It looks like Windows Live Shopping is finally live. From the blog post entitled Ta Da! from the Windows Live Shopping team's blog we get the following excerpt

Today we launch the brand new Windows Live Shopping site!

What is it? It is the beta launch of Microsoft’s Web 2.0 shopping experience, featuring one of the world’s largest product catalogs, user-created content and an easier-to-use interface built on 100% AJAX technology. It uses a unified shopping engine to search or browse almost 40 million products from 7,000 stores ranging from many of the country’s leading retailers to eBay. Results are displayed in an order that is not affected by advertising; merchants cannot pay to have their items show up closer to the top. Users will be able to drag-and-drop items to a shopping list and share lists with friends; see user reviews of products and sellers; and read and create public shopping guides on any subject.

You can get more of an inside perspective on the new service from the Ian McAllister's blog post entitled Windows Live Shopping Beta Has Hatched where he talks about some of the thinking that led to the creation of the service.

Unfortunately, as noted by Mike Arrington in his post Microsoft Live Shopping Launches - But No Firefox the site doesn't support Firefox. This is a known issue and one the team will address in the future. I personally think they should have waited until Firefox support was working. As Mike Arrington points out a lot of geeks and power users have switched to Firefox from IE. Mike states that 70% of TechCrunch's traffic is from Firefox users. In December 2005, Boing Boing stated that more of their readers use Firefox than IE.

Luckily some folks from the IE team helped me fix my IE 7 problems and I got to try out the service. The user interface is definitely snazzy in the way that all Windows Live services have become. Dragging and dropping items into a shopping list is a neat touch as is the slider that lets you control the amount of detail or images in the search results. It doesn't seem that the search index is quite populated yet. Below are search results for an item I've been wanting to buy for the past few weeks [and just purchased after running these searches] from eBay, Froogle, Windows Live Shopping and Yahoo! Shopping.

1. Search for "transformers decal" on eBay
2. Search for "transformers decal" on Froogle
   
3. Search for "transformers decal" on Windows Live Shopping
4. Search for "transformers decal" on Yahoo Shopping
   

How would you rank the quality and quantity of those results?

Somewhere along the line it seems like I downloaded one too many internal builds of Internet Explorer 7 and hosed my browser setup. Since I hate mucking around with re-installing, rebooting and registry tweaks I decided to use Firefox as my full time browser instead. Not only have I not missed IE 7, I've fallen in love with certain Firefox extensions like SessionSaver which recovers all open browser tabs and form content in case you have a browser crash. This has proved to be a godsend when I come in during the morning and our IT department has rebooted my machine due to some security patch. All I need to do is fire up Firefox and have all my open tabs from the previous day show up in the browser.

The only problem I've had has been with constantly being prompted to enter my username and password on every Sharepoint page I browse to in our corporate network. I had almost resigned to having to waste my morning trying to fix my hosed IE 7 install until it occured to me to search the Web for a solution. That's how I found out about the network.automatic-ntlm-auth.trusted-uris preference. Once I tweaked this preference, it was all good.
...
Except for the fact that Sharepoint seems to use a bunch of Javascript that only works in Internet Explorer so I'm still going to have to muck with my Internet Explorer install anyway. 

At least I can browse different pages without that prompt showing up all the time.  I hope this information is useful to some other poor soul who's trying to use Firefox on an intranet that requires NTLM authentication.

From Niall Kennedy's blog post entitled Facebook enters the workplace we learn

Popular social networking site Facebook is moving beyond schools and into the workplace. A new version of thesite went live this morning allowing new registrations on corporatee-mail addresses. I was able to signup using my Microsoft address andcompleted my profile.

From the press release Microsoft Spins Out a Wallop we learn

Microsoft Corp. today announced the spinout of a new social networking technology, developed by Microsoft Research, to create a new Silicon Valley startup, Wallop Inc. Wallop, whose aim is to deliver the next generation of social computing, is led by experienced entrepreneur and CEO Karl Jacob, with 30-year veteran Bay Partners providing Series A financing.
...
Wallop Advances Social Networking
Launching later this year, Wallop solves the problems plaguing current social networking technologies and will introduce an entirely new way for consumers to express their individuality online. For example, today’s social networks have difficulty enabling people to interact in a way similar to the way they would in the real world. Wallop tapped legendary Frog Design Inc. to conceive a next-generation user interface enabling people to express themselves like never before. In addition, Wallop departs from the friend-of-a-friend model common in all social networks today and the root of many of their problems. Instead, Wallop developed a unique set of algorithms that respond to social interactions to automatically build and maintain a person’s social network.

Interesting moves in the world of Social Networking. Facebook moving into the competition with LinkedIn is unsurprising. Microsoft spinning of Wallop so that it may eventually be a competitor of MSN Spaces was not. I guess I'm not as plugged in as I thought at work.

Last week there was an outage on NewsGator Online. This outage didn't just affect people who use the NewsGator Online but also users of their desktop readers such as FeedDemon which synchronize the users feed state between the desktop and the web-based reader.

In his post Dealing with Connectivity Issues in Desktop Applications Nick Bradbury writes

One of the more frustrating challenges when designing a desktop application that connects to the Internet is figuring out how to deal with connectivity issues caused by firewalls, proxy servers and server outages.
...
And as we discovered last week, when your application relies on a server-side API, it has to be able to deal with the server being unavailable without significantly impacting the customer. This was something FeedDemon 2.0 failed to do, and I have to take the blame for this. Because of my poor design, synchronized feeds couldn't be updated while our server was down, and to make matters worse, FeedDemon kept displaying a "synchronization service unavailable" message every time it tried to connect - so not only could you not get new content, but you were also bombarded with error messages you could do nothing about.

A couple of months ago I wrote a blog post entitled The Newsgator API Continues to Frustrate Me where I complained about the fact that Newsgator Online assumes that clients that synchronize with it actually just fetch all their data from Newsgator Online including feed content. This is a bad design decision because it means that they expected all desktop clients who synchronize with the web-based reader to have a single point of failure. As someone who's day job is working on the platforms that power a number of Windows Live services, I know from experience that service outages are a fact of life. In addition, I also know that you don't want clients making requests to your service unless they absolutely have to. This is not a big deal at first but once you get enough clients you start wanting them to do as much data retrieval and processing as they can without hitting your service. Having a desktop feed reader rely on a web service for fetching feeds instead of having it fetch feeds itself needlessly increases the costs of running your online service and doesn't buy your customers a significantly improved user experience. 

I've bumped into Greg Reinacker since I complained about the Newsgator API and he's been adamant about the correctness of their design decisions. I hope the fallout from the recent outage makes them rethink some of the design of Newsgator's RSS platform.

In the blog post entitled Rapleaf to Challenge eBay Feedback Mike Arrington talks about newly formed Rapleaf which aims to build a competitor to eBay's feedback system. This idea shows a lot of insight on the part of the founders. The value that eBay provides to sellers and buyers is primarily the reputation system and not as a venue for auctions. The network effects inherent in eBay's reputation system make it the ultimate kind of lock-in. No power seller or buyer will look at alternatives even if they are free (like Yahoo! Auctions) because they don't want to start from scratch with the reputation they've built or trust trading with people whose reputations haven't been built. However it isn't a slam dunk that Rapleaf will be a successful idea. 

In his post entitled Rapleaf's Fatal Flaws Ian McAllister of Windows Live Shopping writes

Flaw #1 - Transaction Unaware

Rapleaf is not in the middle of transactions. They have no way to determine if a transaction between two parties actually took place. Co-founder Auren Hoffman claims that their sophisticated human and machine-based fraud detection will be able to detect fraud but to me this seems like complete hand-waving...The success of eBay's feedback system rests completely on the fact that they attach feedback only to completed transactions where eBay collects money via commission.

 

Flaw #2 - Cold Start

Every new startup has a cold start problem and must build users, customers, partners, etc. from the ground up but Rapleaf has the mother of all cold start problems. The post mentioned nothing about how they plan to build mindshare in the market and I think they'll be dead in the water if they expect users to start going to www.rapleaf.com in droves all of a sudden and being keen to trust one of the 342 Rapleaf trusted sellers based on 2 items of feedback not attached to any verified transaction.

Flaw #2 was something I'd considered but Flaw #1 didn't even occur to me. Now that I consider it, I can't see how they can be successful as a competitor of companies like eBay since they aren't part of the transaction. It would seem to make more sense for them to be a partner of eBay except that there is no incentive for eBay to partner with them and thus provide an avenue out of the lock-in of eBay's feedback system.

Does this mean Rapleaf is DOA?

I read a number of news stories last week about Microsoft hiring a former exec from Ask.com to run MSN. A number of these news sources and corresponding blog posts got the story wrong in one way or the other

In her news story entitled Former Ask.com president will join Microsoft Kim Peterson of the Seattle Times wrote

Microsoft has hired the former president of search rival Ask.com to run its online business group, overseeing the MSN and Windows Live units and playing a big role in the company's move to the Web.

In the Reuters news story entitled Microsoft hires CEO of Ask.com to head Web unit it states

Software giant Microsoft Corp. said on Friday it hired away Steve Berkowitz, the chief executive of rival Internet company Ask.com, to head Microsoft's own Internet business.

In her blog post entitled CEO of Ask.com moves to Microsoft Charlene Li of Forrester Research wrote

Most importantly, Microsoft is taking a very important step in putting ALL of the hot consumer products under one team. Live.com is at the core of Microsoft's turnaround -- it represents fast development cycles and a totally new approach to addressing the marketplace. At the same time, Microsoft can't turn its back on the advertising juggernaut of MSN.com. In the past year, there's been uncertainty about how MSN.com and Live.com will work together. Having them all come together under Steve will be a first step in addressing the concerns of the MSN.com group while maintaining Live.com's momentum.

Highlighted in red are statements which are at best misleading. I'm not singling out the above news publications and bloggers, almost every article or blog post I read about Steve Berkowitz being hired gave the same misleading impression.

Why are they misleading? That's easy. Let's go back to the Microsoft press release Microsoft Realigns Platforms & Services Division for Greater Growth and Agility which breaks 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.

That's right, three pieces each with it's own corporate vice president. So Charlene Li isn't quite right when she says that MSN.com and Live.com are now aligned under Steve Berkowitz. Instead what's being aligned under him is the business development and marketing for both sites. The platform that powers Live.com should be under Blake Irving while the actual website development is under Steven Sinofsky.

I'm sure that makes as much sense to you as it does to me. However according to the press release, this organizational structure will increase Microsoft's agility in delivering innovation to customers.

It's MS Poll season. This is when at work our employer encourages us to fill out an opinion poll on how we feel our day jobs and the company in general. Besides Mini-Microsoft I've seen a couple of the introspective posts about working in the B0rg cube I expect to see during this season such as Robert Scoble's How Microsoft can shut down Mini-Microsoft and Mike Torres's Playing to "not lose.

I don't really have anything intospective to add to what they've written. I probably won't fill out MS Poll this year since it's always felt to me like a pointless opinion poll. If my management can't tell what I like or dislike about working here then it's a screw up on both our parts which won't be fixed by a hastily filled out opinion poll.

I did find an interesting comment by Leah Pearlman to Mike Torres's post I felt compelled to talk about. She wrote

Re: Innovation. Hmm. I agree and disagree. I agree from the standpoint of a Microsoft employee who wants to work on innovative things.  I agree with you that there’s been too much talk about “how to beat the competition.” Reinventing the wheel because Yahoo! and Google have wheels doesn't get me out of bed in the morning. But! (you knew it was coming) My opinion lately has been that there's too much emphasis put on innovation at Microsoft, and it comes at the expense of fundamentals, intuitiveness, simplicity.  Often times there are great reasons why our competitors have done certain things , and I see people carelessly disregard these things in the name of innovation.

Innovation is one of those words Microsoft has killed. What has begun to irritate me is when people describe what is basically a new feature in their product as an innovation. To start off, by definition, since you work at a big software nothing you work on is innovative. Even Google who used to be raised up as the poster child of innovation in the software industry have been reduced to copying Yahoo! services and liberally sprinkling them with AJAX as they've grown bigger. 

Often when I hear people claiming that the new feature in their Microsoft product is an innovation it just makes them look ignorant. Most of their innovations are either (i) already shipping in products offered by competitors or startups that anyone who reads TechCrunch is aware of or (ii) are also being worked on by some poor slobs at AOL/Google/Yahoo! who also think their feature is extremely innovative. As Jeremy Zawodny pointed out in his post Secrets of Product Development and What Journalists Write

Larger companies rarely can respond that quickly to each other. It almost never happens. Sure, they may talk a good game, but it's just talk. Building things on the scale that Microsoft, Google, AOL, or Yahoo do is a complex process. It takes time.

Journalists like to paint this as a rapidly moving chess game in which we're all waiting for the next move so that we can quickly respond. But the truth is that most product development goes on in parallel. Usually there are people at several companies who all have the same idea, or at least very similar ones. The real race is to see who can build it faster and better than the others.

The culture of bragging about dubious innovations likely springs from the need to distinguish yourself from the pack in a reward culture that takes dog-eat-dog to another level. Either way, do me a favor. Stop calling your new features innovations. They aren't.

Thanks for listening

I've posted a number of blog  entries in the past about how popular various blogs on MSN Spaces are, especially the Asian ones. Unsurprisingly it's taken some of the folks from the insular geek blog set, a while to notice this trend. Recently, Scott Karp wrote about this in a blog post entitled Technorati Top 100 Is Changing Radically which was followed up by a blog post entitled Get on MSN Spaces in Asia and watch the link-love pile up. Sort of by Chris Edwards.

Both blog posts are interesting because the authors refuse to believe that it is possible for blogs they haven't heard of from Asian countries like China and Japan to be more popular than A-list technology bloggers like Dave Winer. In his post, Chris Edwards points out that the incoming links for blogs like M¥$ŤěяĬǾũ§ ĢÎѓĻ contain blogs that only link to the Space via the Recently Updated Spaces module. On an initial glance this seems to be true. When Technorati first started tracking MSN Spaces we realized this module would be a problem and added rel='nofollow' on all links to spaces from this module. This means that search engines and web crawlers should not consider these links as 'votes' for the site for page ranking purposes.

Ignoring that particular space, there are still a number of spaces in the Technorati Top 100 whose most recent links don't come from the Recently Updated Spaces module. For example, check out the incoming links to http://spaces.msn.com/MSN-SA, http://spaces.msn.com/atiger and http://spaces.msn.com/members/thespacecraft (MSN Spaces team blog).

As much as it seems to bother some technology geeks, a number of blogs hosted on MSN Spaces are more popular than so-called A-list technology bloggers.

From the Reuters article Microsoft heads to college to pitch Windows Live we get the following excerpt

The decision to outsource the University of Texas-Pan American's 17,000 student e-mail accounts to Microsoft Corp. for free was a simple one for Gary Wiggins, the school's top IT administrator.

Students hated the existing system and its limited storage, lack of features -- like a calendar, for example -- and cumbersome user interface.

"The legacy system we were moving from was so bad that the new features were very well-accepted," said Wiggins, who is the school's vice president for information technology.

The school could still create e-mail addresses ending in utpa.edu and many students were already familiar with Microsoft's Hotmail e-mail service.

The University of Texas Pan-American is not alone in linking up with Microsoft. The world's largest software maker has clinched deals to host e-mail systems for 72 institutions around the world and is in active discussions to add almost 200 more schools.

Microsoft sees its push onto college campuses as a way to promote its new Windows Live platform, an advertising-funded one-stop shop for Microsoft's Web services from e-mail to news to instant messaging to blogs.

The Windows Live @edu folks have done quite a bit over the past few months. I totally dig what we are doing with projects like theirs and Windows Live Custom Domains. I've actually started factoring in their scenarios when thinking about the next generation of Windows Live communication services we'll be building. The more Windows Live services we get to participate in this the better. Being able to give people email and IM accounts using the my own domain is a great first step but there are a bunch more things I'd like to see. 

One of the devs on Windows Live Favorites just snuck me the following screenshot

Sweet, huh?