Earlier this week Facebook announced the revamp of Facebook Groups. At first I planned to avoid commenting on this release since there is significant overlap between it’s functionality and that of Windows Live Groups so it is hard for me to have an objective perspective. However this morning I saw the following tweet from a designer at Facebook

I found this a little intriguing since I was sure I'd seen the presentation from the Google UX researcher he was referencing and I couldn't see how Facebook Groups addresses the problem he pointed out. If you haven't seen the presentation there is a brief description and link to it in the VentureBeat article Google researcher says friend groups may give it a window to best Facebook. Below are key excerpts from the article which capture the key point from the presentation

Through studying the nuances of social interaction both off- and online, Google researchers found that people typically have between four and six friend groups and only between two and six “close” friends, he said. College friends don’t necessarily mix with work friends, who don’t necessarily mix with a person’s family.
…
Adams pointed out all of the different problem scenarios Facebook users run into if the different parts of their identities end up blurring. One teacher the company interviewed, for example, realized that photos of her with her close friends at a gay bar were being exposed to her 10-year-old students.

Personally, I’d always assumed this collision of friend groups would be the main challenge that would prevent Facebook from being as successful as it could be back in 2008. What I didn’t expect is that people would decide that the benefit of having access to all their friends in one place was worth the cost of having to censor themselves a little bit in their online sharing since what may be appropriate for one group of friends (e.g. your friends from the gay bar scene) may not be for another (e.g. parents of students in your middle school class). Today has grown to having 500 million users based on that fact.

The reasons for self-censorship are sometimes not so controversial. Simply posting a bunch of kid pictures can get annoying for your coworkers even though your family on Facebook loves every single one of them. For the people who find this need to censor how they share online for various reasons, the argument is that Facebook Groups solves this problem. There’s only one catch which Mark Zuckerburg brought up himself a while ago which is mentioned in the TechCrunch article Facebook Overhauls Groups, A Social Solution To Create “A Pristine Graph”

“The naive solution is to do something like Friend Lists,” Zuckerberg says. ”Almost no one wants to make lists,” he continues. He’s noted this before. “The most we’ve ever gotten is 5 percent of people to make a list. It’s pretty brutal to have to do this every single time.” He then went into the algorithmic solutions. These are helpful, Zuckerberg says, but it’s also really easy to get these wrong, he notes. There needs to be a social solution, Zuckerberg says.

Facebook Groups faces all the problems with Friend Lists that Zuckerburg mentions above. In real life, I don’t manage my different social circles at the same time. I go to work and have work friends, I have school friends I still call every once in a while and when I go to my regular poker game there I interact with my poker friends. Every once in a blue moon like at my wedding, all of these worlds collide and it is actually a little stressful to manage them in real time. In addition, when the members of these groups change I don’t have to actively manage them (i.e. when a coworker becomes friendly enough for me to hang out with them outside of work, when a poker friend stops attending the regular poker game or when a coworker switches jobs and we no longer work on related technologies). Friend Lists on Facebook make people work to keep track of changes in their social relationships which is just not how most humans work. I still have phone numbers in my cell phone for people who I was supposed to meet up with for dinner at a conference almost four years ago who’ve since left Microsoft.

Facebook Groups cranks the awkwardness of dealing with this up to 11. Let’s say I create a group for “People who work on social at Microsoft who regularly have lunch” and after a few months to years some of these people leave the company, get promoted or switch roles. As the owner of the group what do I do? Do I kick them out? Do I keep blathering on in private discussions that I know are no longer relevant for half of the recipients and in some cases actually violates work ethics since some of these people have left the company? What happens when I stop working on social at Microsoft?

Facebook Groups may solve some problems users have with Facebook but I suspect it is not the silver bullet that addresses the problem of people having friend groups that they’d like to keep separate on Facebook especially since it introduces a new set of problems for users. Time will tell if I’m right or wrong on this suspicion.

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Software companies love hiring people that like solving hard technical problems. On the surface this seems like a good idea, unfortunately it can lead to situations where you have people building a product where they focus more on the interesting technical challenges they can solve as opposed to whether their product is actually solving problems for their customers.

I started being reminded of this after reading an answer to a question on Quora about the difference between working at Google versus Facebook where Edmond Lau David Braginsky wrote

Culture:
Google is like grad-school. People value working on hard problems, and doing them right. Things are pretty polished, the code is usually solid, and the systems are designed for scale from the very beginning. There are many experts around and review processes set up for systems designs.

Facebook is more like undergrad. Something needs to be done, and people do it. Most of the time they don't read the literature on the subject, or consult experts about the "right way" to do it, they just sit down, write the code, and make things work. Sometimes the way they do it is naive, and a lot of time it may cause bugs or break as it goes into production. And when that happens, they fix their problems, replace bottlenecks with scalable components, and (in most cases) move on to the next thing.

Google tends to value technology. Things are often done because they are technically hard or impressive. On most projects, the engineers make the calls.

Facebook values products and user experience, and designers tend to have a much larger impact. Zuck spends a lot of time looking at product mocks, and is involved pretty deeply with the site's look and feel.

It should be noted that Google deserves credit for succeeding where other large software have mostly failed in putting a bunch of throwing a bunch of Ph.Ds at a problem at actually having them create products that impacts hundreds of millions people as opposed to research papers that impress hundreds of their colleagues. That said, it is easy to see the impact of complexophiles (props to Addy Santo) in recent products like Google Wave.

If you go back and read the Google Wave announcement blog post it is interesting to note the focus on combining features from disparate use cases and the diversity of all of the technical challenges involved at once including

• “Google Wave is just as well suited for quick messages as for persistent content — it allows for both collaboration and communication”
• “It's an HTML 5 app, built on Google Web Toolkit. It includes a rich text editor and other functions like desktop drag-and-drop”
• “The Google Wave protocol is the underlying format for storing and the means of sharing waves, and includes the ‘live’ concurrency control, which allows edits to be reflected instantly across users and services”
• “The protocol is designed for open federation, such that anyone's Wave services can interoperate with each other and with the Google Wave service”
• “Google Wave can also be considered a platform with a rich set of open APIs that allow developers to embed waves in other web services”

The product announcement read more like a technology showcase than an announcement for a product that is actually meant to help people communicate, collaborate or make their lives better in any way. This is an example of a product where smart people spent a lot of time working on hard problems but at the end of the day they didn't see the adoption they would have liked because they they spent more time focusing on technical challenges than ensuring they were building the right product.

It is interesting to think about all the internal discussions and time spent implementing features like character-by-character typing without anyone bothering to ask whether that feature actually makes sense for a product that is billed as a replacement to email. I often write emails where I write a snarky comment then edit it out when I reconsider the wisdom of sending that out to a broad audience. It’s not a feature that anyone wants for people to actually see that authoring process.

Some of you may remember that there was a time when I was literally the face of XML at Microsoft (i.e. going to http://www.microsoft.com/xml took you to a page with my face on it ). In those days I spent a lot of time using phrases like the XML<-> objects impedance mismatch to describe the fact that the dominate type system for the dominant protocol for web services at the time (aka SOAP) actually had lots of constructs that you don’t map well to a traditional object oriented programming language like C# or Java. This was caused by the fact that XML had grown to serve conflicting masters. There were people who used it as a basis for document formats such as DocBook and XHTML. Then there were the people who saw it as a replacement to for the binary protocols used in interoperable remote procedure call technologies such as CORBA and Java RMI. The W3C decided to solve this problem by getting a bunch of really smart people in a room and asking them to create some amalgam type system that would solve both sets of completely different requirements. The output of this activity was XML Schema which became the type system for SOAP, WSDL and the WS-* family of technologies. This meant that people who simply wanted a way to define how to serialize a C# object in a way that it could be consumed by a Java method call ended up with a type system that was also meant to be able to describe the structural rules of the HTML in this blog post.

Thousands of man years of effort was spent across companies like Sun Microsystems, Oracle, Microsoft, IBM and BEA to develop toolkits on top of a protocol stack that had this fundamental technical challenge baked into it. Of course, everyone had a different way of trying to address this “XML<->object impedance mismatch which led to interoperability issues in what was meant to be a protocol stack that guaranteed interoperability. Eventually customers started telling their horror stories in actually using these technologies to interoperate such as Nelson Minar’s ETech 2005 Talk - Building a New Web Service at Google and movement around the usage of building web services using Representational State Transfer (REST) was born. In tandem, web developers realized that if your problem is moving programming language objects around, then perhaps a data format that was designed for that is the preferred choice. Today, it is hard to find any recently broadly deployed web service that doesn’t utilize on Javascript Object Notation (JSON) as opposed to SOAP.

The moral of both of these stories is that a lot of the time in software it is easy to get lost in the weeds solving hard technical problems that are due to complexity we’ve imposed on ourselves due to some well meaning design decision instead of actually solving customer problems. The trick is being able to detect when you’re in that situation and seeing if altering some of your base assumptions doesn’t lead to a lot of simplification of your problem space then frees you up to actually spend time solving real customer problems and delighting your users. More people need to ask themselves questions like do I really need to use the same type system and data format for business documents AND serialized objects from programming languages?

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This morning I stumbled on a great post by Dave Winer titled Why didn't Google Wave boot up? where he writes

So why didn't Google Wave happen?

Here's the problem -- when I signed on to Wave, I didn't see anything interesting. It was up to me, the user, to figure out how to sell it. But I didn't understand what it was, or what its capabilities were, and I was busy, always. Even so I would have put the time in if it looked interesting, but it didn't. 

However, it had another problem. Even if there were incentives to put time into it, and even if I understood how it worked or even what it did, it still wouldn't have booted up because of the invite-only thing. It's the same problem every Twitter-would-be or Facebook-like thing has. My friends aren't here, so who do I communicate with? But with Wave it was even worse because even if I loved Wave and wanted everyone to use it, it was invite-only. So the best evangelist would still have to plead with Google to add all of his workgroup members to the invite list. The larger your workgroup the more begging you have to do. This is exactly the opposite of how you want it to work if you're in Google's shoes. 

This is an important lesson on the value of network effects on social software applications. A service that exhibits network effects is more useful the more of my friends use it (e.g. having SMS on my cell phone is only useful if I have friends who can send & receive text messages). By definition, a social software application is dependent on network effects and needs to do everything in its power to promote them. Placing artificial barriers that prevent me from actually using the product as a communication tool with my social network works against the entire premise of being social in the first place.

Google definitely learned the wrong lesson from the success of Gmail as an invite only service. Being invite-only worked for Gmail at launch because my friends don’t have to use Gmail to receive or send messages to me. So word off mouth could spread because the people who used it would sing it’s praises which caused anticipation amongst those that couldn’t. On the other hand with Wave, the people who got invites couldn’t get to the point where they could sing its praises (if there were any to be sung) because it was too difficult to get their friends on there. By the time they made the service open to all, it was too late due to what Joel Spolsky called The Segway Phenomenon

PR grows faster than the quality of your code. Result: everybody checks out your code, and it's not good yet. These people will be permanently convinced that your code is simple and inadequate, even if you improve it drastically later. I call this the Marimba phenomenon . Or, you get PR before there's a product people can buy, then when the product really comes out the news outlets don't want to do the story again. We'll call this the Segway phenomenon.

Some may point to Facebook as an example of a network that was invite-only but still managed to have network effects but there is a crucial difference in how Facebook regulated growth before opening up to all. Facebook opened its doors to entire networks of people at a time (i.e. everyone in a particular college, all college students, people from select employers, etc) not to arbitrary swaths of people on a first come, first served basis.

Hopefully more startups will keep this in mind before jumping on the invite-only bandwagon.

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I've spent the past week going over the ideas in Chris Dixon's excellent post titled graphs and thought the ideas were powerful enough that they are worth reiterating. The thesis is simple, in recent years many have been focused on social graphs (i.e. graphs bidirectional or one-way “friend” relationships between users) but there are other ways in which users can be connected to each other besides whether they are friends or not. The key points from Chris’s post are excerpted below

Facebook’s social graph is symmetric (if I am friends with you then you are friends with me) but not transitive (I can be friends with you without being friends with your friend).  You could say friendship is probabilistically transitive in the sense that I am more likely to like someone who is a friend’s friend then I am a user chosen at random. This is basis of Facebook’s friend recommendations.

Twitter’s graph is probably best thought of as an interest graph. One of Twitter’s central innovations was to discard symmetry: you can follow someone without them following you. This allowed Twitter to evolve into an extremely useful publishing platform, replacing RSS for many people. The Twitter graph isn’t transitive but one of its most powerful uses is retweeting, which gives the Twitter graph what might be called curated transitivity.
...
Over the next few years we’ll see the rising importance of other types of graphs. Some examples:

Taste: At Hunch we’ve created what we call the taste graph. We created this implicitly from questions answered by users and other data sources. Our thesis is that for many activities – for example deciding what movie to see or blouse to buy – it’s more useful to have the neighbors on your graph be people with similar tastes versus people who are your friends.

Financial Trust: Social payment startups like Square and Venmo are creating financial graphs – the nodes are people and institutions and the relations are financial trust. These graphs are useful for preventing fraud, streamlining transactions, and lowering the barrier to accepting non-cash payments.

Endorsement: An endorsement graph is one in which people endorse institutions, products, services or other people for a particular skill or activity. LinkedIn created a successful professional graph and a less successful endorsement graph.

Local: Location-based startups like Foursquare let users create social graphs (which might evolve into better social graphs than what Facebook has since users seem to be more selective friending people in local apps). But probably more interesting are the people and venue graphs created by the check-in patterns. These local graphs could be useful for, among other things, recommendations, coupons, and advertising.

One of the things that has been interesting to watch is how many services have tried to build this other sorts of relationship graphs on top of Facebook Connect. Quora has tried to build an endorsement graph from Facebook Connect as a basis while Yelp has tried to build a location graph using Facebook's Instant Personalization and Facebook Connect as the foundation. As more of these sorts of relationships graphs between people and other entities are created it is slowly becoming clear to me that there are many scenarios where Facebook’s graph is not the best starting point.

Take this screenshot of the Facebook Friend’s Activity plugin on Engadget as an example.

What this plugin does is show which of my Facebook friends (i.e. mostly family, coworkers and high school friends) have found interesting on Engadget. I couldn’t help but think back to what Chris Dixon mentioned about Twitter being an “interest graph”. I realized that this feature would actually be more useful if it showed me what Engadget articles people I follow on Twitter found interesting rather than what my Facebook friends did.

As the utility of the social graph grows beyond providing a stream of updates from people in that graph to being reused in other contexts, the lack of universal appeal in some of these relationships will grow more obvious. Using Twitter as an example, I suspect if asked to chose between a widget on TechCrunch that shows what articles are interesting among your Facebook friends versus who you follow on Twitter a non-trivial amount of people would pick the latter.

Similarly I wonder how soon till we start seeing some of the endorsement graphs being built on services like LinkedIn and Quora being leveraged in other places where you need to vet the opinions of strangers such as Amazon or even Monster.com.

There are times I’ve debated with others whether there will be one social graph to rule them all and whether that graph will Facebook’s. Now I ‘m convinced that although their graph is likely to be the largest and most generally applicable in the long term, there is a market for social graphs based on relationship types other than whether someone is a “friend” or not which can still significantly improve the user experience on the Web.

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One of the challenging things about working on large scale services that lots of people use every day is that they get attached to their experience with the site and enjoy the familiarity. A consequence of this is that there is a large population of users for whom any change whether good or bad is met with resistance. 

One of the things that you end up learning when building a product is that if you’re afraid that a lot of people may complain about the changes you’ve made to the product they use every day then you’ll end up never making any changes.

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I was reading Pandas and Lobsters: Why Google Cannot Build Social Applications... and came across the following statements

Now, consider the Four Horsemen of Hotness in 2010: Facebook, Quora, Foursquare, and Twitter. Think deeply about why none of these four could have been developed inside Google.
...
Quora is restaurant that serves huge quantities of bacn and toast. Quora is a dozen people running dozens of experiments in how to optimally use bacn to get people to return to Quora, and how to use toast to keep them there. Bacn is email you want but not right now, and Quora has 40 flavors of it that you can order. Quora's main use of Bacn is to sizzle with something delicious (a new answer to a question you follow, a new Facebook friend has been caught in the Quora lobster trap, etc.) to entice you to come back to Quora. Then, once you're there, the toast starts popping. Quora shifts the content to things you care about and hides things you don't care about in real-time, and subtly pops up notifications while you're playing, to entice you to keep sticking around and clicking around.

Although I’m a regular user of Foursquare, Twitter and Facebook and consider myself to be fairly up on what’s going on in the social media space, I’d never used Quora when I read the article. Given that I’ve seen hype about it in various corners I decided to create an account and give the service a try. Below are some of my impressions

What is Quora?

The easiest way to think about Quora is that Quora is to Yahoo! Answers as Facebook is to MySpace. It is a Q&A site where users utilize their real names often linked to Facebook profiles as opposed to pseudonyms. It avoids game mechanics such as high score leaderboards and user badges that services like Stackoverflow and Windows Live QnA instead relying on people getting kudos from their peers in the form of endorsements and votes on their answers to motivate users to answer questions.

Why is Quora is so Hot

Quora seems to have started off as an invitation-only service which allowed them to cherry pick the original users to meet a particular demographic (i.e. Silicon Valley geek) and also carefully manage the initial culture of the site. What they’ve created is a place where members of the Silicon Valley technorati and wannabes can post questions and expect them to be answered by members of the tech elite including insiders at various tech companies. Quora is the kind of place where questions like What are the scaling issues to keep in mind while developing a social network feed? is answered by one of the people who built the original Facebook news feed and a random opinion like Should Mark Zuckerberg step down as CEO of Facebook and find a more seasoned replacement? gets a response from Blake Ross. There aren’t many places online where a question like What were the 4 or 5 key decisions that Larry Page and Sergey Brin made in the early days of Google? can get a serious answer let alone a well researched history lesson as well as some actual insights.

This site is pure gold for technology bloggers, journalists and Web startup geeks. It is unsurprising that these sorts of people would consider Quora to be the greatest thing since sliced bread.

Quora is a Community Site not a Communications Tool

One of the things I find weird about lumping Quora into the same grouping as Facebook, Foursquare and Twitter is that unlike those sites it is not a communication tool. Facebook created a new communication channel between friends, acquaintances and family members that sits somewhere between brings together the functionality of email and IM along with the feed. Twitter created a lighter weight way to consume and create content for brands and people you find interesting as compared to blogging. Foursquare is about broadcasting your location to interested parties.

Quora on the other hand seems to have more in common with mail lists and discussion forums. Specifically, it is more like Metafilter, Digg and Reddit than it is like the aforementioned sites. This is a service that will live and die based on the culture of its community and is very dependent on "power users” who altruistically provide lots of value to the site in exchange for respect from their peers. The challenge for Quora is that it will be difficult to keep its current culture as it grows bigger. Will Facebook and Google insiders still be showing up in various question threads if the site grows to be as big as Yahoo! Answers with the same breadth of audience and volume of content? I can’t imagine that happening.

I also can’t imagine being able to segregate audiences like you can on communications services. Twitter has communities of mommy bloggers, tech bloggers, fans of various celebrities, sports fans, etc which operate independently of each other and really only are noticed by others every once in a while due to the trending topics feature. The same goes for Facebook and Foursquare. Quora will not be able isolate the various demographics from each other without changing the nature of the site. However they will have to figure that out once the current crop of users start logging in and seeing "how is babby formed" style questions because the site has taken off.

Then again, we might get lucky and the site never take off with the masses which may not be good for the VCs that have invested in it but would be for the community that has formed there.

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Many moons ago when we were planning the set of social features we would build into the next version of Windows Live, we were very mindful of the fact that our customers are inundated with lots of social networking sites and what people need are tools to manage their relationships across many services not yet another social networking site. As some of those features have now rolled out to the general public in the form of betas, I’ve been keeping an eye on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter to see what regular people and techies think about what we’ve shipped.

What the Techies are Saying

Yesterday, Omar wrote a post on the Engineering Windows Live blog titled All Your Contacts in One Place where he talked about the work we’ve done in creating a single place where users can view and communicate with not only their Windows Live friends but also their contacts across multiple services including Facebook, MySpace and soon LinkedIn. Chris Messina posted the following in response to the story

I’ve talked about the work we’ve done around bringing customer value with the news feed that is integrated into the new Hotmail experience including how we’ve blended email into the news feed experience in recent posts. So I was pleased to see the following tweet from Jesse Stay

Thanks Jesse

Facebook Users on Windows Live

I regularly perform Facebook searches to see what people who are using the Windows Live Essentials beta think about the investments we’ve made in bringing social networking to the desktop in a big way. Here’s a sampling of some of the feedback I’ve found

You get the idea.

Twitter Users on Windows Live

I performed the same sorts of searches on Twitter and found similar feedback. Here are a few of my favorites

It’s really exciting to see so many people validating the design choices we made and enjoying the product that we’ve spent the last couple of months building. The outpouring of positive feedback has been really humbling and has me jazzed up to build even more things that make people happier as they connect with the people they care about using our products.

Thank you to everyone who has tried out the various betas.

Now Playing: Eminem - Love The Way You Lie (featuring Rihanna)

One of the things I’ve noticed while working on Windows Live is that it helps to think about communications tools such as email, IM and social media sites as being parts of a continuum as opposed to being rigidly defined product categories. They are all ways we share our thoughts, ideas and interesting things we’ve online with others where the main difference is really how public or private the communication channel is and how synchronous we want the conversation to be. Once you start looking at communications tools this way it starts opening the door to asking how we can bring some of these experiences closer together.

Over on the Windows Live blog there have been a number of good blog posts on this topic. Piero Sierra wrote in the blog post Sharing 2.0

Our data is everywhere

People store their stuff across the web, their PCs and their mobile phones, leading to fragmented access and fragmented sharing. Take the example of photo-sharing. A study we ran in September 2009 showed that people stored their photos across up to 15 different types of technologies. Here are the major ones:

It would be nice, not only to have everything in one location, but also to be able to access all this stuff and share from wherever you may be, especially from mobile phones and PCs that you may not own.

We're putting it all out there

It seems like our appetite for using technology to connect with each other is bottomless, whether it be directed communications with the people we love (email, IM), sharing with groups of friends (email, social networking), or full-on public broadcasting (blogs, micro-blogs, photo & video dedicated sites, etc.)

Whenever a new medium emerges, it doesn’t replace the previous ones – it adds to it. That is, people today are sending email and IM and updating their status on social networks and uploading photos everywhere. They're sharing their thoughts and their memories to stay in touch with each other. Sharing and consuming shared data has become the primary internet activity for many of our customers, right up there with shopping and reading news.

With regards to email and sharing specifically, there’s another good blog post on this topic by Dick Craddock titled Email in a World of Social Networking where he wrote

Recently, we surveyed 2,000 people in the US, where nearly 10 million additional people have started to use Hotmail actively over the last year. Our goal was to refresh our understanding of how people use their personal email accounts, particularly in this day of heavy usage of social networks for communications. We surveyed people who use AOL, Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo! Mail – 500 people for each service. Here’s a bit of what they shared with us.

• You’re still very attached to your personal email accounts. We asked the survey group which communication method they would choose if they were allowed to keep only one to communicate with friends and family. Of the choices – email, texting, IM, or the ability to post to their favorite social network – most people told us they’d choose email over all of the other communication methods and tools.     
• Email is today’s tool of choice for managing and sharing documents, interacting with businesses, tracking online activities, receiving and responding to social networking alerts, communicating with friends and family, dating, and so on. Your inbox is your job search strategy room, your filing cabinet, your to-do list, and your social center
• Email is your online photo album, too. People send and receive over 1.5 billion photos each month on Hotmail alone, and email is still the most popular way to share photos.

One of the things that became clear from us from this data is that there’s a good overlap in the kinds of activities that go on in email and what we see in social networks. Some of your friends share photos with you by posting them to Flickr while others send emails with photos as attachments. Sometimes you find out about new comments on photos you posted to Facebook by going to http://www.facebook.com and other times you discover this because you got a notification email. Either way, there’s a lot of overlap in the actual problem being solved although the technology may differ.

So what are we doing to simplify things in Windows Live’s Wave 4 release? Glad you asked.  

Emails with Photo Attachments and Messenger Social

One of the goals we set out with for Wave 4 was to ensure that people should be able to keep up with what their friends are sharing with them no matter where their friends are. This is the motivation behind the integrations we’ve done with popular social networks like MySpace and Facebook. However as you can tell from the blog posts mentioned above, email is also an important way for your friends to share updates and media with you. What we’ve done in this release is to bring in emails that are used for sharing photos from your contacts into the Messenger Social feed across all experiences where it is displayed.

On the web:

On the desktop:

Emails from your Social Networks and Messenger Social

The goal of the Messenger Social feed is to keep you up to date on what your friends are doing. One of the things your friends do is comment on the stuff you post on various social networks. Invariably you get a mail about these comments and we thought to ourselves that these email updates are just as valid to show in your feed as the comments attached to people’s updates that are typically in the feed. Thanks to diligent work of the Hotmail folks who built a bunch of excellent technology around recognizing and categorizing emails from social networks, you now get updates such as

in the Messenger Social feed.

What Do Customers Think of the Blending of Email Content in a Social News Feed?

Since Messenger is still in beta and Hotmail has just begun to roll out not a lot of people (relatively given over 350 million users) have seen this feature yet. Anecdotally, I’ve heard lots of positive feedback about this feature from a bunch of beta users but my favorite is the following comment taken from the reviews of the Windows Live Messenger iPhone app from the Apple App Store(comment #33).

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One of my favorite things we built in Wave 4 of Windows Live is now available. You can now download Windows Live for the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad from the US app store. You can also get it from the France, UK and Canadian app stores. The app kicks serious butt and I use it every day.

The official spiel is as follows

Windows Live Messenger for iPhone and iPod Touch is the best way to connect with the people that matter most and keep up with the things they are doing across the web. Use your iPhone to instant message your friends list, view and comment on your friends’ photos and status updates from Windows Live, Facebook, and MySpace, and at a glance, see what your Messenger friends are sharing from Flickr, YouTube, and many other social and photo sharing sites. Make sure to visit http://profile.live.com/Services today and setup Windows Live to bring in your social networks. Messenger is simply the best way to connect with your closest friends.

Chat:
Instant message with your Windows Live Messenger and Y! Messenger contacts on the go so you’re always connected to the people that matter most. You can even receive IM notifications when your app is closed so you never miss a message.

Social:
Windows Live Messenger gives you one place to view the updates your Messenger friends are sharing from social networks like Facebook, Flickr, MySpace and more, helping you cut through the clutter on the go.

Photos:
Upload photos right from your phone to share your favorite moments with the people that matter most. Create albums, add captions, and let your friends and family comment on your photos.

Hotmail:
Access your Hotmail account without leaving the app to read, reply to, and compose emails. Get email notifications within the application so you know when you have new messages.

For me, push notifications when I get new IMs is the killer feature. I used to think IM was dead on smartphones until I used this app and realized that the problem was really lack of an IM client with push notifications. If you use Windows Live Messenger, you need to cop this app today. If you need further convincing here are some pretty pictures

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Over the past year or so, I’ve been part of the team working on building the next version of the social news feed on Windows Live. Yesterday, the next iteration of this feature was made broadly available on http://home.live.com and http://profile.live.com. As I look back at the work we’ve done there are a number of things I love about the philosophy behind what we’ve built and the actual features we’ve implemented.

The above screenshot shows the header for Messenger Social feed on the Windows Live home page and captures a number of it’s key concepts.

Highlights from your Favorite People

One of the key problems we want to address with this release is the conflicting feelings of information overload from getting a flood of minutiae on a daily basis from people you’d barely consider acquaintances and the feeling of not seeing enough stuff from the people you actually care about because they are being drowned out by other less important people. The way we’ve approached this problem is described on the Messenger Preview site and excerpted below

Because most people today use a variety of social networks and content sharing sites, with different sets of friends and acquaintances dispersed throughout these disparate networks, it can be challenging — and exhausting — to visit different websites and create different accounts just to keep abreast of your friends’ updates. But it isn’t just about bringing all that data together. What’s really valuable is helping you filter through the clutter and get to those updates you really care about — the ones from those people who you communicate with most frequently. There are a lot of intelligent algorithms and machine learning that can help in this, but we’ve found one of the best ways is to simply ask people. So, Windows Live Messenger will come right to the source — YOU — and ask you to specify your favorites:

The Highlights filter shows the most interesting recent content from your social network and strives to ensure you are kept up to date with updates from your favorites even if they aren’t posting a mile a minute like some of your more active social networking friends.

The screenshot above captures what this means in practice. Since Omar is one of my favorites, his updates show up ahead of updates from Mint.com even though his are several hours older than those from the Mint fan page. We learned from experience that although a number of people find the Highlights filter to be a valuable way to cut through the clutter and view the most interesting updates from their social network, there are also times when we have time to kill and don’t mind swimming in the full stream. For those times, we also have a Recent filter which provides the classic reverse chronological view of a stream of updates from your social network.

People-centric not Service-centric

The fundamental idea behind social software is that it enables people to connect with other people. When we first shipped the feed in Wave 3, it was a key part of our design philosophy that we would bring together updates from multiple services into a single experience that emphasized your friends not the services where the data was coming from. One consequence of this is that updates from multiple services are shown in a single stream as shown in the screenshot from the previous section. We don’t provide tabs for multiple services because at the end of the day, what’s important to me is seeing what my friends said today not what my Windows Live friends said versus what my Facebook friends said. Instead our filters enable users to decide how they want to see updates from all of their friends as opposed to making service-centric distinctions.

Another nice touch is that once I’ve connected a service such as Facebook to Windows Live (more on that below) when I see an update from a friend in my feed, not only do I have the options of communicating with him or viewing his data on Windows Live but also communicating with him via that service as well. 

and when I click “Send a message (Facebook)” above, it actually takes me to Facebook to send Omar a message via their messaging feature.

Bi-Directional Connections to Where your Friends are

In our previous release, we had a feature called Web Activities which enabled users to share the activities they performed on other sites such as Facebook, Flickr, MySpace and others with their friends on Windows Live. A consistent bit of feedback we got was that people wanted our integration with other sites to be much deeper. They wanted to be able see what their friends where doing regardless of what network they were on and interact with their content. They also wanted to be able to share content with their friends regardless of what network they were on as well. In short, our customers wanted interoperability, not just data portability. With our current release we have obliged in spades…

When you first interact with the Messenger Social experience we ask you to connect your favorite services to Windows Live so you can see what your friends are up to all over the Web and share what you’re doing on other sites with your friends on Windows Live. If you got the prompt above when visiting http://home.live.com and clicked through to Facebook, you’d see the following options to create bidirectional data flows between Facebook and Windows Live.

As I mentioned before, this isn’t about “portability” and asking your friends to leave Facebook for Windows Live. Instead it is about allowing both sites to interoperate in a way that enables Windows Live users to stay in touch with their friends without either set of users having to switch services. Of course, Facebook isn’t the only social networking service we interoperate with in this manner as you can tell from the following screen shot

With these connections made, I not only get to see what my friends are doing across MySpace and Facebook from within Windows Live but can also broadcast my thoughts to them from within Windows Live as well.

Shortly after our features were made available yesterday I created the following status update

which caused that update to be shared to both my Messenger friends and my Facebook friends (see the handy iconography in the bottom right). You can see the results from both sites below

On Facebook	On Windows Live

There’s more good stuff in the release as stuff rolls out across Windows Live and I’ll be writing more about what we’ve built in the coming weeks. Thanks for reading.

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