Mike Torres has a blog post entitled On "MSN: Social Networking Edition" where he points to news stories about a core piece of a future version of MSN Spaces he and I have been working on for the past few months. Mike writes
On "MSN: Social Networking Edition" Wow, is this actually true? If so, I wonder how this will change the way people find and communicate with others in the future.Quote (emphasis mine) Microsoft Monitor: MSN: Social Networking EditionA forthcoming "friend of friends" feature will add personal networks of friends to a MSN Space. In someone's My Space [sic], there will appear pictures of the friends, which can include friends of other friends. Friends can be added from people known or associated with friends or from MSN Spaces searches. Blake used the example of searching for golf blogs. If friends are on MSN Messenger, an icon indicates so. More on Blake, Yusuf, MSN Messenger file sharing, and "Microsoft's new Web-based mail system" as well. It is an interesting read... Funniest part of the post: "small consumer adoption [of Spaces]". Joe is usually quick to take a shot at Microsoft without actually learning the facts first. Come on, Joe... I think the most recent public number was 17 million spaces created worldwide. Compare that to any of our competitors in their first 3 years of existence. Yeah... small consumer adoption. Maybe 17 million Roombas created those spaces :)Mary Jo Foley has a little bit more here: Microsoft Watch. My favorite part: "Our ability to enter, differentiate and compete has never been stronger," Mehdi told the Wall Street analysts and media representatives who attended the analyst meeting. Couldn't agree more
Wow, is this actually true? If so, I wonder how this will change the way people find and communicate with others in the future.Quote (emphasis mine)
Microsoft Monitor: MSN: Social Networking EditionA forthcoming "friend of friends" feature will add personal networks of friends to a MSN Space. In someone's My Space [sic], there will appear pictures of the friends, which can include friends of other friends. Friends can be added from people known or associated with friends or from MSN Spaces searches. Blake used the example of searching for golf blogs. If friends are on MSN Messenger, an icon indicates so.
More on Blake, Yusuf, MSN Messenger file sharing, and "Microsoft's new Web-based mail system" as well. It is an interesting read... Funniest part of the post: "small consumer adoption [of Spaces]". Joe is usually quick to take a shot at Microsoft without actually learning the facts first. Come on, Joe... I think the most recent public number was 17 million spaces created worldwide. Compare that to any of our competitors in their first 3 years of existence. Yeah... small consumer adoption. Maybe 17 million Roombas created those spaces :)Mary Jo Foley has a little bit more here: Microsoft Watch. My favorite part:
"Our ability to enter, differentiate and compete has never been stronger," Mehdi told the Wall Street analysts and media representatives who attended the analyst meeting.
Couldn't agree more
Although I've primarily been talking about my work on getting a public API for MSN Spaces off the ground, I also work on our social software platform on the back end as well. Once we ship the next version I'll be able to talk a bit more about some of the design decisions we made and I'll get to see how users end up utilizing the features we've been working in.
I love my day job.