Nathan Weinberg who writes the Inside Google blog has a blog entry entitled Screw YouTube where he writes

Miel’s quit YouTube. Considering he introduced me to the service, which I began to love, contribute to, and trumpet as the next great success story, you’d think I’d be surprised. Not even a little.

See, I got kicked off YouTube over two months ago. The reason? Contributing to the success of their service. I uploaded a good number of videos to YouTube, almost none of which I owned the copyright to, all of which I got from other sources on the internet. My first video, the “banned” Xbox 360 ad, was for a time the second most watched video on YouTube, with close to two million viewings.

On February 24, I received two emails, detailing how a video I had posted, a Saturday Night Live sketch in which President Bush asks a Santa Dick Cheney for an Xbox 360, had been rejected due to a third party notification of infringement.

Anyway, I’m done with YouTube, almost. It is clear they have no interest in preserving a digital archive of video content for the future, and that I cannot rely on them for posterity...I do have one thing left to do: Ruin YouTube. Since it is so easy to get someone kicked from YouTube, I am going to launch an assault on the service...Every day, I will destroy at least one account. I will only target those with copyright infringing content. When I am done, the only popular videos on YouTube will be those with zero commercial value. We will see how well the service does without the Daily Show and South Park entire episodes that are its real bread and butter.

I am extremely surprised at such a vindictive and destructive response by Nathan Weinberg to what I see as a reasonable act on the part of YouTube. From my perspective, YouTube is a video sharing service which is likely to make a bunch of money [via ads] serving content that doesn't belong to them. Even if it wasn't illegal I personally think this is unethical. YouTube shouldn't be making money off of TV shows like Daily Show and South Park instead of the creators and/or owners of the copyright on these shows. I find it commendable that the folks at YouTube are trying to make sure they don't become a leech on the system and instead are a way to provide an avenue for long tail content which you cannot find via traditional broadcast media. Of course, this is just common sense on the part of the YouTube folks since they want to avoid the same mistakes made by Napster.

On the flip side I can't help but remember Danah Boyd's excellent paper, Friendster lost steam. Is MySpace just a fad? which argues that one of the reasons that Friendster lost steam is that it failed to recognize and bow down to the wishes of core members of its user base. This lead to alienation and outright hostility from users who were once major users and proponents of the service. Reading Nathan Weinberg's post, I wonder of YouTube is going down the same path. 

 

Danny Sullivan of the Search Engine Watch journal has a blog post entitled Google Worried About Microsoft's Browser Advantage? What Advantage? where he writes

I am nauseatingly exhausted by idea that Microsoft will conjure up some magical method of yanking people into its MSN Windows Live Whatever You Want To Call It search service via the Windows operating system or the Internet Explorer browser. Microsoft has failed for years to be successful in this, which is why it's amazing anyone would still believe it.

In the longer version of this post for Search Engine Watch members, I revisit the tired facts in more depth:

• How search has been integrated into Windows and Internet Explorer since 1996 but failed to help Microsoft.
   
• How even when MSN Search was made the default choice by 2001, Google still rose in traffic share.
   
• How putting the search box into the "chrome" of the browser doesn't necessarily mean Microsoft will have a major win this time.
   
• How search via toolbars still remain the minority of the way searches happen.

Meanwhile, skip past the business aspects. What about the consumer issue of choice? The New York Times writes of Google's preferred solution:

The best way to handle the search box, Google asserts, would be to give users a choice when they first start up Internet Explorer 7. It says that could be done by asking the user to either type in the name of their favorite search engine or choose from a handful of the most popular services, using a simple drop-down menu next to the search box. The Firefox and Opera browsers come with Google set as the default, but Ms. Mayer said Google would support unfettered choice on those as well.

Sure, I can get behind the "give people a choice from the beginning" idea. But if Google wants Microsoft to do that, then Google should make it happen right now in Firefox, which pretty much is Google's surrogate browser. If this is the best way for a browser to behave, then Google should be putting its weight on Firefox to make it happen. And Google should also ensure it does the same with Dell, where it has a partnership that I believe makes it the default search engine on new Dell computers.

There definitely has been a bunch of interesting commentary on this topic. Check it out on tech.memeorandum.
 

Omar Shahine has a blog post entitled From two to one where he writes

Well, one of my philosophies, and something I think our team shares is Don’t piss off the customer.

How do you piss off the customer?

1. Give them a 2 MB inbox
2. Don’t save their sent mail, or make it difficult to do so, and then delete their sent mail after 30 days.
3. Make their inbox about advertising instead of about their email
4. Have crappy Quality of Service.

Sound familiar? It sure does to me. All of these things are anti-customer. What’s the point of offering a service that’s anti-customer? I sure as heck have no intention of working on a service like that. I never would have taken the job that I did if I didn’t know and feel that everyone around me was driven and motivated to fix all of these things, and we have been working on all of these since day I started this job.

Starting next month we are reducing the number of advertising from two graphical ads to a single ad in the inbox. The skyscraper will be gone from Windows Live Mail! I hope people see this as an olive branch from us to the user, and the advertiser. The users will be happier and more engaged, and the advertisers will ultimately benefit in the end. This change and its impact is an investment that we believe is a smart one to make.  Everyone in MSN has been supportive of this decision and we wouldn’t be making it if we didn’t feel that it was the right thing to do and better for all of us in the long term.

One of the best things about working on Windows Live is that on almost every team I've worked with there are people like Omar who totally get it. The number one priority for people building consumer services is making users happy. Now if only Omar and crew can get me some of the features from the Yahoo! Mail beta such as full support for Firefox and tabbed browsing within the in-browser mail client I may just retire my @yahoo.com email address.  

 

I'm going on vacation to Las Vegas in the next few days so I'm going to be heads down trying to wrap up some work before I leave. Expect blogging to be light over the next week or so. In the meantime, here are some links I found interesting which folks can chew over while I'm gone

1. MSN: Another Quarter Closer To Irrelevant:  My favorite quote "why any one company wants to have $50 billion in revenue and compete with IBM and Oracle on one end and Google, Time Warner, and Sony on the other is beyond me".

2. New Microsoft browser raises Google's hackles: Microsoft talking about spending billions "Winning the Web", Google talking antitrust because of browser defaults. I guess Bugs Bunny was right...this means war. Pass the popcorn.

3. How it works: FAQ on reviews, promotions, job changes, and surviving re-orgs: If you are a new hire interested in climbing the corporate ladder at Microsoft [or any other big company] you should print out that comment. I am surprised by how many of my peers still haven't figured a bunch of this stuff out.

4. Steve Rider Moving On: Steve Rider, original developer for start.com/live.com, has left to join a startup founded by Hadi Partovi who was the original manager who greenlighted and incubated the start.com project. At this rate, I wouldn't be surprised if Sanaz dipped before the year was up.

5. Google's GData, MySQL, and the Future of on-line Databases: I think GData is hot. I'd like us to use this as a building block for some of the developer platform stuff we are doing for Windows Live. Unfortunately, I'll likely have to contend with NIH. I'll worry about this when I get back from Vegas.

 

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. 

*sigh*

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.

I can't wait.