In his post Thanks Bloglines Mike Torres writes

Over the course of the last few days, we noticed a problem in the way Bloglines was displaying feeds from MSN Spaces.  This problem was due to our recent URL change and the way we're redirecting visitors from http://spaces.msn.com/members/mike (as an example) to http://spaces.msn.com/mike.  Instead of providing the absolute URL to the RSS feed when Bloglines and others requested the feed, we're only returning the relative URL (i.e. "/mike").

 

Because of this, Bloglines had to turn around a fix to support relative URL redirects in record time.  Within just a couple of hours of contacting them, they had diagnosed the issue, fixed up all the Spaces feeds in their entire system, and patched the redirect logic to make sure it wouldn't happen again.  During this time, the subscriber lists/counts associated with a feed weren't updated for a little while (my 362 subscribers showed as 9, but my ego wasn't bruised) and they even did the extra work to merge "new" feeds with "old" feeds (because when the feed broke, and someone subscribed to the correct feed, Bloglines then had two records for the 'same' feed).

 

In short, this was truly great work by Mark Fletcher and the Bloglines staff.  Sorry guys for keeping you up so late on a Tuesday night!  We'll be making a change to the way we redirect shortly just to make sure this won't be a problem for anyone else in the future.  And for you Bloglines users, you should be back to normal for any MSN Spaces feeds in your list!

Mike and I exchanged mail with Mark Fletcher about this issue on Tuesday, and as he writes we were both grateful and impressed at how quickly the Bloglines folks made changes to fix the consequences of a bug in how we were sending HTTP redirects. Mad props to Mark Fletcher and the folks at Bloglines. You guys definitely rock.

 

In a recent post on the RSS Bandit forums entitled Microsoft Feeds API, one of our users asked when we plan to take addvantage of the Windows RSS Platform. Specifically the question asked was

I downloaded IE7 beta 2 preview and one of the new features is feed support. There really is no comparison between RSS Bandit and the minimilist support IE7 provideds however it is my understanding that there is more to the feed support then the basic UI IE provides. Apparently the Feed API is highly integrated into Vista and has been backported to XP as part of IE7. I would like to suggest (and I have no idea if this is even possible) that RSS Bandit embrace this new API. It's in it's early stages and I'd like to see it mature with the help of RSS Bandit into a usable common feed store for any number of apps (RSS Bandit, IE, plus anything else that decides to use it like the sample screensaver app in the API documentation.) Perhaps that's asking too much but I figured I should at least put the idea out there. It would be really great if, while surfing the net in IE I could subscribe to rss feeds using the IE mechanism, maybe take a quick look through them in IE, then later go back in RSS Bandit and be able to use the much more powerful features (such as stored searches, and folder aggregation) without having to have two copies of my actual feed lists to maintain.

Here's a link to the only info I could find on it so far:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/FeedsAPI/rss/rss_entry.asp

To the various people who have asked this question [including my friends on the IE team], the answer is YES we will support the Windows RSS Platform. As Walter, wrote in his post on Windows RSS Platform there are 3 main components of the platform; the Common Feed List, Feed Synchronization Engine, and Feed Store. Ideally I'd like to use all 3 in RSS Bandit but suspect that it'll be difficult to switch to using the Feed Synchronization Engine or the Feed Store provided by the Windows RSS platform. For example, our feed synchronization engine supports subscribing to USENET newsgroups which I doubt the Feed Syncrhonization Engine in the Windows RSS platform supports. On the other hand, it should be straightforward to satisfy the scenario requested in the quoted post where items subscribed in IE 7 are reflected in RSS Bandit and vice versa.

I need to work out the user interface with Torsten but it should be easy for us to support the Common Feed List. My current thinking is that we'll have a special folder for "My Internet Explorer Subscriptions" as opposed to mirroring the entire feed list in RSS Bandit within IE 7 and vice versa. Thoughts?

 

It seems like I'm not the only person underwhelmed by the recent Internet Explorer 7 beta release. Alex Russell, one of the guys behind the brilliant Dojo Toolkit, has a blog post entitled How IE7 Can Avoid Irrelevance which lists a number of places where Internet Explorer is deficient when it comes to DHTML/AJAX development. He writes

At a minimum, dynamic web apps need the following out of IE and JScript in the very near future:

• Memory leaks need to simply disappear
• Fix the cache+gzip bugs
• Give us getters/setters in JScript or give back watch()
• Fix the event object. Pass it in to DOM handlers by default. Also, offsetLeft and offsetTop are so ambiguious as to be useless. Give us currentTarget.
• Bump the limit on the number of concurrent HTTP connections if those connections are initiated after onload (either via XMLHTTP or other methods)
• Today, allocating more than 5K objects or so brings JScript to its knees. Object allocation cost needs to be O(1)
• Either revive (and start to fix) VML or give it an SVG-Tiny+DOM facade
• Give us a persistent, string-keyed, local cache in the MB range (5-10MB/domain seems a good start)
• Fast DOM queries. CSS selectors or XPath, we don’t care. Just give us a way to say “get us all DOM node objects matching this”
• A way to toggle the box model on a per-element basis without switching doctypes. The CSS 3 box model spec seems a good starting point

If Microsoft is to re-build any credibility around their browser, they need to show us the goods. CSS fixes won’t suffice this time around.

This is a pretty good list and it contains a lot of the features Jon Udell mentioned that he would like to see in future versions of Internet Explorer in his post Further adventures in lightweight service composition . The only thing I'd change about Alex's post would be to rename it How IE8 Can Avoid Irrelevance. I've worked at Microsoft long enough to know that by the time a product hits beta 2, the only kind of changes you are going to see are fixes to major [as in crashing] bugs, security fixes and low cost cosmetic changes. I can only hope that it doesn't take us another five years to see the next version of Internet Explorer

On the positive side, it looks like Dean Hachamovitch who runs the IE team not only has read Alex's blog post but posted a response . That's a good start. .

 

Ken Levy has a blog post entitled From product manager to product planner where he writes

After working as a product manager in the developer division for the past 4.5 years, I've decided to accept an offer to work in a new position at Microsoft. Starting in March, I will be a product planner working on developer community efforts in a new group within the Windows Live division.

I'll definitely miss the regular interaction with VFP team members and the great Visual FoxPro community. I've also had great experiences working with the WebData XML team on the XML tools story for Visual Studio 2005, doing some community work with the VB team, and helping with content for Channel 9 both in front of and behind the camera. I expect to continue to do interviews and be interviewed for Channel 9 from time to time ongoing since it is such a great site for community efforts and transparency.
...
I can't say much about my new role just yet. To get an idea of just some of the developer centric things I'll be working on in the Windows Live team, check out the recent 21 minute video by Robert Scoble on Channel 9 interviewing my new manager, Windows Live group product planner Scott Swanson...MSN Messenger APIs

Given that I was one of the folks who pitched Ken on coming over to work on the developer platform activities in Windows Live, I'm glad to see him come over. When I was on the WebData XML team I saw Ken do great work in evangelizing the XML tools we built for Visual Studio 2005. I can't wait to see what he does for the various APIs we plan to develop around Windows Live.

 

The Associated Press has an article entitled Microsoft Changes Blog Shutdown Policies which states

SEATTLE - Microsoft Corp. is tightening its policies regarding shutting down Web journals after its much-publicized shut down of a well-known Chinese blogger at that government's request.

The Redmond software company, which operates a popular blogging technology called MSN Spaces, said Tuesday that the changes will include efforts to make the banned content available to users elsewhere in the world even if Microsoft decides it has a legal duty to block it in a particular country.

The company also pledged to provide users with a clear notice that it has shut down a Web site because it received a legally binding notice that the material violates local laws. Previously, it has simply said the content was unavailable.

Brad Smith, Microsoft's top lawyer, said in an interview that it will depend on the circumstances of the shutdown as to whether the new policy means that an archive of the blog will remain available elsewhere, or that the Web blog's author will be able to continue posting information to users outside the country that ordered the blockage.

"Some of this, I think, we just have to recognize is evolving technology and changing law," said Smith, speaking by phone from a Microsoft-sponsored government conference in Lisbon, Portugal.

MSN Spaces, which allows users to post journals, pictures and other content on the Internet, boasts 35 million users, including 3.3 million in China.

The company has maintained that it is important to be able to provide users in other countries with such tools, even as it insists it is bound by local laws when it operates in those places.

"We think that blogging and similar tools are powerful vehicles for economic development and for creativity and free expression. They are tools that do good," Smith said. "We believe that it's better to make these tools available than not, but that isn't the end of the discussion, either."

This is good to hear. You can also get the news straight from the horses mouth from the press release Microsoft Outlines Policy Framework for Dealing with Government Restrictions on Blog Content.

 

If you are a regular reader of the Internet Explorer team's blog then you should know that IE7 Beta 2 Preview is now available.

I've used it for about 10 minutes now and I'm still having difficulty getting used to the changes in the user interface. They seem like rather gratuitous changes to me, the browser now seems unfamiliar although I assume that I'll eventually get used to the new look and feel.  My main interest was in checking out the RSS support in the browser and so far I've been unsatisfied by the experience. Below is a screenshot of what it looks like when subscribed to a feed. 

The general RSS reading experience is rather unsatisfactory. There are so many features I take for granted from using RSS Bandit that I find the RSS experience in IE 7 to be disappointing. No search folders, no aggregated views of items within a category, no ability to flag items, no options to email an item or post it to my favorite social bookmarking site.  I couldn't even figure out how to mark individual items as read or unread. I found it to be pretty unusable as a replacement for my current RSS reader. 

PS: For some reason since upgrading to IE 7, all the HTML mail in Outlook now hurts my eyes to look at. Does IE 7 flip on ClearType by default or something?

 

From the official Google Blog we find the post All buttoned up which informs us that

As the Google Toolbar has gotten more popular, the greatest source of ideas about new features has come from our users. The breadth and variety of these requests is so large that it's hard to satisfy everyone. But then we started noticing engineers on the team had cool hacks on their Toolbars for doing customized searches on our internal bugs database, corporate employee directory, etc... We were barely done asking ourselves whether it was possible to offer this capability in the new Google Toolbar beta when one of the engineers started designing a feature called Custom Buttons. Here are some of the coolest aspects of Custom Buttons and why I think they're a big deal:

1) Simple API: The term API is almost a misnomer -- it literally takes seconds to make one of these. I just can't resist the urge to make a new one every time I run into new website. A couple of simple steps and voila - a new button's sitting on your Toolbar (check out the Getting Started Guide).

2) Flexibility: The simple inclusion of RSS & Atom feeds (and particularly allowing the update of toolbar button icons through feeds) has allowed for buttons like a weather button and a mood ring button.

3) Accessibility: Most users don't even need to make buttons. It takes one click on our buttons gallery or on a website that offers them to install a button for your favorite sites. And the custom buttons we built to search our intranet showed us how valuable a customizable toolbar can be to organizations, so now there's an enterprise version of Google Toolbar that can be securely deployed across a company.

I use the Google toolbar quite frequently when performing searches and one of my biggest gripes is that it doesn't give me the option of using Google Music Search for my searches. So when I found out about the new version of the toolbar, I downloaded it out and clicked on "Add Search Type" which took me to the Google Toolbar Button Gallery. Guess what? There's no option for adding Google Music Search to my list of default search types.

So I tried reading the documentation on Getting Started with the Google Toolbar API so I could figure out how to add it myself and came up short.  The entire API seems to assume that some stuff gets installed in my right-click menu in Internet Explorer which doesn't seem to be the case. I wonder if I need to reboot to get the changes to show up? Bah. Now I feel irritated that I just wasted 15 minutes of my time on this. 

 

Joe Wilcox, research analyst for Jupiter Research, has a blog post entitled What AOL Explorer Means to Microsoft which touches on a topic I've discussed in previous blog posts. He writes

In IE 7, Microsoft makes revolving a search term through several different search engines a fairly easy process. The approach makes sense for a platform provider, but it may not be the best for MSN Search--or is that Windows Live Search, now?

I'm wondering if maybe Microsoft will be forced to an internal browser war of sorts. Microsoft's IE development clearly is focused more on corporate customers and not introducing too many disruptive changes there. AOL is going after consumers with its browser. I don't see how Microsoft can effectively compete, protect its turf and extend opportunities for MSN and search with IE development so corporate focused.

Microsoft needs to more seriously treat the consumer and corporate browser markets as separate opportunities. In one sense, Windows Live seeks to resolve the consumer problem by offering consumers more products and services. To get there, Microsoft is going to have to draw and even clearer line between IE as a platform and corporate product and IE as throughway for consumer products and services.

It seems pretty obvious to me that if Microsoft is serious about Windows Live, then it doesn't make much sense for our Web browser to be tied to the operating system division with its long ship cycles and focus on making corporate customers happy (i.e. keeping disruption to a minimum). I said as much in my previous post on this topic; Mac IE's Death: A Case for Microsoft Disbanding or Transfering the Windows IE Team. I'm glad to see that some analysts are also beginning to point out this hole in our Windows Live strategy.

 

A few weeks ago I had a chat with Robert Rebholz about folksonomies, RSS and information overload. It was a rather fun discussion and he let me know about a tool he'd built called the OPML-o-mater. The way the tool works is described below, 

The OPML-o-mater delivers a personalized list of RSS feeds in an xml format called OPML. OPML files can be imported by any competent RSS Reader/Aggregator.

You want the feeds from the OPML-o-mater because they're known quality feeds -- at least they were when we entered them. Even if you already have all the feeds you need, it might be worth a look to discover if we've one or two you didn't know about.

In general it works this way:

• We've tagged the feeds.
• You select the tags that describe your interests
• The OPML-o-mater finds and displays feeds associated with the tags you've selected
• You pick the feeds you want
• Press the generate OPML button
• Save the OPML file to your local machine
• Import it into your feed reader

More specifically, we've tagged all the feeds. The first column of the OPML-o-mater lists the tags. You select a single tag from column one that describes an area of interest for you. Column two displays the tags that were also used anytime the tag you selected was used to describe a url (bear in mind that a single feed/url may have many tags associated with it). In column three the feeds associated with the selection made in column one are displayed.

I think this is a very interesting way to solve the "How Do I Find Interesting Blogs?" problem which plagues users of RSS readers today. I currently am subscribed to 158 feeds in RSS Bandit. Given that there are tens of millions of blogs out there, I am sure that there are literally thousands of blogs I'd love to read if I just knew about them. The tough question for me has been how to find them and then how to integrate that process into RSS Bandit in an automated way. 

What would be cool would be for the OPML-o-mater to evolve into the equivalent of http://del.icio.us/popular/ for RSS feeds and then for it to expose an API that tools such as RSS Bandit could integrate into part of their user experience. This idea is interesting enough that I wish I had the time and dedicated server resources to build it myself.  

 

The live.com folks recently blogged about a recent change to the site to support inline images which states

we've been listening to your feedback and one of the main things you've been asking for has been more pizzazz on the page. we just shipped something that hopefully adds a little bit of that :)

now you can view embedded images in rss feeds inline on your live.com page:

- if you have 5+ headlines you get a smaller image that rotates every 20 seconds

- if you have 1 headline you get a larger image

 

we'll let a picture do the rest of the talking :)

As you can tell from the screenshot, the change definitely jazzes up the look of the page.