A couple of MSN betas snuck out into the world this week.

In his post MSN Shopping Officially Launches New Beta Site, Chris Jolley talks about the new http://beta.shopping.msn.com. Some of the new features include

• RSS Feeds – it remains to be seen how aggressively consumers take to this, but I think it's super-cool how we are embracing an emerging technology.    
• Ratings & Reviews - allows consumers to see what other consumers think of a product, providing them with increased confidence in their purchase decisions
• Ability to browse our complete selection through an easy-to-understand taxonomy and powerful search
• Refine searches with expanded, relevant criteria
  •  By price, rating, popularity, name, best match
  • Multiple Views - Results can be viewed in three different views
• Usability enhancements:
  • Recently viewed– helpful little personalization feature that helps continuity between sessions
  • Compare prices across stores, find out who has free shipping, hot deals, etc.
  • Clean and consistent UI – The UI is clean and simple and designed to NOT get in the user's way
• Useful Merchandising – Comprehensive set of merchandising, including the Gift Center , Seasonal Shops & Guides , and more

I met with the PM who owns the RSS feeds feature a few months ago to talk about my scenarios and its great to see that it's finally out there. I use the Amazon RSS feeds all the time and can definitely see myself getting some use out of the news feeds from MSN Shopping. All I can say about the ratings & reviews feature is...FINALLY. I've already begun to scheme about how I can convince Mike that we should totally gank learn from the feature in Yahoo 360° where you can include your reviews on your "space".

The MSN Screensaver beta is also out. Some of the features include

Personalize with background photos and news and weather information from MSN or any RSS feeds from websites you choose.

Search the Web and click news headlines directly from the Screen Saver.

Stay connected with Hotmail, MSN Messenger, and MSN Spaces. Track how many unread Hotmail messages and current Messenger conversations you have, and display blogs and photos from your friends’ MSN Spaces.

Some of the features of the screen saver are so useful I'm wondering why they are wasted on an app that typically runs when the user is away from the computer.

And finally, http://www.start.com/myw3b has some new features. Sanaz Ahari has a blog post entitled new things on start.com... where she writes

first and foremost, check out our new search results:

- we now have tabbed results that include web, news and rss , so you don't need to do seperate types of search we just give you all the results and it's all ajax based of course

- the rss resutls are very cool, cause you can just subcribe by clicking on subscribe and they'll get added to your feed

 

we've also added themes : ice, granite and ocean... ice is my favorite :)

super easy to navigate, needless to say all in place and no refreshes required.

 

we got rid of our not so useful home link and folder view - so now when you click on a folder we don't replace your dashboard with the content of that folder... yes, we listen to our user feedback :)

 

lastly you can now hit the esc button to close your overlay modules - super usable...

There's a followup post on the start.com weblog entitled more on start: OPML support and popular feeds which states that they added support for importing OPML files as well.  

Postscript: Anyone notice what all three of these betas have in common? (Hint: Starts with R ends with S and has an S in the middle).

Shelley Powers posted a comment to a recent post of mine about her experience interviewing for a Microsoft position. She wrote

Tod, if I sound angry, I am. Bill Gates went in front of Congress and said we should have unlimited H1Bs, because Microsoft just can't find 'good' people in this country.

I interviewed with Microsoft. As soon as I started talking with the guy, I knew he wasn't interested. Within the first five minutes. I've been around long enough to know when someone isn't interested.

Microsoft doesn't hire 50 year old men, must less 50 year old women.

As for interviewing, yes I have interviewed people. And hired them. I've never once had a bad hire. You can tell when you talk to people, their enthusiasm, how they respond to what you say, if they're a good fit. Do they have to have all of the tech background? Not a bit. Oh, I wanted certain things: interest and background with a specific programming language, experience with relational databases, and so on. But as for the nits, most of us can do something called 'learn'. I looked for motivation, interest, fit with the team, experience, but more importantly interest in the job.

I can understand Shelley's frustration around not being made an offer for a position she feels qualified to handle. Last year, when I decided to leave the XML team I interviewed with a bunch of teams at Microsoft including the newly formed RSS team within the Internet Explorer group. The job would have involved community evangelization around the Longhorn/IE RSS efforts and working on platform APIs for RSS. Given my work on RSS Bandit and the fact that the job I was leaving was designing the core XML APIs in the .NET Framework I thought I was a shoo-in for the job. I wasn't. I didn't get an offer because I wasn't "passionate" or "experienced" enough according to the feedback I got when I inquired as to why I didn't get the job.

I could have decided to give up because "Microsoft doesn't hire black men" or "Microsoft doesn't hire people in their 20s for high visibility positions" but didn't. Instead I kept interviewing and ended up at MSN working on social software. Personally I think I'm happier at MSN than I would have been on the RSS team, I've gotten to broaden my technical horizons and work with a more diverse set of individuals on a prettier campus. Also I still get to work on RSS stuff both in my personal time and with different teams at Microsoft in an advisor role.

It's easy to give in to despair. Don't.

Jeff Schneider has a post entitled Hey, Don Box where he asks

All of us in the SOA blogosphere have appreciated your input and insight. However it has come to my attention that Microsoft isn't practicing what they're preaching. I'm hoping that you can tell me that my information is dead wrong.

I ask one simple favor. Start blogging about how Microsoft is using SOA internally.

Don works on a platforms team so he is the wrong person to ask about first hand experience at actually deploying XML web services or service oriented applications at Microsoft. As for whether Microsoft uses services internally, this is all we do at MSN. I'm responsible for underlying platform services that are used by MSN Messenger, Hotmail, and MSN Spaces. The fact that you can lock down your space to distinct people in your Hotmail address book or the people who are on your Messenger Allow List (i.e. who you've given access to see your presence online) are all due to our service oriented architecture on our back ends. This would be a lot more difficult if each of these applications was a monolithic app on our back end.

I'm also responsible for another set of services which are used MSN Member Directory, MSN Groups, and even Windows MarketPlace which I found out recently are going to be used by a lot more MSN properties without them ever having to ping me. When services work the way they are supposed to that's what happens.

To answer Jeff's question, at least with MSN, Microsoft is definitely practicing what it preaches when it comes to service orientation.

In a post entitled Atom 0.3 Denouement begins his advocacy for developers to stop supporting Atom 0.3 and states his intent to start flagging such feeds as being invalid in the Feed Validator come the fall. I planned to avoid blogging about his post until I saw the following comment by Mark Pilgrim where he wrote

Atom 1.0 will shortly be an IETF RFC, which makes it as much of a web standard as HTTP.  Atom 0.3 was just some guys (and gals) dicking around on a wiki.  As it turned out, some guys dicking around on a wiki were able to produce a relatively decent standard, but that isnt saying much given the competition.  Atom 1.0 is a great standard, worthy of the label and worthy of being pushed by standards advocacy groups like WaSP...

Although what Mark Pilgrim has written is factual it is misleading as well. Although Atom 0.3 was not backed by a standards body (and neither has any flavor of RSS by the way) it still became a de facto standard thanks to the advocacy of people like Mark & Sam. Specifically once Google decided to switch their RSS feeds to Atom 0.3 feeds they used their power as a dominant content producer to force every major aggregator to support Atom 0.3.

At the time I blogged about how this was a stupid thing to do since it basically guaranteed that there would be two conflicting versions of Atom for the immediate future. Now there are hundreds of thousands to millions of aggregator users who will potentially be screwed when Google decides to switch to Atom 1.0. These end users are sacrificial pawns in what has basically been a battle of [male] geek egos over whether a blog post in an XML feed should be contained in an element named atom:entry or item.

The only bright light in all this crap is that a few years after everyone else figured it out some of these XML syndication geeks are now realizing that instead of arguing over XML element names it is more interesting to figure out what other kinds of data can be syndicated beyond blog posts and news stories. See Danny Ayers's post Brownian Motion and Bill de hra on Atoms in a small world for examples of some of the Atom geeks finally getting it.

Better late than never, I guess.

During my morning blog reading I stumbled on three blog postings about Microsoft and recruiting which paint an interesting picture.

1. From Shelley Powers's When We Are Needed

   This essay was inspired in no part by a discussion that occurred at Dori Smiths weblog, when she made the statement about women not being able to find work (linked earlier). In her comments, Robert Scoble said:

   Hmmm, at the same time you say the jobs are disappearing I was just talking with a key manager over on MSN Search and he says he is having trouble finding qualified developers in the United States. I also have had the same feedback from the developer division, the IE group, and quite a few others. And if you think this is a Microsoft thing, you should check with HR people at Google, Yahoo, Cisco, and other Silicon Valley companies. They are all having trouble finding great developers.

   I was angry and blasted Scobles comment, anger inspired in no small part by the implication that corporations such as Microsoft are just begging for people, when most of us know (and as I discussed earlier), this isnt true. Here is a fact, technology unemployment in this country exceeds overall unemployment. And women in technology have an unemployment rate higher than the men.

2. From Joel Spolsky on June 15, 2005

   Recruiting

   To Gretchen : recruiting successfully isn't only up to recruiters. The best recruiting department in the world can't make people want to work at a company that's moribund, that can't figure out how to ship a compelling upgrade to their flagship OS , or update their flagship database server more than once every five years, that has added tens of thousands of technical workers who aren't adding any dollars to the bottom line, and that constantly annoys twenty year veterans by playing Furniture Police games over what office furniture they are and aren't allowed to have. Summer interns at Fog Creek have better chairs, monitors, and computers than the most senior Microsoft programmers.

   Recruiting has to be done at the Bill and Steve level, not at the Gretchen level. No matter how good a recruiter you are, you can't compensate for working at a company that people don't want to work for; you can't compensate for being the target of eight years of fear and loathing from the slashdot community, which very closely overlaps the people you're trying to recruit, and you can't compensate for the fact that a company with a market cap of $272 billion just ain't going to see their stock price go up . MSFT can grow by an entire Google every year and still see less than 7% growth in earnings. You can be the best recruiter in the world and the talent landscape is not going to look very inviting if the executives at your company have spent the last years focusing on cutting benefits , cutting off oxygen supplies, and cutting features from Longhorn .

3. From Steven Sinofsky's Welcome to TechTalk!

   I wanted to start this blog to share information and views about how Microsoft recruits and hires college graduates, and what a career at Microsoft is like, at least from one perspective. I invite questions, points, and counter-points. Im excited to use this forum to have a discussion about college hiring at Microsoft. The name TechTalk comes from the series of seminars we do during the summer for interns at Microsoft--one of the most fun times of the year for me is to get to present to this group and learn from them how they feel about the work we're doing and the future of Microsoft.

   By way of introduction, my name is Steven Sinofsky and I am a senior vice president at Microsoft in the Office group. You can read my "official" bio on http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/exec/ssinofsky . Ive worked on Microsoft Office since Office 4.2d (the last 16 bit release). Ive been a program manager and a software design engineer, in addition to a general manager.

Despite what Shelley thinks I know for a fact that we have a hard time filling positions at work. Whether this is because of a lack of qualified candidates in the US or because the Slashdot crowd hates Microsoft [as Joel puts it] is something I dont know. I do know our product teams spends a lot of time talking to folks who sound good on paper but dont do so hot when we talk to them. As for whether H1B visas are a good thing or not, well I'm here on an H1B visa so I guess I'm biased. :)

It is good to see high level execs like Sinofsky getting directly involved in recruiting efforts. One of the things that is missing in the hundreds of Microsoft blogs is a sense of why the Microsoft internships are so cool. Looking back at my blog posts from when I was an intern four years ago it is fun to see how I became infected by the B0rg. Having someone like Sinofsky take part in showing off why it is so cool to be an intern at Microsoft is goodness. Microsoft's best hires are usually folks who started off as interns.

The Office guys definitely rock.

It looks like Karen will be attending the BlogHer conference. From her post it seems she'll be part of a session with the following abstract

Women around the world are leveraging blogs to get their message across - whether it be to share their experiences, promoting their business or voicing their opinions. But changing the blogosphere doesn't just happen from blogging about it - change can also happen from the source - those who are building the tools and software. Technology isn't as male-oriented as you might think.

Did you know that many of the big-name blogging tools have women helping to design and build them? Ever wonder how decisions get made or why things are designed or work the way they do? We invite women interested in helping to shape blogging tools and those currently building blogging tools to participate in this forum. You don't have to be a techie - share your thoughts and gripes on blogging tools today.Tell us what you what to see happen.

To many people the most familiar female face when it comes to blogging tools is Mena Trott. However there are a bunch of women working on building popular blogging platforms such as MSN Spaces who have been quite influential as well. For example, when I joined MSN the Spaces team had women in key positions; Karen owned the blogging experience, Divya owned photos and Lydia owned profiles. Since then some folks have come and gone and although Divya & Lydia are no longer with us we've added Maya who works on cool top secret stuff and DeEtte who now owns the photo experience.

Although A-list and tech blogs tend to be filled with testosterone totting geeks pontificating about pointless geekery this doesn't mean that there haven't been women involved bringing one of the biggest revolutions in personal publishing to the world. 

Hopefully, the BlogHer conference will be a useful way for some of these women to network and find a way to increase the visibility of their efforts. If that is what they want.

From the Microsoft-Watch article Google Pinches Another Microsoft Exec 

Google continues to hire away top Microsoft talent. But this time, Microsoft is fighting back. On Tuesday, Google announced plans to open a product research-and-development center in China, and said it was appointing former Microsoft vice president Kai-Fu Lee to head the operation. On Wednesday, Microsoft announced it was filing a lawsuit against Lee and Google, claiming breach of both employee confidentiality and non-compete agreement.
...
Other mid-level Microsoft executives have joined Google over the past couple of years, as well. And Google opened a product-development office in Kirkland, Wash., late last year. Some industry watchers speculated that Google did so in order to attract more hires from Microsoft, which is headquartered in nearby Redmond, Wash.

It's the mid-level product and program managers whom Microsoft and other tech companies should guard most jealously, said Directions on Microsoft analyst Michael Cherry.

"While a lot of people make a big thing about the executives and senior vice presidents that leave, these people rarely ship software," Cherry said. "I think it is a bigger issue when the group program managers and program managers with ten plus years of experience silently leave. No one mourns their departure, but these are the people that take the grandiose architectures and wild-eyed visions and actually make them into products that people can use—and do so in a timely manner.

"The loss of these silent but hard working employees who keep the teams working together may have a bigger effect on the schedules of products like Yukon and Longhorn, and have a bigger long term impact on the company than any of the growing number of VPs and visionary architects," Cherry added.

From the Seattle PI article Ex-Microsoft exec sued over Google job

Microsoft also accused Google of "intentionally assisting Lee."

"Accepting such a position with a direct Microsoft competitor like Google violates the narrow noncompetition promise Lee made when he was hired as an executive," Microsoft said in its lawsuit. "Google is fully aware of Lee's promises to Microsoft, but has chosen to ignore them, and has encouraged Lee to violate them."
...
Tom Burt, a lawyer for Microsoft, said Lee announced Monday that he was leaving for the Google job and had given no indication that he planned to honor an agreement not to work for a direct competitor for one year.

"To the contrary, they're saying, 'In your face,'" Burt told The Associated Press.

Google shot back with a statement saying: "We have reviewed Microsoft's claims and they are completely without merit. Google is focused on building the best place in the world for great innovators to work. We're thrilled to have Dr. Lee on board at Google. We will defend vigorously against these meritless claims."

Um, OK...

Andy Edmonds has a post over on the MSN Search blog entitled Tagging Feedback at MSN Search where he talks about the internal app he built that is used to track feature requests and bug reports about MSN Search.

When the MSN Search team gets feedback or bug reports, each one is "tagged" with multiple keywords/categories which can then be analyzed later by frequency. The example, Andy shows in his post is the tag "ypResults" which is used to categorize featue requests for yellow page hits as part of web search results. With this system the search team can have a simple yet effective way to keep track of their most hot button issues

Andy showed this to me a few months ago and I thought it was really cool. I'd have loved to have a system like this when I used to work on the XML team to figure out what features/bugs were most often requested by users in a quantitative way.

Below is a screenshot of the feature (names changed to protect the innocent)

I was at the Anger Management 3 concert last night and it was quite the show. Lil' Jon & The Eastside Boyz were a welcome surprise as the opening act. They cycled through the BME clique hits from "Get Low" to "Salt Shaker" for the 30 minutes they were on stage. The problem with Lil' Jon is that most of the hits you associate him with are collaborations so at concerts you end up getting half the performance not being live for songs such as "Yeah!" or "Lovers & Friends".

The next set had the entire G-Unit record label including newly signed acts like Mobb Deep & M.O.P. performing for just over an hour. The first part of the G-Unit set sucked because we had to sit through the crap singles from Tony Yayo, Young Buck and Lloyd Banks solo efforts as well as some of the crud from The Massacre. Halfway through it picked up with the better songs from The Massacre (Disco Inferno, Candy Shop), old hits from Get Rich or Die Tryin' (P.I.M.P., In Da Club, Wanksta) and G-Unit's Beg for Mercy (I Wanna Get To Know Ya). M.O.P. did their hit from a few years ago, "Ante Up", and Mobb Deep hit the crowd with "Quiet Storm" without Lil' Kim. There was a momentary infusion of crap when a lot of time was devoted to a new 50 Cent & Mobb Deep song but the show got back on track after that. The G-Unit set was OK but I'd have loved t hear some of their mix tape cuts instead of just mainstream tracks.

Eminem killed. He made the concert go from OK to fantastic with almost an hour and a half of performances from himself and D12. Even 50 Cent got in on the act when they performed "Patiently Waiting" and "Gatman & Robin". The parts of the show where Eminem riffed with the audience about tabloids, Mariah Carey and Michael Jackson were also golden.

If this show is going to hit your town you should definitely check it out.

My buddy Erik Meijer and Peter Drayton have written a paper on programming languages entitled Static Typing Where Possible, Dynamic Typing When Needed: The The End of the Cold War Between Programming Languages. The paper is meant to seek a middle ground between the constant flame wars over dynamically typed vs. statically typed programming language. The paper is pretty rough and definitely needs a bunch of work. Take the following excerpt from the first part of the paper

Static typing fanatics try to make us believe that “well-typed programs cannot go wrong”. While this certainly sounds impressive, it is a rather vacuous statement. Static type checking is a compile-time abstraction of the runtime behavior of your program, and hence it is necessarily only partially sound and incomplete. This means that programs can still go wrong because of properties that are not tracked by the type-checker, and that there are programs that while they cannot go wrong cannot be type-checked. The impulse for making static typing less partial and more complete causes type systems to become overly complicated and exotic as witnessed by concepts such as "phantom types" and "wobbly types"
...
In the mother of all papers on scripting, John Ousterhout argues that statically typed systems programming languages make code less reusable, more verbose, not more safe, and less expressive than dynamically typed scripting languages. This argument is parroted literally by many proponents of dynamically typed scripting languages. We argue that this is a fallacy and falls into the same category as arguing that the essence of declarative programming is eliminating assignment. Or as John Hughes says, it is a logical impossibility to make a language more powerful by omitting features. Defending the fact that delaying all type-checking to runtime is a good thing, is playing ostrich tactics with the fact that errors should be caught as early in the development process as possible.

We are interesting in building data-intensive three-tiered enterprise applications. Perhaps surprisingly, dynamism is probably more important for data intensive programming than for any other area where people traditionally position dynamic languages and scripting. Currently, the vast majority of digital data is not fully structured, a common rule of thumb is less then 5 percent. In many cases, the structure of data is only statically known up to some point, for example, a comma separated file, a spreadsheet, an XML document, but lacks a schema that completely describes the instances that a program is working on. Even when the structure of data is statically known, people often generate queries dynamically based on runtime information, and thus the structure of the query results is statically unknown.

The comment about making programming languages more powerful by removing features being a logical impossibility seems rather bogus and seems out of place in an academic paper. Especially when one can consider the 'removed features' to be restrictions which limit the capabilities of the programming language.

I do like the fact that the paper tries to dissect the features of statically and dynamically typed languages that developers like instead of simply arguing dynamic vs. static as most discussions of this form take. I assume the purpose of this dissection is to see if one could build a programming language with the best of both worlds. From personal experience, I know Erik has been interested in this topic from his Cω days.

Their list of features runs the gamut from type inference and coercive subtyping to lazy evaluation and prototype inheritence. Although the list is interesting I can't help but think that it seems to me that Erik and Peter already came to a conclusion and tried to fit the list of features included in the paper to that conclusion. This is mainly taken from the fact that a lot of the examples and features are taken from Cω instead of popular scripting languages.

This is definitely an interesting paper but I'd like to see more inclusion of dynamic languages like Ruby, Python and Smalltalk instead of a focus on C# variants like Cω. The paper currently looks like it is making an argument for Cω 2.0 as opposed to real research on what the bridge between dynamic and static programming languages should be.