According to Mike Arrington over at TechCrunch in the blog post entitled Major Google/Intuit Partnership there has been yet another major distribution/bundling deal between Google and a major software distributor. Mike writes

The Google services will be built into QuickBooks 2007, available this Fall, for U.S. customers only.

I sure hope there’s an easy way to turn this stuff off.

Update: Notes from Analyst call:

Eric Schmidt is talking about embracing the long tail of small businesses on the conference call. Less than half of Quickbooks businesses have an online presence. This will help them get online, he says. Businesses will be able to create an adwords account using pre-filled information from Quickbooks. If the business doesn’t have a website Google will create a notecard page for them. All businesses will be given a $50 credit to start. Google will also create a business listing for businesses for search on Google.com and Google Maps.

Intuit is also integrating Google Desktop (borderline Spyware) into Quickbooks. Thank God this is opt-in…but given that Quicken’s customers are not on average very web savvy, there is a very good chance that many small businesses will opt in without really understanding what they are doing (storing the contents of their hard drive on Google’s servers).

Google has been on a impressive rampage of distribution deals over the past year. It's made deals with AOL, Sun, Adobe, MySpace, Dell and now Intuit to distribute its software and services. This means it'll be even tougher for competitors like Yahoo and Microsoft to gain marketshare from it since it is buying up all the defaults and entry points into search and related services it can find.

A cunning yet expensive strategy. It'll be interesting to see how many more deals they'll make before their done locking up all the defaults they want.

Pete Cashmore has a blog post entitled MySpace: We’ll Crush YouTube where he writes

As if we needed more proof of MySpace’s intolerance of outside development, News Corp. chief operating officer Peter Chernin told investors at an industry conference today that since much of YouTube’s traffic comes from MySpace, it’s time to cut out the middle man. Chernin estimated that around 60-70% of YouTube’s visitors come from MySpace, and as a result he wants to ramp up MySpace Video, giving users less incentive to look elsewhere. But while the 60% figure might not be totally accurate, MySpace is definitely a catalyst for YouTube’s growth - they actually reported a dip in traffic when MySpace temporarily disabled YouTube embeds at the end of 2005 (they were forced to allow them again after a user revolt).

But it’s not just YouTube - Chernin expressed distaste for all the services that are feeding the MySpace beast: “If you look at virtually any Web 2.0 application, whether its YouTube, whether it’s Flickr, whether it’s Photobucket…almost all of them are really driven off the back of MySpace, there’s no reason why we can’t build a parallel business.” While I’m not convinced that Flickr gained success on the back of MySpace, Photobucket almost certainly did - ImageShack isn’t mentioned, but it also owes much of its success to America’s leading social network.

The sentiments indicate a very worrying trend: MySpace has stated its intention to clone the best tools, and Chernin believes that MySpace can equal or better the third party tools with in-house products.

Marshall Kirkpatrick sums things up in a post entitled MySpace: We don’t need Web 2.0 on TechCrunch where he states

To summarize: the COO of News Corp. says that Web 2.0 is leaching traffic off of MySpace, that they can build their own services to compete with any of it and that there’s going to be an increasingly aggresive commercial push on the site. That sounds both dangerously arrogant and like a real validation of fears that MySpace dependency is too risky for outside developers.

Om Malik had a piece in Business 2.0 yesterday titled Suddenly Everything’s Coming Up Widgets, where he said “Everyone’s a winner here: MySpace, because it becomes stickier; YouTube and Slide, because they get the traffic; and the user, because he or she gets it all on one page.” It sounds like MySpace’s owners may not want to play a game where everyone wins.

I find this quite surprising. One of the reasons MySpace is where it is today primarily because they stumbled upon the fact that providing a platform for gadgets/widgets allows for richer end user experiences than opening up APIs for viewing and creating content via Atom/RSS/MetaWeblog API which is what blogging sites have traditionally done when building a platform. To turn on the very developers and partner companies that are improving the user experience of your service seems like the road to folly. It's one thing to provide compting experiences to them and quite another to view them as leeches. At Microsoft, we know that the road to success is by building the best platform not just by building the best or most integrated applications. This is a lesson that history has borne out. 

This should be a blow to all those VC funded startups whose entire business model is building MySpace widgets. Not to worry, they can always switch to writing gadgets for Windows Live Spaces. ;)

I've probably mentioned that in my teenage years I was in a rap group with some friends from high school. Eventually, I became a computer geek and now work at Microsoft. However some of my friends kept at it and some of their friends have as well. Thanks to YouTube, I can now share their music with you

1. My name is... by Ikechukwu

2. Delicious by BigLo feat. 2shotz

It's great to see some of my friends living their dream. It's definitely made my day.

By the way, uploading videos to YouTube is ridiculously easy. Any Microsoft competitor in this space will have a hard act to follow. It will be interesting to see if YouTube ends up getting usurped from the #1 spot.

From the press release entitled Windows Live Services Reach Key Milestones we learn

REDMOND, Wash. — Sept. 11, 2006 — Microsoft Corp. today announced the release from beta of Live Search and of Live.com in 47 markets worldwide, and final availability of Live Local Search in the U.K. and the U.S. Microsoft also announced that Live Search will now power the Web search capability on MSN^®, the company’s media and entertainment portal, attracting more than 465 million unique users worldwide per month.
...
By using Live.com as their personal search home page, customers can harness the power of Live Search to find, customize and track news, images, video, RSS feeds and blogs across the Web. They can try it at http://www.live.com.

Live Local Search will offer increased availability of bird’s-eye imagery, improved mobile integration and functionality, and other user interface improvements and customization tools.

Additional details can be found on the Live Search and Live Local Search team blogs at http://livesearch.spaces.live.com and http://virtualearth.spaces.live.com, respectively. These services are now available in select international markets, in which feature availability and beta status will vary.

About MSN and Windows Live

MSN attracts more than 465 million unique users worldwide per month. With localized versions available globally in 42 markets and 21 languages, MSN is a world leader in delivering compelling programmed content experiences to consumers and online advertising opportunities to businesses worldwide. Windows Live, a new set of personal Internet services and software, is designed to bring together in one place all the relationships, information and interests people care about most, with enhanced safety and security features across their PC, devices and the Web. MSN and Windows Live will be offered alongside each other as complementary services. Some Windows Live services entered an early beta phase on Nov. 1, 2005; these and future beta updates can be found at http://ideas.live.com. Windows Live is available at http://www.live.com.

MSN is located on the Web at http://www.msn.com.

From the press release it looks like the Windows in Windows Live is silent. It's Live Search and Live Local not Windows Live Search and Windows Live Local. I guess that makes sense since the domain is http://www.live.com. Congratulations to all my friends in Live Search (mad props Sanaz) and Live Local (yaaay Steve Lombardi) now that their products are out of beta.

PS: The bit above highlighted in red is for the folks who may have been confused after reading Marshall Kirkpatrick's post on Techcrunch entitled Live.com leaving beta, replacing MSN search.

Over the weekend I stumbled on a blog post entitled Sex Baiting Prank on Craigslist Affects Hundreds which contains the following excerpt

On Monday, a Seattle web developer named Jason Fortuny started his own Craigslist experiment. The goal: "Posing as a submissive woman looking for an aggressive dom, how many responses can we get in 24 hours?"

He took the text and photo from a sexually explicit ad (warning: not safe for work) in another area, reposted it to Craigslist Seattle, and waited for the responses to roll in. Like Simon's experiment, the response was immediate. He wrote, "178 responses, with 145 photos of men in various states of undress. Responses include full e-mail addresses (both personal and business addresses), names, and in some cases IM screen names and telephone numbers."

In a staggering move, he then published every single response, unedited and uncensored, with all photos and personal information to Encyclopedia Dramatica (kinda like Wikipedia for web fads and Internet drama). Read the responses (warning: sexually explicit material).

Instantly, commenters on the LiveJournal thread started identifying the men. Dissenters emailed the guys to let them know they were scammed. Several of them were married, which has led to what will likely be the first of many separations. One couple in an open marriage begged that their information be removed, as their religious family and friends weren't aware of their lifestyle. Another spotted a fellow Microsoft employee, based on their e-mail address. And it's really just the beginning, since the major search engines haven't indexed these pages yet. After that, who knows? Divorces, firings, lawsuits, and the assorted hell that come from having your personal sex life listed as the first search result for your name.

The question I've been asking myself from the first moment I saw this story is "What is CraigsList's response going to be?". The blog post indicates that there is a growing trend of people posting requests for romantic liasons on CraigsList only to turn around and embarass all the people who responded by posting their responses on the Web. If this trend continues, it will likely lead to a chilling effect towards using CraigsList as a dating service. The folks at CraigsList must realize this yet I haven't found any official response from them on this issue available online. 

This highlights one of the key problems with social software. When you build software that enables people to interact with strangers, you run the risk of people interacting with strangers who aren't so nice. The practice of griefing in multiplayer games is an example of when human interaction in social software goes awry. Other examples include fraud in eBay transactions, stalkers on social networking sites, con artists on dating sites and spammers in all their various forms. All of these problems make people less likely to use certain online services and may be the death knell of certain websites if they don't figure out how to handle malicious users of the service. 

Different services resort to different mechanisms to prevent griefers, however most of them are preventive. There is little that is or can be done once the malicious act has been committed by the 'griefer'. Given that I work with the teams that produce services that can be harmed by griefers as part of my day job (e.g. Windows Live Spaces and Windows Live Expo) this worries me. What can sites like CraigsList do to prevent people like Jason Fortuny from turning people away from their service because they fear having a negative experience? My gut feel is that Craig Newmark would go a long way in reassuring users of the service if they stepped in and took [legal] action against "griefers". Users feel a lot safer about using the service if they know that someone is looking out for their well-being if something bad happens. Consider it the social software equivalent of a "money back guarantee". 

What do you think?

Joel Spolsky has a blog post entitled Wasabi where he writes

In most deployed servers today, the lowest common denominators are VBScript (on Windows), PHP4, and PHP5 (on Unix). If we try to require anything fancier on the server, we increase our tech support costs dramatically. Even though PHP is available for Windows, it's not preinstalled, and I don't want to pay engineers to help all of our Windows customers install PHP. We could use .NET, but then I'd have to pay engineers to install Mono for all our Unix customers, and the .NET runtime isn't quite ubiquitous on Windows servers.

Since we don't want to program in VBScript or PHP4 or even PHP5 and we certainly don't want to have to port everything to three target platforms, the best solution for us is a custom language that compiles to our target platforms.

Since we are not blub programmers, we like closures, active records, lambdas, embedded SQL a la LINQ, etc. etc. and so those are the kinds of features we put into Wasabi.

And since FogBugz goes back many years and was originally written in VBScript, Wasabi is 100% backwards-compatible with VBScript but includes obvious improvements. """Multiline strings.""" Dim a = 0. And so on.

Most people don't realize that writing a compiler like this is only about 2 months work for one talented person who read the Dragon book. Since the compiler only has one body of code to compile, it is much easier to write. It doesn't have to be a general-purpose compiler. It doesn't have a math library, for example.
...
That said, there are major drawbacks. The documentation is a little bit thin and disorganized, because we've only documented the diffs to VBScript, not the whole language. Programmers that join Fog Creek might take a little bit longer getting up to speed. Our edit-compile-test loop got slower because there's one more step.

Should you write your own compiler? Maybe, if you're doing something that's different enough from the mainstream and if there's no good off-the-shelf technology for your problem. There's a good chance that the domain you're working in could really use a domain-specific language.

This sounds like one of those things that sounds like a great way to reduce costs and lower productivity at first until you've had to live with this decision for a few years. There are a couple of other drawbacks to consider that Joel doesn't mention in his post either because they haven't had time to occur yet or probably because FogCreek may be a special case due to Joel's reputation.

1. Recruiting new employees: Getting four years of experience using Java, C# or even Ruby is one thing. On the other hand, who wants to test what the marketability of "4 years of Wasabi experience" is on their resume?

2. Programming languages and runtimes evolve: My intern started yesterday and he mentioned that he knows Java but not C#. I gave him a link to C# from a Java developer's perspective which was the most comprehensive comparison of both languages I could find. Since that article was written Java 1.5 has added generics, enumerations, boxing of value types and changed the syntax of the for loop. Similarly C# 2.0 has added generics, nullable types and anonymous methods. By C# 3.0 we'll have lambda expressions, type inferencing of local variables and embedded SQL-like query all built into the language.

   Imagine that you rolled your own language because C# or Java didn't have some of the above features (e.g. closures, lambdas, embedded SQL, etc). At what point do you decide that it makes more sense to keep going with your in-house programming language versus participating in the ecosystem of developer tools that exist around these technologies?

3. Attrition: What happens when your compiler guru who cut his teeth on a twenty year old textbook on compiler theory decides to leave for greener pastures? Who's going to maintain and update your homegrown programming language as the field of software development evolves and customer requirements change?
   

These are just some of the problems Joel glosses over as he makes the case for rolling your own programming languages. What may have seemed like a good idea once upon a time often may turn out to be a bad decision in hindsight. Only time will tell, if Wasabi becomes one of those stories or not. 

I just got an email from J.J. Allaire pointing me to the blog post on the Windows Live Writer plugins blog entitled Windows Live Writer Blog This for RSS Bandit which states

And now comes Blog This for RSS Bandit.

RSS Bandit is a popular feed reader (what are feeds?) which by default can Blog This with w.bloggar (a desktop blogging client) and post to del.icio.us.

Installation is simple albeit manual. Extract the file, highlight the files, then copy and paste them into the RSS Bandit plugins folder: not into the Windows Live Writer plugin folder.

Start RSS Bandit. See something you would like to write about? Right-click on the headline and choose BlogThis using Windows Live Writer.

Windows Live Writer launches with the Select Destination Weblog window where you select which blog to post to. Once selected it takes a moment or two and then there is your screen with the text from the feed’s post:

I just wrote about wanting to write this plugin a few hours ago. I'll probably still write one on my own and replace the w.bloggar plugin in the default install of RSS Bandit with a Windows Live Writer plugin. Perhaps even an installer for existing users who don't want to wait until the next version of RSS Bandit to get this feature? 

In what seems like an interesting bit of corporate tit for tat I noticed the following two announcements this week

In his blog post entitled IronPython 1.0 released today! Jim Hugunin of Microsoft writes

I’m extremely happy to announce that we have released IronPython 1.0 today!

I started work on IronPython almost 3 years ago.  My initial motivation for the project was to understand all of the reports that I read on the web claiming that the Common Language Runtime (CLR) was a terrible platform for Python and other dynamic languages.  I was surprised to read these reports because I knew that the JVM was an acceptable platform for these languages.  About 9 years ago I’d built an implementation of Python that ran on the JVM originally called JPython and later shortened to Jython.  This implementation ran a little slower than the native C-based implementation of Python (CPython), but it was easily fast enough and stable enough for production use – testified to by the large number of Java projects that incorporate Jython today.
...
The more time I spent working on IronPython and with the CLR, the more excited I became about its potential to finally deliver on the vision of a single common platform for a broad range of languages.
...
IronPython is about bringing together two worlds.  The key value in IronPython is that it is both a true implementation of Python and is seamlessly integrated with the .NET platform. 

In other news, Tim Bray of Sun Microsystems has a blog post entitled JRuby Love where he writes

Charles Nutter and Thomas Enebo, better known as “The JRuby Guys”, are joining Sun this month. Yes, I helped make this happen, and for once, you’re going to be getting the Sun PR party line, because I wrote most of it.

Jacki DeCoster, one of our PR people, tried to imagine what kinds of questions people would have, and we went from there.

Why is Sun hiring JRuby developers Charles Nutter and Thomas Enebo? · First, they are excellent developers. Technologies like Ruby are getting intense interest from the developer community, and Sun is interested in anything that developers care about. ¶

What will their new role be at Sun? · First, they have to get JRuby to 1.0 and make sure that the major applications are running smoothly and are performant.

Interesting times indeed. My time spent on working with XML has made me appreciate the power of dynamic languages and I'll definitely be givin gIronPython a shot. I've started reading Dive Into Pythonand once I'm done I think my first programming assignment will be to write an IBlogExtension plugin for RSS Bandit that lets you post to your blog using Windows Live Writer.

From Omar Shahine's blog post entitled Inline Search for Internet Explorer we learn

This is simply a must have add-in for IE. For those of us that used the FireFox Find feature and were like "OMG", you can now have the same thing in IE. 

You can see in the screen shot below how this works:

[Source: Paul Thurrott's Internet Nexus]

As an Emacs user, I've grown used to having inline search as a feature and often get frustrated when the application I'm using doesn't support its. It's great to see this feature added to Internet Explorer. I just downloaded it and it works great with the most recent beta of Internet Explorer 7. Give it a shot.

By the way, Jeremy Epling and Joshua Allen who both work on the IE team also told me to check out http://www.ieaddons.com if I'm interested in tricking out my Internet Explorer install. I've added the site to my bookmark list and will check it out later today to see if there any other interesting IE extensions I've been missing out on.

While working on the favicon support for RSS Bandit I've been seeing some weird errors where a favicon for a particular website (e.g. Jamie Zawinski's favicon) cause a weird out of memory exception to be thrown when trying to load the image using the FromFile() method of the System.Drawing.Image class. 

It turns out the problem is spelled out in KB 810109: You receive a "System.OutOfMemoryException" error message when you try to use the Bitmap.FromFile method in the .NET Framework 1.0 which reads

SYMPTOMS
When you try to load an image by using the Bitmap.FromFile method in the Microsoft .NET Framework 1.0, you receive the following error message:
    An unhandle exception of type 'System.OutOfMemoryException' occurred in system.drawing.dll

CAUSE
This problem may occur when you use the Bitmap.FromFile method and one of the following conditions is true:
•    The image file is corrupted.
•    The image file is incomplete.

Note You may experience this problem if your application is trying to use the Bitmap.FromFile method on a file stream that is not finished writing to a file.
•    The image file does not have a valid image format or GDI+ does not support the pixel format of the file.
•    The program does not have permissions to access the image file.
•    The BackgroundImage propery is set directly from the Bitmap.FromFile method.

I'm posting this here so I have a handy pointer to it once I start getting bug reports about this feature not working correctly once we ship Jubilee. This feature definitely does jazz up the look of the application, so far my favorite favicon has been from the Dead 2.0 weblog.