builder is a lot more coherently organized and aesthetically pleasing. The search macro management page for Live Search also could do with some improvement, primarily in simplifying the process for creating complex macros.

PS: Revenue sharing is a nice touch by Google and I'd be quite surprised if Yahoo! doesn't follow suite soon.

 

Adam Barr has a blog post entitled Trying to Grok Windows Live where he writes

At the Company Meeting last week, Ray Ozzie stood up and gave a very nice, very inspiring speech about how we have to shift the company to Live (Windows Live, Office Live, etc). He spoke without slides or notes and it's obviously something he cares a lot about and has thought a lot about. I'm entirely convinced that he has a great vision of the future in his mind.

The only problem is, I really don't know what he is talking about.

I'm fully prepared to believe it's because I'm too dense to understand. But when he talks about "betting the company on Windows Live", what does that mean? How does Windows become a service? I understand that there are things we need to do in order to make the Internet a platform; back in 2000 I wrote that I thought that's what .Net was. But I don't see how this involves changing Windows in some fundamental way.

This isn't the first time I've heard someone from Microsoft say they don't understand what Ray Ozzie is talking about when he talks about "Live" software. I feel such a disconnect when I hear this because when I read Ray's "Internet Services Disruption Memo, I was like "Duh" so it is difficult to understand the perspective of people who don't appreciate the power of the Web.

From my perspective, Ray Ozzie's memo and his various speeches have one simple message

1. The Web has fundamentally changed the face of computing.
   
2. The Web is here to stay.
   
3. The world's largest software company has to adapt to this reality
   

A good analogy for understanding what it means for software to embrace the Web is to compare an application like WinAmp 3.0 which plays music on your hard drive or from CD to iTunes 7.0 which plays music on your hard drive or from CD and can be used to purchase music from an online store and can be used to subscribe to podcasts on the Web. One doesn't have to resort to "creating an AJAX version of WinAmp" or whatever other straw man argument usually comes up in this context to turn a desktop MP3 player into "Live" software. iTunes shows that.

What Microsoft needs to do is repeat that lesson across all of its products and think about how they can embrace the Web instead of simply reacting to it or barely acknowledging its existence.

 

Leah Pearlmann has a blog post entitled The Final Chapter: Messenger + Yahoo which announces

And this month, this chapter of the story comes to a close. ANYONE using the latest version of Windows Live Messenger or Yahoo! Messenger (in most countries) will be able to add friends, send messages and select emoticons with those from either network like crazy – and we encourage you to do so!

 

People should be able to reach all their friends and family using just one IM service. Students should not have to use two IM services. NO ONE should have to give up watching American Idol for any reason.

Moral of the story: Windows Live and Yahoo! Messenger, holding hands to make the world a happier, better connected, Idol-istic place.

I've been taking a look at some of back end of how Yahoo! Messenger and Windows Live interop works as part getting my intern on how our platform works. I've been impressed by how smoothly this has been implemented as well as how some of the user interface complexities have been handled (e.g. what happens when you add a buddy who uses the same email address on both IM networks).

Kudos to Kitty and the rest of the team for getting this out of beta and bringing the dream of complete interoperability across the major IM networks closer to really.

 

It looks like Kurt, Samir and the rest of the Windows Live Expo team has been busy the past couple of months. From the blog post entitled on their team blog we learn

The team has spent the past 2 months working on features that were either gathered from end user feedback or were part of our long-term roadmap, so we are excited to share our work with you. As part of this update we wanted to highlight the following new features:

Integrated payment service:  Paypal’s 150 million registered users can now easily reference their account in order to complete secure person-to-person transactions on Windows Live Expo.  Buyers can purchase items from sellers on Expo with a credit card thru Paypal or using their Paypal debit accounts. Additionally, sellers can specify their preferred method of shipping and declare the cost for doing so.

 New high quality job listings: Expo now allows users to search and browse thousands of local and national job listings which are supplied by our partner CareerBuilder.

 Featured ads: The new featured ads area (provided by AdMission) allows you to generate a lot more interest in your listing by offering a fun, rich media experience that highlights your classified listing. The featured ads module will initially appear in the real estate and autos sections (example).

I chatted with Samir about the addition of integrated payments and a job listing service a few weeks which led an interesting line of thinking on my part. Besides identity, the most important pillar of social software is reputation. In Windows Live, we are building all these notions of a user's reputation which don't really overlap but tell you more about the user. For example, a user who Hotmail considers a spammer (i.e. has a bad reputation as an email user) may also be an awesome seller on Expo to whoever responds to his V1@gr@ spam (i.e. has a good reputation as a seller). Then there are the various notions of expertise being built up in Windows Live QnA. A person who is great at answering questions about Marvel and DC Comics may suck at answering other kinds of questions. How should all these aspects of a users reputation be represented in our various services? Should they be unified in some way? Is it interesting to be able to click on my profile and get an overview of all aspects of my reputation in Windows Live? Do we need a Reputation Metasystem to go along with the Identity Metasystem so we can enable federated/interoperable reputation systems?

Anyway, I digress. Check out Windows Live Expo, the newest changes to site make it an even more compelling service than before.

 

Twice this week I've had someone mention that even though they like Windows Live Local, they can never remember the URL. I have to admit that I sometimes end up typing http://live.local.com instead of http://local.live.com. It wasn't until this morning that I remembered that there is an easier to remember URL for accessing the site

http://maps.live.com

Brilliant. Now if only we could change the product name to Windows Live Maps. After all, Google renamed Google Local to Google Maps because of end user confusion. Anyway, kudos to the team for building such an awesome site. I've been playing with the recently released people search feature and I it's pretty sweet. This continues to be my favorite Windows Live service.

 

Pete Cashmore has a blog post entitled MySpace: We’ll Crush YouTube where he writes

As if we needed more proof of MySpace’s intolerance of outside development, News Corp. chief operating officer Peter Chernin told investors at an industry conference today that since much of YouTube’s traffic comes from MySpace, it’s time to cut out the middle man. Chernin estimated that around 60-70% of YouTube’s visitors come from MySpace, and as a result he wants to ramp up MySpace Video, giving users less incentive to look elsewhere. But while the 60% figure might not be totally accurate, MySpace is definitely a catalyst for YouTube’s growth - they actually reported a dip in traffic when MySpace temporarily disabled YouTube embeds at the end of 2005 (they were forced to allow them again after a user revolt).

But it’s not just YouTube - Chernin expressed distaste for all the services that are feeding the MySpace beast: “If you look at virtually any Web 2.0 application, whether its YouTube, whether it’s Flickr, whether it’s Photobucket…almost all of them are really driven off the back of MySpace, there’s no reason why we can’t build a parallel business.” While I’m not convinced that Flickr gained success on the back of MySpace, Photobucket almost certainly did - ImageShack isn’t mentioned, but it also owes much of its success to America’s leading social network.

The sentiments indicate a very worrying trend: MySpace has stated its intention to clone the best tools, and Chernin believes that MySpace can equal or better the third party tools with in-house products.

Marshall Kirkpatrick sums things up in a post entitled MySpace: We don’t need Web 2.0 on TechCrunch where he states

To summarize: the COO of News Corp. says that Web 2.0 is leaching traffic off of MySpace, that they can build their own services to compete with any of it and that there’s going to be an increasingly aggresive commercial push on the site. That sounds both dangerously arrogant and like a real validation of fears that MySpace dependency is too risky for outside developers.

Om Malik had a piece in Business 2.0 yesterday titled Suddenly Everything’s Coming Up Widgets, where he said “Everyone’s a winner here: MySpace, because it becomes stickier; YouTube and Slide, because they get the traffic; and the user, because he or she gets it all on one page.” It sounds like MySpace’s owners may not want to play a game where everyone wins.

I find this quite surprising. One of the reasons MySpace is where it is today primarily because they stumbled upon the fact that providing a platform for gadgets/widgets allows for richer end user experiences than opening up APIs for viewing and creating content via Atom/RSS/MetaWeblog API which is what blogging sites have traditionally done when building a platform. To turn on the very developers and partner companies that are improving the user experience of your service seems like the road to folly. It's one thing to provide compting experiences to them and quite another to view them as leeches. At Microsoft, we know that the road to success is by building the best platform not just by building the best or most integrated applications. This is a lesson that history has borne out. 

This should be a blow to all those VC funded startups whose entire business model is building MySpace widgets. Not to worry, they can always switch to writing gadgets for Windows Live Spaces. ;)

 

From the press release entitled Windows Live Services Reach Key Milestones we learn

REDMOND, Wash. — Sept. 11, 2006 — Microsoft Corp. today announced the release from beta of Live Search and of Live.com in 47 markets worldwide, and final availability of Live Local Search in the U.K. and the U.S. Microsoft also announced that Live Search will now power the Web search capability on MSN^®, the company’s media and entertainment portal, attracting more than 465 million unique users worldwide per month.
...
By using Live.com as their personal search home page, customers can harness the power of Live Search to find, customize and track news, images, video, RSS feeds and blogs across the Web. They can try it at http://www.live.com.

Live Local Search will offer increased availability of bird’s-eye imagery, improved mobile integration and functionality, and other user interface improvements and customization tools.

Additional details can be found on the Live Search and Live Local Search team blogs at http://livesearch.spaces.live.com and http://virtualearth.spaces.live.com, respectively. These services are now available in select international markets, in which feature availability and beta status will vary.

About MSN and Windows Live

MSN attracts more than 465 million unique users worldwide per month. With localized versions available globally in 42 markets and 21 languages, MSN is a world leader in delivering compelling programmed content experiences to consumers and online advertising opportunities to businesses worldwide. Windows Live, a new set of personal Internet services and software, is designed to bring together in one place all the relationships, information and interests people care about most, with enhanced safety and security features across their PC, devices and the Web. MSN and Windows Live will be offered alongside each other as complementary services. Some Windows Live services entered an early beta phase on Nov. 1, 2005; these and future beta updates can be found at http://ideas.live.com. Windows Live is available at http://www.live.com.

MSN is located on the Web at http://www.msn.com.

From the press release it looks like the Windows in Windows Live is silent. It's Live Search and Live Local not Windows Live Search and Windows Live Local. I guess that makes sense since the domain is http://www.live.com. Congratulations to all my friends in Live Search (mad props Sanaz) and Live Local (yaaay Steve Lombardi) now that their products are out of beta.

PS: The bit above highlighted in red is for the folks who may have been confused after reading Marshall Kirkpatrick's post on Techcrunch entitled Live.com leaving beta, replacing MSN search.

 

I just got an email from J.J. Allaire pointing me to the blog post on the Windows Live Writer plugins blog entitled Windows Live Writer Blog This for RSS Bandit which states

And now comes Blog This for RSS Bandit.

RSS Bandit is a popular feed reader (what are feeds?) which by default can Blog This with w.bloggar (a desktop blogging client) and post to del.icio.us.

Installation is simple albeit manual. Extract the file, highlight the files, then copy and paste them into the RSS Bandit plugins folder: not into the Windows Live Writer plugin folder.

Start RSS Bandit. See something you would like to write about? Right-click on the headline and choose BlogThis using Windows Live Writer.

Windows Live Writer launches with the Select Destination Weblog window where you select which blog to post to. Once selected it takes a moment or two and then there is your screen with the text from the feed’s post:

I just wrote about wanting to write this plugin a few hours ago. I'll probably still write one on my own and replace the w.bloggar plugin in the default install of RSS Bandit with a Windows Live Writer plugin. Perhaps even an installer for existing users who don't want to wait until the next version of RSS Bandit to get this feature? 

 

Today I was browsing Windows Live QnA and stumbled across one the user pages (shown below) and realized that we've finally shipped the Windows Live friends list to another web property besides Windows Live Spaces

This is one of the coolest things about working on platform technology, you ship it once and it gets used all over the place. When I first started working on the social networking for Windows Live along with Mike Torres and others, we strongly believed that Social Networking features should be an integrated part of all of our online experiences instead of just being part of a single "social networking" site. The friends list isn't just a feature of Windows Live Spaces or Windows Live Messenger, it's a feature of Windows Live. 

Another principle we've had is that anywhere you see a user in a Windows Live property, there should be multiple ways to interact with that user via the 'contact control' shown above. One of these ways is to add an entry point for viewing that user's friends list or adding that user to your IM or friends list [NOTE: you can opt out of having people spam you using this mechanism]. This is a part of our user experience platform which Jay and Neel have been working on for a while. Encouraging multiple ways for people to interact should be a key aspect of social software applications.

It's been almost two years since I started at MSN Windows Live and one of the best things about working here is that I've rarely had to argue with people about fundamental principles of what the user experience we provide should be. Our debates are more around when to ship the features and how to implement them than anything else.

 

"Social Search" is like "Web 2.0" in that if you ask five people what it means you'll get back seven different definitions. To me, the user experience for 'Social Search' is pretty straightforward. I'd like to ask questions and get back answers that take advantage of the knowledge the application has about my social circle (e.g. friends, family, trusted experts, etc).

The incident that got me interested in social search happened two years ago. The apartment complex I lived in [Avalon Belltown -- don't stay here, my car got broken into in their "secure" parking deck and they acted like it was my fault] raised my rent by $300 when my lease was up. I thought that was fairly obnoxious but didn't have the time to do an exhaustive survey of apartment complexes in the Seattle area to find one that met my desires. I knew that one or more of my co-workers or friends would be able to give me a suggestion for a cheaper apartment complex that would meet my requirements but short of spamming a bunch of people at work, I didn't have a good way to get this information out of my social circle. So I stayed there after renegotiating the lease [which they later reneged on but that is another story].

Since then I've been interested in the notion of 'social search' and other ways to make the user experience on the Web better by taking advantage of the knowledge applications have about our relationships to other people. This is why I ended up working on the team that I work on today and have been involved in building features such as Social Networking for Windows Live. I believe that we are now about halfway to what I'd like to see in the 'social search' arena at Windows Live. We have Windows Live QnA, Windows Live Expo, and Windows Live Spaces which I see as different pieces of the puzzle.

The next step for me has been thinking about how to extend this notion of applications being smarter because they know about our relationships outside Windows Live by exposing APIs to the different kind of relationship information we have today. This is one of the reasons I find the Facebook API quite fascinating. However I'm not sure what the right forum is to get feedback on what kinds of APIs people would like to see from us. Maybe asking here in my blog will get some bites. :)