Steve Rubel has a blog post entitled Dissecting Windows Live PR with Data where he uses the infamous Alexa traffic chart which has become popular among bloggers and other amateur pundits to dissect the populariity of a website. Specifically he writes

According to Alexaholic there was a lag between these news events and when the site became a regular visit for many consumers. In other words, it took Windows Live a considerable amount of time following the launch to build any kind of critical mass. (A caveat here. Alexa data is questionable when measuring true traffic data because it amounts for a small subset of the total browsing public.  However, the overall trends it shows I feel are bankable.)

I've noticed that quite a few folks have misinterpreted the traffic spike within the past month for the live.com domain in Alexa. If you take a deeper look at the Traffic Details for Live.com you'll notice the following data

• login.live.com - 46%
• mail.live.com - 38%
• ideas.live.com - 6%
• live.com - 4%
• local.live.com - 2%
• help.live.com - 1%
• expo.live.com - 1%
• safety.live.com - 1%
• Other websites - 1% 

That's right, the largest chunk of the traffic for the live.com domain is split between the Passport Windows Live ID login page which is now being used by most MSN and Windows Live services when signing in. The second largest slice is for the Windows Live Mail beta. I don't think one can draw any conclusions on the 'adoption' or popularity of Windows Live based on this data.

My buddy Joshua Allen has a blog post entitled Was WS-* a Failure? where he writes

Dare excerpts Yaron Goland, explaining how MSN uses POX instead of WS-* in many cases. It is very good to see MSFT employees no longer afraid to say that WS-* is sometimes not the right choice.

On the other hand, it's reasonable to say that WS-* met most of its objectives; and IMO has been a great success. Read this post from Miguel. Miguel makes the point that Java is still vendor-proprietary, in contrast to the way that .NET is ISO. IMO, one of the most important goals of WS-* was to break the stranglehold that J2EE had on the middleware/appserver market. Today, reading about Scott McNealy stepping down amid Sun financial troubles, it is hard to remember how dominant Sun used to be. But Sun is still very powerful in the enterprise, and I imagine it would be game over by now (with Sun/Oracle alliance being the clear winners) if Microsoft had not pushed WS-*. WS-* leveled the playing field, and gave both Microsoft and IBM ability to go head-to-head with Sun in app servers. Today, an Oracle/Microsoft alliance seems more realistic than Oracle/Sun.

So perhaps WS-* was the critical factor that liberated the Internet from a dark future of Sun/Java control, and enabled the new era of POX/HTTP to flourish.

That's an interesting perspective which I think is worth sharing. I also want to correct what seems like a misconception about Yaron's post. I'm not aware of many teams at MSN Windows Live that have eschewed using the WS-* family of technologies (SOAP/WSDL/XSD/etc) for Plain Old XML over HTTP (POX).  On my team, the distributed computing protocols we use are either SOAP or WebDAV. Most of the Windows Live teams whose back ends I'm familiar with also tend to use SOAP. The only upcoming change I can see for our team we have been flirting with the idea of using binary infosets instead of textual XML but still sticking with SOAP. I'm not sure whether we'll do it or not but that would be a compelling reason for taking the Windows Communications Foundation (aka Indigo) out for a spin. I see more dinners with Doug and Mike in my future.

On the other hand, the front end teams that actually build the web sites [as opposed to platform teams like mine] who use AJAX techniques seem to lean towards using JSON as opposed to XML. I guess that would make those services POJ not POX. :)

When I think about POX or RESTful Web services in the context of my day job, it is usually focused on the work we are doing for the Windows Live developer platform. I ask myself questions like "If we were to expose something equivalent to the Flickr API for MSN Spaces, what would be the best choice for developers?". For such questions, RESTful APIs seem like a no-brainer.

One of the cool things about my day job is that I get to work with over a dozen teams all over Microsoft who are interested in consuming our Web services. This means that sometimes I get juicy scoops which I have to sit on for months before I can talk about them. One example, is the feature described in Joe Friend's blog post Blogging from Word 2007 where he writes

We've been working late into the nights and very late into our development schedule for Word 2007 and we have a special goody for all you bloggers in Beta 2 of Office 2007. That's right blog post authoring from Word. This is a very late breaking feature and is definitely beta software.
...
This is pretty standard stuff if you've ever used one of the many blog post authoring applications. In Beta 2 we support MSN Spaces, SharePoint 2007 (of course), Blogger, and Community Server (which is used for blogs.msdn.com). You can also set up a custom account with services that support the metaweblog API or the ATOM API. All the blog providers seems to interpret these APIs a bit different so there kinks we're still working out. But the basics should work in Beta 2. We hope to add a few more services to the list before we ship. The Word blog authoring feature is extensible and we will publish information so that blog providers can insure that their systems work with Word.

I met with Joe's team a few months ago and was pleased to hear they were going to add this feature to Word 2007. I've been working with them on this feature for a while and now that we actually have an official blog posting tool coming out of Microsoft, it's time for me to start investing more time in looking at exposing more of our blog-related features via an API.

This is definitely cool news. If you are a blogger that uses Microsoft Word, you definitely need to give it a try. They've gone out of their way to build a product that is easy to use and doesn't stomp on your expectations of a blogging tool (i.e. no nasty HTML for one). Mad props to Krista, Joe Friend and all the other folks who worked on getting this out the door.

I smiled today as I read Mark Nottingham's post where he described vendors of WS-* technologies as Vendor-pires. However what I found even more interesting was the following comment by Yaron Goland which states

First of all who says that the vampires are necessarily happy with WS-*? I leave it as an exercise to the reader to figure out why my group's VP (Brian Arbogast) goes around giving speechs about just using plain HTTP.

Second of all who says even the vampires can talk with each other in any useful way?!?!?! At least three people with text on this webpage know the answer to that question from hard real world experience.

Third, what to do without WS-*? Gosh, I don't know, how about ship useful code? I hear that HTTP stuff is pretty cool. If anyone cares you can peruse a bunch of blog entries on my website (www.goland.org) where I walk through a number of key enterprise scenarios and show that nothing more than HTTP+XML is required.

And yes, I still work for Microsoft. In fact, one of my jobs is to write the best practices for the design of all external interfaces for Windows Live. What you will see is a lot of HTTP, microformats, URL encodings and XML. My instructions are clear, first priority goes to simple HTTP interfaces..

Oh and here is a thought that an unnamed Microsofty gave me. The new shlock movie (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0417148/) Snakes On A Plane (SOAP). Just a thought.

Yaron Goland is another one of the folks who'll be working on the Windows Live developer platform along with others like Danny Thorpe, Ken Levy and myself (virtually). I've been thinking that there is a big disconnect between the folks who sell the technologies and the folks who use them even within Microsoft. I've been slowly trying to bridge that gap but we definitely still have a long way to go as an industry.

Richard MacManus has a blog post entitled AIM Pages - AOL breaking down the Walled Garden where he writes

I'm told by my sources that it's still in the testing phase, nevertheless it *is* live on the Web. There is a lot more functionality to come though. For example PaidContent wrote recently:

"Unlike walled-garden Classic AOL, AIM Pages is built on giving users ways to collect and connect to various parts of the web — and each other — from one base. For instance, users can add a flickr module. “Our approach is not to get you to leave flickr but to super-set your stuff from flickr,” explained Parkins. Other modules focus on AOL content, like the Top 11 list from AOL Music; options will be limited at first with more modules being introduced on a rolling basis."

As Mike said, the design is very modular - and that extends not only to internal AIM Pages functionality, but also to external web services modules. From the AIM Pages homepage, click on 'Create your profle'. You will be taken to your profile page, click 'Add Modules' and then you will see a 'Module Gallery' at the top-left. The most interesting part in that gallery is the 'Under Construction' selection. It currently features modules like delicious, netflix and youtube - but there's a whole lot more to come!

Check out AOL's test 'playground' I Am Alpha to see what I mean. In there you'll see modules for popular web services such as: MySpace, YouTube, del.icio.us, Flickr, Amazon, eBay, MapQuest, Netflix, AOL apps, RSS feeds, plus plenty of other test modules. Now admittedly these are all very alpha quality modules (as the name implies), but it shows that AOL is ahead of the curve in integrating external services into its social networking offering.

This sounds like regurgitated press release pablum. Both MSN Spaces and Yahoo! 360 allow users to integrate external services into their social networking offerings via RSS/Atom feeds. If you go to http://spaces.msn.com/darestestspace you'll see the RSS feed for this blog included in a sidebar. It is a nice touch to special case the feeds from specific services to provide a richer experience but it isn't a revolutionary step like Richard MacManus implies. 

As for whether this implies 'breaking down walled gardens', I don't see how it does. Can I export my AOL social network to MySpace? Can I talk to my AIM buddies from Yahoo! Messenger? Instead what this does is acknowledge that walled gardens exist. AIM Pages can't get people to export their data from these services so they do the next best thing by republishing the content via RSS feeds.

I sometimes joke at work that we could save a ton of money by having people upload their photos in Flickr and then use the RSS feeds to power the photo album feature in MSN Spaces. Yahoo! pays the image hosting costs while we get to show the ads on people's spaces. I bet we could even do all this via the Flickr API without people having to leave our user interface. Would that also be considered breaking down walled gardens? 

I expect a lot of services to rethink their use of RSS/Atom feeds as such repurposing becomes more popular.

In a blog post entitled AIM Pages Launches - First Impression  Mike Arrington of TechCrunch writes

AIM Pages, the new AOL Myspace competitor that we’ve been buzzing about for the last couple of weeks, launched this morning at aimpages.com.

First impression: The site is clean and organized (something I’m not sure the Myspace crowd wants), and module based (about me, photos, etc.). Modules can be dragged to any point on the screen. It’s not working properly with Firefox (or possibly at all), which I imagine will be fixed. UPDATE: I am using Firefox 2.0 on a Mac, not 1.5. This may be the cause of my problems.

If AIM Pages launched today as a stand alone company with no affiliateion to AOL, I’d be ripping it apart. Personal publishing is very easy, and users have too many choices. Anything new really has to stand out, and AIM Pages doesn’t. AIM Pages is a slick looking Ajax product, but is not really raising the bar v. Myspace, Tagworld and others. I’m also dissapointed that it’s not working properly in Firefox. Now, the fact that your AIM Page will be prepopulated with your AIM buddies is a big competitive advantage, and I imagine AIM will have some level of success due to that asset.

In the reverse direction, according to the post MySpace IM is Live by Om Malik, MySpace is adding an integrated IM client to their social networking service. This same tack has also been taken by Yahoo with Yahoo! 360 and by Microsoft with MSN Spaces. The integration is beta in all of the aforementioned services but it seems clear that within a year that most of the major Web players will have a suite of social software services that will include IM, social networking, blogging, photo and media sharing as all part of a single integrated experience. So far, Google are the laggards in this space but I wonder how long it will take them to play catch up.

In the meantime, you can compare and contrast what a personal page looks like in all of the aforementioned services

1. http://spaces.msn.com/darestestspace/
2. http://www.aimpages.com/tenor/profile.html
3. http://360.yahoo.com/profile-oifn9.o6da.Tz.JDUSJEGMMj6ZQxnfhU279kmtOyttkPMw--
4. http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=76636812

Since I work on the Social Networking platform for Windows Live, I'm interested in people's observations about this convergence in social software applications. Holla at me. 

I stumbled on a post entitled Using Gmail for work from Rakesh Agrawal, President and CEO of Snapstream, about switching from Microsoft Outlook and Exchange to GMail for his work email. He writes

After going through my fourth or fifth Microsoft Exchange crash and countless Outlook problems (after 3 years!), I decided that I had had enough. For a little over a month, I've been using Gmail as my primary client for e-mail -- for work e-mail, for personal e-mail and everything in between. So far I love it, though I've discovered that there are also a few things that make it undesirable. Read on for the details...

The Benefits

For me, there have been countless benefits of running email in the network cloud and not on a local client on my PC. Let me count the ways...

• - No more crash-prone exchange server or outlook clients:
  
• - Access from literally any computing device with Internet access:
  
• - Gmail Mobile (m.gmail.com):
• - reliable and effective search:
• - spam filtering is really, really good
• - filtering is fast, simple (just like search):

The Downsides

• - E-mail accounts functionality could be a lot better:
• - m.gmail.com doesn't support "accounts":
  
• - No offline access:
• - It's not a local application:
• - Space limitations:
• - Formatting limitations:
• - Occasional hiccups of service:

Most of his complaints seem to be already fixed in existing versions of Exchange. I often access my Outlook mail using the Outlook Web Access functionality that has been a part of Exchange for years [and is the reason XMLHttpRequest exists in the first place]. In fact VPNing has been such a hassle for me at home that I often resort to a combination of OWA and the RPC over HTTP feature of Outlook 2003. I get mobile access fine from my Audiovox SMT 5600 phone which syncs both my mail and calendar which has quite literally changed my life. Of course, it does mean that I check work email when I shouldn't such as when I'm at airports supposedly on vacation.For search, I use Windows Desktop Search which works great. However it is a fair point that there is no decent equivalent if accessing mail from the Web or a mobile phone. 

I found this post via Nathan Weinberg who addresses the offline problem in his commentary on Rakesh's post by adding

So, how can Google address his caveats? The biggest seems to be an offline version of Gmail, something Google has not indicated it is developing. I think the Windows Live Mail Desktop solution is the way to go, designing a light, yet very well featured desktop email client that is clearly designed to work in conjunction with web-based email, not as a replacement.

I totally agree with that approach because it marries the best of the Web and the desktop instead of one trying to replace the other. This topic points out the kind of interesting tensions that I believe exist at Microsoft today. The Exchange team should look at posts like Rajesh and wonder how to stay competitive with Web-based solutions but I suspect they also wonder if products like Windows Live Mail and Office Live aren't cannibalizing their business. Ideally, we should offer a continuoum of products which should include Web-based offerings for companies that don't want the hassle/cost of managing their own mail servers to enterprise offerings for the bigcos who can't fathom why any business wouldn't want all their mail to be processed and stored in-house. This seems to be the tack that we are taking today, which is great, but it definitely leads to interesting conversations.

One size doesn't fit all. Always remember that. 

NOTE: I inserted the link to the Windows Live Mail Desktop team's blog to Nathan's post.

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. :)