Mike has a post entitled 5 Things I Dislike About MSN Spaces where he lists the top 5 issues he has with the service. 

Five things I dislike about MSN Spaces:

1. I can't use BlogJet to post to my blog today.  Not a huge deal, but I love this little tool.  Web browsers (Firefox included!) just don't do it for me in the way of text editing.

2. We don't have enough themes, which means there isn't enough differentiation between spaces.  People come in a lot of flavors.

3. We don't have comments on anything other than blog entries, which means a lot of people are using comments to either a) comment on photos, or b) comment on the space itself.

4. The Statistics page doesn't roll-up RSS aggregator "hits", only web page-views.  I want to know who is reading this post in various aggregators.

5. The recent blog entry on the MSN Messenger 7.0 beta contact card doesn't show enough information to compel me to visit the user's space.  

since I'm the eternal copycat I also decided to put together a top 5 list of issues I'd like to see fixed in the service. Some of them I am in the process of fixing and some I'm still nagging folks like Mike to fix since they are UI issues and have nothing to do with my areas of responsibility. Here's my list

Five things I'd like to see fixed in MSN Spaces:

1. I can't post to my blog using standard weblog tools such as the BlogJet, w.bloggar or Flickr. I now have 3 blogs and I'd love to author my posts in one place then have it automatically posted to all three of them. My MSN Spaces blog prevents this from happening today.

2. The text control for posting to your blog should support editing raw HTML and support a WYSIWYG editting. I find it stunning that open source projects like dasBlog & Community Server::Blogs have a more full featured edit control for posting to ones blog than a MSN Spaces.

3. The user experience around managing and interacting with my blogroll is subpar. I'd love to be able to upload my aggregator subscription list as an OPML file to my MSN Space blog roll. While we're at it, it would be cool to render MSN Spaces blogs differently in my blog roll and links in my posts perhaps with a pawn such as what LiveJournal does with Livejournal user pawn which links to a user's profile.

4. I want to be able to upload music lists from other play lists formats besides Windows media player. I have a bunch of playlists in WinAmp and iTunes which I want to upload to my MSN Space but don't have the patience to transcribe. It is cool that we allow uploading Windows Media Player playlists but what about iTunes and WinAmp?

5. I need more ways to find other MSN Spaces that I might be interested in. The recently updated spaces and newly created spaces widgets on the MSN Spaces homepage aren't cutting it for me. In additon, once that is fixed it would also be cool if it was made really simple to subscribe to interesting MSN Spaces in my RSS aggregator of choice using a one-click subscription mechanism.


 

Categories: MSN

I've been doing a bit of reading about folksonomies recently. The definition of folksonomy in Wikipedia currently reads

Folksonomy is a neologism for a practice of collaborative categorization using simple tags in a flat namespace. This feature has begun appearing in a variety of social software. At present, the best examples of online folksonomies are social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, a bookmark sharing site, Flickr, for photo sharing, and 43 Things, for goal sharing.

What I've found interesting about current implementations of folksonomies is that they are   blogging with content other than straight text. del.icio.us is basically a linkblog and Flickr isn't much different from a photoblog/moblog. The innovation in these sites is in merging the category metadata from the different entries such that users can browse all the links or photos which match a specified keyword. For example, here are recent links added del.icio.us with the tag 'chicken' and recent photos added to Flickr with the tag 'chicken'. Both sites not only allow browsing all entries that match a particular tag but also go as far as alowing one to subscribe to particular tags as an RSS feed.

I've watched with growing bemusement as certain people have started to debate whether folksonomies will replace traditional categorization mechanisms. Posts such as The Innovator's Lemma  by Clay Shirky, Put the social back into social tagging by David Weinberger and it's the social network, stupid! by Liz Lawley go back and forth about this very issue. This discussion reminds me of the article Don't Let Architecture Astronauts Scare You by Joel Spolsky where he wrote

A recent example illustrates this. Your typical architecture astronaut will take a fact like "Napster is a peer-to-peer service for downloading music" and ignore everything but the architecture, thinking it's interesting because it's peer to peer, completely missing the point that it's interesting because you can type the name of a song and listen to it right away.

All they'll talk about is peer-to-peer this, that, and the other thing. Suddenly you have peer-to-peer conferences, peer-to-peer venture capital funds, and even peer-to-peer backlash with the imbecile business journalists dripping with glee as they copy each other's stories: "Peer To Peer: Dead!"

I think Clay is jumping several steps ahead to conclude that explicit classification schemes will give way to categorization by users. The one thing people are ignoring in this debate (as in all technical debates) is that the various implementations of folksonomies are popular because of the value they provide to the user. When all is said and done, del.icio.us is basically a linkblog and Flickr isn't much different from a photoblog/moblog. This provides inherent value to the user and as a side effect [from the users perspective] each new post becomes part of an ecosystem of posts on the same topic which can then be browsed by others. It isn't clear to me that this dynamic exists everywhere else explicit classification schemes are used today.

One thing that is clear to me is that personal publishing via RSS and the various forms of blogging have found a way to trample all the arguments against metadata in Cory Doctorow's Metacrap article from so many years ago. Once there is incentive for the metadata to be accurate and it is cheap to create there is no reason why some of the scenarios that were decried as utopian by Cory Doctorow in his article can't come to pass. So far only personal publishing has provided the value to end users to make both requirements (accurate & cheap to create) come true.

Postscript: Coincidentally I just noticed a post entitled Meet the new tag soup  by Phil Ringnalda pointing out that emphasizing end-user value is needed to woo people to create accurate metadata in the case of using semantic markup in HTML. So far most of the arguments I've seen for semantic markup [or even XHTML for that matter] have been academic. It would be interesting to see what actual value to end users is possible with semantic markup or whether it really has been pointless geekery as I've suspected all along. 


 

Categories: Technology

January 21, 2005
@ 01:44 AM

My article on Cω is finally published. It appeared on XML.com as Introducing Comega while it showed up as the next installment of my Extreme XML column on MSDN with the title An Overview of Cω: Integrating XML into Popular Programming Languages. It was also mentioned on Slashdot in the story Microsoft Research's C-Omega

I'll be following this with an overview of ECMAScript for XML (E4X) in a couple of months.


 

Categories: Technology

O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference. It looks like I'm going to be attending the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego. If you're there and want to find me I'll be with the rest of the exhibitors hanging out with MSR Social Computing Group talking about the social software applications that have been and are being built by MSN with input from the folks at Microsoft Research. I should also be at Tuesday's after party.

 

Categories: Technology

If you've been following the blogosphere you should know by now that the Google, Yahoo! and MSN search engines decided to start honoring the rel="nofollow" attribute on links to mean that the linked page shouldn't get any increased ranking from that link. This is intended to reduce the incentive for comment spammers who've been flooding weblogs with links to their websites in comment fields. There is another side effect of the existence of this element which is pointed out by Shelley Powers in her post The Other Shoe on Nofollow where she writes

I expected this reason to use nofollow would take a few weeks at least, but not the first day. Scoble is happy about the other reason for nofollow: being able to link to something in your writing and not give ‘google juice’ to the linked.

Now, he says, I can link to something I dislike and use the power of my link in order to punish the linked, but it won’t push them into a higher search result status.

Dave Winer started this, in a way. He would give sly hints about what people have said and done, leaving you knowing that an interesting conversation was going on elsewhere, but you’re only hearing one side of it. When you’d ask him for a link so you could see other viewpoints, he would reply that "…he didn’t want to give the other party Google juice." Now I imagine that *he’ll link with impunity–other than the fact that Technorati and Blogdex still follow the links. For now, of course. I imagine within a week, Technorati will stop counting links with nofollow implemented. Blogdex will soon follow, I’m sure.

Is this so bad? In a way, yes it is. It’s an abuse of the purpose of the tag, which was agreed on to discourage comment spammers. More than that, though, it’s an abuse of the the core nature of this environment, where our criticism of another party, such as a weblogger, came with the price of a link. Now, even that price is gone.

I don't see this is an abuse of the tag, I see it as fixing a bug in Google's PageRank algorithm. It's always seemed broken to me that Google assumes that any link to a source is meant to convey that the target is authoritative. Many times people link to websites they don't consider authoritative for the topic they are discussing. This notion of 'the price of a link' has been based on a design flaw in Google's PageRank algorithm. Social norms should direct social behavior not bugs in software.

A post entitled Nofollow Sucks on the Aimless Words blog has the following statement

Consider what the wholesale implementation of this new web standard means within the blogosphere. "nofollow" is English for NO FOLLOW and common sense dictates that when spider finds this tag it will not follow the subsequent link.

The author of the blog post later retracts his statements but it does bring up an interesting point. Robert Scoble highlights the fact that it didn't take a standards committee to come up with this just backchannel conversations that took a few hours. However as Tim Ewald recently wrote in his post "Make it easy for people to pay you"

The value of the standardization process is that it digs issues - architectural, security, reliability, scalability, etc. - and addresses them. It also makes the language more tighter and less vague

The Aimless Words weblog points out that it is unclear to anyone who isn't party to whatever conversations that went on between Google, MSN, Yahoo and others what exactly are the semantics of rel='nofollow' on a link. Given that it is highly unlikely that all three search engines even use the same ranking algorithms I'm not even sure what it means for them to say the link doesn't contribute to the ranking of the site. Will the penalty that Yahoo search applies to such sites be the same in Google and MSN search? Some sort of spec or spec text would be nice to see instead of 'trust us' which seems to be what is emanating from all the parties involved at the current time.

PS: I was wondering why I never saw the posts about this on the Google blog  in RSS Bandit and it turned out to be because the Google Blog atom feeds are malformed XML. Hopefully they'll fix this soon.


 

Categories: Technology

January 19, 2005
@ 04:36 PM

The New Yorker has an article by Seymour Hersh entitled THE COMING WARS: What the Pentagon can now do in secret where he discusses alleged plans the US administration has for invading Iran in the near term. To article is scary reading but the part that had me the most stunned is the following excerpt

In my interviews over the past two months, I was given a much harsher view. The hawks in the Administration believe that it will soon become clear that the Europeans’ negotiated approach cannot succeed, and that at that time the Administration will act. "We’re not dealing with a set of National Security Council option papers here," the former high-level intelligence official told me. "They’ve already passed that wicket. It’s not if we’re going to do anything against Iran. They’re doing it."

The immediate goals of the attacks would be to destroy, or at least temporarily derail, Iran’s ability to go nuclear. But there are other, equally purposeful, motives at work. The government consultant told me that the hawks in the Pentagon, in private discussions, have been urging a limited attack on Iran because they believe it could lead to a toppling of the religious leadership. "Within the soul of Iran there is a struggle between secular nationalists and reformers, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the fundamentalist Islamic movement," the consultant told me. "The minute the aura of invincibility which the mullahs enjoy is shattered, and with it the ability to hoodwink the West, the Iranian regime will collapse"—like the former Communist regimes in Romania, East Germany, and the Soviet Union. Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz share that belief, he said.

"The idea that an American attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities would produce a popular uprising is extremely illinformed," said Flynt Leverett, a Middle East scholar who worked on the National Security Council in the Bush Administration. "You have to understand that the nuclear ambition in Iran is supported across the political spectrum, and Iranians will perceive attacks on these sites as attacks on their ambitions to be a major regional player and a modern nation that’s technologically sophisticated." Leverett, who is now a senior fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy, at the Brookings Institution, warned that an American attack, if it takes place, "will produce an Iranian backlash against the United States and a rallying around the regime."

This sounds suspiciously like the same reasoning that claimed that Iraqis would welcome the US led invasion with open arms. I know the saying "those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it" is a cliché but this is getting ridiculous. Maybe someone should get these folks a copy of DJ Green Lantern's Shade 45: Sirius Bizness mixtape and put on track 10 where Immortal Technique opens up the second verse with

They say the rebels in Iraq still fight for Saddam,
But that's bullshit i'll show you why it's totally wrong,
Cuz if another country invaded the hood tonight,
It'd be warfare through Harlem and Washington Heights
I wouldn't be fightin' for Bush or white americas dream,
I'd be fightin' for my peoples survival and self esteem,
I wouldn't fight for racist churches from the south my nigga,
I'd be fightin' to be keep the occupation out my nigga,

It doesn't take an expert in Middle East history with a Ph.D to figure this stuff out. The continual waste of life and resources going on in the Middle East due the Bush administrations misadventures completely turns my stomach.


 

Categories: Ramblings

January 18, 2005
@ 04:44 PM

After several months of waiting for The Game's new album, The Documentary is finally out. I knew subscribing to Amazon's RSS feeds would come in handy.

G-G-G-G-G-Unit!!!


 

Categories: Ramblings

It had to happen sooner or later. MyMSN now supports adding RSS or Atom 0.3 feeds as content sources for your home page. RSS/Atom content modules can be customized to show articles from up to 1 day old to up to 365 days old, display from up to 1 article to up to 30 articles and either show article summaries as a tool tip or inline following the article headline. 

Below are screenshots of me testdriving the new features

  1. MyMSN homepage with option to add RSS feeds as content modules
  2. Adding Jeremy Zawodny's Atom feed to my MyMSN homepage
  3. Jeremy Zawodny's Atom feed and Robert Scoble's RSS feed as part of my homepage

In addition the MyMSN folks also provide a handy way to create a link that enables people to add a feed to their MyMSN front page. The following link will add my RSS feed to your MyMSN front page

http://my.msn.com/addtomymsn.armx?id=rss&ut=http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/SyndicationService.asmx/GetRss&ru=http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog

Just as with other Web based aggregators there is also a handy button one can add to a website to enable one-click subscription to your RSS feed. This brings to a grand total of four buttons I need to add to my homepage; Add to MyMSN button, Add to MyYahoo button, Add to Bloglines button, and Add to Newsgator button.

There is also an MSN RSS Directory that contains links to the RSS feeds produced by MSN properties such as MSNBC, MSN Autos and MSN Music.  

I'm really glad to see this ship. When I was first hired onto MSN I was supposed to work with the MyMSN folks on this effort but eventually things changed. Even though I haven't been directly responsible for this feature I've been in touch with the folks driving it and I think it is totally killer that Microsoft has finally officially cast a stone in the XML syndication waters.

Great work all around.


 

Categories: MSN

Derek has a post entitled Search is not Search where he alludes to conversations we had about my post Apples and Oranges: WinFS and Google Desktop Search. His blog post reminds me about why I'm so disappointed that the benefits of adding structured metadata capabilities to file systems is being equated to desktop search tools that are a slightly better incarnation of the Unix grep command. Derek wrote

I was reminded of that conversation today, when catching up on a recent-ish publication from MIT's Haystack team: The Perfect Search Engine is Not Enough: A Study of Orienteering Behavior in Directed Search. One of the main points of the paper is that people tend not to use 'search' (think Google), even when they have enough information for search to likely be useful. Often they will instead go to a know location from which they believe they can find the information they are looking for.

For me the classic example is searching for music. While I tend to store my mp3s in a consistent directory structure such that the song's filename is the actual name of the song, I almost never use a generic directory search to find a song. I tend to think of songs as "song name: Conga Fury, band: Juno Reactor", or something like that, so when I'm looking for Conga Fury, I am more likely to walk the album subdirectories under my Juno Reactor directory, than I am to search for file "Conga Fury.mp3". The above paper talks a bit about why, and I think another key aspect that they don't mention is that search via navigation leverages our brain's innate fuzzy computation abilities. I may not remember how to spell "Conga Fury" or may think that it was "Conga Furvor", but by navigating to my solution, such inaccuracies are easily dealt with.

As Derek's example shows, comparing the scenarios enabled by a metadata based file system against those enabled by desktop search is like comparing navigating one's music library using iTunes versus using Google Desktop Search or the MSN Desktop Search to locate audio files.

Joe Wilcox (of Jupiter Research) seems to have reached a similar conclusion based on my reading of his post Yes, We're on the Road to Cairo where he wrote

WinFS could have anchored Microsoft's plans to unify search across the desktop, network and the Internet. Further delay creates opportunity for competitors like Google to deliver workable products. It's now obvious that rather than provide placeholder desktop search capabilities until Longhorn shipped, MSN will be Microsoft's major provider on the Windows desktop. That's assuming people really need the capability. Colleague Eric Peterson and I chatted about desktop search on Friday. Neither of us is convinced any of the current approaches hit the real consumer need. I see that as making more meaningful disparate bits of information and complex content types, like digital photos, music or videos.

WinFS promised to hit that need, particularly in Microsoft public demonstrations of Longhorn's capabilities. Now the onus and opportunity will fall on Apple, which plans to release metadata search capabilities with Mac OS 10.4 (a.k.a. "Tiger") in 2005. Right now, metadata holds the best promise of delivering more meaningful search and making sense of all the digital content piling up on consumers' and Websites' hard drives. But there are no standards around metadata. Now is the time for vendors to rally around a standard. No standard is a big problem. Take for example online music stores like iTunes, MSN Music or Napster, which all tag metadata slightly differently. Digital cameras capture some metadata about pictures, but not necessarily the same way. Then there are consumers using photo software to create their own custom metadata tags when they import photos.

I agree with his statements about where the real consumer need lies but disagree when he states that no standards around metadata exist. Music files have ID3 and digital images have EXIF. The problem isn't a lack of standards but instead a lack of support for these standards which is a totally different beast.

I was gung ho about WinFS because it looked like Microsoft was going to deliver a platform that made it easy for developers to build applications that took advantage of the rich metadata inherent in user documents and digital media. Of course, this would require applications that created content (e.g. digital cameras) to actually generate such metadata which they don't today. I find it sad to read posts like Robert Scoble's Desktop Search Reviewers' Guide where he wrote

2) Know what it can and can't do. For instance, desktop search today isn't good at finding photos. Why? Because when you take a photo the only thing that the computer knows about that file is the name and some information that the camera puts into the file (like the date it was taken, the shutter speed, etc). And the file name is usually something like DSC0050.jpg so that really isn't going to help you search for it. Hint: put your photos into a folder with a name like "wedding photos" and then your desktop search can find your wedding photos.

What is so depressing about this post is that it costs very little for the digital camera or its associated software to tag JPEG files with comments like 'wedding photos' as part of the EXIF data which would then make them accessible to various applications including desktop search tools. 

Perhaps the solution isn't expending resources to build a metadata platform that will be ignored by applications that create content today but instead giving these applications incentive to generate this metadata. For example, once I bought an iPod I became very careful to ensure that the ID3 information on the MP3s I'd load on it were accurate since I had a poor user experience otherwise.

I wonder what the iPod for digital photography is going to be. Maybe Microsoft should be investing in building such applications instead of boiling the oceans with efforts like WinFS which aim to ship everything including the kitchen sink in version 1.0.  


 

Categories: Technology

About two weeks ago there was an interview on C|Net with Bill Gates entitled Gates taking a seat in your den where he mentioned there had been 1 million MSN Spaces created in our first month. About a week later Mike Torres blogged that the number had risen to 1.5 million MSN Spaces created. In response to both of these statements about the growth of MSN Spaces I've seen a couple of detractors complaining about our adoption numbers. A prototypical example of the kind of these comments is the following post by Ed Brill entitled Gates: close to a million people on MSN Spaces. Ed Brill wrote

I made this comment on Scoble's blog, here for y'all as well...
Not to take this too far afield, but this is one of those fascinating examples of how MS is so good at staying "on message", but how bad it makes them look when that message lacks credibility. Those of us in the blogging community look at this "1 million" number with an extremely crooked eye, no offense to Mike Torres and his work. We all know someone who created an MSN Space only for the purpose of checking it out, and will never use it again. We know there are people who blog elsewhere that created Spaces because it's more free web space. We know that there are "people" who created more than one space, just like "people" have more than one Hotmail account. But BillG says "1 million" and the choir says "yea, verily."
...
It's a fascinating culture to observe from the outside, and it often works. But when the claim is too far afield, it does nothing to help the corporate image and credibility. (In this case, neither did BillG's comment that "So no big problem; it's not that people have stopped using IE").

I was quite surprised by this outburst given that quoting the number of unique user accounts is common practice for online services. In fact in a recent press release from Six Apart entitled Weblogging Software Leader Six Apart Acquires LiveJournal it is stated

Six Apart, makers of the highly acclaimed Movable Type publishing platform and TypePad personal weblogging service, today announced that it has acquired Danga Interactive, Inc., the operators of the popular service LiveJournal, for an undisclosed amount of stock and cash. With the acquisition, Six Apart solidifies its position as the industry's recognized leader in weblogging software across all markets, and LiveJournal can continue its rapid growth trajectory under Six Apart's umbrella. As of today, the combined user base of both companies exceeds 6.5 million users, with thousands more added daily.

The 6.5 million user number above is calculated from about 1 million TypePad accounts and about 5.5 million LiveJournal accounts. Of course, anyone with a web browser can go to the LiveJournal statistics page where it states they currently have about 2.5 million active blogs out of 5.7 million blogs. In fact, according to the statistics page over 1.5 million blogs have never been updated. This means over 20% of the blogs on LiveJournal didn't get past the first post.

This isn't meant to single out LiveJournal especially since according to the Perseus blog survey from a few years ago, LiveJournal's retention numbers are the best in the industry. In fact, the Perseus blog survey estimates that about 66% of blogs are eventually abandoned. This is something that everyone on the MSN Spaces team is aware of and which Bill Gates himself alluded to in his interview that got Ed Brill so upset. Specifically Bill Gates said

Well, actually I think the biggest blogging statistic I know, which really blew me away, is that we've got close to a million people setting up blogs (Web logs) with the Spaces capability that's connected up to Messenger. Now, with blogs, you always have to be careful. The decay rate of "I started and I stopped" or "I started and nobody visited" is fairly high, but as RSS (Really Simple Syndication) has gotten more sophisticated and value-added search capabilities have come along, this thing is really maturing.

Given that caveat I'm not really sure what more Ed Brill expects. Given that MSN Spaces has been in beta for less than 2 months we don't have meaningful 'active' user numbers yet although from our daily stats it seems we are at least in the same ratio as the rest of the industry.

One of the unfortunate things about working for Microsoft is that no matter what we do we tend to get attacked. Eventually one learns to filter out useful feedback from the 'I hate Microsoft' crowd.


 

Categories: MSN