I was just reading the blog post entitled $40,000 Is a Lot of Dollars on the Windows Live Messenger team's blog and saw that we've announced the Invasion of the Robots contest. From the website

Microsoft is challenging developers worldwide to create conversational robots, or BOTs, for MSN® Messenger and Windows Live™ Messenger. The most original, useful robots collect $40,000 in total prizes.

Too bad, I'm not eligible to enter the contest. $40,000 sounds like a nice chunk of change for a summer's worth of coding.

 

2006 looks like another good year for superhero movies. I just saw X-Men: The Last Stand and I'm looking forward to Superman Returns and My Super Ex-Girlfriend. I love the annual summer movie season and this year has been pretty decent so far for movies.  Below is a brief list of movies I've seen this year with a mini-review and a rating.

• Thank You For Smoking (***** out of *****): Excellent satire. Hilarious because you know it is true. The only dark spot was Katie Holmes who just seems unbelievable in any role outside of Dawson's Creek. She ruined Batman Begins for me as well.
  

• Mission: Impossible 3 (**** out of *****): An action packed adrenaline rush. Definitely the best movie in the series.
  

• Ice Age: The Meltdown (**** out of *****): As funny as the original. I like how the movie was about global warning but they managed to not include any lectures on the topic in the movie.
  

• RV (**** out of *****): Funny, if you liked Chevy Chase's vacation movies from years past. I did.
  

•  X-Men: The Last Stand (*** out of *****): Not as action packed as the second movie in the series. Having two main plotlines(Jean Grey's Phoenix Saga and a cure for mutants) instead of a single theme didn't help. They definitely tried to go out with a bang but in the final seconds of the movie you could tell that they left the door open for more sequels even if this is the "Last Stand". Lame.
  

• The Brothers Grimm (** out of *****): This movie was ridiculously bad, I'm stunned Matt Damon agreed to be in this crap. I didn't bother to finish it.
  

• Elizabethtown (** out of *****): Besides the fact that there seemed to be little on-screen chemistry between Kirsten Dunst and Orlando Bloom, this movie was trying too hard to tug at our heart strings. Go watch The Family Stone instead.
  

• Date Movie (* out of *****): Rule #1 of parody moies, don't make a parody that is less funny than the original.
  

What movies have you seen this year that are worth seeing and what would you advise that I avoid given my ratings above?

 

Torsten and I have started working on RSS Bandit regularly again. Last weekend I fixed a bunch of bugs including the problem that prevented IE 7 from importing OPML files from RSS Bandit. I've gotten a few emails from folks at work about that particular issue so I thought it would be good to knock that issue out early. This morning, I checked-in support for the Atom Thread Extensions which means I can now see comment counts and view comments inline on Sam Ruby's blog.

One change we're planning to make is to switch to using a full-fledged text search engine to power the search feature of RSS Bandit. Currently, we load all the text in memory and use the .NET Framework's string comparison operators to find the target text. We want to move to a model where files on disk are indexed in the background and we don't have to have stuff in memory to search it. This should significantly improve the memory consumed by RSS Bandit.

We've investigated a couple of options for our search solution. My first thought was integrating with MSN Windows Desktop Search. After exchanging some mail with various members of the team, I decided that this wouldn't meet our needs for a number of reasons

• Users will need to have Windows Desktop Search installed so we either need to figure out how to bundle it with RSS Bandit or disable the feature if it is not installed.
  
• The indexing service is file-centric. However we need to index individual RSS/Atom items within the cached RSS/Atom feeds on disk. This means we'll have to change our model to storing one file per RSS/Atom item which could lead hundreds to thousands of files per feed.
  
• The biggest gotcha was that making the indexer understand the structure of RSS/Atom feeds requires writing a custom IFilter which involves gnarly C++ coding then dealing with hairy COM<->.NET interop issues. Not exactly the kind of work one wants to do in their free time.
  

After further investigation we've settled on Lucene.NET which doesn't have any of the aforementioned problems. However we have been dealing with some issues that could either be bugs or just a misunderstanding of how the APIs should be used. We'll keep you posted. 

 

In his blog post entitled Announcing Windows Live Gadget SDK James Lau writes

I am very excited to bring you the first public release of the Windows Live Gadget SDK today! You can start using this SDK right now to build Gadgets that run on Live.com...But as many features as we are adding to Live.com, the site is still very much a Gadget platform for you developers out there to build on. We rely on you to build rich and interesting Live Gadgets that we haven't thought of, and to build a strong ecosystem around this platform. Live.com is still in Beta today, but it promises to be one of the most popular Internet destinations when we launch later this year. You can leverage on the high traffic site to extend services beyond your web site by building Gadgets that live on Live.com.

Although we are releasing the SDK today, the Gadget platform and APIs are still changing. And we want to listen to your ideas and feedback to help us build a better platform. Some of the things that we know we need to work on are:

1. Unified Gadget model - we want to enable developers to write a Gadget once and have it run on both Vista Sidebar and on the web, maybe even in other environments.
2. Allow 3rd party gadgets to change header and footer - today, all 3rd party Gadgets are hosted within and iframe and do not have access to the title, title icon and footer.
3. Make calling web services easier - this is self-explanatory.
4. Better Settings model - there is no standard way to do settings today for 3rd party Gadgets. We would like to move to a more declarative model.
5. Better Localization model - we provide API for you to find out the query the current locale but we don't provide much other support otherwise. This is not a big problem for most Gadgets, but it would be nice for more advanced Gadgets.

I can probably think of 5 or 6 others, but I'd rather have you tell me what you think are the important things you want to see.

I've been waiting for the Gadgets SDK to ship for a while so I could rewrite my MSN Spaces Photo Album gadget and turn it into an article. Expect to see an article about this from me before the end of next month. Kudos to James, Scott Isaacs and the rest of the gadgets gang for getting this out. 

 

If you are a developer interested in building applications or mashups with Windows Live APIs then you should keep an eye on http://dev.live.com. This will be a complimentary site to the Windows Live developer center on MSDN. The site hasn't launched yet but we already have some content on there such as the Virtual Earth interactive SDK. Expect more details to seep out the closer we get to TechEd 2006. In the meantime, you can keep an eye on Ken Levy's blog to get the skinny.

Having a developer center on MSDN and a separate community-centric site hosted on live.com is something I proposed a couple of months ago. This model has seemed to work for http://msdn.microsoft.com/aspnet and http://www.asp.net where the former site is where official documentation and downloads live while the latter is where you find screencasts, forums and other more interactive content. I expect there will be a bunch of crosslinking between http://dev.live.com and http://msdn.microsoft.com/live once both sites get rolling along.

PS: It's kinda crazy seeing how many recommendations from my thinkweek paper are actually being implemented. I definitely will be writing another one this fall.

 

From the press release MSN Spaces Now Largest Blogging Service Worldwide we learn

REDMOND, Wash. — May 24, 2006 — MSN^® Spaces is the most widely used blogging service worldwide with more than 100 million unique visitors, according to data released today by comScore Networks Inc. of Reston, Va., an independent Internet audience measurement and consulting company.

comScore World Metrix’s proprietary audience report for April 2006 showed the total number of unique visitors to MSN Spaces has more than doubled in the past 12 months, from 41.65 million to 101 million.* Figures compiled by comScore Media Metrix indicate that during April 2006, nearly one in seven Internet users worldwide had visited MSN Spaces.

MSN Spaces allows consumers to create personal Internet sites where they can express themselves in a variety of ways and interact with the important people in their life. The service provides people with a place to create and update a Web log, or blog, as well as share photos, music playlists and more. For example, more than 6 million photos are uploaded to the service each day, with more than 2.5 billion photos uploaded since MSN Spaces launched as a beta service in December 2004.

It's quite cool realize that I've been working on the MSN Windows Live communications services platform team for about a year and a half building the world's most popular blogging service and supporting the worlds most popular instant messaging client to boot. I guess since we haven't rolled out the social networking features of MSN Spaces across the entire site, we can't be called the world's most popular social networking service. Yet.

Thanks to all our users who keep using our services and giving us great feedback. You rock. We have lots of good stuff planned for y'all in the coming months.

 

Greg Linden has a blog post entitled Early Amazon: Shopping Cart Recommendations where he writes

I loved the idea of making recommendations based on the items in your Amazon shopping cart. Add a couple things, see what pops up. Add a couple more, see what changes. The idea of recommending items at checkout is nothing new. Grocery stories put candy and other impulse buys in the checkout lanes. Hardware stores put small tools and gadgets near the register. But here we had an opportunity to personalize impulse buys. It is as if the rack near the checkout lane peered into your grocery cart and magically rearranged the candy based on what you are buying.
...
I hacked up a prototype. On a test site, I modified the Amazon.com shopping cart page to recommend other items you might enjoy adding to your cart. Looked pretty good to me. I started showing it around. While the reaction was positive, there was some concern. In particular, a marketing senior vice-president was dead set against it. His main objection was that it might distract people away from checking out -- it is true that it is much easier and more common to see customers abandon their cart at the register in online retail -- and he rallied others to his cause.

At this point, I was told I was forbidden to work on this any further. I was told Amazon was not ready to launch this feature. It should have stopped there. Instead, I prepared the feature for an online test. I believed in shopping cart recommendations. I wanted to measure the sales impact.

I heard the SVP was angry when he discovered I was pushing out a test. But, even for top executives, it was hard to block a test. Measurement is good. The only good argument against testing would be that the negative impact might be so severe that Amazon couldn't afford it, a difficult claim to make. The test rolled out
...
The results were clear. Not only did it win, but the feature won by such a wide margin that not having it live was costing Amazon a noticeable chunk of change. With new urgency, shopping cart recommendations launched.

On the O'Reilly Radar site, Marc Hedlund points to this post as an example company leadership that encourages employees to not only come up with innovations but go head-to-head with management to get them out to customers.

It's interesting how different people look at the same story. When I originally read the story, what jumped out to me was that Amazon must have a great A/B testing framework which allows them to measure such tweaks to the user experience of their site so accurately. Coincidentally, I just had lunch with one of the folks at work who is building a generic A/B testing framework for Windows Live, MSN and third party developers; the Microsoft Experimentation Platform.

I wonder how many web companies have the infrastructure to test and measure the kind of change Greg prototyped at Amazon on their website today? Probably not a lot. We should fix that.

 

From the Microsoft press release Microsoft Introduces New Version of Windows Live Local we learn

REDMOND, Wash. — May 23, 2006 — Microsoft Corp. today announced the third release of Windows Live™ Local, the company’s online local search and mapping service that gives people the ability to quickly find maps, directions and local search information that is layered on top of rich, immersive aerial photography.
...
New Sharing Capabilities

The following new capabilities in the online service enable the seamless sharing of localized knowledge:

•	Real-time traffic flow. Customizable driving directions are now even more useful with the addition of real-time traffic flow and incident reporting provided by Traffic.com. This functionality will be available only in the U.S. release.
•	Collections. Social networking functionality allows customers to create lists of favorite landmarks and locations, attach personal photos and save them to a Scratchpad. Collections can be saved, recalled later, “permalinked,” and shared with friends and community in e-mail or through their MSN® Spaces blog.
•	Integration with Windows Live Messenger. Sharing maps and location information from within Windows Live Messenger chats is easier. Users begin a sharing session from the Actions menu. People sharing a chat session can see and interact with the same Windows Live Local map and benefit from a shared mapping and local search experience.

Integration With Microsoft Office Outlook

Also being released today is Windows Live Local Add-in for Microsoft Office Outlook. This add-in introduces Windows Live Local mapping capabilities to the Outlook Calendar, enabling Outlook users to find and print maps and directions to meeting locations from within Outlook...This add-in is available for users of Outlook running on Windows^® XP and Outlook 2003 and can be downloaded free of charge from http://outlook.local.live.com.

New Tools for Businesses and Developers

Virtual Earth map control was also released today, enabling developers to bring the same great mapping, imagery and local search capabilities into their business applications and "mashups" (Web applications that seamlessly combine content from more than one source). Virtual Earth map control is available to all developers free of charge for limited use and can be licensed for commercial service and support along with the rest of the Virtual Earth platform components. Windows Live Local is built on the Virtual Earth platform, and includes Virtual Earth map control. Key new features include support for address lookups and driving directions, improved local search functionality, and the ability to easily display standard data sets and Windows Live Local user Collections.

Expansion of Windows Live Local Into and the U.K.

Following last year’s launch of Windows Live Local in the U.S., its arrival, along with that of the MSN Virtual Earth platform, in the U.K. and Canada is evidence of Microsoft’s ongoing commitment to provide this set of services in new markets and regions. Customers in these countries will experience similar high-quality local search and driving directions capabilities currently available in the U.S. Features such as bird's-eye-view imagery, improved aerial views and real-time traffic will be included in future releases and updates. Bird’s-eye-view imagery, also known as oblique imagery, is an image from an angled view taken from a range of 3,000 to 3,500 feet. The perspective offers the customer a unique view of a given area at superior resolution.

The Virtual Earth folks just keep cranking out releases at a great pace. The traffic flow information is something I've been dying to get so that I don't have to get directions from Windows Live Local and then have to go to the Seattle Area Trafic page to see what traffic looks like. Adding the bird's eye imagery to countries besides the U.K. is pretty cool too. I wonder if I'll ever get bird's eye imagery of Lagos.

On a side note, our team worked on the user collections feature with the VE folks. The cool thing about being a platform team is that we are like sand on the beach we get in everything. ;)

 

As someone who was raised in the third world, I can't help but shake my head at articles like Study: Obesity rises faster in poor teens which begins

Older American teenagers living in poverty have grown fatter at a higher rate than their peers, according to research that seems to underscore the unequal burden of obesity on the nation's poor.

"Today the percentage of adolescents age 15-17 who are overweight is about 50 percent higher in poor as compared to non-poor families, a difference that has emerged recently," said Johns Hopkins' sociologist Richard Miech, the study's lead author.

Being poor and being overweight seems like an oxymoron to me. Or at least it was when I was growing up. You gotta love America, where the poor are overweight and people go hunting on a full stomach. :)
 

I've been reading some interesting conspiracy theories about why some recent Microsoft product launches have missed the boat on targetting features of interest to tech geeks.

In his post Microsoft's lack of action will slow Podcasting Growth Todd Cochrane writes

Well it is pretty obvious that Microsoft did not get Podcasting support built into Windows Media Player 11 and all I can say is that they obviously blew it. I have been debating what to say for a few days. My summation is not fit to print, what I really don't understand is how they could have been so stupid.

They had a opportunity with Windows Media Player 11 to get in the game, I can guarantee that their inaction will slow the growth of podcasting in a big way. But it makes sense Podcasting does not make them any money, if I were a betting man I bet MTV had something to say in the process and likely killed any podcasting integration as it would have made the URGE network a lesser value.

In his post How Internet Explorer Stifles Microsoft Devanshu Mehta writes

Microsoft has chosen the growth of IE over every other division in the company for 10 years now. Windows versions from 95 onwards have suffered enough. Now, the company’s IE-centric view of its business is hurting younger divisions of the company that have a chance of becoming a major force as the company looks to take on Google...It all began when MSN announced their AdCenterGoogle AdWords- sells text-based, contextual, per-click advertising for MSN properties on the internet. Curious, I went to sign up for an account...I was more curious in Microsoft’s method, their design and approach as compared to my experience with AdSense. So I went to the MSN adCenter site and clicked to sign up. service which – similar to

Lo and behold:

Microsoft adCenter does not currently support the web browser you are using. Please sign in using Internet Explorer 6+. More about system requirements

Oh great! Another MS web site that does not work with Firefox. So I click on the phrase system requirements to find out what I would need. Would a Mac user like me have any recourse? Or did MS not want my business? It only got worse. The System requirements link did not work either! Not only could they not design a web site for my browser, they couldn’t even manage to create a link to their requirements page that I could click on!

Unlike Devanshu and Todd, I don't think there are sinister conspiracy theories for why two Microsoft products were released and ignored features of interest to the geek demographic. In every product release, you have a limited amount of resources and time in which to apply those resources to your next version. This means that you tend to focus on features that will provide the most bang for the buck and may ignore features that have limited appeal such as supporting a browser which is used by 8% of the market or a media subscription model is only used by 1% of internet users. I don't always agree with the practice of deciding on features based on market penetration statistics but I can understand when product teams make such decisions. I suspect that is more likely the cause of these omissions than some nefarious collusion between MTV and the Windows Media team or some plot to ensure IE's market dominance by having Windows Live services require only that browser.

Disclaimer: The post above is my own personal opinion and does not reflect the opinions, intentions or strategies of my employer or the Microsoft product teams referenced.