Earlier this morning, Jeff Kunins posted the announcement that Messenger Connect is out of beta and available worldwide. Key excerpts from his post include

Today, we are pleased to announce that Messenger Connect is out of beta and available worldwide. We’ve gotten a great response so far: leading sharing syndicators ShareThis, AddThis, Gigya, and AddToThis have already made the Windows Live sharing badge available on more than 1 million websites (check it out now on Bing ).
…
Over 2500 developers gave us great feedback during the beta, helping us to refine and improve this release of Messenger Connect. Below is a quick summary, but for all the details check out this post from Angus on the Windows Live for Developers blog . Our focus with the release of Messenger Connect was to make it easier for partners to adopt, without compromising user privacy.

• Easier to check out –We made it faster and simpler for partners to try out Messenger Connect and determine if it would be useful for their sites. For example: you can try out the real time chat control without needing to write any code.
  
• Easier to adopt and integrate– Wereduced the effort needed for sites to implement Messenger Connect usefully and powerfully by providing new tools and sample code for ActivityStrea.ms template selectors and more.
  

A number of folks worked really hard behind the scenes to get us to this point and I’m glad to see what we’ve shipped today. I haven’t announced this on my blog yet but I recently took over as the Lead Program Manager responsible for our Messenger Connect and related platform efforts in Windows Live. If you’ve been a regular reader of my blog it shouldn’t be a surprise that I’ve decided to make working on building open web platforms my day job and not just a hobby I was interested in.

As Angus Logan says in his follow up blog post on the Windows Live for Developers blog; this is just the beginning. We’d love to get feedback from the community of developers on what we’ve released and the feedback we’ve gotten thus far has been immensely helpful. You can find us at http://dev.live.com/forums

PS: Since someone asked on Twitter, you can find out more about Messenger Connect by reading What is Messenger Connect?

Now Playing: Waka Flocka Flame - No Hands (featuring Roscoe Dash and Wale)

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

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

Now Playing: 50 Cent - It Is What It Is

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

What the Techies are Saying

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

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

Thanks Jesse

Facebook Users on Windows Live

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

You get the idea.

Twitter Users on Windows Live

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

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

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

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

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

The official spiel is as follows

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now Playing: Snap - The Power

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

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

Highlights from your Favorite People

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

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

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

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

People-centric not Service-centric

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

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

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

Bi-Directional Connections to Where your Friends are

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

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

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

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

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

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

On Facebook	On Windows Live

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

Now Playing: Usher - OMG (featuring Will.I.Am)

Earlier this morning, Ori Amiga posted Messenger across the Web on the Inside Windows Live blog. Key excerpts from his blog post include

Earlier today, John Richards and Angus Logan took the stage at The Next Web Conference in Amsterdam where they announced Messenger Connect – a new way for partners and developers to connect with Messenger. Messenger Connect allows web, Windows and mobile app developers to create compelling social experiences on their websites and apps by providing them with social promotion and distribution via Messenger.

…

Messenger Connect

Messenger Connect brings the individual APIs we’ve had for a long time (Windows Live ID, Contacts API, Messenger Web Toolkit , etc.) together in a single API that's based on industry standards and specifications ( OAuth WRAP , ActivityStrea.ms , PortableContacts ) and adds a number of new scenarios.

The new Messenger Connect provides our developer partners with three big things:

• Instantly create a user profile and social graph: Messenger user profile and social graph information allows our shared customers to easily sign-in and access their friends list and profile information. This allows our partners to more rapidly personalize their experiences, provides a ready-made social graph for customers to interact with, and provides a channel to easily invite additional friends to join in.
• Drive engagement directly through chat indirectly through social distribution: By enabling both real-time instant messaging conversations (chat) and feed-based sharing options for customers on their site, developers can drive additional engagement and usage of their experiences by connecting to the over 320 million Messenger customers worldwide.
• Designing for easy integration in your technical environment: We are delivering an API service that will expose a RESTful interface, and we’ll wrap those in a range of libraries (including JavaScript, .NET, and others). Websites and apps will be able to choose the right integration type for their specific scenario. Some websites prefer to keep everything at the presentation tier, and use JavaScript libraries when the user is present. Others may prefer to do server-side integration, so they can call the RESTful endpoints from back-end processes. We're aiming to provide the same set of capabilities across the API service and the libraries that we offer.

I’m really proud of the work that’s gone into building Messenger Connect. Although I was in some of the early discussions around it, I ducked out early to focus on the platform behind the new social view in Messenger and didn’t have much insight into the day to day of building the product. However I’ve got to say I love the way the project has turned out. I suspect a lot of web developers will as well.

Kudos to Ori and the rest of the team.

Now Playing: Ludacris - My Chick Bad (featuring Nicki Minaj)

Over on the Inside Windows Live blog there’s a new post titled Preview of the new Windows Live Messenger which talks about a key part of what I’ve been working on over the past year or so. Interesting tidbits from the blog post include

Today in a speech at the Universidade de São Paulo in Brazil, Steve Ballmer is sharing a preview of the new Windows Live Messenger . In this post we want to talk more about our philosophy and approach for this new version.
...

Staying in touch with close friends

Most people today visit at least one social network and dozens of content sharing sites, get email with photos and social notifications, and of course, maintain accounts in numerous places with different sets of friends and content. So we focused on connecting Messenger to the social networks you already use, and prioritizing the most important updates so you can quickly see what your favorite people are doing, wherever they’re doing it.

We know your close friends share using email, IM, and social networks. So we brought all of those together into a single view. The status from your Facebook friends who don’t use Messenger? Check. The photos your mom sent you as plain old e-mail attachments? Check. The Office docs you’re collaborating on with friends in SkyDrive? Check. And the stuff your favorite Messenger friends are doing on hundreds of sites they choose to share from? Check.

And since simple “aggregation” can make things worse instead of better, we focused on prioritizing the people that matter most to you, so you don’t miss the handful of important updates from your closest friends and family just because your college and work “friends” are broadcasting their whole life every minute of the day. Just tag your favorite people, and we optimize your feed for the stuff those people are doing. Of course, it’s not 100% exclusive to your favorites – the most interesting things from your other friends like photos, videos, and links (especially the ones being commented on a lot) are there too. This makes us a great companion to the services you already love like Facebook, Flickr, MySpace, LinkedIn and more – and when you have time to go beyond those most important updates, diving deeper into those sites is just a click away.

Lastly, we recognized that we could connect your social updates to the power of the Windows PC and really bring it to life. So we took advantage of the latest advances in hardware and graphics to give you a modern social experience. This means that Messenger brings beautiful high-resolution views of the photos, videos, and links that your friends are sharing, right to your desktop. View their Facebook albums, gorgeously presented so that they're fun to browse through and easy to comment on. Messenger is also the simplest way to update your status and instantly post it to other sharing sites you use. You can even bring your photo albums right into high-definition video chats with your friends.

Here’s a picture of the new social view for Messenger:

This is a pretty exciting day for the team and I’ll be scouring the web looking to read what people think about what we’re building. If you want to learn more about the new version of Messenger, you can visit messengerpreview.com 

Later in the year, I’ll see what I can do about writing a post on the Inside Windows Live blog about the philosophy and technology that underlies this experience. Let me know in the comments what you would like to learn more about in such a post. 

Now Playing: DJ Khalid - All I Do Is Win (featuring Ludacris, Snoop Dogg, Rick Ross, and T-Pain)

On the MSN blog there's a new blog post entitled The New MSN Homepage Unveiled which states

Today is an exciting day for our team at MSN because we unveiled the most significant redesign our MSN.com homepage has seen in over a decade. We spent thousands of hours talking with customers; testing hundreds of ideas; experimenting around the world and carefully evaluating what our users want, and don’t want - to deliver a homepage that is designed to be the best homepage on the Web. We hope you’ll agree.
…
So, we started from scratch to cut the clutter on our homepage and reduced the amount of links by 50%. There’s also a simplified navigation across news, entertainment, sports, money, and lifestyle that lets you drill into information topics that interest you, without being overwhelming. Local information from your neighborhood is important to you and so is high quality, in-line video – so we offer both, right on the homepage. And, you told us you want the latest information not only from your favorite sources, but also from your friends, and the breadth of the Web – so we now offer convenient access to Facebook, Twitter, & Windows Live services and the most powerful search experience on the Web from Bing, empowering you to make more informed, faster decisions. And this is just the beginning - keep visiting our blog for more MSN news in the coming weeks.

This is a really exciting release for my team on Windows Live since we're responsible for the underlying platform that powers the display of what activities your friends have been performing across Windows Live. Working with the MSN home page team was a good experience and its great to see that the tens of millions of people who visit the MSN home page regularly will now get to experience our work. Kudos to the MSN team on a very nice release.

You can try out the new home page for yourself at http://preview.msn.com

Now Playing: Jay-Z - Reminder

I’ve been busy with work and spending time with my son so I haven’t been as diligent as I should be with the blog. Until my time management skills get better, here are some thoughts from a guest post I wrote recently for the Live Services blog.

Dare Obasanjo here, from the Live Services Program Management team. I'd like to talk a bit about the work we are doing to increase interoperability across the "Social Web."

The term The Social Web has been increasingly used to describe the rise of the Web as a way for people to interact, communicate and share with each other using the World Wide Web. Experiences that were once solitary such as reading news or browsing one's photo albums have now been made more social by sites such as Digg and Flickr. With so many Web sites offering social functionality, it has become increasingly important for people to be able to not only be able to connect and share with their friends on a single Web site but also to take these relationships and activities with them wherever they go on the Web.

With the recent update to Windows Live, we are continuing with the vision of enabling our 500 million customers to share and connect with the people they care about regardless of what services they use. Our customers can now invite their contacts from MySpace (the largest U.S. social networking site) and Hi5 to join them on Windows Live in a safe manner without having to resort to using the the password anti-pattern. These sites join Facebook and LinkedIn as social networks from which people can import their social graph or friend list into Windows Live.

In addition to interoperating with social networks to bridge relationships across the Web, we are also always working on enabling customers to share the content they are find interesting or activities they are participating in from all over the Web with their friends who use Windows Live services like Hotmail and Messenger. Customers of Windows Live can now add activities from over thirty different online services to their Windows Live profile including social networking sites like Facebook, photo sharing sites like Smugmug & Photobucket, social music sites like last.fm & Pandora, social bookmarking sites like Digg & Stumbleupon and much more.

We are also happy to announce today that in the coming months, MySpace customers will be able to share activities and updates from MySpace with their Windows Live network.

Below is a screenshot of some of the updates you might find on my profile on Windows Live 

These recent announcements bring us one step closer to a Social Web where interoperability is the norm instead of the exception. One of the most exciting things about our recent release is how much of the behind-the-scene integration is done using community driven technologies such as the Atom syndication format, Atom Activity Extensions, OAuth, and Portable Contacts. These community driven technologies are moving to ensure that the Social Web is a web of interconnected and interoperable web sites, not a set of competing walled gardens desperately clutching to customer data in an attempt to invent Lock-In 2.0 

As we look towards the future, I believe that the aforementioned standards around contact exchange, social activity streams and authorization are just the first steps. When we look at all the capabilities across the Web landscape it is clear that there are scenarios that are still completely broken due to lack of interoperability across various social websites. You can expect more from Windows Live when it comes to interoperability and the Social Web.

Just watch this space.

Now Playing: Eminem - We Made You

From the blog post on the Office Live team blog entitled Looking ahead and bringing you even more we learn

Today, I wanted to share with you some exciting news about Office Live: To simplify and improve the customer experience around our Live services, we’ve made the decision to converge Windows Live and Office Live into an integrated set of services at one single destination. We think that just makes a ton of sense and goes a long way toward giving you a simpler, richer, better service that allows you to do more with one account.

Every day, more and more people are signing up for Office Live Workspace and Office Live Small Business (4 million of you so far!), as well as Windows Live (460 million to date!).

Secondly there’s the MSDN forum post entitled Working Together: Live Mesh and Windows Live by the Live Mesh team which informs us that

For some time now, many of you have expressed interest in seeing some sort of combination of Live Mesh and other Microsoft services. In order to further explore these ideas we would like to ask you to share with us the scenario(s) that you have in mind. 

What combination(s) are you interested in, and why? Whatever your interests, whatever problem you’re trying to solve or scenario you want to enable, we’d like to hear the details – and the more specific you can be, the better.

We know you have ideas – this is the place to share them!

Thank you,

The Live Mesh Team

I love it when things come together this way. There's been a lot of choice in Web-based storage solutions offered by Microsoft and some would argue that it's been too much choice. It will be good to how the cross pollination of ideas ends up working out between these various products over the coming months and years.

If you are interested in developer or end user scenarios around Web-based storage I recommend chiming in on the MSDN forum post linked above. It's your chance to give your feedback to Microsoft and help influence the direction of the most innovative technology product of the past year. 

Now Playing: Amy Winehouse - You Know I'm No Good

Angus Logan has the scoop

I’m in San Francisco at the 2008 Crunchie Awards and after ~ 350k votes were cast Ray Ozzie and David Treadwell accepted the award for Best Technology Innovation/Achievement on behalf of the Live Mesh team .

The Crunchies are an annual competition co-hosted by GigaOm , VentureBeat , Silicon Alley Insider , and TechCrunch which culminates in an award the most compelling startup, internet and technology innovations.

Kudos to the Live Mesh folks on getting this award. I can't wait to see what 2009 brings for this product.

PS: I noticed from the TechCrunch post that Facebook Connect was the runner up. I have to give an extra special shout out to my friend Mike for being a key figure behind two of the most innovative technology products of 2008. Nice work man.

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

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

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

Now Playing: Akon, Lil Wayne & Young Jeezy - I'm So Paid

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now Playing: DMX - Party Up (Up in Here)

Reading depressing layoff related blog posts like George Oates's Not quite what I had in mind and the Valley Wag's Laid-off Yahoos packing heat for Jerry Yang? reminded me that I've been meaning to post about open positions on our team for a while.

The team I work for is responsible for the "social graph", "news feed" and online presence platforms that power various Windows Live experiences. You can see some of our recent efforts in action by downloading Windows Live Essentials (beta) or visiting my profile on Windows Live and browsing around. If you are interested in building world class software that is used by hundreds of millions of people and the following job descriptions interest you then send me your resume 

Software Design Engineer (Developer)

The Windows Live Messenger service is the backbone of one of world’s leading instant messaging services. The service enables hundreds of millions of users to communicate efficiently using text, voice, video and real-time status updates. This high-profile business is growing to accommodate mobile devices, social networking, web applications and other new areas.
We are seeking a developer with a fondness and talent for working on large-scale fault-tolerant distributed systems. The job involves working on the back-end components that maintain user state and route messages and notifications. In addition to improving the systems performance and resiliency, our team will tackle hard new problems such as
- Supporting new ways of addressing users (personas or aliases)
- Extending user state to support offline presence and presence views
- Creating a generic notification service
- implementing effective request throttling and load-balancing across datacenters.

Software Design Engineer/Test (Tester)

Looking for your next big challenge? How about building the next version of the world’s largest IM and social network platform?
We are looking for a great SDET with solid design, problem solving skills and exceptional track record to help build the next version of Windows Live Messenger and Social Network platform. The Messenger network is already one of the largest social networks on the planet, delivering BILLIONS of messages a day for HUNDREDS of MILLIONS of users world-wide.
The SDET role involves working on these next-generation services and proving they can be delivered to the massive scale required, with the quality our users have come to expect. Particular focus areas for this role are scalability, performance and reliability:
Scalability - building software systems to take each piece of hardware to its limits, identifying bottlenecks, removing them and pushing harder; while also, proving the system can grow linearly, as hardware is added. (…think 1,000s of machines).
Performance - ensuring consistently fast response times across the system by smoothly managing peak traffic -- which averages in the 10s of millions of simultaneous online connections.
Reliability - building online services that remain reliable under stress which the operations team is able to easily monitor, troubleshoot, and repair; enabling the aggressive up time requirements we aim for.

Email your resume to dareo@msft.com (replace msft with microsoft) if the above job descriptions sound like they are a good fit for you. If you have any questions about what working here is like, you can send me an email and I'll either follow up via email or my blog to answer any questions of general interest [within reason].

Now Playing: Rascal Flatts - Fast Cars and Freedom

One feature that you will not find in Windows Live's What's New list, which shows a feed of a the activities from user's social network, is inline comments. A number of sites that provide users with activity feeds from their social network such as Facebook and Friendfeed allow comments to be made directly on news items in the feed. These comments end up showing up as part of the activity feed that are visible to anyone who can view the feed item.

When Rob and I were deciding upon the key functionality of the What's New feed for the current release of Windows Live, we voted against inline comments for two reasons.

The key reason is that we want the feed to be about what your people in your network are doing and not what people you don't know are doing or saying. However with the Facebook feed I often have lengthy threads from people I don't know in my feed taking up valuable space above the fold. For example,

In the above screenshot, I find it rather awkward that a huge chunk of my feed is being taken up by comments from people I don't know who are from Randy's network. Besides the social awkwardness it creates there is another issue with the above screenshot. Given that there is limited real estate for showing your feed it seems counter productive for it to be dominated by comments from people you don't know which are never as interesting as actual feed items.

For the second reason, let's look at a screenshot of an activity feed from FriendFeed

in the above screenshot there are 24 comments on the feed item representing Robert Scoble's blog post. These are 24 comments that could have been posted on his blog but aren't. The more sites Robert imports his blog feed into, the more it fractures and steals away the conversation from his blog post. This is in addition to the fact that there is some confusion as to where people should leave comments on his blog post. I've had people get confused about whether to respond to my posts as a comment on my blog, in Friendfeed or on Facebook and it didn't seem helpful for us to add yet another decision point to the mix.

For these reasons, we don't have inline commenting in the What's New list in Windows Live. This isn't to say this is an irreversible decision. It has been pointed out that for feed items that don't have their own comment threads (e.g. status messages) it might be useful to have inline commenting. In addition, I'm sure there are some people who believe that the benefits of inline commenting outweigh the drawbacks that we've mentioned above. I'd love to hear what users of Windows Live think about the above decision and thought process behind it. Let me know in the comments. 

PS: If you are interested in more behind the scenes looks at some of the big and small decisions around the What's New feature in Windows Live, you should read Rob Dolin's ongoing series of posts entitled Series: What New in Windows Live “What’s New” and Why.

Now Playing: Guns N' Roses - Chinese Democracy

The place to find the most recent comments on your photos, blog posts, profile, files and shared favorites is http://profile.live.com/recentcomments.

If you are like me and prefer to navigate from a central place like http://home.live.com, the screenshot below shows where to find the link to recent comments on that page

Now Playing: Rihanna - Rehab (Album Version)

Giving users complete control of their online experience has always been a core tenet of Windows Live and this hasn't changed with the What's New list feature in Windows Live. This feature enables users to view an activity feed of what members of their social network are doing AND to provide an activity feed of what the user has done recently. You can see an example of the latter on my Windows Live profile.

Listed below are the various ways we keep users in control of their online experience related to this feature.

In Control of What You See

By default a user sees activities from members of their network and from groups they are in. However users can opt out of getting activities from any member of their network or from any group they are in without breaking their relationship with that user or group. In addition, users can also opt out of getting activities of a specific type (e.g. friend additions or Twitter updates) from members of their network.

We provide two entry points for managing what updates you get from your network. First of all, users can manage updates from a particular user or update type by hovering over the item in the dashboard and clicking on the gear icon. The users, groups and applications that are currently blocked can be viewed on the What's New settings page at http://profile.live.com/whatsnewsettings. This is what that page looks like for me at the current time. 

As you can see from the above screenshot, I haven't hidden any update types from my What's New list. I did add the "Paintballers" group to my list of hidden groups though. Although I like getting paintballing events in my calendar, I'm not interested in discussions or photos about paintball on a regular basis.

In Control of What Others See About You

Some times, users may want to retract updates that have gone out to their social network. For example, a reference to inappropriate content that may offend people in their social network or pictures of streaking or similar nude pranks which inadvertently go out to the wrong people. For this reason, we give users the ability to delete such items from their profile which immediately deletes it from the what's new lists of their friends as shown below

It should also be noted that each update type typically has a permission associated with it. This means that a user can control who has access to a particular photo album, their shared favorites or even their Twitter stream (as shown below). That way you can still broadcast updates to your friends on Windows Live without worrying that you are accidentally sharing inappropriate content with your boss or coworkers.

In addition there is an options page where users can completely opt out of broadcasting updates from Windows Live to members of their social network.  For example, I know someone who'd rather not have it broadcasted whenever he changes his status message in Messenger since he believes they should ephemeral thoughts and not captured for posterity. This options page also allows configuring updates from other web sites that are being aggregated on the user's profile. The What's New with you settings page can be found at http://profile.live.com/WhatsNewWithYouSettings.

A screenshot of the settings page is shown below

Conclusion

So you can see when it comes to activity feeds in Windows Live, our mantra is to keep users in control. Let me know what you think of our approach in the comments.

Now Playing: Kanye West - See You In My Nightmares (feat. Lil Wayne)

So I've been constantly refreshing Twitter search for "Windows Live" and so far the comments on our latest release have been super positive. Here is a sampling of tweets from the last two hours

slaguzman : @WindowsLiveWire I really like the new version of Windows Live! Keep up the good work.

paulsterling : new windows live looks really good - nice!

Bashmohandes : Windows Live Wave 3 is AWESOME !!!

benriga : New Windows Live is looking pretty sweet. It's come a long way with the new wave.

niceguyscott : The new windows live experience is doap.

MikeGalos : OK. After an hour. Windows Live Wave 3 is very, very cool.

Anchelspain : Loving the new and improved version of the Windows Live services. Mail, social network, blogging, picture uploading... everything's great!

sharepointing : I am liking the "Social Networking" refresh at Windows Live

Elepsis : The new Windows Live services are starting to roll out. They're looking pretty awesome. :)

joshpowell : The new Windows Live services are pretty cool. I'm adding in web services such as Twitter, Flickr, etc. to a central feed.

baxiabhishek : Sweet! Windows Live Wave 3 is rolled out for my account. Awesome!

Ingdawg : @majornelson Windows Live Home is awesome. Love how everything is in one place.

ScottTrepanier: Uploading photos to the new Windows Live...I love it.

Excited and proud doesn't even begin to cover what it feels like to get this release out there.

  Now Playing: Amy Winehouse - Love Is A Losing Game

As some of you know, last year I worked on the platform behind the What's New page on Windows Live Spaces which provides the similar functionality to the News Feed on Facebook.  That was just our first run at the feature and almost immediately after our release there was some great feedback from various corners. The most complete feedback I found online came from Jamie Thomson who wrote about the Spaces home page and gave the following suggestions

There's a lot of potential for this activity list given that it could capture any activity people commit using their Live ID. Every live property has the potential for being able to post activity on here so one day we may see notifications of:

• change of messenger status
• posting of photos on Live Space
• addition of gadgets to Live Space
• items placed for sale on Expo
• questions asked or answered on QnA
• collection shared from Live Maps
• video posted on MSN video
• changes to XBox gamer card
• changes to Zune Social (after it launches)
• items posted to the Live Gallery
• an event being planned
• purchased a song from Zune marketplace
• posts in MSN groups (soon to be Live Groups)
• posts to online forums (forums.microsoft.com)
• downloads of public files from Skydrive

Its all pretty good but let's be honest, this is basically a clone of of what Facebook already have. Given Facebook's popularity though Microsoft didn't really have a choice but to copy them. If Microsoft really want to differentiate themselves in this arena then one option would be to provide avenues for interacting with other online services such as Flickr, Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce,  etc... This list could then become an aggregator for all online activity and that's a pretty compelling scenario. One really quick win in this area would be to capture any blog entry that is posted from Live Writer, regardless of whether it is posted to Live Spaces or not.

Turning the idea on its head...it would be cool to be able to publish the activity list on other sites such as MySpace, Bebo and (them again) Facebook.

It isn’t often that you can get such complete feedback from one of your customers and then turn around and say you implemented every feature they asked for. From the list of 15 suggested activities to add to the feed above, I’d say about half either now show up in the feed today or will soon show up. The rest won’t either because the service is being deprecated (e.g. Live Expo being wound down) or we explicitly decided that notifications on that change didn’t seem particularly relevant (e.g. notifications when someone you know downloads a file off of SkyDrive).

Besides the features Jamie asked for we added one more that seems obvious in hindsight; an Atom feed of the updates from your social network so you can keep up to date with your social network from your favorite feed reader. Thanks to this feature we satisfied another recent request from Jamie and there is now a Vista gadget that can be used to consume your What's New feed directly from your desktop. Both the gadget and Atom feed feature were the results of dev work by our 2008 summer interns. As I mentioned on Twitter a few months ago I suspect many of my readers will appreciate their output.

We also enable our users to aggregate their online activity in a single place and then share it with their friends. For example, if you go to my Windows Live profile you’ll see that I’ve aggregated my activities from Twitter, Pandora, StumbleUpon,and my personal weblog onto my Windows Live profile which will then show up on the What’s New page of my friends in Windows Live. Activities can be aggregated from a number of other sites including Flickr, Flixster, PhotoBucket, Yelp, iLike, blogs hosted on Wordpress.com and a bunch of other sites with more to come in the future. Of course, you can just import a regular old RSS or Atom feed as well. 

Although this functionality started out as a feature of Windows Live Spaces, it soon became clear that this feature really should be a “Windows Live” feature. This means it is deeply integrated into all of the major Windows Live products including desktop applications like Windows Live Messenger and the Windows Live Toolbar. Also there are a ton of revamped Windows Live web experiences that pivot around the What's New list such as the Home, Photos, Groups and the Profile pages.

Now for the back story.

At the end of last year, the main problem it seemed we had to tackle was making it easier for other Windows Live and/or Microsoft product teams to plug into the What's New feed on Windows Live Spaces. However the list of teams interested in the feed continued to grow as did the number of feature requests we got the more we talked to people about it. Once we saw all the new requirements for the feature at the beginning of this year and started doing the math on what it would take to support on the order of hundreds of millions people using this feature and handling billions of transactions a day it quickly became clear we had to redesign from scratch. In the words of Frederick Brooks, build one to throw away – you will anyway. It has been a grueling but fun year getting the platform out and it feels great to see millions of people enjoying our handiwork. This should explain my interest in Twitter’s scaling problems earlier this year since a micro blogging service with a model of followers and an open API is in the same problem space as providing a news feed that supports activity aggregation on a social networking site. Building a system to support over 280 million Hotmail users, 260 million Messenger users and around 120 million Spaces users from scratch has been a helluva thing. We've definitely pulled all of the scaling tricks out of the bag including my favorite trio of Dark Launches, Gradual Ramps and Isolation.

Much love to everyone who made this happen; Hammad, Brad B, Austin, Derrick, Peter, Paul, Badriddine, John, and Kyle. You guys were a killer dev & test team (the interns included). We also had great support from our leads Mike P, Inder & Diego. Our ops folks were incredible, I owe you all a big hug; Srdjan, Curtis, David G (deserter!!! *smile* ),  Scott R, Keith, William, Eric, Ziad, Teri, Michael, and Edet. Props to Kerstin, Sharad, Suresh, Alpesh and everyone else who made the aggregation experience shine on the platform end. Thanks to all the UX folks who touched or were touched by this feature including Miriam, David L, Jeff, Lavinder, Douc, Hua, Stacey, Vlad, Alton, Chad, Edgar, Colin, Jennifer, Omar, Mike, Shu, Michelle, Chris, Jason, Scott S, Chuck, Ben, Khalid, Deepa, Rob (my partner in crime – we worked on this so closely I have him on speed dial on my cell phone) and a ton of other folks on the Windows Live Experience team,  you guys rock. And finally thanks to all the management folks that were super supportive; Ramesh, Russ, Chris, Tread, Ben and Debra. Without you guys none of this would have happened.

Damn, I love working here.

PS: Brandon, I hope you like this release. 

PPS: By the way, we're hiring and are looking for a few good operations folks, developers and testers who wouldn't mind spending their days building services that are used by tens of millions of people every single day.  Send me your resume if interested.

 Now Playing:Ice Cube - Gangsta Rap Made Me Do It 

Disclaimer: What follows are my personal impressions from investigating the community technology preview version of the Live Framwork (LiveFX). It is not meant to be an official description of the project from Microsoft, you can find that here.

At Microsoft's recent Professional Developer Conference, a new set of Web services called Live Framework (aka LiveFX) was unveiled. As I've spent the past year working on platforms for user experiences in Windows Live, I actually haven't been keeping up to date with what's going on in developer API land when it comes to programming against our services. So I decided to check out the Live Framework website and find out exactly what was announced.

What is it?

Although the main website is somewhat light on details, I eventually gleaned enough information from the Live Framework SDK documentation on MSDN to conclude that LiveFX consists of the following pieces

1. A Resource Model: A set of RESTful APIs for interacting with Live Mesh and Windows Live data.
2. Libraries: A set of libraries for the .NET Framework, Silverlight and Javascript for accessing the REST APIs.
3. The Live Operating Environment: A local web server that implements #1 above so it can be programmed against using #2 above.

The Scary Architecture Diagram

This diagram tries to capture all the ideas in LiveFX in a single image. I found it somewhat overwhelming and after learning more about LiveFX I consider it to be a rather poor way of conveying across its key concepts.  It doesn't help that this diagram is somewhat aspirational given that some key pieces of the diagram are missing from the current technology preview. 

The Resource Model

Live Mesh and Windows Live data is exposed by LiveFX as a set of resources identified by URIs which can be interacted with via the Atom Publishing Protocol (RFC 5023). Relationships between resources are exposed as hyperlinks between resources. The hierarchical data model currently exposed in the CTP is shown in the diagram below taken from the MSDN documentation.

It should be noted that although AtomPub is the primary protocol for interacting with resources in LiveFX, multiple serialization formats can be used to retrieve data from the service including Atom, RSS, Plain Old XML (POX), JSON or even binary XML.

Since LiveFX is a fully compliant implementation of the Atom Publishing Protocol, one can browse to the service document of a user's Mesh or other top level resource and traverse links to various Atom collections and feeds in the hierarchy. Below is a screenshot of the LiveFX resource browser showing the service document for a user's Mesh with the links to various child collections exposed as hyperlinks.

Besides supporting multiple serialization formats, there are a number of other features of LiveFX that separate it from a vanilla implementation of the Atom Publishing Protocol.

• Synchronization via FeedSync: Mesh resources in LiveFX can be synchronized using FeedSync (formerly Simple Sharing Extensions). FeedSync is a family of extensions to RSS and Atom that enables bidirectional synchronization of XML feeds and the resources they reference. However synchronization in LiveFX is based on a client/server model instead of a peer-to-peer model which means that instead of the server subscribing to changes from the client and vice versa, clients subscribe to changes from the server and then inform the server when they make a change. More information about how LiveFX implements FeedSync can be found here.

• Query Model and Linq to REST: LiveFX supports the same URI query parameters for paging, sorting, filtering and inline expansion of linked resources as other Microsoft cloud-based data APIs including ADO.NET Data Services (formerly Astoria), SQL Server Data Services and Windows Azure Storage services. One of the benefits of this consistency is that the ADO.NET client libraries can be used to perform Linq queries over the LiveFX data types using a technology that has been colloquially described as Linq to REST. For example, the following C# Linq query actually executes HTTP GET requests using the $filter parameter under the covers.

  MeshObject GetMeshObjectByTitle(string title)
  { MeshObject meshObject = (from mo in mesh.CreateQuery<MeshObject>() where mo.Resource.Title
  == title select mo).FirstOrDefault<MeshObject>(); return meshObject;
  }

  The HTTP request this makes over the wire is

  GET https://user-ctp.windows.net/V0.1/Mesh/MeshObjects/{meshObjectID}/DataFeeds/?$filter=(Title eq ‘WhateverWasPassedIn’)

• Batch Requests via Resource Scripts: LiveFX supports batching using a construct known as resource scripts. Using resource scripts a developer can submit a single request which contains multiple create, retrieve, update and delete operations at once. A resource script consists of a control flow statement which can contain one or more control flow statements, web operation statements, synchronization statements, data flow constructs and data flow statements.  You can find out more about resource scripts by reading the document About Live Framework Resource Scripts on the LiveFX developer site.

• Resource Introspection via OPTIONS: One problem that commonly occurs in REST APIs is determining which operations a resource supports. Some protocols like OpenSocial specify a mechanism where HTTP responses should indicate which parameters are not supported. The problem with this approach is that the client has to first make an HTTP request then have it fail before determining if the feature is supported. LiveFX supports the HTTP OPTIONS verb on every resource. By performing the following HTTP request

  OPTIONS https:// user-ctp.windows.net/V0.1/{UserID}/Mesh/MeshObjects/{meshObjectID}

  a client can retrieve an introspection metadata document which describes what query parameters and serialization formats the resource supports. The $metadata query parameter can also be used to retrieve the introspection metadata document. This enables clients using libraries that don't support making HTTP OPTIONS requests to also be able to retrieve introspection metadata.

• Support for Portable Contacts: By specifying the parameter $type=portable when requesting contact data, the results will be returned in the Portable Contacts schema format as either JSON or Plain Old XML. 

The Libraries

Like most major Web vendors who have exposed REST APIs, Microsoft has provided client libraries to make interacting with the LiveFX service more natural for developers who aren't comfortable programming directly against HTTP. The following client libraries are provided

• A generic AtomPub client library for the .NET Framework. Learn more about programming with it here.
• A .NET Framework library which provides a high-level object model for interacting with the LiveFX service. More details here.
• A Javascript library which provides a high-level object model for interacting with the LiveFX service. Programming samples can be found here.

The Live Operating Environment

The Live Operating Environment refers to two things. The first is the Web platform upon which the LiveFX REST APIs are implemented. The second is a  local cache which runs on your PC or other device which exposes the same REST interface as the LiveFX Web service. This is somewhat similar to Google Gears except that the database is accessed RESTfully instead of via a SQL API.

The intent of the local version of the Live Operating Environment is to enable developers to be able to build apps that target the desktop or the Web without having to change their programming model. All that needs to be altered is changing the base URI from https://user-ctp.windows.net to http://localhost:2048 when accessing LiveFX resources. Everything else works exactly the same.

The Bottom Line

As the title of this blog post states there is a lot of similarity in concept between LiveFX and Google's Data APIs (GData). Like GData, LiveFX provides a consistent set of AtomPub based APIs for accessing resources from a particular vendor's online services along with a set of client libraries that wrap these RESTful APIs. And just like GData, there are Microsoft-specific extensions to the Atom syndication format and custom query parameters for sorting, filtering and paging.  LiveFX also supports batching like GData, however from my perspective adding batching to a Web service seems like an attempt to reinvent distributed transactions. This is a bad idea given the flaws of distributed transactions that are well discussed in Pat Helland's excellent paper Life beyond Distributed Transactions: An Apostate's Opinion. 

A number of LiveFX's additional features such as synchronization and resource introspection which have no analog in GData are fairly interesting and I wouldn't be surprised to see these ideas get further traction in the industry. On the flip side, the client-side Live Operating Environment is a technology whose benefits elude me. I admit it is kind of cool but I can't see its utility.

Now Playing: John Legend - Green Light (feat. Andre 3000)

About a year ago I wrote up a definition of a social operating system in my post The Difference between a Social Network Site, a Social Graph Application and a Social OS which I think is worth revisiting today. In that post I defined a Social OS as

Social Operating System: These are a subset of social networking sites. In fact, the only application in this category today is Facebook .  Before you use your computer, you have to boot your operating system and every interaction with your PC goes through the OS. However instead of interacting directly with the OS, most of the time you interact with applications written on top of the OS. Similarly a Social OS is the primary application you use for interacting with your social circles on the Web. All your social interactions whether they be hanging out, chatting, playing games, watching movies, listening to music, engaging in private gossip or public conversations occurs within this context. This flexibilty is enabled by the fact that the Social OS is a platform that enables one to build various social graph applications on top of it.

In retrospect, the fundamental flaw with this definition is that it encourages services that want to become social operating systems to aspire to become walled gardens. The problem with walled gardens on the Web is that they shortchange users. This is because the Web is about sharing and communicating with people from all over the world while walled gardens are about limiting you to interacting with people (and content) that are part of a particular online service or Web site. Thus walled gardens limit their users.

Jeremy Zawodny had a great post about this entitled There is no Web Operating System (or WebOS) where he wrote

Luckily, two of my coworkers caught on to what I was saying and managed to help put it into context a bit. First off was Matt McAlister (who runs YDN, the group I work in). In The Business of Network Effects he does a good job of explaining how businesses and services in a network are fundamentally different from those which are isolated islands.

Recalling a brief conversation we had a couple weeks ago, he says:

Jeremy Zawodny shed light on this concept for me using building construction analogies.

He noted that my building contractor doesn't exclusively buy Makita or DeWalt or Ryobi tools, though some tools make more sense in bundles. He buys the tool that is best for the job and what he needs.

My contractor doesn't employ plumbers, roofers and electricians himself. Rather he maintains a network of favorite providers who will serve different needs on different jobs.

He provides value to me as an experienced distribution and aggregation point, but I am not exclusively tied to using him for everything I want to do with my house, either.

Similarly, the Internet market is a network of services. The trick to understanding what the business model looks like is figuring out how to open and connect services in ways that add value to the business.

Bingo.

The web is a marketplace of services, just like the "real world" is. Everyone is free to choose from all the available services when building or doing whatever it is they do. The web just happens to be a far more efficient marketplace than the real world for many things. And it happens to run on computers that each need an operating system.

But nobody ever talks about a "Wall Street Operating System" or a "Small Business Operating System" do they? Why not?

Ian Kennedy followed up to Matt's post with The Web as a Loose Federation of Contractors in which he says:

I like Jeremy's illustration - an OS gives you the impression of an integrated stack which leads to strategies which favor things like user lock-in to guarantee performance and consistency of experience. If you think of the web as a loose collections of services that work together on discreet projects, then you start to think of value in other ways such as making your meta-data as portable and accessible as possible so it can be accessed over and over again in many different contexts.

Bingo again.

No matter how popular a particular website becomes it will not be the only service used by its customers. So it follows that no matter how popular a social networking site becomes, it will not be the only social networking service used by its customers or their friends. Thus a true Social Operating System shouldn't be about creating a prettier walled garden than your competitors but instead about making sure you can bring together all of a user's social experiences together regardless of whether they are on your site or on those of a competing service. If I use Twitter and my wife doesn't, I'd like her to know what I'm doing via the service even though she isn't a Twitter user. If my friends use Yelp to recommend restaurants in the area, I'd like to find out about the restaurants even though I'm not a Yelp user. And so on.

With the latest release of Windows Live, we're working towards bringing this vision one step closer to reality. You can read more about it in the official announcement and the accompanying blog post. I guess the statement "life without walls" also applies to Windows Live.

Now Playing: T-Pain - Chopped N Skrewed (Feat. Ludacris)

From the Microsoft press release Microsoft Introduces Updated Windows Live Service we learn

REDMOND, Wash. — Nov. 12, 2008 — Microsoft Corp. today announced the next generation of Windows Live, an integrated set of online services that make it easier and more fun for consumers to communicate and share with the people they care about most. The new generation of Windows Live includes updated experiences for photo sharing, e-mail, instant messaging, as well as integration with multiple third-party sites. The release also includes Windows Live Essentials, free downloadable software that enhances consumers’ Windows experience by helping them simplify and enjoy digital content scattered across their PC, phone and on Web sites. For more information about windows live go to http://www.windowslive.com .

Consumers today are creating online content and sharing it in many places across the Web. To help make is simple for the more than 460 million Windows Live customers to keep their friends up to date, Microsoft is collaborating with leading companies including Flickr, LinkedIn Corp., Pandora Media Inc., Photobucket Inc., Twitter, WordPress and Yelp Inc. to integrate activities on third-party sites into Windows Live through a new profile and What’s New feed. The new Windows Live also gives consumers the added convenience of having a central place to organize and manage information.

It's really exciting to know that hundreds of millions of people will soon be able to take advantage of what we've been thinking about and working on over the past year. I plan to hold my tongue until everyone can play with the new version themselves. For now I'll leave some links and screenshots from various blogs showing our baby off.

From TechCrunch: Sweeping Changes At Live.com: It’s A Social Network!

From Windows Live Wire:Windows Live – Keeping your life in sync

From Mary Jo Foley on All About Microsoft: Windows Live Wave 3: Microsoft’s kinder and simpler consumer services strategy?

From Kara Swisher on BoomTown: Microsoft Officially Facebooks, Oops, Socializes Windows Live Internet Services

Now Playing: Terence Trent D'Arby - Sign Your Name

Disclaimer: What follows are my personal impressions from using the beta version of Windows Azure. It is not meant to be an official description of the project from Microsoft, you can find that here. 

Earlier this week I scored an invite to try out the beta version of Windows Azure which is a new hosted services (aka cloud computing) platform from Microsoft. Since there's been a ridiculous amount of press about the project I was interested in actually trying it out by developing and deploying some code using this platform and sharing my experiences with others.

What is it?

Before talking about a cloud computing platform, it is useful to agree on definitions of the term cloud computing. Tim O'Reilly has an excellent post entitled Web 2.0 and Cloud Computing where he breaks the technologies typically described as cloud computing into three broad categories

1. Utility Computing: In this approach, a vendor provides access to virtual server instances where each instance runs a traditional server operating system such as Linux or Windows Server. Computation and storage resources are metered and the customer can "scale infinitely" by simply creating new server instances. The most popular example of this approach is Amazon EC2.
2. Platform as a Service: In this approach, a vendor abstracts away the notion of accessing traditional LAMP or WISC stacks from their customers and instead provides an environment for running programs written using a particular platform. In addition, data storage is provided via a custom storage layer and API instead of traditional relational database access. The most popular example of this approach is Google App Engine.
3. Cloud-based end user applications: This typically refers to Web-based applications that have previously been provided as desktop or server based applications. Examples include Google Docs, Salesforce and Hotmail. Technically every Web application falls under this category, however the term often isn't used that inclusively.

With these definitions clearly stated it is easier to talk about what Windows Azure is and is not. Windows Azure is currently #2; a Platform as a Service offering. Although there have been numerous references to Amazon's offerings both by Microsoft and bloggers covering the Azure announcements, Windows Azure is not a utility computing offering [as defined above].

There has definitely been some confusion about this as evidenced by Dave Winer's post Microsoft's cloud strategy? and commentary from other sources.

Getting Started

To try out Azure you need to be running Windows Server 2008 or Windows Vista with a bunch of prerequisites you can get from running the Microsoft Web Platform installer. Once you have the various prerequisites installed (SQL Server, IIS 7, .NET Framework 3.5, etc) you should then grab the Windows Azure SDK. Users of Visual Studio will also benefit from grabbing the Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio.

After this process, you should be able to fire up Visual Studio and see the option to create a Cloud Service if you go to File->New->Project.

Building Cloud-based Applications with Azure

The diagram below taken from the Windows Azure SDK shows the key participants in a typical Windows Azure service

The work units that make up a Windows Azure hosted service can have one of two roles. A Web role is an application that listens for and responds to Web requests while a Worker role is a background processing task which acts autonomously but cannot be accessed over the Web. A Windows Azure application can have multiple instances of Web and Worker roles that make up the service. For example, if I was developing a Web-based RSS reader I would need a worker role for polling feeds and Web role for displaying the UI that the user interacts with. Both Web and Worker roles are .NET applications that can be developed locally and then deployed on Microsoft's servers when they are ready to go.

Azure applications have access to a storage layer that provides the following three storage services

• Blob Storage: This is used for storing binary data. A user account can have one or more containers which in turn can contain one or more blobs of binary data. Containers cannot be nested so one cannot create hierarchical folder structures. However Azure allows applications to work around this by (i) allowing applications to query containers based on substring matching on prefixes and (ii) delimiters such as '\' and other path characters are valid blob names. So I can create blobs with names like 'mypics\wife.jpg' and 'mypics\son.jpg' in the media container and then query for blobs beginning with 'mypics\' thus simulating a folder hierarchy somewhat. 

• Queue Service: This is a straightforward message queuing service. A user account can have one or more queues from which they can add items to the end of each queue and remove items from the front. Items have a maximum time-to-live of 7 days within the queue. When an item is retrieved from the queue, an associated 'pop receipt' is provided. The item is then hidden from other client applications until some interval (by default 30 seconds) has passed after which the item becomes visible. The item can be deleted from the queue during that interval if the pop receipt from when it was retrieved is provided as part of the DELETE operation.  The queue service is valuable as a way for Web roles to talk to Worker roles and vice versa.

• Table Storage: This exposes a subset of the capabilities of the ADO.NET Data Services Framework (aka Astoria). In general, this is a schema-less table based model similar to Google's BigTable and Amazon's SimpleDB. The data model consists of tables and entities (aka rows). Each entity has a primary key made of two parts {PartitionKey, RowKey}, a last modified timestamp and an arbitrary number of user-defined properties. Properties can be one of several primitive types including integer, strings, doubles, long integers, GUIDs, booleans and binary. Like Astoria, the Table Storage service supports performing LINQ queries on rows but only supports the FROM, WHERE and TAKE operators. Other differences from Astoria are that it doesn't support batch operations nor is it possible to retrieve individual properties from an entity without retrieving the entire entity.

These storage services are accessible to any HTTP client and not just Azure applications. 

Deploying Cloud-based Applications with Azure

The following diagram taken from the Windows Azure SDK shows the development lifecycle of an Windows Azure application

The SDK ships with a development fabric which enables you to deploy an Azure an application locally via IIS 7.0 and development storage which uses SQL Server Express as a storage layer which mimics the Windows Azure storage services.

As the diagram shows above, once the application is tested locally it can be deployed entirely or in part on Microsoft's storage and cloud computation services.

The Azure Services Platform: Windows Azure + Microsoft's Family of REST Web Services

In addition to Windows Azure, Microsoft also announced the Azure Services Platform which is a variety of Web APIs and Web Services that can be used in combination with Windows Azure (or by themselves) to build cloud-based applications. Each of these Web services is worthy of its own post (or whitepaper and O'Reilly animal book) but I'll limit myself to one sentence descriptions for now.

• Live Services: A set of REST APIs for consumer-centric data types (e.g. calendar, profile, etc) and scenarios (communication, presence, sync, etc). You can see the set of APIs in the Live Framework poster and keep up with the goings on by following the Live Services blogs.

• Microsoft SQL Services: Relational database in the cloud accessible via REST APIs. You can learn more from the SSDS developer center and keep up with the goings on by following the SQL Server Data Services team blog.

• Microsoft .NET Services: Three fairly different services for now; hosted access control, hosted workflow engine and a service bus in the cloud. Boring enterprise stuff. :) 

• Microsoft Sharepoint Services: I couldn't figure out if anything concrete was announced here or whether stuff was pre-announced (i.e. actual announcement to come at a later date).

• Microsoft Dynamics CRM Services: Ditto.

From the above list, I find the Live Services piece (access to user data in a uniform way) and the SQL Services (hosted storage) most interesting. I will likely revisit them in more depth at a later date.

The Bottom Line

From my perspective, Windows Azure is easiest viewed as a competitor to Google App Engine. As comparisons go, Azure already brings a number of features to the table that aren't even on the Google App Engine road map. The key important feature is the ability to run background tasks instead of just being limited to writing applications that respond to Web requests. This limitation of App Engine means you can't write any application that does any serious background computation like a search engine, email service, or RSS reader on Google App Engine. So Azure can run an entire class of applications that are simply not possible on Google App Engine.

The second key feature is that by supporting the .NET Framework, developers theoretically get a plethora of languages to choose from including Ruby (IronRuby), Python (IronPython), F#, VB.NET and C#. In practice, the Azure SDK only supports creating cloud applications using C# and VB.NET out of the box. However I can't think of any reason why it shouldn't be able to support development with other .NET enabled languages like IronPython. On the flipside, App Engine only supports Python and the timeline for it supporting other languages [and exactly which other languages] is still To Be Determined.

Finally, App Engine has a number of scalability limitations both from a data storage and a query performance perspective. Azure definitely does better than App Engine on a number of these axes. For example, App Engine has a 1MB limit per file while Azure has a 64MB limit on individual blobs and also allows you to split a blob into blocks of 4MB each. Similarly, I've been watching SQL Server Data Services (SSDS) for a while and I haven't seen or heard complaints about query performance.

Azure makes it possible for me to reuse my existing skills as a .NET developer who is savvy with using RESTful APIs to build cloud based applications without having to worry about scalability concerns (e.g. database sharding, replication strategies, server failover, etc). In addition, it puts pressure on competitors to step up to the plate and deliver. However you look at it, this is a massive WIN for Web developers.

The two small things I'd love to see addressed are first class support for IronPython and some clarity on the difference between SSDS and Windows Azure Storage services. Hopefully we can avoid a LINQ to Entities vs. LINQ to SQL-style situation in the future.

Postscript: Food for Thought

It would be interesting to read [or write] further thoughts on the pros and cons of Platform as a Service offerings when compared to Utility Computing offerings. In a previous discussion on my blog there was some consensus that utility computing approaches are more resistant to vendor lock-in than platform as a service approaches since it is easier to find multiple vendors who are providing virtual servers with LAMP/WISC hosting than it will be to find multiple vendors providing the exact same proprietary cloud APIs as Google, Amazon or Microsoft. However it would be informative to look at the topic from more angles, for instance what is the cost/benefit tradeoff of using SimpleDB/BigTable/SSDS for data access instead of MySQL running on multiple virtual hosts? With my paternity leave ending today, I doubt I'll have time to go over these topics in depth but I'd appreciate reading any such analysis.

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The second most interesting announcement out of PDC this morning is that Windows Live ID is becoming an OpenID Provider. The information below explains how to try it out and give feedback to the team responsible.

Try It Now. Tell Us What You Think

We want you to try the Windows Live ID OpenID Provider CTP release, let us know your feedback, and tell us about any problems you find.

To prepare:

1. G o to https://login.live-int.com and use the sign-up button to set up a Windows Live ID test account in the INT environment .
2. Go to https://login.live-int.com/beta/ManageOpenID.srf to set up your OpenID test alias.

Then:

• Users - At any Web site that supports OpenID 2.0, type openid.live-INT.com in the OpenID login box to sign in to that site by means of your Windows Live ID OpenID alias.
• Library developers - Test your libraries against the Windows Live ID OP endpoint and let us know of any problems you find.
• Web site owners - Test signing in to your site by using a Windows Live ID OpenID alias and let us know of any problems you find.
• You can send us feedback at:
• E-mail - openidfb@microsoft.com

This is awesome news. I've been interested in Windows Live supporting OpenID for a while and I'm glad to see that we've taken the plunge. Please try it out and send the team your feedback.

I've tried it out already and sent some initial feedback. In general, my feedback was on applying the lessons from the Yahoo! OpenID Usability Study since it looks like our implementation has some of the same usability issues that inspired Jeff Atwood's rants about Yahoo's OpenID implementation. Since it is still a Community Technology Preview, I'm sure the user experience will improve as feedback trickles in.

Kudos to Jorgen Thelin and the rest of the folks on the Identity Services team for getting this out. Great work, guys.

UPDATE: Angus Logan posted a comment with a link to the following screencast of the current user experience when using Windows Live ID as an OpenID provider experience

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Just because you aren't attending Microsoft's Professional Developer Conference doesn't mean you can't follow the announcements. The most exciting announcement so far [from my perspective] has been Windows Azure which is described as follows from the official site

The Azure™ Services Platform (Azure) is an internet-scale cloud services platform hosted in Microsoft data centers, which provides an operating system and a set of developer services that can be used individually or together. Azure’s flexible and interoperable platform can be used to build new applications to run from the cloud or enhance existing applications with cloud-based capabilities. Its open architecture gives developers the choice to build web applications, applications running on connected devices, PCs, servers, or hybrid solutions offering the best of online and on-premises.

Azure reduces the need for up-front technology purchases, and it enables developers to quickly and easily create applications running in the cloud by using their existing skills with the Microsoft Visual Studio development environment and the Microsoft .NET Framework. In addition to managed code languages supported by .NET, Azure will support more programming languages and development environments in the near future. Azure simplifies maintaining and operating applications by providing on-demand compute and storage to host, scale, and manage web and connected applications. Infrastructure management is automated with a platform that is designed for high availability and dynamic scaling to match usage needs with the option of a pay-as-you-go pricing model. Azure provides an open, standards-based and interoperable environment with support for multiple internet protocols, including HTTP, REST, SOAP, and XML.

It will be interesting to read what developers make of this announcement and what kind of apps start getting built on this platform. I'll also be on the look out for any in depth discussions on the platform, there is lots to chew on in this announcement.

For a quick overview of what Azure means to developers, take a look at Azure for Business and Azure for Web Developers. 

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A few days ago, Omar Shahine wrote about the new features of Windows Live Calendar in a post entitled Windows Live Calendar gets To Dos where he writes

At long last, we have shipped To Dos . It’s been a long time since I worked on Windows Live Calendar and we were talking about building To Dos. The best part about To Dos is that they work with Shared Calendars. In other words, if you and your spouse have a “Family Calendar” you can now create and manage a shared task list… something Google Calendar still doesn’t have.

With the new release of Windows Live Calendar and the new Beta releases of the Windows Live Suite there is a ton of great end to end Calendar functionality.

1. Outlook Connector to sync all your Windows Live Calendars to Outlook, including your Birthday Calendar for all your Contacts.
2. Windows Live Mail now with Calendar Sync will also sync all your Windows Live Calendars
3. Shared Calendars that you can create, share and manage with other Windows Live Users
4. Calendar Subscriptions to public internet calendars that you can subscribe and sync to all the products above.

And of course now To Dos. Dare should be happy about this. He’ll need it when the baby comes :-).

One thing has been frustrating me for months is that there was no easy way to incorporate shared calendaring into my wife and I's workflow even though we both used calendaring products from Microsoft. Typically my wife would add an item to her calendar (in Windows Calendar) and then have to literally tell me about the appointment at which point I'd either enter it into my Windows Mobile phone which would synchronize it with Outlook + Exchange or I'd fire up my laptop and enter it directly into Outlook. The big problem with this "approach" is when she tells me about something and I don't immediately enter it into my phone (e.g. when i don't want to be inappropriate at our midwife appointments) in which case I forget and end up being late or missing shared appointments.

This has all changed with the usage of two free products from Microsoft. The first is the newest version of Windows Live Mail (Wave 3 beta) which now has a built in calendar with synchronizes with Windows Live Calendar which my wife now uses. The second is Microsoft Office Outlook Connector which allows you to synchronize email with Windows Live Hotmail and calendars from Windows Live Calendar directly into Outlook which I use at work.

Besides installing both pieces of software the only setup step needed was for my wife to share her calendar with me from Windows Live Calendar. Now that my wife has begun her maternity leave in preparation for the birth of our son, I'm glad I can fire up Outlook and see what's going on with her during my work day. For example, looking in my Outlook calendar for tomorrow shows an appointment I'd almost forgotten

That would have been embarrassing.

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Darren Neimke a post entitled The “What’s New” feature in Live Messenger where he gives some feedback on a new feature of Windows Live Messenger which shows updates from the user's social network at the bottom of the Messenger window in a slideshow/carousel. Although I don't work on the Windows Live Messenger team, I did work on the platform that powers this feature and I am intimately familiar with how it works. So here are his questions and my answers

The new beta for Windows Live Messenger has given us an interesting new featured called “What’s new” which displays updates from your friends at the bottom of the Messenger application.  As you can see from the promotional image for this feature, it displays Who, What, and When information from your friends updates.

I really like the idea behind this feature and watching “What’s new” updates has already led me to information that I might previously have missed.  I would say that in the current beta, some parts appear not to be working correctly.

I'm glad to see that bringing activity streams down to the desktop client has led Darren to find out information about his social network that he would have otherwise missed. Serendipitous discovery is what this feature is about and its great to see people getting value out of it within the first few days of using the feature.

Since this is a beta some features may not seem to work correctly either because we haven't gotten around to implementing them or because we would like user feedback on how people expect the features to work.

The actual feature as it is installed on my machine does not seem to display the “When” part of the information as you can see from the following image:

Actually the "When" part of the activity is available in the beta. By default the "What's New" carousel is in collapsed mode but you can expand it by clicking on the divider that separates the "What's New" carousel from the contact list as shown below.

STEP 1: Hover over divider

STEP 2: Click to expand

As you can see from the screenshot above, the expanded view takes a lot of real estate from the contact list which is why the default is the collapsed mode. We did have some concerns that users wouldn't discover that they could expand the carousel which seems to have been borne out by Darren's assumption that the feature wasn't there.

Another issue with the status update shown above is that the link that is displayed does not take me to the post that Jamie commented on.  Instead, it takes me to Jamie’s profile page.  Probably not what I’d be interested in seeing here as I’d be much more interested in reading the post and the comment that Jamie made.

Another feature which doesn’t appear to have been implemented as yet is a “Post a note” link.  Currently this appears as a non-clickable piece of text.

The fact that various links don't work in the "What's New" is a known issue. You can expect that these links should work in subsequent releases.

I haven’t really seen much discussion or documentation about the “What’s new” feature as yet to see what events get added and whether there is an SDK behind all of this. 

I’m interested in seeing where this feature goes as it appears to have a lot of promise.  Overall, I think that the current UX is lacking in some way – most popular applications that display feeds tend to show more than just a single entry.  I’m also wondering whether it would make sense to see some sort of provider model that would allow me to publish updates into the feed somehow.

Jamie Thomson has a blog post on the new notification types in the What's New feed where he references the original list from Rob Dolin who's actually responsible for PMing the content of the feed. There are also comments from other Windows Live users discussing the kind of updates they've seen in the feed thus far. I assume Rob is waiting until Wave 3 is final before writing a post on the various update types that show up in the feed. However it should be noted that part of the platform work our team did in this release was to make the process of adding new update types to the feed easier. Thus even if Rob Dolin does post a list of the current update types in the What's New feed, that list could change in a matter of days, weeks or months. 

I've thought a little bit about what a public API for interacting with the What's New feed should be like but I'm currently not sold on whether we should have one and if so what capabilities it should expose. I'd be interested in hearing more from people who would be interested in such an SDK.

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Chris Jones has a blog post entitled Building Windows Live where he talks about the what all of us on Windows Live have been working on over the past year. He writes

We have spent the last year working on our next major wave of releases for Windows Live. This wave is part of our ongoing work to build a great set of communication and sharing experiences that help keep your life in sync. This wave includes significant updates to our software applications for your Windows PC, and in the next few hours, we will release public betas of the latest version of the Windows Live suite of PC applications, including Messenger , Mail , Photo Gallery , Movie Maker , Writer , Toolbar , and Family Safety . You’ll find new features across the products and most notably, Windows Live Messenger has been almost entirely redesigned. I’m sure many of you will have questions, and, over the coming weeks, we’ll have individuals from the engineering team share more about what we have built and why we made the investments we made. Our intent is to post regularly to this blog, and if there are topics you think we should cover, please leave a comment or send me an e-mail at chris.jones@microsoft.com .

It seems the download links were found early by those intrepid correspondents over at LiveSide and a number of people have already started trying the new versions out. The download URLs are http://g.live.com/1rebeta3/en/wlsetup-web.exeand http://g.live.com/1rebeta3/en/wlsetup-all.exe depending on whether you want to download a subset of the Windows Live desktop applications or all of them.

I probably won't be blogging in detail about what I've worked on over the past few months until the products are out of beta but I will leave with this screenshot from Darren Neimke's post Loving the new Live Beta’s.

I'm sure you can guess which of the features called out above I worked on.

PS: My favorite thing about the new wave of Windows Live products is that the world now has a seamless calendar sharing solution that works. If Omar doesn't write something similar first, I'll probably throw a blog up about how my wife and I plan to use Outlook + Outlook Connector and Windows Live Mail + Windows Live Calendar to share our schedules so I no longer miss birth center appointments. :)

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