It seems news of an upcoming Windows Live service got leaked before it was intended to be announced. From the blog post entitled Here we are - Windows Live QnA! we get

A little background…
Once upon a time, there was an intern at Microsoft who had an idea for getting people answers to the questions they needed. He nicknamed it the “hyperengine” and everyone in Web Search used it for internal projects; it was way cool. Then, when he went back to college, the internal discussions started. Shouldn’t we be building a real one?

Grassroots momentum continued and eventually Windows Live QnA was born. We hired the intern back (yes,he graduated) and got another college hire to be core developers of this new idea  -- creating a question-answer engine driven by the people.

Why do it?
Windows Live QnA gives us an opportunity to showcase unique knowledge – provided, filtered, rated and approved by human beings – not available anywhere else.  QnA allows people to ask questions of their knowledgeable friends, family, classmates at school, professional and community peers in a way that others around the world can benefit from the answers.  We want to build the biggest, friendliest and most helpful community of smart humans the world has ever seen.  Some people will love the fame and recognition that answering questions will bring them; others will appreciate getting answers quickly and easily.
....
Topics will range from business, health, arts, sports, technology and more.
• Does ivy kill trees?
•  What's a good, inexpensive moving company in Seattle?
• Any great ideas on getting motivated to exercise?
• What’s the best chocolate chip cookie recipe?
• Can I hook up an Xbox to a PC monitor instead of a TV?
....
 Key features include: 
•       In a one-to-many system, consumers may pose questions to the Windows Live QnA community, thereby creating a store of human knowledge containing facts, opinions and experiences on topics ranging from business, health, arts, sports, technology and more.
•       People then can rate answers and reputation-based scoring is available so you and others know which sources are most reputable.
•       Questions are tagged so others can easily find similar or related questions and answers to learn from
•       The ability to mark and remove inappropriate content

Just before I left for Nigeria last year, I remember a series of meeting I had with Brady Forrest and Nishant Dani about this project. The meetings were mainly exploratory but proved interesting enough that I actually moved my trip out a few days so that Brady and Nishant could get all their questions answered before I left the country.

It's almost a year later and the project is a lot further along with some nice hiring coups such as getting Betsy Aoki on board. Unfortunately once Yahoo! Answers shipped I realized that whenever Windows Live QnA got out the door people would call it a "me too" offering. From Mike Torres's post about Windows Live QnA I see that Jeremy Zawodny of Yahoo! did just that in his link blog.

Right now, I think the question and answer offerings from the various big search providers (Google Answers, Yahoo! Answers and Windows Live QnA) will need to significantly change the game to distinguish themselves. So far the main differentiator between Yahoo! Answers and Google Answers has been price (it's free). However we'll need to kick things up a notch for Windows Live QnA.

There is definitely a lot of room for improvement in this space. I can't help but remember the Web Search History: Before Google Answers and Yahoo Answers There Was "Answer Point" From Ask Jeeves post from the Search Engine Watch blog which outlined some of the tough problems in launching a user-powered Q&A service in a mail from Jim Lanzone, Senior Vice President of Search Properties at Ask Jeeves. He wrote  

I commend Yahoo for joining sites like Wondir in trying the free model again. Beyond the obvious issues like spam, I can share a few challenges with community-driven question-answering that we experienced.

First, as a free service, there was little incentive for people to answer other people's questions. I think the dynamic of question-answering is/was different than other user-generated content. With user reviews, like those found on Amazon, TripAdvisor or Citysearch, people are playing "critic", a long-standing model from newspapers and magazines. With Wikipedia, participants are creating specialized content, in one centralized location, for the masses to consume. With De.icio.us and Flickr, tagged items are made public, but the initial motive is borne at least somewhat from self-interest: organization of bookmarks and photos. With question-answering, on the other hand, it takes a true good samaritan to spend the time to provide answers to one-off questions for people you don't know. (And an even better samaritan to perform this good deed repeatedly, over time, for free.) Meanwhile, if you do it for ego, your answers get lost in the system pretty quickly. So neither motive was that compelling. We observed that only a small group of "experts" took the time to answer questions for others.

Secondly, if not enough people provide answers, then you can't answer enough questions. This is a problem when search has such a long tail of queries, as we showed at Web 2.0. Most searches are unique. This is why search engines are so useful, even though relevance is far from perfect: we can cast a very broad net.

The notion of waiting for an answer is also in conflict with one of the biggest user needs in search: speed. Most things that people search for are things they want an answer to, or a solution for, almost immediately. In theory people will put in more effort to get a better answer, but in practice they seldom do. For example, 30% of users surveyed say they want advanced search, but only 1% of them ever use it. The same thing applied to AnswerPoint. It was usually just faster and easier for people to search normally, iterating on their searches, than to submit a question to the community and wait for an answer.

Lastly, there's the reason we created Smart Answers in the first place: people like to search from one box. Getting them to head to a different part of our site for results is always an uphill battle for any engine.

These are all issues the Windows Live QnA folks are aware of and are looking at innovative ways to tackle. It seems they are already going down the right path of tackling the third problem with the promise that Windows Live QnA will be an integrated aspect of Windows Live Search.

 

From the press release Windows Live Messenger Beta Now Available Broadly to Consumers for Download we learn

REDMOND, Wash. — May 9, 2006 — Microsoft Corp. today announced that the new Windows Live™ Messenger beta is available broadly to the public for download at the Windows Live Ideas Web site. The beta of Windows Live Messenger, which is the next generation of MSN^® Messenger, the most widely used instant messaging service with more than 230 million customers worldwide, includes customer-driven feature enhancements that make it even easier for consumers to stay in touch with the people and information that matter most to them. Windows Live Messenger was previously available for beta testing by invitation only. The beta also makes PC-to-phone calling available in six additional markets...

Some features include the following:

•	Windows Live Call with Verizon Web Calling service. With one click, users can go directly to the Windows Live Call feature and, through the Verizon Web Calling service, place affordable outbound local voice calls and domestic or international long-distance voice calls over the Internet..
•	Cordless phones designed exclusively for Windows Live Messenger. Beginning today, customers will be able to purchase phones from companies such as Uniden Corp. and Philips that make Windows Live Call available through the handset, which can be used to make landline and Internet phone calls.
•	Windows Live Contacts. Contact information is always current with Windows Live Contacts in Windows Live Messenger; users choose which contacts they want updated automatically. Windows Live Contacts are integrated and accessible across Windows Live Messenger, Windows Live Mail and MSN Spaces.
•	Unified contacts. Customers now have the ability to see and search all their contacts with the unified contact list accessible through Windows Live Messenger. Users can have up to 600 contacts, and easily search using the word wheel feature, which automatically sorts the contact list.
•	Sharing Folders. By simply dragging and dropping their files and personal photos of any size to their Windows Live Messenger window, customers can share them with family, friends and colleagues.
•	Offline instant message (IM). Customers can now send an IM to their offline contacts, who will receive the IM the next time they log in.
•	Video conversation. The free synchronized audio and video service in Windows Live Messenger, powered by Logitech International SA, allows customers to view and talk to their friends through their PCs in full-screen video with one push of a button using the webcams and broadband Internet connections.

I didn't work on any of the major features in this release except for Social Networking which isn't widely available yet and thus is omitted from the press release. By the way, the Friends List (the PR name of the social networking feature) is now available to our users from the Netherlands as well as Australian users. At this rate, I guess we'll have it rolled out worldwide by Christmas...JUST KIDDING!!! ;)

The next major release of Windows Live Messenger will have more features that I managed to get my hands on. At this rate, people may stop mistaking me for someone who works on the MSN Spaces team. 

 

I found a blog post entitled Called Out… by Al Billings who just left the Microsoft Internet Explorer team which is excerpted below in its entirety [in case it gets altered later]

Oops, looks like I made someone cranky…

I could respond to this in some detail but it isn’t worth the effort. Let’s just say that Dare has worked closely with the IE team on our RSS features. He was consulted, at least for his opinion, on much of the work. In spit of this, he makes a consistent public effort to talk shit about IE7 and its RSS support while the people that I have worked with, who care passionately about RSS and its role in IE, keep on talking to him internally since Dare works on a partner team affected by the work.

I find Dare to be a whiner and an unconstructive partner who burns bridges with people that he should be building them with instead. The fact that he gives little direct feedback (or confrontation) to coworkers on the IE team but will then turn around, the same day, and make snarky comments in his blog is not cool. In fact, I’ll be slightly bold and say it makes him look like a complete asshole.

Since I no longer have to work professionally with him in any capacity and this is my personal opinion, I don’t see a reason to pull any punches. With his attitude, he really should go get a job for the competition. He certainly doesn’t help the company he works for…

I have issues with how Microsoft has done many things but I have the utmost respect for the people that I have worked with, especially on the IE team. There are a lot of very intelligent and talented people there and I am glad that I had the opportunity to work with them.

For myself, it is time for a change. Part of it is motivatated by the desire that my wife and I have to live in the Bay Area and part of it is that I’ve worked at Microsoft for a month shy of nine years. It isn’t the same company that I started at but I don’t doubt it will survive. I’m at peace with that. I’m not so sure that Dare can say the same and, as was commented to me, it seems more likely that Dare is crafting his exit strategy and trying to make a name for himself. He’s no Scoble though so this seems a doomed adventure.

Last week, I got mail from some exec at Microsoft complaining about my blog. Today I read this tripe from Al Billings who has the gall to criticize my corporate loyalty as he ditches Microsoft for [supposed] greener pastures.

I'll write here the same thing I wrote to the exec that complained about. My blog is a personal weblog that precedes my time at Microsoft which will likely outlive my time as a Microsoft employee. In it I talk about things that affect my life such as my personal life, work life and interests. Since I work at a technology company and my interests are around technology, I sometimes talk about Microsoft technology and working at Microsoft. Since everything about Microsoft's technology and work life aren't perfect, sometimes these posts are critical.

If you don't like my blog then don't read it. If you think my blog is so bad for Microsoft, then [please] go ahead and complain to my management. They get enough complaints about my blog as it is, I'm sure there must be some threshold where they'll decide that receiving mail about my blog is more work than keeping me around. Then I'm sure you'll get your wish that I work at some competitor. :)

 

One way I can tell that I am approaching thirty is that I now spend more time watching VH1 than MTV. Not only do I feel too old to watch MTV whenever I happen to surf to that channel, I've felt that way for years. There are other ways things have slowly began to change as I settle into a long term relationship with someone who I believe is the one (to coin an overused cliché). The change that has been most unsettling for me is that I worry about money a lot more than I used to. Over four years ago, when I was fresh out of college I remember looking at my five figure salary and wondering what I'd do with all that money. Being single in a new city with no commitments [not even student loans] meant that I didn't really worry much about money. My friend Michael Brundage captured the feeling quite well in his much linked essay on Working at Microsoft where he wrote

It's hard for people who don't work at Microsoft's main campus to understand just how unreal the experience of working there can become. Some employees forget that most of the world doesn't have broadband wireless networking, high-end consumer electronics, luxury vehicles, and enough money that they don't need to live on a budget. Some employees spend so much time using Microsoft products, that they forget about the competition and/or lose touch with typical customers' needs.

As you grow older commitments begin to show up whether you want them to or not. I live with my girlfriend and she has kids. My mom retires this year and after having her come visit a few months ago, it is clear that I need to find a bigger place to stay. This means I've started worrying about house prices. I recently found out that median house prices in the Seattle area now hover at $419,000 which is a $100,000 more than what it was when I first moved here. A friend of mine just dropped half a million bucks for a house a few streets down from where I live. At first I thought that was crazy until I found out that the median house price in Queen Anne is $505,000. 

After Microsoft's recent stock plunge which resulted in an 11% loss in market value, it took me a while to realize that this affected my net worth by a couple of grand. I now realize that I should actually pay attention to my stock portfolio beyond whatever default actions seemed like a good idea when I was fresh out of college. Stock portfolio? Growing older does suck.

I now worry about the fact that people at work with titles like containing 'Vice President' and 'Chief X Officer' either read my blog or get complaints about it because it is too critical of Microsoft. I don't want my personal weblog to now place some glass ceiling on my career growth at Microsoft. It's bad enough that I'm black. ;)

Speaking of career growth, I saw some interesting comments to the post on the Mini-Microsoft blog entitled FAQ on reviews, promotions, job changes, and surviving re-orgs - Comment Repost. There were a lot of people who agreed with the somewhat cynical advice on how to deal with the review system and climbing up the corporate ladder at a place like Microsoft. There were other comments who described the advice as only being necessary for poorly performing bottom feeders that deserve to be fired. Given that I'm someone who would have benefited from this advice during my first couple of annual reviews at Microsoft, I guess that makes me a poorly performing bottom feeder that deserve to be fired. I remember the review where my naivete was shattered like it was yesterday. I had gotten a lower score than expected and was chatting with a coworker on how our reviews went. I didn't feel I got a clear idea on what I needed to improve on since my manager had made it seemed like I'd been doing a good job. To my surprise, my coworker responded that I had been called out as a role model during his review to which to aspire. The surprise was that this coworker got a better score than me. After a little bit of digging I realized that the corporate review process is primarily a popularity contest. The Microsoft practice of having a bunch of mid-level managers on a team argue about who deserves what score on the team means that anyone who (i) isn't visible to all the mid-level managers on the team and (ii) doesn't have a manager who's good at arguing on their behalf is going to get the short end of the stick. In many cases you can't do much about the latter but the former is completely under your control. For the most part, simply being good at your job doesn't guarantee you'll get a good review score. On a cynical note, it's hard to even define what being good at your job even means at a lowly individual contributor level sometimes. How easy is it to prove or disprove that the lowly developers and testers who work on white elephant projects like Longhorn Windows Vista are actually good at their jobs? Performance reviews at that level of granularity on such monster projects seem mostly subjective anyway. The repercussions of people's actions often can't be seen for years. Like the poster says, Mediocrity - It Takes a Lot Less Time and Most People Won't Notice the Difference Until it's Too Late. Being good at your job is important, however you also shouldn't expect that's all it takes to get a good review score. As I grow older, my lack of faith in human nature seems to grow by leaps and bounds. 

The good thing about going on vacation is that it gives you time to be introspective even if the introspection occurs amid the blare of slot machines and constant booze ups that is Las Vegas. :)

 

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.