Mac OS X Ad

Which do you prefer and why?

From the press release Microsoft Announces Three New Windows Live Products for Mobile Devices we learn

Today at 3GSM World Congress 2007, Microsoft Corp. announced three new Windows Live™ for mobile services that provide search and communications capabilities to help people access their world of relationships, information and interests from their mobile device. Now available in the United States and the United Kingdom, Live Search for Windows Mobile^® and Live Search for Java provide customers with advanced local search and mapping capabilities on their mobile device. In conjunction with the availability of Windows Mobile 6, Microsoft also introduced Windows Live for Windows Mobile — a rich set of Windows Live services including e-mail, instant messaging and search — uniquely designed to work with Windows Mobile powered devices.

You can download the search clients for Java or Windows Mobile phones by going to http://mobile.search.live.com/ from your desktop or http://wls.live.com/ from your phone. I downloaded the client app onto my Cingular 3125 and it is quite snazzy. Traffic and local business search in my phone, all for free. My only gripe is that there doesn't seem to be GPS integration in the local results presented which may be a limitation of my phone as opposed to the software.

It looks like you can only get Windows Live for Mobile with integration with Windows Live Spaces, Windows Live Hotmail and Windows Live Messenger when you get a new Windows Mobile phone with Windows Mobile 6.0 or can figure out how to upgrade your phone's OS. In the meantime, you can drool over the features at official website for Windows Live™ for Windows Mobile®.

Via the LiveSide post entitled Live.com to get social - share your own pages I noticed that we've finally shipped Live.com collections. The official description of the feature is excerpted below

Collections are Live.com pages of gadgets and feeds created and shared by users. Add your favorite Collections to your own Live.com page, or share one of your Live.com pages with the community.

This is a pretty sweet feature because it allows people to build 'templates' which others can use. For example, I can create a Live.com page which has  subscriptions to TechCrunch, Mashable, Read/Write Web and http://del.icio.us/tags/web20 as well as a couple of relevant gadgets then share that with coworkers who are interested in subscribing to the latest goings on in the Web 2.0 blogs. Much better than sharing OPML files, isn't it?

There is more about this feature and others in the Windows Live Gallery team's blog post entitled Another release goes out the door!. So far, it seems that user-created Live.com collections haven't yet been enabled although you can try out some of the collections that have been published by Microsoft. If you are interested in when this feature will be enabled for all Live.com users to share their customized and pimped out homepages with others, then head over to the Gallery and Live.com team blogs with your questions. 

A couple of weeks ago I read a blog post by Matt Cutts entitled What did I miss last week? where he wrote

- Hitwise offered a market share comparison between Bloglines, Google Reader, Rojo, and other feed readers that claimed Bloglines was about 10x more popular than Google Reader. My hunch is that both AJAX and frames may be muddying the water here; I’ve mentioned that AJAX can heavily skew pageview metrics before. If the Google Reader team gets a chance to add subscriber numbers to the Feedfetcher user-agent (which may not be a trivial undertaking, since they probably share code with other groups at Google that fetch using the same bot mechanism), that would allow an apples-to-apples comparison.

As I was thinking about the fact that Google Reader can't make changes to the FeedFetcher user agent without tightly coupling a general platform component that likely services Google Reader, Google Homepage, Google Blog Search and other services with their own. I realized that by using one user agent for all of this servides, it pretty much makes it impossible for Web masters to exclude themselves from some of Google's crawlers.

Exactly how one would go about creating a robots.txt file that limits your feed from showing up in Google Blog Search results but doesn't end up exlcuding you from Google Reader and Google Homepage as well? I can't think of a way to do this but maybe it's because my kung fu is weak. Any suggestions? 

PS: This isn't work related.

Nick Carr has a blog post entitled Googlegate in North Carolina where he writes

North Carolina's Senate Finance Committee is hastily arranging hearings for next week on the state's use of tax incentives to lure businesses, as public outrage mounts over disclosures that Google was granted as much as a quarter billion dollars in secret tax breaks for a plant expected to employ approximately 200 workers. There's no word yet on whether any Google officials will be asked to testify.
...
The Googlegate controversy is unlikely to abate any time soon. Troubling new details of the secret deal-making continue to emerge. Today's Charlotte Observer features a long article describing how public officials leaned on some local residents to sell their homes to make way for the Google plant. The mayor of the town of Lenoir, Davis Barlow, and the county commissioner, Tim Sanders, were among the officials who, according to the paper, went "door-to-door on behalf of the Internet giant Google. In some cases, officials returned to homes four or five times. Barlow and Sanders effectively used the personal touch, avoiding a drawn-out public debate that Google was secretly telling them would scuttle the deal. That personal touch enabled some residents to feel comfortable in selling their property."

This reminds me of a comment I once heard about why the deal makers at GOOG are such hardball players. It goes back to the Google Founders' Awards which were intended to be a way to significantly reward people who add value to the company's bottom line.  Since this award is worth millions of dollars, there is a lot of stiff competition and I'd heard that it ended up the sales folks, acquisitions experts and other deal makers who end up as the primary contenders for the award.

I guess it makes sense, which other job functions can say that they directly save or benefit the company a quarter of a billion dollars on the bottom line? Not the lead developer of Google Calendar or the PM who wrote the spec for Google Base, that's for sure. :)

Unfortunately, when you put millions of dollars in incentives in front of your employees you shouldn't be surprised if they start cutting ethical corners to make things happen. Even CEOs and CFOs aren't immune from this which is why we have Sarbanes Oxley today.

During my morning workout I was watching stories on Iran on both Good Morning America and CNN. GMA had an exclusive interview with the President of Iran and interviewed some of the citizens in a move which made it seem like "the Iranian people" love America and it is their leaders that hate the United States. My favorite quote was one of the burkha clad ladies being quoted as saying "I'd like to go Las Vegas" [sic]. CNN on the other hand was all about the recent "news" that Iraqi insurgents are being armed and trained by elite Iranian troops. I'm now going through a serious case of déjà vu, it's like 2003 all over again.

Dave Winer does a good job of calling bullshit on this snow job in his post Iranian weapons? BFD where he writes

The NY Times ran this story on Saturday, today there's a mysterious US press briefing announcing that they had discovered that weapons imported from Iran to Iraq are killing American soldiers. So what exactly are we supposed to conclude from this? They don't say.

On the Sunday talk shows, the politicos don't say what's obvious to this voter.

1. If you don't want Americans blown up by Iranian weapons, get them out of Iraq.

2. It's a big surprise? We're calling them names, threatening them, moving our aircraft carriers into their ports, and we're supposed to be shocked that they're helping people who are fighting with us in Iraq? I would be surprised if it were otherwise, if they weren't helping them.

3. Who's providing more weapons to our enemies, Iran or the U.S.? I don't have the slightest doubt that the American taxpayer is the largest single source of support for people killing Americans in Iraq. We're pumping billions of dollars into Iraq every month, a lot of that must be in the form of weapons. Our supposed allies in Iraq are actually Sunni or Shi'ite militia. There are virtually no non-partisans in Iraq, everyone is on some side, and aside from the Americans and British, they're all trying to blow our guys up.

4. We'll leave behind a power vacuum in Iraq if we leave now? Seems doubtful to me. The place is already in chaos. We have 150,000 troops in Iraq (or thereabouts) in a country of 27 million people.

I agree with a lot of what Dave Winer has to say although I disagree that pulling out is the right course of action since the country is likely to devolve further into a state of civil war which the United States is directly responsible for. Unfortunately, it seems that while the congress is endlessly debating whether to issue the equivalent of a press release that expresses mild indignation at the president's troop surge in Iraq, he has already moved on and is planning how he'll expand his invasion and occupation of the Middle East into Iran.

The phrase to hell in a handbasket never seemed so accurate.

Niall Kennedy has a blog post entitled Netvibes module developer collects web credentials, personal content where he writes

A developer created a Netvibes module and submitted it for inclusion in the Netvibes Ecosystem module directory. A Netvibes employee examined and approved the submitted module for inclusion in the directory. The remotely-hosted module was then altered by the developer to retrieve stored preferences from other configured modules and store information from other modules loaded in the page such as the contents of a webnote, the user's latest Gmail messages, upcoming appointments and contacts, etc. The developer stored this data in a remote database and later examined his collected findings.

Each Netvibes module is rendered inline, meshing the markup generated by the module with the rest of the page's content. A module developer is encouraged to access only their own module's content using a special Netvibes variable, but any developer can request other content on the page through standard JavaScript or the Prototype JavaScript framework.

I talked to Niall about this on IM and upon reading the blog post from the Netvibes team as well as Niall's summary of the situations it seems they are doing at least three things wrong from a security perspective.

1. 3rd party gadgets hosted inline within the page instead of within iframes which means the gadget can walk the DOM and interact with other gadgets on the page.
2. 3rd party gadgets are fetched from 3rd party domains instead of a snapshot of the code being run from their domains which means malicious developers can alter their gadgets after they have been submitted
3. 3rd party gadgets not hosted on a separate top level domain which means gadgets may may be able to set and read cookies from the *.netvibes.com domain

All of these are safeguards that we take in Windows Live Gallery, Windows Live Spaces and Live.com to prevent malicious gadgets. I'm stunned that the response of the Netvibes developers is to change the text of their warning message and allow user rating of gadgets. Neither of are significant mitigations to the threats to their service and I'd recommend that they reconsider and actually secure their service instead of pushing this onto their users.

Richard Sim over on the Hotmail/Windows Live Mail team's blog has posted an entry entitled We Heard You Loud and Clear which states

To do this, we started from scratch and built a whole new service from the ground up – and we called this Windows Live Mail. As we brought users onboard to this new service and had them kick the tires, we learned quickly that users loved it. We knew we were onto a good thing. We also found that many users were extremely loyal to the Hotmail brand and perceived the beta as an upgrade to Hotmail. In fact, our most loyal users have been very happy with Hotmail for years and while they loved the improvements in the beta, some were a bit confused by name change. 
 
As we prepare to launch the final version of our new web mail service, we recognize the importance of ensuring that our 260+ million existing customers come over to the new service smoothly and without confusion. By adopting the name “Windows Live Hotmail”, we believe we’re bringing together the best of both worlds – new and old. We’re able to offer the great new technology that Windows Live has to offer while also bringing the emotional connection many existing and loyal users have with Hotmail.

I'm glad to see that a lot of the unwise decisions around branding that originally infested Windows Live are beginning to fade. First Windows Live Local switched to Windows Live Maps. Now Windows Live Mail is Windows Live Hotmail, which builds on a brand that is about a decade old instead of throwing it away.

What we need now is a campaign to rename Windows Live Mail desktop to something less unwieldy which also respects our brand with lots of mindshare. Perhaps Windows Live Outlook Express? :)  

I've mentioned in the past that I like the SessionSaver extension for Firefox and would like to implement similar functionality for RSS Bandit. I finished up this feature last night but I kept getting weird behavior. The expected behavior is that when RSS Bandit is launched it remembers the application state from the last time it was closed such as whether it was minimized to the system tray, open browser tabs, what nodes in the feed subscription tree were expanded and what news item(s) were selected. 

The weird behavior was that every once in a while when the application restarted, I'd get an InvalidActiveXStateException which was thrown from the IWebBrowser2.Navigate method when restoring the open browser tabs from the previous time the application ran. Further investigation narrowed the issue down to only showing up when the application had been minimized to the system tray when it was closed and thus being immediately minimized to the system tray when the application was restarted. 

I managed to read a comment on some forum that indicated that the problem is that IWebBrowser2.Navigate method doesn't work if the WebBrowser control isn't visible. This means that this feature won't work as smoothly as I'd like when the application is restarted after being closed from the system tray but it does get rid of the ugly exception.

I hope this blog post explains why the feature will seem wonky in this situation for our users and may prove useful to developers who come across this weird error in the future.

A couple of blogs I'm subscribed to are pimping the brand new Yahoo! Pipes which I unfortunately can't seem to access right now. You can read some of the hype in blog posts like Jeremy Zawodny's Yahoo! Pipes: Unlocking the Data Web and Tim O'Reilly's Pipes and Filters for the Internet where it is described as "milestone in the history of the internet". I'd have loved to try out the service giving my interest in mashups and feed syndication but the site seems to be down or is just really, really slow.

As Dave Winer writes in his post Pipes Investigation

I see that Yahoo has a new web app, called Pipes, that looks to me like a feed construction kit. It takes RSS inputs, processes them in ways that are specified by the user, and produces feeds as its output.
...
From a quick persual of the functionality last night and the fact that the server isn't responding right now (5:45AM Pacific), it seems this app uses lots of CPU on the server. 

As someone who works on large scale online services for a living, Yahoo! Pipes seems like a scary proposition. It combines providing a service that is known for causing scale issues due to heavy I/O requirements (i.e. serving RSS feeds) with one that is known for scaling issues due to heavy CPU and I/O requirements (i.e. user-defined queries over rapidly changing data). I suspect that this combination of features makes Yahoo! Pipes resistant to popular caching techniques especially if the screenshot below is any indication of the amount of flexibility [and thus processing power required] that is given to users in creating queries.

Really interesting idea though. I agree with Dave Winer that this is definitely fodder for geeks and not the average Web user. After all, RSS still hasn't crossed the adoption chasm with average Web users let alone an RSS feed remixing service.