Since we released the latest version of the Windows Live what's new feed which shows what's been going on with your social network at http://home.live.com, we've gotten repeated asks to provide a Windows Vista gadget so people can keep up with their social circle directly from their desktop.

You asked, and now we've delivered. Get it from here.

What I love most about this gadget is that a huge chunk of the work to get this out the door was done by our summer interns from 2008. I love how interns can be around for a short time but provide a ton of bang for the buck while they are here. Hope you enjoy the gadget as much as I have.

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From Palm Pre and Palm WebOS in-depth look we learn

The star of the show was the new Palm WebOS. It's not just a snazzy new touch interface. It's a useful system with some thoughtful ideas that we've been looking for. First of all, the Palm WebOS takes live, while-you-type searching to a new level. On a Windows Mobile phone, typing from the home screen initiates a search of the address book. On the Palm WebOS, typing starts a search of the entire phone, from contacts through applications and more. If the phone can't find what you need, it offers to search Google, Maps and Wikipedia. It's an example of Palm's goal to create a unified, seamless interface.

Other examples of this unified philosophy can be found in the calendar, contacts and e-mail features. The Palm Pre will gather all of your information from your Exchange account, your Gmail account and your Facebook account and display them in a single, unduplicated format. The contact listing for our friend Dave might draw his phone number from our Exchange account, his e-mail address from Gmail and Facebook, and instant messenger from Gtalk. All of these are combined in a single entry, with a status indicator to show if Dave is available for IM chats.

This is the holy grail of contact management experiences on a mobile phone. Today I use Exchange as the master for my contact records and then use tools like OutSync to merge in contact data for my Outlook contacts who are also on Facebook before pushing it all down to my Windows Mobile phone (the AT&T Tilt). Unfortunately this is a manual process and I have to be careful of creating duplicates when importing contacts from different places.

If the Palm Pre can do this automatically in a "live" anmd always connected way without creating duplicate or useless contacts (e.g. Facebook friends with no phone or IM info shouldn't take up space in my phone contact list) then I might have to take this phone for a test drive.

Anyone at CES get a chance to play with the device up close?

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As I've mentioned previously, one of the features we shipped in the most recent release of Windows Live is the ability to import your activities from photo sharing sites like Flickr and PhotoBucket or even blog posts from a regular RSS/Atom feed onto your Windows Live profile. You can see this in action on my Windows Live profile.

One question that has repeatedly come up for our service and others like it, is how users can get a great experience from just importing RSS/Atom feeds of sites that we don't support in a first class way. A couple of weeks ago Dave Winer asked this of FriendFeed in his post FriendFeed and level playing fields where he writes

Consider this screen (click on it to see the detail):

Suppose you used a photo site that wasn't one of the ones listed, but you had an RSS feed for your photos and favorites on that site. What are you supposed to do? I always assumed you should just add the feed under "Blog" but then your readers will start asking why your pictures don't do all the neat things that happen automatically with Flickr, Picasa, SmugMug or Zooomr sites. I have such a site, and I don't want them to do anything special for it, I just want to tell FF that it's a photo site and have all the cool special goodies they have for Flickr kick in automatically.

If you pop up a higher level, you'll see that this is actually contrary to the whole idea of feeds, which were supposed to create a level playing field for the big guys and ordinary people.

We have a similar problem when importing arbitrary RSS/Atom feeds onto a user's profile in Windows Live. For now, we treat each imported RSS feed as a blog entry and assume it has a title and a body that can be used as a summary. This breaks down if you are someone like Kevin Radcliffe who would like to import his Picasa Web albums. At this point we run smack-dab into the fact that there aren't actually consistent standards around how to represent photo albums from photo sharing sites in Atom/RSS feeds.

Let's look at the RSS/Atom feeds from three of the sites that Dave names that aren't natively supported by Windows Live's Web Activities feature.

Picassa

<item>
  <guid isPermaLink='false'>http://picasaweb.google.com/data/entry/base/user/bo.so.po.ro.sie/albumid/5280893965532109969/photoid/5280894045331336242?alt=rss&amp;hl=en_US</guid>
  <pubDate>Wed, 17 Dec 2008 22:45:59 +0000</pubDate>
  <atom:updated>2008-12-17T22:45:59.000Z</atom:updated>
  <category domain='http://schemas.google.com/g/2005#kind'>http://schemas.google.com/photos/2007#photo</category>
  <title>DSC_0479.JPG</title>
  <description>&lt;table&gt;&lt;tr&gt;&lt;td style="padding: 0 5px"&gt;&lt;a href="http://picasaweb.google.com/bo.so.po.ro.sie/DosiaIPomaraCze#5280894045331336242"&gt;&lt;img style="border:1px solid #5C7FB9" src="http://lh4.ggpht.com/_xRL2P3zJJOw/SUmBJ6RzLDI/AAAAAAAABX8/MkPUBcKqpRY/s288/DSC_0479.JPG" alt="DSC_0479.JPG"/&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&lt;td valign="top"&gt;&lt;font color="#6B6B6B"&gt;Date: &lt;/font&gt;&lt;font color="#333333"&gt;Dec 17, 2008 10:56 AM&lt;/font&gt;&lt;br/&gt;&lt;font color=\"#6B6B6B\"&gt;Number of Comments on Photo:&lt;/font&gt;&lt;font color=\"#333333\"&gt;0&lt;/font&gt;&lt;br/&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="http://picasaweb.google.com/bo.so.po.ro.sie/DosiaIPomaraCze#5280894045331336242"&gt;&lt;font color="#3964C2"&gt;View Photo&lt;/font&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&lt;/tr&gt;&lt;/table&gt;</description>
  <enclosure type='image/jpeg' url='http://lh4.ggpht.com/_xRL2P3zJJOw/SUmBJ6RzLDI/AAAAAAAABX8/MkPUBcKqpRY/DSC_0479.JPG' length='0'/>
  <link>http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/PORshBK0wdBV0WPl27g_wQ</link>
  <media:group>
    <media:title type='plain'>DSC_0479.JPG</media:title>
    <media:description type='plain'></media:description>
    <media:keywords></media:keywords>
    <media:content url='http://lh4.ggpht.com/_xRL2P3zJJOw/SUmBJ6RzLDI/AAAAAAAABX8/MkPUBcKqpRY/DSC_0479.JPG' height='1600' width='1074' type='image/jpeg' medium='image'/>
    <media:thumbnail url='http://lh4.ggpht.com/_xRL2P3zJJOw/SUmBJ6RzLDI/AAAAAAAABX8/MkPUBcKqpRY/s72/DSC_0479.JPG' height='72' width='49'/>
    <media:thumbnail url='http://lh4.ggpht.com/_xRL2P3zJJOw/SUmBJ6RzLDI/AAAAAAAABX8/MkPUBcKqpRY/s144/DSC_0479.JPG' height='144' width='97'/>
    <media:thumbnail url='http://lh4.ggpht.com/_xRL2P3zJJOw/SUmBJ6RzLDI/AAAAAAAABX8/MkPUBcKqpRY/s288/DSC_0479.JPG' height='288' width='194'/>
    <media:credit>Joanna</media:credit>
  </media:group>
</item>

Smugmug

<entry>
   <title>Verbeast's photo</title>
   <link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="http://verbeast.smugmug.com/gallery/5811621_NELr7#439421133_qFtZ5"/>
   <content type="html">&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="http://verbeast.smugmug.com"&gt;Verbeast&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&lt;a href="http://verbeast.smugmug.com/gallery/5811621_NELr7#439421133_qFtZ5" title="Verbeast's photo"&gt;&lt;img src="http://verbeast.smugmug.com/photos/439421133_qFtZ5-Th.jpg" width="150" height="150" alt="Verbeast's photo" title="Verbeast's photo" style="border: 1px solid #000000;" /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;</content>
   <updated>2008-12-18T22:51:58Z</updated>
   <author>
     <name>Verbeast</name>
     <uri>http://verbeast.smugmug.com</uri>
   </author>
   <id>http://verbeast.smugmug.com/photos/439421133_qFtZ5-Th.jpg</id>
   <exif:DateTimeOriginal>2008-12-12 18:37:17</exif:DateTimeOriginal>
 </entry>

Zooomr

 <item>
      <title>ギンガメアジとジンベイ</title>
      <link>http://www.zooomr.com/photos/chuchu/6556014/</link>
      <description>
        &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.zooomr.com/photos/chuchu/&quot;&gt;chuchu&lt;/a&gt; posted a photograph:&lt;br /&gt;

        &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.zooomr.com/photos/chuchu/6556014/&quot; class=&quot;image_link&quot; &gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://static.zooomr.com/images/6556014_00421b6456_m.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;ギンガメアジとジンベイ&quot; title=&quot;ギンガメアジとジンベイ&quot;  /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;

      </description>
      <pubDate>Mon, 22 Dec 2008 04:14:52 +0000</pubDate>
      <author zooomr:profile="http://www.zooomr.com/people/chuchu/">nobody@zooomr.com (chuchu)</author>
      <guid isPermaLink="false">tag:zooomr.com,2004:/photo/6556014</guid>
      <media:content url="http://static.zooomr.com/images/6556014_00421b6456_m.jpg" type="image/jpeg" />
      <media:title>ギンガメアジとジンベイ</media:title>
      <media:text type="html">
        &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.zooomr.com/photos/chuchu/&quot;&gt;chuchu&lt;/a&gt; posted a photograph:&lt;br /&gt;

        &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.zooomr.com/photos/chuchu/6556014/&quot; class=&quot;image_link&quot; &gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://static.zooomr.com/images/6556014_00421b6456_m.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;ギンガメアジとジンベイ&quot; title=&quot;ギンガメアジとジンベイ&quot;  /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;

      </media:text>
      <media:thumbnail url="http://static.zooomr.com/images/6556014_00421b6456_s.jpg" height="75" width="75" />
      <media:credit role="photographer">chuchu</media:credit>
      <media:category scheme="urn:zooomr:tags">海遊館 aquarium kaiyukan osaka japan</media:category>
    </item>

As you can see from the above XML snippets there is no consistency in how they represent photo streams. Even though both Picasa and Zoomr use Yahoo's Media RSS extensions, they generate different markup. Picasa has the media extensions as a set of elements within a media:group element that is a child of the item element while Zooomr simply places a grab bag of Media RSS elements such including media:thumbnail and media:content as children of the item element.  Smugmug takes the cake by simply tunneling some escaped HTML in the atom:content element instead of using explicit metadata to describe the photos.

The bottom line is that it isn't possible to satisfy Dave Winer's request and create a level playing field today because there are no consistently applied standards for representing photo streams in RSS/Atom. This is unfortunate because it means that services have to write one off code (aka the beautiful fucking snowflake problem) for each photo sharing site they want to integrate with. Not only is this a lot of unnecessary code, it also prevents such integration from being a simple plug and play experience for users of social aggregation services.

So far, the closest thing to a standard in this space is Media RSS but as the name states it is an RSS based format and really doesn't fit with the Atom syndication format's data model. This is why Martin Atkins has started working on Atom Media Extensions which is an effort to create a similar set of media extensions for the Atom syndication format.

What I like about the first draft of Atom media extensions is that it is focused on the basic case of syndicating audio, video and image for use in activity streams and doesn't have some of the search related and feed republishing baggage you see in related formats like Media RSS or iTunes RSS extensions.

The interesting question is how to get the photo sites out there to adopt consistent standards in this space? Maybe we can get Google to add it to their Open Stack™ since they've been pretty good at getting social sites to adopt their standards and have been generally good at evangelization.

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One of the features we recently shipped in Windows Live is the ability to link your Windows Live profile to your Flickr account so that whenever you add photos to Flickr they show up on your profile and in the What's New list of members of your network in Windows Live. Below are the steps to adding your Flickr photos to your Windows Live profile.

1. Go to your Windows Live profile at http://profile.live.com and locate the link to your Web Activities on the bottom left

2. Click the link to add Web Activities which should take you to http://profile.live.com/WebActivities/ shown below. Locate Flickr on that page.

3.) Click on the "Add" link for Flickr which should take you to http://profile.live.com/WebActivities/Add.aspx?appid=1073750531 shown below

4.) Click on the link to sign-in to Flickr. This should take you to the Flickr sign-in page shown below (if you aren't signed in)

5.) After signing in, you will need to grant Windows Live access to your Flickr photo stream. Click the "OK I'll Allow It" button shown below

6.) You should then be redirected to Windows Live where you can complete the final step and link both accounts. In addition, you can decide who should able to view your Flickr photos on your Windows Live profile as shown below

7.) After pushing the "Add" button you should end up back on your profile with your Flickr information now visible on it.

A.) People in your network can now see your Flickr updates in various Windows Live applications including Windows Live Messenger as shown below

PS: The same basic set of steps work for adding activities from Twitter, Pandora, StumbleUpon, Flixster, PhotoBucket, Yelp, iLike, blogs hosted on Wordpress.com, or from any RSS/Atom feed to your Windows Live profile. Based on announcements at CES yesterday, you'll soon be able to add your activities from Facebook to Windows Live as well.

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In my recent post on building a Twitter search engine on Windows Azure I questioned the need the expose the notion of both partition and row keys to developers on the platforms. Since then I've had conversations with a couple of folks at work that indicate that I should have stated my concerns more explicitly. So here goes.

The documentation on Understanding the Windows Azure Table Storage Data Model states the following

PartitionKey Property

Tables are partitioned to support load balancing across storage nodes. A table's entities are organized by partition. A partition is a consecutive range of entities possessing the same partition key value. The partition key is a unique identifier for the partition within a given table, specified by the PartitionKey property. The partition key forms the first part of an entity's primary key. The partition key may be a string value up to 32 KB in size.

You must include the PartitionKey property in every insert, update, and delete operation.

RowKey Property

The second part of the primary key is the row key, specified by the RowKey property. The row key is a unique identifier for an entity within a given partition. Together the PartitionKey and RowKey uniquely identify every entity within a table.

The row key is a string value that may be up to 32 KB in size.

You must include the RowKey property in every insert, update, and delete operation.

In my case I'm building an application to represent users in a social network and each user is keyed by user ID (e.g. their Twitter user name). In my application I only have one unique key and it identifies each row of user data (e.g. profile pic, location, latest tweet, follower count, etc). My original intuition was to use the unique ID as the row key while letting the partition key be a single value. The purpose of the partition key is that it is a hint to say this data belongs on the same machine which in my case seems like overkill.

Where this design breaks down is when I actually end up storing more data than the Windows Azure system can or wants to fit on a single storage node. For example, what if I've actually built a Facebook crawler (140 million users) and I cache people's profile pics locally (10kilobytes). This ends up being 1.3 terabytes of data. I highly doubt that the Azure system will be allocating 1.3 terabytes of storage on a single server for a single developer and even if it did the transaction performance would suffer. So the only reasonable assumption is that the data will either be split across various nodes at some threshold [which the developer doesn't know] or at some point the developer gets a "disk full error" (i.e. a bad choice which no platform would make).

On the other hand, if I decide to use the user ID as the partition key then I am in essence allowing the system to theoretically store each user on a different machine or at least split up my data across the entire cloud. That sucks for me if all I have is three million users for which I'm only storing 1K of data so it could fit on a single storage node. Of course, the Windows Azure system could be smart enough to not split up my data since it fits underneath some threshold [which the developer doesn't know]. And this approach also allows the system to take advantage of parallelism across multiple machines if it does split my data.

Thus I'm now leaning towards the user ID being the partition key instead of the row key. So what advice do the system's creators actually have for developers?

Well from the discussion thread POST to Azure tables w/o PartitionKey/RowKey: that's a bug, right? on the MSDN forums there is the following advice from Niranjan Nilakantan of Microsoft

If the key for your logical data model has more than 1 property, you should default to (multiple partitions, multiple rows for each partition).

If the key for your logical data model has only one property, you would default to (multiple partitions, one row per partition).

We have two columns in the key to separate what defines uniqueness(PartitionKey and RowKey) from what defines scalability(just PartitionKey).
In general, write and query times are less affected by how the table is partitioned.  It is affected more by whether you specify the PartitionKey and/or RowKey in the query.

So that answers the question and validates the conclusions we eventually arrived at. It seems we should always use the partition key as the primary key and may optionally want to use a row key as a secondary key, if needed.

In that case, the fact that items with different partition keys may or may not be stored on the same machine seems to be an implementation detail that shouldn't matter to developers since there is nothing they can do about it anyway. Right?

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