Disclaimer: This is my opinion. It does not reflect the intentions, strategies, plans or stated goals of my employer

Ever since the last Microsoft reorg where it's Web products were spread out across 3 Vice Presidents I've puzzled about why the company would want to fragment its product direction in such a competitive space instead of having a single person responsible for its online strategy.

Today, I was reading an interview with Chris Jones, the corporate vice president of Windows Live Experience Program Management entitled Windows Live Moves Into Next Phase with Renewed Focus on Software + Services and a lightbulb went off in my head. The relevant bits are excerpted below

PressPass: What else is Microsoft announcing today?

Jones: Today we’re also releasing a couple of exciting new services from Windows Live into managed beta testing: Windows Live Photo Gallery beta and Windows Live Folders beta.

Windows Live Photo Gallery is an upgrade to Windows Vista’s Windows Photo Gallery, offered at no charge, and enables both Windows Vista and Windows XP SP2 customers to share, edit, organize and print photos and digital home videos... We’re also releasing Windows Live Folders into managed beta today, which will provide customers with 500 megabytes of online storage at no charge.
...
We’re excited about these services and we see today’s releases as yet another important step on the path toward the next generation of Windows Live, building on top of the momentum of other interesting beta releases we’ve shared recently such as Windows Live Mail beta,Windows Live Messenger beta and Windows Live Writer beta....soon we’ll begin to offer a single installer which will give customers the option of an all-in-one download for the full Windows Live suite of services instead of the separate installation experience you see today. It’s going to be an exciting area to watch, and there’s a lot more to come.

PressPass: You talk a lot about a “software plus services” strategy. What does that mean and how does it apply to what you’re talking about today?

Jones: It’s become a buzz word of sorts in the industry, but it’s a strategy we truly believe in. The fact that we’re committed to delivering software plus services means we’re focused on building rich experiences on top of your Windows PC; services like those offered through Windows Live.

All the items in red font refer to Windows desktop applications in one way or the other. At this point it now made sense to me why there were three VPs running different bits of Microsoft's online products and why one of them was also the VP that owned Windows. The last reorg seems to have divided Microsoft's major tasks in the online space across the various VPs in the following manner

• Satya Nadella: Running the search + search ads business (i.e. primarily competing with Google search and AdWords)

• Steve Berkowitz: Running the content + display ads business (i.e. primarily competing with Yahoo!'s content and display ad offerings)

• Steven Sinofsky and Chris Jones: Adding value to the Windows platform using online services (i.e. building something similar to iLife + .Mac for Windows users). 

From that perspective, the reorgs make a lot more sense now. The goals and businesses are different enough that having people singularly focused on each of those tasks makes more sense than having one person worry about such disparate [and perhaps conflicting] goals. The interesting question to me is what does it mean for Microsoft's Web-based Windows Live properties like Windows Live Hotmail, Windows Live Favorites and Windows Live Spaces if Microsoft is going to be emphasizing the Windows in Windows Live? I guess we've already seen announcements some announcements from the mail side like Windows Live Mail and the Microsoft Office Outlook Connector now being free.

Another interesting question is where  Ray Ozzie fits in all this.

A couple of months ago, I was asked to be part of a recruiting video for Microsoft Online Business Group (i.e. Windows Live and MSN). The site with the video is now up. It's http://www.whywillyouworkhere.com. As I expected, I sound like a dork. And as usual I was repping G-Unit. I probably should have worn something geeky like what I have on today, a a Super Mario Bros. 1up T-shirt. :)

The MSN Soapbox team has a blog post entitled Soapbox Is Now Open For Full Video Viewing which states

We have just opened Soapbox on MSN Video for full video viewing. You no longer need to be signed into the service to view Soapbox videos!

 

However just as before, you still need to sign in to upload, comment, tag or rate videos. e Embedded Player is also available for full viewing and embedding.

 

While it might not be visible, we have spent the last month working hard on improving our backend, to make encoding and performance as scalable as possible.

 

We are also now conducting proactive filtering of all uploaded content, using technology from Audible Magic.Audible Magic bases their filtering on the video's audio track and their database is being updated constantly. By using this technology, we see this as an important step to ensure the viability and success of Soapbox over the long run.

You can dive right in and explore the site's new interface by checking out my friend Ikechukwu's music video. I like the redesign of the site although there seem to be a few minor usability quibbles. The content filtering is also an interesting addition to the site and was recently mentioned in the Ars Technica article Soapbox re-opens, beating YouTube to the punch with content filtering. Come to think of it, I wonder what's been taking Google so long to implement content filtering for copyrighted materials given how long they've been talking about it. It's almost as if they are dawdling to add the feature. I wonder why?

Speaking of usability issues, the main problem I have with the redesign is  that once you start browsing videos the site's use of AJAX/Flash techniques works against it. Once you click on any of the videos shown beside the one you are watching, the video changes inline instead of navigating to a new page which means the browser's URL doesn't change. To get a permalink to a video I had the hunt around in the interface until I saw a "video link"  which gave me the permalink to the video I was currently watching. Both Google Video and YouTube actually reload the page and thus change the URL when you click on a video. Even then YouTube makes the URL prominent on the page as well. Although I like the smoothness of inline transitions, making the permalink and other sharing options more prominent would make the site a lot more user friendly in my opinion.

The intrepid investigators over at LiveSide seem to have stumbled upon a Digg-like site created by Microsoft called MSN Reporter. From their post MSN enter social news arena with Digg competitor - MSN Reporter we learn

As an ongoing part of MSN's efforts to increase the amount of user generated content on its network, the Dutch MSN team has created MSN Reporter, a social news site similar to the likes of digg and reddit. Available in beta since October 2006, currently MSN Reporter has launched only in three markets, Netherlands, Belgium and Norway.

Allowing users to share and rate news on the site, it has a simple interface, much like the Digg of old. It also has Windows Live integration, with Alerts, add to Live.com and with a BlogIt! option sending posts straight to Windows Live Spaces. With buttons that says "Kicken!" and "Dumpen!" who doesn't feel the urge to participate?

So far there has been considerable interest in the new service, with reportedly 500,000 and 800,000 users visting the site in the 1st and 2nd months respectively.  With articles getting upto 10,000 votes and 1,000 comments, this is a on a completely different level to most existing social news sites.

This is a pleasent surprise. I've been wanting Microsoft to do a Digg-like site for a while but gave up on it after I stopped being able to figure out whether I should be pitching the idea to folks at MSN or Windows Live. It looks like the folks at MSN have not only taken the initiative and built a social news site but it seems to be capitalizing on the popularity of the MSN brand in Europe given some of those stats above.

PS: In other Windows Live MSN news LiveSide is claiming that Windows Live Wifi Suite will rebrand to MSN. They even post a link to http://hotspot.msn.com which is still Windows Live branded at the moment. It looks like they even scooped the product team's blog. I'm not sure if this is just a rumor or a leak since I have no insight into what goes on at MSN but it would make sense if the LiveSide story is true. . 

The MSN SoapBox team has a blog post entitled Soapbox Now in Public Beta which states

We just flipped the switch from an Invitation Only, to a Public Beta.

 

No need to request an invitation and sign in to watch videos on Soapbox anymore!

Cool. I guess it's now OK to start petitioning the developers of Bloglines and Google Reader to show embedded MSN Soapbox videos like in my those in my post Ads: Vista vs. Mac OS X.

I'm still not sure how I feel about MSN SoapBox. Besides the obvious branding questions, I question the wisdom of building a YouTube clone as opposed to building an experience more like MySpace Video which would leverage our existing brand and investments in offerings like MSN Windows Live Spaces. Whatever, I guess.

The site is still a rather snazzy use of Flash and there are a couple of things in the interface I think existing sites like Google Video and YouTube could learn from. Check it out at http://soapbox.msn.com.

I've had a number of people mention the article about Steve Berkowitz and MSN/Windows Live in the New York Times entitled Looking for a Gambit to Win at Google's Game which contains a bunch of choice negative quotes about our products supposedly from Steve Berkowitz. The article starts of without pulling punches as you can see from the following excerpt

The pressure is on for Mr. Berkowitz to gain control of Microsoft’s online unit, which by most measures has drifted dangerously off course. Over the last year, its online properties have lost users in the United States. The billions of dollars the company has spent building its own search engine have yet to pay off. And amid a booming Internet market, Microsoft’s online unit is losing money.

Google, meanwhile, is growing, prospering, and moving increasingly onto Microsoft’s turf.

Microsoft lost its way, Mr. Berkowitz says, because it became too enamored with software wizardry, like its new three-dimensional map service, and failed to make a search engine people liked to use.

“A lot of decisions were driven by technology; they were not driven by the consumer,” he said. “It isn’t always the best technology that wins. It is the best experience.”
...
Mr. Berkowitz does not defend the brand choice he inherited.

“I don’t know if Live is the right name,” he said, saying he had not decided what to do about it. But before he gets around to deciding whether to change the brand, he wants to make Microsoft’s search engine itself more appealing to consumers.

What he did decide was to keep the MSN name afloat, too, as it is well known and its various services have 430 million users around the world. He promoted Joanne K. Bradford, Microsoft’s head of advertising sales, to oversee and revive the MSN portal.

Definitely some harsh words attributed to our corporate VP which has led some Windows Live watchers to wonder whether the brand is going to be tossed. I'm going to ignore the obvious flame bait of seeing an article claiming that one of our corporate vice presidents criticized what is probably the only best of breed online service we provide (i.e. http://maps.live.com) and just focus on an implicit yet incorrect assumption carried throughout the article. The assumption is that Steve Berkowitz runs Windows Live.

I've commented on our org chart before but here is a refresher course for the reporters and bloggers out there that feel compelled to write about Windows Live and MSN. If you go back to the press release after our last major reorg Microsoft Realigns Platforms & Services Division for Greater Growth and Agility you'll notice that it beaks out Microsoft's internet business into the following three pieces

Windows and Windows Live Group
With Sinofsky in charge, the Windows and Windows Live Group will have engineering teams focused on delivering Windows and engineering teams focused on delivering the Windows Live experiences. Sinofsky will work closely with Microsoft CTO Ray Ozzie and Blake Irving to support Microsoft’s services strategy across the division and company.
Windows Live Platform Group
Blake Irving will lead the newly formed Windows Live Platform Group, which unites a number of MSN teams that have been building platform services and capabilities for Microsoft’s online offerings. This group provides the back-end infrastructure services, platform capabilities and global operational support for services being created in Windows Live, Office Live, and other Microsoft and third-party applications that use the Live platform. This includes the advertising and monetization platforms that support all Live service offerings.
Online Business Group
The new Online Business Group includes advertising sales, business development and marketing for Live Platforms, Windows Live and MSN — including MSN.com, MSNTV and MSN Internet Access. David Cole, senior vice president, will lead this group until his successor is named before his leave of absence at the end of April. [Dare - Steve Berkowitz is the replacement]

As you can see from the above press release you'll note that Steve Berkowitz owns the sales, marketing and business aspects of Windows Live but not the products themselves. Steven Sinofsky and his subordinates, specifically Chris Jones and Christopher Payne, are responsible for Windows Live. Although Steve Berkowitz is probably the right guy to talk to about the marketing and branding of Windows Live, he probably isn't the right person to talk to about the future of Windows Live products like search (holla at Christopher Payne) or email/IM/blogging (talk to Chris Jones).

I find it interesting to see articles like NY Times: Will Berkowitz keep Windows Live? because I think although things are confusing now with two poorly differentiated and overlapping brands, it would send out the wrong signal to the the market, our competitors and our customers if we decided to go back to the MSN brand for all our online services. What do you think? 

From the blog post entitled 1GB storage allocation for free Hotmail accounts is live! on the Hotmail Windows Live Mail team's blog we learn

1GB storage allocation for free Hotmail accounts is live! If you are new to Hotmail, then your account is created automatically with 1GB storage allocation. All existing accounts are at 1GB. To see that you would need sign out and sign in again. The storage meter bar in our classic UI would show 1000 as the max number. If your account is migrated to Windows Live Mail then your storage allocation is 2GB.

This is great news for the hundreds of millions of people with Hotmail accounts. Kudos to the mail team on making this switch.

I just saw some article entitled Ten Worst Internet Acquisitions Ever which contains the following excerpt

10. Hotmail - acquired by Microsoft (MSFT) in 1998 for about $400 million. Hotmail was a second-tier free email service when Microsoft bought it and the acquisition did little to improve Microsoft's internet portal ambitions.

This looks like another example of journalists bloggers fail to do even a modicum of research. Since I'm being lazy, I'll just use the Alexa traffic details for MSN to debunk this silliness.  According to Alexa, MSN is the #2 site on the internet with over 84% of the traffic being to hotmail.msn.com.

It seems to me that Hotmail has contributed a lot in furthering Microsoft's internet portal ambitions. Then again, don't let the facts get in your way of thowing snarky comments at Microsoft. ;)

If you are a 'Web 2.0' watcher by now you've seen the hubbub over the Peanut Butter Manifesto memo which is an Yahoo! internal memo authored by Brad Garlinghouse, a senior VP at the company. The memo is a rant against the typical list of woes that face big companies (e.g. the contradiction of being spread too thin yet having too many people, duplicative products and misaligned goals across the company). What I've found most interesting hasn't been the memo but instead the responses to it.

For example, in a blog post entitled Yahoo’s Brad Garlinghouse Makes His Power Move Mike Arrington views the memo as a clever attempt at an internal coup by Brad Garlinghouse. However even more interesting is the following comment in response to Arrington's post by someone named gullova which is excerpted below

Yahoo continues to get whipped by Google because its leaders can not get the product and engineering teams to focus on the right projects.

Witness Panama (the new ad system). Yahoo has been talking about Panama since early 2004. Yet the product they are launching is barely what Google had 2 years ago.

They threw hundreds of people at Panama, hurting other projects along the way, yet ultimately they are building the wrong product. Panama is far too focused he needs of search advertisers, which makes little sense since Yahoo’s search share has been shrinking since the day they dropped Google and launched their own search engine.

Had Panama instead been about display advertising, Yahoo could have at minimum increased monetization on Yahoo, which lets remind ourselves is still the largest site on the web and which they could monetize at 0% TAC (so its all gravy to the bottom line).

Yahoo is full of guys like Brad who can articulate themselves well and give great presentations. The problem is that the engineering team doesn’t listen to them, and the executive team doesn’t make them listen.

If they really want to get listened to, they should just shut down Panama and run Google ads instead. Its not a stretch to say they’d probably make more money.

The last sentence is the kicker for me. What if instead of competing with Google by funding its own search engine and advertising product, Microsoft partnered with Google like AOL has done? One of the pros of doing this are that it would free up a huge commitment of resources in competing with an industry leader that is years ahead of Microsoft to then focus on building applications that grow its audience directly which is then left to Google to monetize. Another possible pro is that the average revenue per user (ARPU) may go up with Google AdSense + AdWords being used to monetize Windows Live and MSN audiences as opposed to Microsoft's offerings. However a couple of minutes searching online doesn't given enough public data to determine whether this would be the case or not.

The cons are many. The first is that Microsoft would be seen to be admitting defeat if it switched to using Google's monetization engine although from a purely business perspective this isn't a significant con. Another con is that Microsoft would be enriching a competitor who is targetting one of its cash cows for obsolesence. See Google Docs & Spreadsheets, the JotSpot purchase and Google Apps for your Domain which are all attempts at attacking the success of Microsoft Office and related products like Microsoft Exchange. In this case, Microsoft would be guilty of being penny wise and pound foolish. The final con and perhaps the biggest problem with Microsoft going with the Google monetization engine is that it makes Microsoft entirely dependent on a single customer/supplier [who was also a rival] for a majority of the revenue from its online businesses.

When I started this post I tried to keep an open mind about the idea but by the time I finished writing it was clear that this is a bad idea. Funny how that happens.

The folks behind Microsoft's video sharing site MSN SoapBox have a team blog at http://soapboxteam.spaces.live.com. You should swing by and say hello. You might learn a thing or two. For example, I found out from the post entitled Spaces and Live.com Embedded Video Gadget that one can create a playlist of videos that is displayed when the SoapBox player is embedded in another website. The relevant excerpt is shown below

Dare spent the weekend updating his Embedded Video Gadget to allow Soapbox ideos to play within a Spaces and Live.com gadget.  The good news is that the Embedded Video Gadget now allows embedding single videos, as well as multiple videos, such as My Videos and My Favorites. 

The videos you see at the top of the Soapbox Team Blog, are an actual My Favorites example.

This is a pretty sweet feature and one I've not seen used a lot by other video sharing sites. I've been exchanging some mail with the team and they've been pretty good about responding to feedback and sharing information. If you have some ideas for the team or just want to find out how to get an invite to the beta go ahead and leave a comment in their blog.

Via Nicole's post on the Messenger Says blog entitled Up on a Soapbox I found out that videos beta users (like me) post on MSN Soapbox can be viewed by folks who haven't been invited to the service. I posted my friend Ikechukwu's rap video up there. You can compare the video viewing experience of MSN Soapbox to Youtube by watching the video on both sites, check it out

1. My name is... by Ikechukwu on MSN Soapbox

2. My name is... by Ikechukwu on Youtube

From the press release entitled MSN Launches Beta of Soapbox on MSN Video we learn

REDMOND, Wash. — Sept. 18, 2006 — MSN today announced the U.S. beta release of Soapbox on MSN^® Video, a user-uploaded video service that makes it easy for people to express themselves by uploading, discovering and sharing personal videos with the Soapbox community and others around the world. Soapbox will be available on MSN Video and will be deeply integrated throughout Microsoft Corp.’s portfolio of online services, including Windows Live™ Spaces and Windows Live Messenger.

“Soapbox delivers on a critical component of the MSN growth strategy of deepening audience engagement by enabling people to participate in the content experience,” said Rob Bennett, general manager of Entertainment and Video Services for MSN. “By adding a user-uploaded video service, we are rounding out our existing investments in commercially produced and original content on MSN Video.”
...
Availability

The beta of Soapbox on MSN Video is available on an invitation-only basis in the U.S. Those interested in participating in the beta can sign up for the waiting list now at http://soapbox.msn.com. Access to the beta will expand over time by enabling existing beta testers to invite a limited number of friends.

I'm on the invite list for the beta but I haven't tried out the site yet. However there is a brief overview of the site at TechCrunch in the post Microsoft SoapBox Just Launched by Mike Arrington. He writes

Om Malik says, via a commenter, that “Soapbox autodetects your browser + platform and streams WM for IE/Windows users, but Flash for Firefox/Windows and Firefox+Safari on Mac.”LiveSide says videos up to 100 MB in size can be uploaded in AVI, ASF, WMV, MOV, MPEG 1/2/4, 3GPP, DV file formats

I'll try out the service myself later this week and see if I can get any invites to share with folks who are interested in giving it a shot once they give us invites.

For those who missed it, the MSN AdCenter team now has a blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/adcenter. The most recent post is about the New adCenter Release Coming Up and it reads

You may be asking yourself, "Why a new version?" Well, our goal is both to make your adCenter campaign management easier and to improve your user experience. We've learned a lot from the customer feedback we've gotten so far, and now we're ready to share our ideas with you.

Updates include:
1. Order creation process simplified into 4 steps
2. Broader differentiation between campaigns and orders  
3. New pricing tab includes all budget, bidding, and incremental pricing
4. Negative keywords can be applied at the order level
5. Keyword / ad rejections include reason codes

 and lots of other cool changes - I'll post more details here later in the week so you'll know what to expect when you login after the release - and when the release will happen.

This is one product I can't wait for Microsoft to ship. It's cool that we want to improve our search engine and other online properties to be more competitive but it is all for naught if we don't have a good story around how we and our customers make money from our services. AdCenter to the rescue...

Recently we had some availability issues with MSN Spaces which have caused some  complaints from some of our loyal customers. Mike Torres addresses these issues in his post Performance & uptime which states

One of the hardest parts about running a worldwide service with tens of millions of users is maintaining service performance and overall uptime.  As a matter of fact, a member of our team (Dare) had some thoughts about this not too long ago.  While we're constantly working towards 100% availability and providing the world's fastest service, sometimes we run into snags along the way that impact your experience with MSN Spaces.

 

That seems to have happened yesterday.  For the networking people out there, it turned out to be a problem with a load balancing device resulting in packet loss (hence the overall slowness of the site).  After some investigation, the team was able to determine the cause and restore the site back to normal.

 

Rest assured that as soon as the service slows down even a little bit, or it becomes more difficult to reach individual spaces, we're immediately aware of it here within our service operations center.  Within minutes we have people working hard to restore things to their normal speedy and reliable state.  Of course, sometimes it takes a little while to get things back to normal - but don't believe for a second that we aren't aware or concerned about the problem.  As a matter of fact, almost everyone on our team uses Spaces daily (surprise!) so we are just as frustrated as you are when things slow down.  So I'm personally sorry if you were frustrated yesterday - I know I was!  We are going to continue to do everything we can to minimize any impact on your experience...  most of the time we'll be successful and every once in a while we won't.  But it's our highest priority and you have a firm commitment from us to do so.

I'm glad to seeing us be more transparent about what's going on with our services. This is a good step.

From the press release Microsoft Acquires FolderShare, a File-Synchronization Technology Provider we learn

REDMOND, Wash. — Nov. 3, 2005 — Microsoft Corp. today announced it has acquired FolderShare™, a leading service in the emerging space of file synchronization and remote access technology that helps customers access information across multiple devices. FolderShare customers will continue to be able to enjoy the service at http://www.foldershare.com. Financial details of the acquisition were not disclosed.

Launched in 2002 and owned and operated by Austin, Texas-based ByteTaxi Inc., the award-winning FolderShare service saves customers the hassle of sending large files via e-mail, burning them to CDs or DVDs and mailing them, or uploading them to a Web site. Instead, it allows customers to sync important information, making it well suited for personal or small-business use. The FolderShare service also enables private, remote access to customers’ own files from any Web browser.

"Our mission for Windows Live™ is to enable customers to easily find the information, pursue the interests and deepen the relationships that enrich their lives," said Blake Irving, corporate vice president of the MSN Communication Services and Member Platform group at Microsoft. "I'm thrilled with the acquisition of FolderShare and the opportunity to offer this technology with Windows Live software and services. FolderShare technology will help customers access their information anytime, anywhere and on multiple devices, unifying their overall experience."

FolderShare is an awesome product so this is definitely good news. Even better is that they are joining our group (the Communication Services Platform). Windows Live is looking better and better every day.

Yesterday Dave Winer wrote in a post about cloning the Google API Dave Winer wrote

Let's make the Google API an open standard. Back in 2002, Google took a bold first step to enable open architecture search engines, by creating an API that allowed developers to build applications on top of their search engine. However, there were severe limits on the capacity of these applications. So we got a good demo of what might be, now three years later, it's time for the real thing.

If you didn't get a chance to hear yesterday's podcast, it recommends that Microsoft clone the Google API for search, without the keys, and without the limits. When a developer's application generates a lot of traffic, buy him a plane ticket and dinner, and ask how you both can make some money off their excellent booming application of search. This is something Google can't do, because search is their cash cow. That's why Microsoft should do it. And so should Yahoo. Also, there's no doubt Google will be competing with Apple soon, so they should be also thinking about ways to devalue Google's advantage.

This doesn't seem like a great idea to me for a wide variety of reasons but first, let's start with a history lesson before I tackle this specific issue

A Trip Down Memory Lane
This history lesson used to beis in a post entitled The Tragedy of the API by Evan Williams but seems to be gone now. Anyway, back in the early days of  blogging the folks at Pyra [which eventually got bought by Google] created the Blogger API  for their service. Since Blogspot/Blogger was a popular service, a the number of applications that used the API quickly grew. At this point Dave Winer decided that since the Blogger API was so popular he should implement it in his weblogging tools but then he decided that he didn't like some aspects of it such as application keys (sound familiar?) and did without them in his version of the API. Dave Winer's version of the Blogger API became the MetaWeblog API. These APIs became de facto standards and a number of other weblogging applications implemented them.

After a while, the folks at Pyra decided that their API needed to evolve due to various flaws in its design. As Diego Doval put it in his post a review of blogging APIs, The Blogger API is a joke, and a bad one at that. This lead to the creation of the Blogger API 2.0. At this point a heated debate erupted online where Dave Winer berated the Blogger folks for deviating from an industry standard. The irony of flaming a company for coming up with a v2 of their own API seemed to be lost on many of the people who participated in the debate. Eventually the Blogger API 2.0 went nowhere. 

Today the blogging API world is a few de facto standards based on a hacky API created by a startup a few years ago, a number of site specific APIs (LiveJournal API, MovableType API, etc) and a number of inconsistently implemented versions of the Atom API.

On Cloning the Google Search API
To me the most salient point in the hijacking of the Blogger API from Pyra is that it didn't change the popularity of their service or even make Radio Userland (Dave Winer's product) catch up to them in popularity. This is important to note since this is Dave Winer's key argument for Microsoft cloning the Google API. 

Off the top of my head, here are my top three technical reasons for Microsoft to ignore the calls to clone the Google Search APIs

1. Difference in Feature Set:  The features exposed by the API do not run the entire gamut of features that other search engines may want to expose. Thus even if you implement something that looks a lot like the Google API, you'd have to extend it to add the functionality that it doesn't provide. For example, compare the features provided by the Google API to the features provided by the Yahoo! search API. I can count about half a dozen features in the Yahoo! API that aren't in the Google API.

2. Difference in Technology Choice: The Google API uses SOAP. This to me is a phenomenally bad technical decision because it raises the bar to performing a basic operation (data retrieval) by using a complex technology.  I much prefer Yahoo!'s approach of providing a RESTful API and MSN Windows Live Search's approach of providing RSS search feeds and a SOAP API for the folks who need such overkill.
   

3. Unreasonable Demands: A number of Dave Winer's demands seem contradictory. He asks companies to not require application keys but then advises them to contact application developers who've built high traffic applications about revenue sharing. Exactly how are these applications to be identified without some sort of application ID?  As for removing the limits on the services? I guess Dave is ignoring the fact that providing services costs money, which I seem to remember is why he sold weblogs.com to Verisign for a few million dollars. I do agree that some of the limits on existing search APIs aren't terribly useful. The Google API limit of 1000 queries a day seems to guarantee that you won't be able to power a popular application with the service.
   

4. Lack of Innovation: Copying Google sucks.
   

The stuff I've been working on over the past couple of months is so close to shipping I can taste it. For now you'll have to whet your appetites with the information on the list of upcoming Windows Live Offerings which include

Explore and Find New Interests

Windows Live will deliver new ways for customers to discover and explore:

Social Networking. Social Networking features for Windows Live will be based on the people whom customers know rather than strangers who may visit their blog or Web site. Social Networking in Windows Live will be centered on a customer’s unified contact list, enabling the user to find and connect with people who have similar interests, but may be new to his or her social circle. Customers will be able to choose and control who has access to discover and connect with them.

Windows Live Spaces. Microsoft will continue to invest in services that help people express themselves, and find, connect and nurture deeper relationships with others around the world. MSN Spaces will transition to Windows Live Spaces as Microsoft adds new features to the service next year.

We have a bunch of great stuff coming up over the next year or so. Thanks to Mike for spotting this list. He and I worked closely on the design of Social Networking for Windows Live and it's a feature I know lots of our users will love.

Today Microsoft announced Windows Live. The official blurb is in the press release at Microsoft Previews New Windows Live and Office Live Services

SAN FRANCISCO — Nov. 1, 2005 — Microsoft Corp. today previewed two new Internet-based software services — Windows Live™ and Microsoft® Office Live — designed to deliver rich and seamless experiences to individuals and small businesses. The new offerings combine the power of software plus services and are compelling enhancements to the Microsoft Windows® and Microsoft Office products. In particular, Windows Live helps bring together all the elements of an individual’s digital world while Office Live helps small companies do business online.
...

Windows Live

Windows Live™ is a set of personal Internet services and software designed to bring together in one place all of the relationships, information and interests people care about most, with more safety and security features across their PC, devices and the Web. Microsoft demonstrated early versions of several new Windows Live offerings, some of which are accessible at http://ideas.live.com , a new Web site where people can try the latest Windows Live beta services:

•	Live.com serves as the personalized starting point for Windows Live services, powered by cutting-edge technologies such as RSS and Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX). Live.com offers complete choice and customization for individuals who want quick access to the people and information they care about most. Live.com, which will be a great place to experience Windows Live Search, is available for trial today.
•	Windows Live™ Mail is a new, global Web e-mail service, built from the ground up to be faster, safer and simpler. Existing MSN® Hotmail® users will be able to seamlessly upgrade to the new service. People can sign up for the beta waiting list at http://ideas.live.com .
•	Windows Live™ Messenger helps individuals deepen their connections with the people they care about through instant messaging, file and photo sharing, PC-based calling, and more. Windows Live Messenger will enter the beta stage later this year. More information is available at http://ideas.live.com .
•	Windows Live™ Safety Center is a Web site where users can scan for and remove viruses from their PC on demand. The service is currently in beta form, available at http://ideas.live.com .
•	Windows OneCare™ Live is a previously announced PC health subscription that helps protect and maintain PCs via an integrated service that includes anti-virus, firewall, PC maintenance, and data backup and restore capability. People can sign up for the beta waiting list at http://ideas.live.com .
•	Windows Live™ Favorites is a service that enables individuals to access their Microsoft Internet Explorer and MSN Explorer favorites from any PC that’s online. The service is currently in beta form at http://ideas.live.com .

Windows Live will be offered alongside MSN.com, a global leader in services with more than 215 million active MSN Hotmail accounts; more than 185 million MSN Messenger contacts worldwide; and over 25 million MSN Spaces created by individuals to share their photos, Web logs (blogs) and interests with friends. MSN.com will continue to deliver rich programmed content and provide access to Windows Live services.

As someone who works on MSN Windows Live products I've seen about ten hours of presentations over the past few months on what this means for us and have come up with a simple way of explaining it to the uninitiated.

From a practical perspective, when I think about Windows Live I think about three things:

1. User-centric web applications with rich user interfaces: You can expect more applications with rich, dynamic, user interfaces such as has been shown in the Mail beta and on http://www.live.com. For the geeks out there this means that you'll be seeing a lot more AJAX applications coming out of us and a focus on software that puts the user in control of their online experience.
   

2. Smart desktop applications that improve the Windows user experience:  The MSN division has slowly become Microsoft's consumer software division. From desktop search to instant messaging, a number of key applications that were once thought of as bits that ship with the operating system are now being shipped on a more frequent basis by MSN. With Windows Live, this reality is being acknowledged and embraced. Expect to see more beneficial integration between consumer applications coming from Microsoft and our web properties such as the integration between MSN Messenger & MSN Spaces.

3. The Web as a platform:  http://msdn.microsoft.com/msn was just the beginning, expect a lot more. Coincidentally I just finished giving a presentation to a few hundred of my co-workers from across the company on MSN Windows Live services as a Web platform. This is definitely an area I will be spending a lot of my time on in the following months.
   

To meet this vision will require some new offerings from Microsoft and the reworking of some existing products as well. In some cases, this will simply look like a branding change while in others it will be deeper fundamental changes in how the application works. You can try out some of the Windows Live applications today at http://ideas.live.com/.

Of course, this isn't an official explanation. That is what you'll find in the press release. Instead this is my interpretation based on talking to various folks who've been working on this and the various presentations we've gotten on the topic on my team. There is going to be a lot written about Windows Live over the next couple of days and a lot of it will be inaccurate or fueled by speculation. What I've written above is as accurate a picture as I can paint based on the knowledge I have as someone who now works on this stuff.

From the press release MSN Search Announces MSN Book Search we learn

SAN FRANCISCO — Oct. 25, 2005 — MSN Search today announced its intention to launch MSN^® Book Search, which will support MSN Search’s efforts to help people find exactly what they’re looking for on the Web, including the content from books, academic materials, periodicals and other print resources. MSN Search intends to launch an initial beta of this offering next year. MSN also intends to join the Open Content Alliance (OCA) and work with the organization to scan and digitize publicly available print materials, as well as work with copyright owners to legally scan protected materials.

"With MSN Book Search, we are excited to be working with libraries worldwide to digitize and index information from the world’s printed materials, taking another step in our efforts to better answer people’s questions with trusted content from the best sources," said Christopher Payne, corporate vice president of MSN Search at Microsoft Corp. "We believe people will benefit from the ability to not just view a page, but to easily act on that data in contextually relevant ways, both online in the search experience and in the applications they are using."

MSN will first make available books that are in the public domain and is working with the Internet Archive to digitize the material. MSN will then work to extend its offering to other types of offline content. The digitized content will primarily be print material that has not been copyrighted, and Microsoft will clearly respect all copyrights and work with each partner providing the information to work out mutually agreeable protections for copyrights.

If you're keeping track that means all three major search engines (Yahoo!, Google and MSN) have announced book search engines. So far only Google is facing lawsuits from publishers because it plans to digitize copyrighted works unless the copyright holders explicitly opt-out. Expecting that publishers and authors will have to go to each search engine vendor that plans to offer a book search service to explicitly tell them not to redistribute their works seems to be putting an unnecessary burden on copyright holders and runs counter to the spirit of copyrights.

The lawsuits around Google Print may turn out to be an interesting turning point in how copyright is viewed in the digital era.

The official XBox website recently announced the My XBox service which offers seamless integration between Xbox 360, Xbox Live®, and Xbox.com. The announcement contains the following excerpt

Clinton: Once you've created your gamer card, we give you all kinds of ways to show it off. It'll appear next to all of your posts in the forums, plus you can pop it into your personal Web page or blog, and even display it on your active Windows® desktop.

TriXie: Very cool! I heard a rumor that we'll be able to get some cool Xbox® functionality with MSN Spaces.

Clinton: That's true. When the new version of MSN Spaces launches—around the time Xbox 360 hits store shelves—you'll be able to use Xbox 360 themes on your Space, plus drop in new Xbox modules like your gamer card and your games list.

TriXie: Wow, you guys have thought of everything. I can't wait to get my hands on all these great My Xbox features! Thanks Clinton.

We definitely have some holiday gifts for our millions of users in the next version of MSN Spaces. It is very exciting to think that in the near future millions of people will be using the features I worked on to better express themselves and share content with their friends and family online. As Mike mentioned on his blog, "You can blog on MSN Spaces, but MSN Spaces is not just a blogging service."

I've been using MSN Virtual Earth for a while now and like it quite a lot. However there is definitely room for improvement and I'm glad to see that the team is soliciting feedback from users on what features they consider most important for the next release. In the post Suggestions for Virtual Earth Release 2? they write

The VE team is rolling on the next release and is interested in your feature requests. Lets make it interesting - You have 10 bucks to spend on features. How would you spend 'em? Post your comments here. My shopping list might look like this -

 

4  Street maps for Italy

3  Driving directions integrated in the application and not linked off to maps.msn.com

3  improved WiFi coverage for the Locate me feature in rural areas.

 

You get the idea. Go ahead, buy your features. Just remember to stay within your budget :-)

If you use VE and have some features you'd like to see in the next release, go ahead and post a comment with your requests. Here's how I'd spend my $10 on features; $2 to expand the Virtual Earth API to include conversions from physical addresses to latitudes & longitudes (aka geocoding), $3 to integrate driving directions into VE as opposed to being linked to http://maps.msn.com as is done today, $4 to add the ability to store my favorite locations in VE, and $1 to add maps of Canada to the service.

So how would you spend your dollars on VE features?

Dave Sifry, the CEO of Technorati, has a regular series of posts called The State of the Blogosphere where provides various statistics about the number of blogs Technorati is tracking. In State of the Blogosphere, October 2005 Part 1: On Blogosphere Growth he writes

About 70,000 new weblogs are tracked every day, which is about a new weblog created each second, somewhere in the world. It also appears that blogging is taking off around the world, and not just in English. Some of the significant increases we've seen over the past 3 months have been due to a proliferation of chinese-speaking weblogs, both on MSN Spaces as well as on Chinese sites like blogcn.com .

The growth of the Chinese blogosphere on MSN Spaces is a trend those of us working on Spaces have seen first hand. I wouldn't be surprised if we are one of the biggest blog hosting services for Chinese bloggers. An interesting side effect of this growth is that an increasing number of blogs in the Technorati Top 100 are blogs that are popular with Chinese users of MSN Spaces.

Below is a list of the MSN Spaces on today's version of the top 100 list

27. spaces.msn.com/members/princesscecicastle
11,999 links from 3,455 sites. View All »

30. Hack MSN Spaces
­Spaces Customization at its Best™
By Devdutt Parikh
12,540 links from 3,329 sites. View All »

41. spaces.msn.com/members/slim
By slim
8,569 links from 2,771 sites. View All »

47. Herramientas para Blogs
Herramientas para spaces. Un blog sobre personalización de los spaces
By mmadrigal madrigal
7,309 links from 2,578 sites. View All »

49. Scott's "SiteExperts" Place
Web developers, Web developers, Web developers! MSN Client architect who shares his thoughts on DHTML, AJAX, Client Frameworks, etc., and how we are engineering MSN properties.
By Scott Isaacs
7,103 links from 2,509 sites. View All »

66. spaces.msn.com/members/flowersummer
6,405 links from 2,118 sites. View All »

71. spaces.msn.com/members/locker2man
By locker2man
5,358 links from 2,026 sites. View All »

74. spaces.msn.com/members/hcy521
6,640 links from 2,007 sites. View All »

It is interesting to note that every space on the Technorati Top 100 list is either Chinese or is about customizing/hacking the MSN Spaces user interface which is popular among our Chinese users. I'd never have guessed that these would be the most popular spaces when we launched the service last year.

More info keeps spilling out about the beta of the Hotmail "Kahuna" release. If you go to http://join.msn.com/mailbeta/features, you'll get an overview of the new features in the next version of Hotmail including screenshots. The list includes

• Reading Pane
• The Info Bar
• Anti-Phishing features
• The wonderful world of right clicking
• Drag and drop
• Address AutoComplete
• Keyboard shortcuts
• Rich text editing
• Storage that grows with you
• Save sent mail

As the saying goes a picture is worth a thousand words. It's a lot easier to appreciate the work that's gone into the next version of Hotmail when you actually see it. Even better is using it, so don't forget to sign up for the beta by going to http://www1.imagine-msn.com/minisites/hotmail/Default.aspx.

I've seen a couple of complaints online from people who saw the video of the Hotmail "Kahuna" release but couldn't get into the beta. The beta is now open to the general public. If you'd like to sign up for the beta, just click on the link below and follow the steps listed

http://www1.imagine-msn.com/minisites/hotmail/Default.aspx

I'm totally digging the beta and have definitely been impressed with the improvements in the service. Kahuna is gearing up to be an excellent release.

There's been a bunch of MSN Virtual Earth hacking going on in my building over the past couple of weeks. There was my Seattle Movie Finder hack. Recently two folks on the MSN Messenger team created a shared map browsing application using the recently released MSN Messenger Activity API. Chandu Thota has the details in his post Virtual Earth and MSN Messenger : Peer-2-Peer Mapping Experience

If you are running MSN Messenger 6.0 or higher, open a conversation with your contact and click on "Activities" menu item; it will display a list of activities that you can use which includes "Virtual Earth Shared Map" as shown below:

Once you and your contact accept this activity you both can find, pan and zoom on the Virtual Earth map all interactively, like the one shown below:

Okay, I don't want to waste your time anymore - this is one of the coolest things I have seen in this space - try it out! you won't be disappointed! :)

PS: Kudos to Steve Gordon and Shree Madhavapeddi from MSN for creating such a wonderful app!

I got a demo of this from Steve and Shree last week, I didn't realize that it would show up in the MSN Messenger application so soon. That is some quick turn around time.

I also got a demo of a cool Start.com gadget which uses MSN Virtual Earth from Matt this week. I wonder how long that will take to sneak out onto the Web.

PS: In his post about this Robert Scoble states that the application was created by Scott Swanson. This isn't accurate, Scott wrote a similar application as a PDC demo but the version you can get in MSN Messenger activities menu isn't it.

While using Firefox this morning, I just realized something was missing. There is a Google Toolbar for Firefox, there is a Yahoo! Toolbar for Firefox, so how come there isn't an MSN Toolbar for Firefox? Just yesterday, Ken Moss who runs the MSN Search team posted on their blog about MSN Search Plugins for Firefox where he wrote

However, some of our customers prefer using Firefox and we respect that choice.  Some developers in our user community have created Firefox plug-ins to make it easy to do searches on MSN from the Firefox search box.  Even though it’s currently buried in Firefox under “Add Engines… Find lots of other search engines…”, it seems that our customers have been finding it since we’re listed as one of the most popular search engine plugins.

I use Firefox sometimes in the course of my job – and when I do, I love having the MSN Search engine plugged-in up in the chrome.  If you’re currently a Firefox user – I hope you’ll enjoy this little nugget. For more MSN Search fun with Firefox (or IE!), try out the PDC version of MSN Search enabled by a Trixie / Greasemonkey script.

It's cool to see the MSN Search team giving a shout out to plugins built by the developer community but I think it would be even cooler if we step up to the plate like Yahoo! and Google have done by providing an official,  full fledged toolbar for Firefox.

From the press release MSN Launches Paid-Search Service in France and Singapore we learn

NEW YORK — Sept. 26, 2005 — Today, Yusuf Mehdi, senior vice president of the MSN^® Information Services & Merchant Platform division, opened the second annual Advertising Week 2005 in New York City by announcing the official launch of adCenter in France and Singapore. adCenter powers a paid-search service from MSN that provides advanced audience intelligence and targeting capabilities to help advertisers improve their return on investment when it comes to paid-search advertising.The official launch of adCenter in France today and Singapore on Aug. 31 follows successful pilot programs in both countries. U.S. testing of adCenter is set to begin in October.
...
Powerful campaign management tools and deep audience intelligence unique to MSN make it easy for advertisers to optimize and refine their campaigns to reach a specific audience. Some of those tools include the following:

• Keyword Selection allows advertisers to indicate whom they want to reach based on geographic location, gender, age range, time of day and day of week, and suggests keywords based on the desired audience.

• Site Analyzer assists advertisers by suggesting keywords based on the content of their Web site, rather than on another keyword.

• Audience Profiler provides advertisers with an expected profile of those customers who are most likely to search for specific keywords.

• Cost Estimator helps advertisers remain within their budget by estimating rank, traffic and cost per month per keyword.

• Campaign Optimization allows advertisers to respond quickly and decisively throughout the campaign to easily refine budget allocations and keywords, as well as apply targeting filters such as geographic, demographic and dayparting.

• Post Sales Audience Intelligence & Reporting provides advertisers with detailed reports on campaign performance and audiences reached including click-through rate, estimated position and spending levels.

"We’re excited by the positive feedback we have received from advertisers thus far," Mehdi said. "The launch of adCenter in France and Singapore is a great first step to delivering on our global vision to connect advertisers to consumers in a much more meaningful way."

In the near future, adCenter will become a one-stop shop from which advertisers can manage all their MSN advertising campaigns, end to end, including display and direct ads. In addition, advertisers will be able to use advanced targeting tools and audience intelligence data to reach their desired audiences across the MSN network. Advertisers interested in learning more or signing up for adCenter can go to http://advertising.msn.com.

Our team got a demo of adCenter a few months ago and it definitely looks like it hits all the right points which is impressive for a version 1.0 offering. Given how much revenue MSN gets from advertising it's good to see us giving advertisers more tools to improve the value to get from advertising on MSN. Based on the fact that competitors like Yahoo! and Google already have offerings in this space, adCenter is an overdue addition to our stable of services.

From Omar Shahine's post mail.start.com we learn

Well, we launched Kahuna Milestone 3 (M3) yesterday with a new URL (http://mail.start.com). We are building Kahuna iteratively, and plan on releasing much goodness on a frequent basis. This is very different from the way that Hotmail and MSN has typically released software, but we feel it’s the best way to achieve success.

As I mentioned recently I've been using the Hotmail beta for a while now and it's a phenomenal improvement over the current version. Below is a screenshot of the beta in action.

If you'd like invites to the beta, you should keep an eye on the Hotmail team's space. You can also find more screenshots of the Hotmail beta on their space as well.

There are two videos about MSN's AJAX efforts on Channel 9 today.

1. Omar Shahine and team - New Hotmail "Kahuna": Hundreds of millions of people use Hotmail. Here's the first look at the next-generation of Hotmail, code-named "Kahuna."
   
   You meet the team which is located at Microsoft's Silicon Valley campus, hear their design philosophy, and get a first look.

2. Scott Isaacs - MSN DHTML Foundation unveiled: Scott Isaacs is one of the inventors of DHTML. He is one of Microsoft's smartest Web developers and built a framework that's being used on Start.com, the future Hotmail, and other places like the new gadgets in Windows Vista. Hope you enjoy meeting Scott, sorry for the bad lighting at the beginning. If you've done any AJAX development, you'll find this one interesting and you'll get a look at some bleeding-edge Web development that MSN is doing.
   

I've been using the Hotmail beta and it is definitely hot. My girlfriend saw me using it and when I told her that was the next version of Hotmail she told me to send hugs and kisses to the Hotmail team. Kudos to Omar, Aditya, Steve Kafka, Imran, Walter, Reeves and all the other folks at Hotmail who're making Kahuna happen.

Additionally it looks like I'll be working on Hotmail features in our next release. So maybe I'll get some of those hugs and kisses next time. ;)

Today's preview of the Start.com Developer illustrates fundamental shifts in web programming patterns:

• DHTML-based Gadgets
  Start.com consumes DHTML-based components called Gadgets. These Gadgets can be created by any developer, hosted on any site, and consumed into the Start.com experience. The model is completely distributed. You can develop components derived from other components on the web.
• Adding Behavior to RSS
  RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is an incredible platform for sharing content and information. Today all RSS feeds are treated equally by aggregators. Start.com integrates the world of RSS with Gadgets enabling any feed to optionally be associated with a rich, interactive experience. Some feeds present information that may be better presented in an alternative format. Other feeds leverage extensions or provide extra semantics beyond standard RSS (e.g., Open Search, Geo-based coordinates, etc). By enabling a feed to define a unique experience or consume an existing one, the richness of the aggregator experience can improve organically without requiring a new application. Of course, we also allow the user to control whether a custom experience is displayed for a feed.
• Open-ended Application Model
  Start.com is what I call an open-ended application. An open-ended application consumes Gadgets and provides core application services and experiences. This is and has been the Start.com model since its inception (how do you think they released new features every week?). By opening up Start.com, we have removed the boundaries around Start.com features and experiences. The community of developers and publishers can now define and control the richness of the Start.com experience.

These are the web-applications of the future - applications that can integrate not only content (e.g., RSS) but associated behaviors and services. Today, via Start.com, the developer community can preview MSN's client technology and infrastructure. At Start.com/Developer, you will find early samples and documentation. This site will be continually improved with more documentation and samples. Go and build Gadgets and custom experiences for your feeds. Most importantly, since we are far from finished, please give us feedback. The platform can only improve with your feedback. Also, we are always looking for interesting Gadgets and custom RSS experiences.

I'm not sure I'm feelin' the "Web 3.0" monicker but the extensibility of the site is definitely cool beans. I remember a conversation I had with Steve Rider I had during the early days of the site where I asked if it would be possible to customize how different RSS feeds were displayed. At the time, I had noticed that there were three primary widget types for weather reports, stock quotes and headlines. I suggested that it would be cool if people could add annotations to the RSS feed to tell it how to display on the Start.com. Being an XML geek I was was thinking of extensions such as a start:display-style element which could have values like "columns", "headlines" or "rows".

Steve thought my idea was cool and chatted with Scott Isaacs about it. Since Scott is the DHTML guru of DHTML gurus, he kicked the idea up a notch and actually designed an infrastructure where sophisticated rendering behavior could be associated with an RSS feed using JavaScript. The rest is history.

Damn, I love working here.

I am proud to announce that we have launched the MSN Developer Center on MSDN. This is culmination of some of the efforts I started driving shortly after writing the blog post MSN Developer Network? where I wrote

Yesterday, in a meeting to hash out some of the details of MSN Spaces API an interesting question came up. So far I've been focused on the technical details of the API (what methods should we have? what protocol should it use? etc) as well as the scheduling impact but completely overlooked a key aspect of building developer platform. I hadn't really started thinking about how we planned to support developers using our API. Will we have a website? A mailing list? Or a newsgroup? How will people file bugs? Do we expect them to navigate to http://spaces.msn.com and use the feedback form?

Besides supporting developers, we will need a site to spread awareness of the existence of the API.

After writing that post I started talking to various folks at MSN who were interested in providing APIs for their various services and realized that there was an opportunity for us to come up with a unified developer portal as opposed to a number of disjoint efforts. My argument was that instead of developers having to figure out they need to go to http://addins.msn.com/devguide.aspx to find out about extending MSN toolbar and http://www.viavirtualearth.com to find out about building MSN Virtual Earth mash-ups, we should just have http://msdn.microsoft.com/msn for all of MSN's Web 2.0 efforts. Everyone I talked to thought this made sense and now here we are.

Currently you can find information on extending or building applications with the APIs from Windows Desktop Search, MSN Toolbar, Start.com, MSN Virtual Earth, MSN Search, and MSN Messenger. In the near future I will be adding information about the APIs for interacting with MSN Spaces.

In addition to the developer center, we also have MSN Developer Forums where developers can discuss the various MSN APIs and interact with some of the people who work on the technologies.

Of course, this is just the beginning. Over the long term we have a bunch of stuff planned for the dev center including more APIs and more MSN properties joining the Web 2.0 party. This is going to be lots of fun.

PS: Shout outs go out to Jim Gordon, Chris Butler, Seth Demsey, Scott Swanson, Josh Ledgard and a host of others who helped make this a reality.

Since my previous post on the various MSN sessions at PDC, two new ones have finally had their details announced. They are

PRSL02 - Case Study: How Hotmail Used Atlas and ASP.NET to Build a Great User Experience

September 14, 12:30 PM - 1:15 PM 152/153 (Hall F) Walter Hsueh

Microsoft's Hotmail web application team is developing the successor to Hotmail: a modern webmail experience focused on safety, simplicity, and speed. We will walk you through the scale and performance requirements of the Internet's largest distributed webmail application and show you how building on ASP.NET and Atlas technologies provides the right solution for the problem space. Learn from our experiences and design patterns of how we leveraged the "Atlas" programming model and "Atlas" components to build rich, interactive Web applications. PRSL04 - MSN: Extending Start.com Using Startlets September 15, 1:00 PM - 1:45 PM 408 AB Scott Isaacs/ Sanaz Ahari MSN's Web incubation team is creating a new AJAX-based personalized Web experience at start.com - here is your opportunity to get under the covers and see how we are building this site. Start.com allows for consumers to personalize their web experience to the things that matter the most to them. See how we build Start.com modules (Startlets) such as the Stock Picker, Weather Picker, and Blogger Map. Learn how to create your own custom Startlets for Start.com. We will also present how your RSS feed can also define a unique experience when viewed within Start.com. The Start.com team and architect will give you a tour of code you can use today. Join us for lunch and catch the latest wave of innovation from MSN's Web incubation team.

A couple more details of MSN's upcoming announcements of the various APIs we'll be opening up during PDC have come out. The write up with the best overview I've seen so far has been the article Microsoft Web plan takes aim at Google which states

Microsoft will detail its "Web platform" strategy at its Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles next week, company executives told CNET News.com
...
At the developers conference next week, Microsoft plans to publish the API to its MSN Search service, which can be used by developers through the Simple Object Access Protocol, or SOAP. The noncommercial license will let people produce 10,000 search results per day per Internet address, said Seth Demsey, group program manager for MSN Search. Microsoft will release an API for its desktop search as well.

Also next week, the company will announce a free commercial license to use a JavaScript "control" to display data from its Virtual Earth mapping service. The MSN Messenger group, meanwhile, will allow developers to write Windows applications that make use of the "Activity" window. This would allow a customer service representative, for example, to display customer information in a chat session.
...
Next Thursday, Microsoft executives will discuss a developer program for Start.com, an MSN incubator Web site that consolidates information from RSS feeds and other Web sites onto a single customizable page.

That's right, during the PDC we'll be announcing developer programs for four MSN properties; MSN Virtual Earth, MSN Messenger, Start.com and MSN Search. Unfortunately, MSN Spaces isn't on that list but this is mainly due to logistics reasons and not because we won't be opening it up to as a platform for developers.

Of course, there are more details from the horses mouth.

MSN Messenger
From Leah Pearlmann's post about the MSN Messenger Activity API we learn

The release of the API will be announced at the upcoming Microsoft PDC next week in LA. Along with this announcement will be another for a contest
...
Starting next week, you, yes you, can download the Activity API, build an Activity using the competition guidelines, and submit it. You Activity will be posted in the App Gallery where people around the globe can try it out and vote for it (which they will, because YOURS will be the best).

Activities will be judged based on creativity, usability, inclusion of MSN services/features and number of popular votes. Besides the most valuable reward – unlimited bragging rights— you can also win:

• Alienware Area 51 laptop with armored case (grand prize)
• Aurora Desktops (1^st runner-up)
• Oakley Thump sun glasses with built in MP3 player (2^nd runner-up)

For more information, go to visit this forum or wait until September 12^th and then go to http://www.worldsbestapp.com and http://msdn.microsoft.com/msn/messenger

I've been involved in the discussions on opening up different parts of our IM client and it's great to see some of these efforts begin to bear fruit. Once the contest is live, don't hesitate to post questions to the developer forum. I'll be watching as will several folks on the MSN Messenger team.

By the way, the MSN Messenger PM team is looking for someone with experience to drive their audio and video efforts. If this sounds like your cup of tea, then check out the job description and maybe even respond.

MSN Virtual Earth
The big news here was posted by Chandu Thota in his blog posting Virtual Earth APIs available for commercial use (and they are FREE!) where he wrote

Here is the good news folks: We are now offering the MSN Virtual Earth API for commercial applications free of charge to developers.  This APIs include the JavaScript map control and local search service (exposed via the What/Where search boxes on Virtual Earth site today). 

Here are some important notes about this release:

1. Maps are available in U.S. only and does not include any routing capabilities. In the future we will add European and Asian geographies. 
2. In order to use the API for commercial applications with no charge, your application must use the local search service on the map (the What/Where search boxes)
3. There is no SLA for Virtual Earth enabled applications until January 1, 2006.  Also, if you choose to use Virtual Earth in your production environment before the end of 2005, you must notify the MSN Virtual Earth team first in order to ensure capacity
4. MapPoint Web Service and Virtual Earth platform are not integrated (yet!)

 Now how does the future look like? On January 1, 2006, you will have two additional options to choose from to fit your commercial application needs:

1. You can use the Virtual Earth APIs for free as long as you use the What/Where search boxes on your map. This is also makes sense from a revenue stand point since you will have the opportunity to make money by placing advertisements on your site in a revenue sharing model (more details to be announced at a later date)
2. If you do not want to utilize the What/Where search boxes on your site or advertising, you can use the Virtual Earth API under your current MapPoint Web Service contract. In this scenario you will be charged for transactions through the Virtual Earth API. Note that this option comes with SLAs. 

There you have it - now you have what you are waiting for: the opportunity to integrate maps into your applications at free of cost (as long as you use the What/Where search boxes). I will be writing more about how to integrate maps and the What/Where search boxes into your web applications on this blog in my future posts. In the mean time, don't forget to check out ViaVirtualEarth to learn how to build applications using Virtual Earth Map control (and to win $1000!)

That's right, they have a developer contest going on as well. I'd hoped to have my article on building my Seattle Movie Finder page up by PDC to give folks a place to start when building their first mapping mash-up but I never got enough spare time at work. The article should be done by next week and should hopefully show up online the week after PDC.

It looks like I'm going to regret not going to PDC since we'll be unveiling some stuff I've been working with folks on over the past couple of months. Here's a hint, http://msdn.microsoft.com/msn. ;)

If you'll be at PDC, you definitely should check out some of the info first hand by attending some of our conference sessions. Such as

COM301 MSN Messenger: Extending MSN Messenger with Multi-Person Instant Messaging Applications

Day/Time: Wednesday, September 14 1:45 PM- 3:00 PM Room: 406 AB

Speaker(s): Scott Swanson

Session Type(s): Breakout

Session Level(s): 300

Track(s): Communications

This session covers the architecture and design of multi-person IM applications within MSN Messenger using the Messenger Activity API. We show how to use the peer-to-peer capabilities of the Activity API to build multi-user IM applications that can send files, instant messages, data, and integrate with other services. Build your IM applications to work with MSN Messenger, the world's largest instant messaging service with more than 165 million customers worldwide.

DAT322 MSN Search: Building Web and Desktop Search into Your Applications

Day/Time: Thursday, September 15 5:15 PM- 6:30 PM Room: 409 AB

Speaker(s): Seth Demsey, Chris McConnell

Session Type(s): Breakout

Session Level(s): 300

Track(s): Data & Systems

This session shows you how to harness the power of Web and Desktop Search within your applications. We provide an overview of the MSN Search APIs for both searching the Web and your desktop. We then demonstrate how to use these APIs to create applications that harness the power of searching your local data and Web data.

DATL03 Tips, Tricks & Hacks to MSN Search and Desktop Search Platforms

Day/Time: Friday, September 16 12:00 PM- 12:45 PM Room: 403 AB

Speaker(s): Andy Edmonds

Session Type(s): Lunch Session

Track(s): Data & Systems

This session will show you how to get the most of MSN Search and Windows Desktop Search. From advanced syntax to API usage and RSS, you will be equipped to get exactly what you want from these search tools. Learn about the ranking sliders which allow you to emphasize freshness or popularity in the results. We will also be distributing a hack which customizes MSN Search to the needs of a PDC attendee. For Windows Desktop Search you'll learn how to make yourself more productive with advanced query syntax, Deskbar shortcuts, additional locations and customized previews.

DATL05 Case Study: Extending Virtual Earth for Windows Mobile Devices

Day/Time: Thursday, September 15 1:00 PM- 1:45 PM Room: 404 AB

Speaker(s): Steve Lombardi

Session Type(s): Lunch Session

Track(s): Data & Systems

MSN Virtual Earth (www.virtualearth.com) is an evolution of local search technology that gives consumers a deeply immersive search experience where they can easily find, discover, plan, and share what is important to them. Microsoft is now harnessing its extensive search and mapping assets to create an entirely new local search experience for consumers and businesses. In this session, learn how you can programmatically tap into the power of Virtual Earth to location enable your device applications. Learn how the powerful managed code features of Windows Mobile 5.0 enable you to integrate your devices contacts and calendar with Virtual Earth's powerful search and mapping engines.

PNL09 APIs in the Sky: Developing Public Web Services

Day/Time: Friday, September 16 10:30 AM- 12:00 PM Room: 152/153 (Hall F)

Speaker(s): Don Box, Seth Demsey, Omri Gazitt, Alan Geller, David Nielsen, Doug Purdy

Session Type(s): Panel

Track(s): Communications

Want to know how Amazon, Paypal and MSN design, build, and maintain their Web services? Interested in learning best practices and key insights from the architects of Windows Communication Foundation ("Indigo")? If so, this is the panel for you. Join Don Box and other industry luminaries as they discuss the practical trade-offs involved when building Web services today and what you can expect to see in the near and long-term future.

It looks like http://www.start.com is now an actual site as opposed to a 'coming soon' graphic. However the disclaimer at the bottom still states, this site is not an officially supported site. it is an incubation experiment and doesn't represent any particular strategy or policy.

Curioser and curioser.

I've known about this for a couple of days but was planning to wait until it was mentioned on the MSN Search blog. However since they've been scooped it looks like the cat is out of the bag. So here goes

Searching for Web (RSS, Atom) Feeds

Need to find an RSS or Atom feed? No problem.  Use the feed: operator to do so.  This searches for all documents that are RSS or atom feeds

http://search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=feed%3A+robert+scoble&FORM=QBHP

Searching for documents that contain Web (RSS, Atom) Feeds

Need to find a document that contains an RSS or Atom feed?  Use the hasfeed: operator.

http://search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=hasfeed%3A+C%23&FORM=QBRE

Folder Level Site Search

You can now use site search (site: operator) to restrict your search to a particular folder hierarchy in the URL up to two levels deep.  For example,

http://search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=site%3Awww.microsoft.com%2Fwindows&FORM=QBHP (searching the Windows site on MS.com)

http://search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=site%3Aspaces.msn.com%2Fmembers%2Fmike&FORM=QBRE (searching a blog on MSN Spaces)

Note:  There is a known issue around this feature. You cannot include a / after the second directory. This will be fixed in the near future. 

So it looks like MSN Search is the first of the big three search engines to provide RSS search and the improvements to the site: operator are also quite cool. They definitely get mad props from me for getting these features out there. 

From the Microsoft press release Microsoft Acquires Teleo, Innovative VoIP Technology Company we learn

REDMOND, Wash. — Aug. 30, 2005 — Microsoft Corp. today announced it has acquired Teleo Inc., a provider of voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) software and services that enable the placement of phone calls from PCs to traditional phones and that deliver this technology in unique ways through a variety of software and Web applications. Microsoft expects to combine the technology and expertise of Teleo with the existing VoIP investments of MSN to further develop products and services that connect consumers to the people and information that most matter to them. Financial details were not disclosed.

Founded in 2003 and headquartered in San Francisco, Teleo is a privately held company whose initial planned service offering, also called Teleo, was designed to allow customers to use their PC to make phone calls to cell phones, regular phones or other PCs. Through its integration with Microsoft^® Outlook^® and Microsoft Internet Explorer, the Teleo service was designed to facilitate click-to-call dialing of any telephone number that appears on-screen, for example through a Web site or via search results or e-mail.

VoIP technology already is prominently featured in MSN^® Messenger as well as other Microsoft products and services. Microsoft plans to incorporate and expand upon Teleo technologies, integrating them into the infrastructure that supports MSN and ultimately projects delivering new VoIP consumer applications in future releases of MSN services.

This is pretty good news for MSN Messenger users. Instant Messaging is more than just sending text from one computer to another. Voice and video conversations are also valid ways to communicate using our instant messaging client. Also the ability to communicate with people on other devices besides their computers is also one thing we think is important. In fact, while I was in Nigeria I made heavy use of MSN Messenger's SMS to IM conversation capabilities to send messages to my girl friend's phone while she was at work back here in Seattle.

It's all about communication and the addition of the Teleo folks to our fold will only increase and improve the communication capabilities of MSN Messenger. Excellent.

Lots of folks I've talked to at work have had mixed feelings about the recently announced Google Talk. The feelings are usually relief and disapointment in equal portions. Relief because Google hasn't shipped yet another application that redraws the lines of what that class of application should look like (e.g. GMail and Google Maps) meaning we have to play catch up. Disappointment because we actually expect better from Google.

You can see some of these sentiments from various folks at MSN such as Mike Torres in his post Competition & Google Talk, Sanaz Ahari in her posts Google Talk review and Google Talk pt II, and Richard Chung in his post Google Talk Blows.

Of course, Microsoft employees aren't the only ones underwhelmed by Google Talk. Doing a quick search of the blogosphere for comments about Google Talk leads me to lots of bloggers expressing ambivalence about the application.

The most interesting reaction I noticed was from Robert X. Cringely who was inspired to ask Has Google Peaked? in his most recent column. In the article he not only asks whether Google's best products are already behind it but also points out that they have become experts at Fire and Motion. Below is the relevant excerpt from Robert X. Cringely's column

Google plays on its technical reputation even though, if you look closely, it isn't always deserved. Many Google products haven't been revved since they were introduced. And while some Google products are excellent, some aren't, too.

Google likes to play the Black Box game. What are they DOING in all those buildings with all those PhDs? I'm sure they are doing a lot that will change the world, but just as much that will never even be seen by the world. For the moment, though, it doesn't matter because Google can play the spoiler. They offered a gigabyte of e-mail storage, for example, at a time when they had perhaps one percent the number of e-mail users as a Hotmail or Yahoo. And by limiting the Gmail beta, they avoided the suffering of both those other companies when they, too, had to increase their storage allocations, but for tens of millions of real users.

Now Google will do something similar for chat and VoIP with Gtalk, pushing the others toward an interoperability that undermines the hold each company thinks it has on its users.

In my original post about Google Talk I mentioned that using Jabber/XMPP was an attempt at a disruptive move by Google. Of course, it is only disruptive if its competitors like AOL, MSN and Yahoo! react by breaking down the walls of the walled gardens they have created in their various IM products.

I find it interesting that instead of trying to push the envelope with regards to the user experience in instant messaging, Google chose to 'punk' its competitors instead. I guess we'll just have to see how MSN, Yahoo & AOL end up reacting.

David Card of Jupiter Research has a blog post entitled Pre-emptive IM Strike from MSN where he describes one of the reasons I love working at MSN

Finally, MSN wants to remind everyone that it's got six years of experience in this stuff -- hear that, Sergey? -- and is sticking to its promise of thrice-yearly upgrades, so watch for more goodies in November.

The upgrades are all fine, but I was actually more impressed by Irving's crisp articulation of the IM Big Picture. MSN is trying to move the conversation away from IM (defined as "real-time text messaging," how dull) to "contacts." I think they downplay presence management, but that's okay, presence sounds too much like AOL-friendly talk. As does Buddy Lists, but I can't break the habit.

What's critical about IM isn't real-time text messaging but the Buddy List as a communications/presence management hub.(Link is ancient history for geek/vision cred.) You manage your buddies and buddy groups and their relationships to you (and each other), shifting those according to what persona you're inhabiting (work, home, fun, shopping, etc.) and what communications are available to you or you want to make available to them. Then broadcast that selectively. The company that can teach consumers how to do this, and own that management tool is in a very powerful position. The portals will be duking it out with the mobile carriers for this, I suspect.

MSN's vision is pretty parallel to the one above. Irving claims Microsoft has an "ABCH" -- Address Book Clearing House -- that is a repository for all those contacts, relationships and permissions that come from Messenger and Hotmail. You can imagine how powerful that might be -- we're not just talking "gleams" and sharing playlists here -- and how much grief Microsoft will get for playing Big Brother.

Anyway, MSN gets it.

Besides the fact that I'm one of the program managers for ABCH and thus it's kind of cool to get a shout out from our VP, there are some other things about this excerpt that have me smiling. When I first came to MSN I thought I'd have to beat people over the head with the message that Social Software is the Platform of the Future but I didn't have to because everybody gets it. Everyone I've talked to from vice presidents and general managers to developers and testers working directly on individual features has their mind wrapped around our social software vision. It's really simple, the #1 goal of social software should be around improving the ways I communicate and interact with the people I know and a secondary goal is giving me avenues to communicate and interact with people I don't. It's really that simple.

We definitely have some interesting stuff coming down the road in the next couple of months. I can only hope our users have as much fun using our software as we had building it.

On an unrelated note, I have updated the track of the week from my high school days on my space. Just click on the play button on the Windows Media player module to hear this week's track. Listening to some of this stuff I can't help thinking, "I could have been a contender". :)

Omar Shahine has a post where he talks about FireAnt. FireAnt is communications part of the AJAX framework shared by Hotmail, Start.com, MyMSN and MSN Spaces which Steve Rider alluded to in his post Spaces, Hotmail and Start (oh my!).

Omar writes

Last summer we spent a lot of time at the white-board evaluating a number of ways to deliver a new architecture for Hotmail. We considered a number of things:

1. Modification of the current C/C++ ISAPI architecture to support a hybrid ASP model.
2. .NET rewrite for the DataLayer and BusinessLayer and XML/XSLT for the PresentationLayer
3. Same as #2 but the Presentation layer would be JavaScript, XMLHTTP, and DHTML/CSS. This now has the fancy name, AJAX.

After much deliberating, we chose #3, and started running. For 4 weeks basically 1 PM, a developer and an intern built a prototype, and then the real thing (in case you are in college I’d note how cool it is that we put an intern on the most important technology we we're building). As more people started to move over to the FireAnt project, we got more and more excited about what was happening. You see, writing AJAX code can be a pain, and we didn’t want to spend our days and nights writing a lot of JavaScript and debugging client side Script. Instead we built an infrastructure that dynamically take server side objects (classes and methods) and automatically generates client side JavaScript stubs. The end result is that the client side object model looked exactly like the server side object model. Information was transported across the wire using XMLHTTP and the whole thing happened Asynchronously.

We extended .NET Attributes to mark classes and methods as FireAnt classes/methods and at build time the script is generated. If you think of SOAP support in the .NET Framework, it’s basically similar. As a developer you do not worry about generating SOAP messages, or building a SOAP parser. All you do is mark your method as [WebMethod] and your classes as [Serializable] and the .NET framework takes care of proxying, class generation etc. That’s what we were shooting for.

This was a big deal for us as it allows us to be incredibly productive. Since last summer, we have built a ton of features using FireAnt and the JavaScript Frameworks from Scott Isaacs. Late last fall we went up to Redmond and showed FireAnt to a number of folks in MSN, one of those folks was Steve Rider. It was really exciting to see the looks on folks faces when Walter (our FireAnt “architect”) setup his “Hello World” demo. You could just see that people realized that doing AJAX style development any other way was crazy.

We’ve since showed our stuff to a number of teams inside Microsoft. As a result of our work, Walter and Scott have spent a considerable amount of time with the Whidbey/ASP.NET folks and it’s pretty exciting to see ATLAS come together. If you want to learn more, Walter will be giving a talk at the PDC on what we’ve built. It’s great so see collaboration between our team and the Developer Division as the end result will be a better more scalable version of the .NET Framework for you.

Trying to build a complex AJAX website with traditional Visual Studio.NET development tools is quite painful which is why the various teams at MSN have collaborated and built a unified framework. As Omar points out, one of the good things that has come out of this is that the various MSN folks went to the Microsoft developer division and pointed out they are missing the boat key infrastructure needed for AJAX development. This feedback was one of the factors that resulted in the recently announced Atlas project.

A key point Omar touches on is that development became much easier when they built a framework for handling serialization and deserialization of objects to transmitted using XMLHTTP. The trick here is that the framework handles both serialization and deserialization on both the server (ASP.NET code) and the client (Javascript code). Of course, this is AJAX development 101 and anyone who's used AJAX frameworks like AJAX.NET is familiar with these techniques. One of the interesting things that falls out of using a framework like this is that the serialization format becomes less interesting, one could as easily use JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) as opposed to some flavor of XML.

If you're going to be at the Microsoft Professional Developer's Conference (PDC) and are interested in professional AJAX development you should definitely make your way to the various presentations by the MSN folks. Also, we're always looking for developers so if building AJAX applications that will be utilized by millions of people on a daily basis sounds like your cup of tea give us your resume.

Joe Wilcox, an analyst for Jupiter Research, recently posted his changed impressions on MSN Spaces in his blog post Making Room for My Space. He writes

I have started using MSN Spaces as the place where I keep my personal Weblog. Duing 2004 and part of 2005, I used TypePad's blogging service, and more recently moved one of my domains to a bloghoster. While a domain offers great search engine exposure, using the hosted blogging software requires some knowledge of HTML/CSS coding and other techniques; it's more work and trouble than I have time for. TypePad is a good alterative that's fairly easy to use, but it's by no means point and click.

To Microsoft's credit, MSN Spaces is remarkably easy to use, or so I am discovering as I give the service a hard second look. Sure, there were glitches at beta launch, but the service seems solid now. Some established blogger balked at the lack of control, meaning Microsoft tools took most of it, when the service launched as beta. But Microsoft never meant the service for them, but the masses of people that hadn't yet started blogging, and maybe folks like me too busy to become an amateur blogsite designer.

The simplicity and beauty of Microsoft's approach foreshadows possible future product changes competitors and partners shouldn't ignore...MSN Spaces takes that approach, of providing easy tools for doing the most common blogsite tasks. The user doesn't have as much control, but he or she can get the most common tasks quickly done. Over time, Microsoft has increased the amount of control and customization that power users would want, such as Friday's release of three MSN Spaces PowerToys, for layout control, custom (sandbox) modules and Windows Media content.
...
I would encourage Microsoft competitors and partners to closely watch MSN Spaces' progress. Apple blindsided Microsoft with iPod and the iTunes Music Store, a circumstance well understood by Microsoft product managers. Simplicity is one cornerstone of the products' success. Synching iPod to iTunes is no more complicated than connecting the device to the computer. There are settings to do more, but the baseline functionality that is suitable to most users is plug and synch. Microsoft has embarked on a similar, simpler approach with MSN Spaces.

It is interesting seeing how geeks adore complexity in the software and hardware that they use. I can still remember Robert Scoble's complaints about Spaces in his post MSN Spaces isn't the blogging service for me or even CmdrTaco's comments when Apple released the iPod, "No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame". Despite both products being dissed by A-list geeks they have become widely adopted by millions of people.

More proof that designing for regular people is a lot different from designing for geeks.

I was recently re-reading Jesse James Garrett's article Ajax: A New Approach to Web Applications and it struck me that the article was very much an introductory text on building web applications which skirted a number of real world issues. The core idea behind the article is that using DHTML and server callbacks results in web sites that are more responsive [from the end user's perspective] than traditional web applications. This is very true.

However if you are building a large scale web application there is more to consider when using AJAX than how to create a function that hides the differences between the XMLHttpRequest object in IE and Firefox. Problems that have to be solved [or at the very least considered] include

1. How to abstract away browser detection from each page in the application
2. How to make the site accessible or at least work on non-Javascript enabled browsers
3. How to efficiently manage the number of connections to the server created by the client given the "chattiness" of AJAX applications compared to traditional web applications
4. How to reduce the amount of time spent downloading large script files
5. How to create permalinks to portions of the application
6. How to preserve or at least simulate the behavior of the browser's 'Back' button

At MSN we've had to come up with solutions to a number of these problems while working on Start.com, MSN Spaces, the next version of Hotmail, and the next version of MyMSN. We have built our own AJAX framework and come up with a number of best practices for building large scale applications using AJAX.

Much to my surprise Scott Isaacs (one of the inventors of DHTML and now an architect at MSN) has started a series on the problems that face web sites that plan to utilize AJAX and how we solved them at MSN. The first two articles in the series are Why Ajax is so 1999? Part 1 and Why Ajax is so 1999? Part 2. Scott will also be giving a talk at the Microsoft Professional Developer's Conference (PDC) about Start.com and some of the cool AJAX stuff we've done.

I actually expected this would be the kind of information we'd keep close to our chest since they give us a competitive advantage so it is quite a welcome surprise to see us sharing knowledge with the Web developer community this way. I've already started nagging Scott to write a book about this stuff or at least update his Inside Dynamic HTML for the new millenium.

The MSN Mobile team dropped two excellent betas last week. The first was http://mobile.spaces.msn.com/ which is mentioned in Mike Torres's post on the Mobile Spaces (Beta) where we learn

you can:

1. Create a space from a mobile device. Pocket PCs, Palms, and most popular mobile phones are supported. Just browse over to http://mobile.spaces.msn.com from your mobile device (or go to http://spaces.msn.com and you will be redirected to the mobile version)
   
2. See a list of your contacts' recently updated spaces. This feature is really useful for a mobile device and great for catching up with people! Just "click" on a contact to get to their space and start exploring.
   
3. Add blog entries, view your archives, email a link to your space, and even change your settings - all from your itty bitty mobile device.
   
4. Read and add new comments (my favorite feature!) You are now able to stay on top of discussions from wherever you happen to be - in school, on a bus, in a meeting, or in line at Starbucks.

The second beta is http://mobile.msn.com/search/ which brings local search to your mobile device. This is mentioned in the blog post Get Local Search with Maps and Directions on your phone! from the MSN Search blog where we learn

So what does it do? You can search for a restaurant, store, school, dentist, museum – basically, anything listed in the Yellow Pages and White Pages. Just enter your search term (i.e. "coffee" or "Victrola" ) and location (zip code, city/state or full street address) and hit the Search button. Your recently used locations are even stored and easily accessible the next time you use the service. We’ll return the first handful of results, including name, address, distance from your current location and phone number – which you can dial by clicking! Select the result name and you’ll see a page with more detail, including a color map. Select "get directions" and we’ll provide turn-by-turn driving directions between your starting location and result address (both editable). All of these features have been specially designed to work on your phone, requiring minimal interaction and optimized for speed and ease of use.

The MSN Mobile crewis definitely shipping some good stuff. Props go out to Michael Smuga and the rest of the gang.

Robert Scoble has a blog post entitled Filtering Out MSN's Filter which seems like a good enough opportunity to state why I think of the newest addition to MSN's family of offerings. Robert wrote

MSN Filter sure is getting some people upset (hi Ross Mayfield).

Personally I wanted to give MSN Filter a few weeks before giving my opinion, but Ross goaded me into it.

Boring. Boring. Boring.

First, what is it? MSN hired five people to do a blog each. There's one on sports. Another on tech. Music. TV. Lifestyle.

I have to agree with Robert, I think the MSN Filter sites are pretty boring. More importantly as a MSFT shareholder and someone that works at MSN, I think it is a bad business investment in its current incarnation. Precedents for professional blogging such as Gawker Media (e.g. Gizmodo) and Weblogs Inc. (e.g. Engadget) family of sites are supported by topic specific ads including some from Google's AdSense program. On the other hand, if you look at MSN's Technology Filter you don't see any such ads.

I think it is pretty cool that MSN is allowing folks experiment with ventures like MSN Filter. However my personal opinion is that in its current incarnation it's a lame knock off of the stuff coming out of folks like Nick Denton and Jason Calacanis and it doesn't have a chance of making much [if any] money for us since they are eschewing targetted ads.

Lame. Lame. Lame.

Over the past couple of months the MSN Spaces team has gotten a bunch of feedback about features users would like to see in the service. Common requests include more flexibility in customizing the look of the space, ability to play videos or music in a module and the ability to add modules containing cutom HTML.

The team has been listening and all of those features were released yesterday as Powertoys. As Powertoys they aren't fully supported features and are only available in English. They are basically cool hacks by some of the developers on the Spaces team which are a prelude to what this functionality might look like in a future release of Spaces.

If you are an MSN Spaces user you should read Mike Torres's posts about how to enable the HTML Module, Windows Media Player module and the Tweak UI Powertoy. They totally jazz up your Space.

Great work from Ryan for being the man with plan on getting these out.