Steve Yegge, who works at Google, has a blog post entitled Good Agile, Bad Agile which has a lot of really interesting bits. The first is his take on the origin of Extreme Programming where he writes

So some of the consultants began to think: "Hey, if these companies insist on acting like infants, then we should treat them like infants!" And so they did. When a company said "we want features A through Z", the consultants would get these big index cards and write "A" on the first one, "B" on the second one, etc., along with time estimates, and then post them on their wall. Then when the customer wanted to add something, the consultant could point at the wall and say: "OK, boy. Which one of these cards do you want to replace, BOY?"

Is it any wonder Chrysler canceled the project?

So the consultants, now having lost their primary customer, were at a bar one day, and one of them (named L. Ron Hubbard) said: "This nickel-a-line-of-code gig is lame. You know where the real money is at? You start your own religion." And that's how both Extreme Programming and Scientology were born.

The link which explains that Chrysler cancelled the project where a lot of the Extreme Programming and Agile Methodology hype started is on Wikipedia so for all I know that clarification may be gone by the time you read this post. Unfortunately in trying to track down the details in more permanent location all I can find is a USENET thread and more wiki entries. That's pretty interesting, that XP and Agile resulted in a failed software project in the original project where it all started.

There is also some stuff about working at Google where he writes

From a high level, Google's process probably does look like chaos to someone from a more traditional software development company. As a newcomer, some of the things that leap out at you include:

- there are managers, sort of, but most of them code at least half-time, making them more like tech leads.

- developers can switch teams and/or projects any time they want, no questions asked; just say the word and the movers will show up the next day to put you in your new office with your new team.

- Google has a philosophy of not ever telling developers what to work on, and they take it pretty seriously.

- developers are strongly encouraged to spend 20% of their time (and I mean their M-F, 8-5 time, not weekends or personal time) working on whatever they want, as long as it's not their main project.

- there aren't very many meetings. I'd say an average developer attends perhaps 3 meetings a week, including their 1:1 with their lead.

- it's quiet. Engineers are quietly focused on their work, as individuals or sometimes in little groups or 2 to 5.

- there aren't Gantt charts or date-task-owner spreadsheets or any other visible project-management artifacts in evidence, not that I've ever seen.

- even during the relatively rare crunch periods, people still go get lunch and dinner, which are (famously) always free and tasty, and they don't work insane hours unless they want to.

For some reason this reminds me of Malcolm Gladwell's The Talent Myth which is excerpted below

This "talent mind-set" is the new orthodoxy of American management. It is the intellectual justification for why such a high premium is placed on degrees from first-tier business schools, and why the compensation packages for top executives have become so lavish. In the modern corporation, the system is considered only as strong as its stars, and, in the past few years, this message has been preached by consultants and management gurus all over the world. None, however, have spread the word quite so ardently as McKinsey, and, of all its clients, one firm took the talent mind-set closest to heart. It was a company where McKinsey conducted twenty separate projects, where McKinsey's billings topped ten million dollars a year, where a McKinsey director regularly attended board meetings, and where the C.E.O. himself was a former McKinsey partner. The company, of course, was Enron.
...
"We had these things called Super Saturdays," one former Enron manager recalls. "I'd interview some of these guys who were fresh out of Harvard, and these kids could blow me out of the water. They knew things I'd never heard of." Once at Enron, the top performers were rewarded inordinately, and promoted without regard for seniority or experience. Enron was a star system. "The only thing that differentiates Enron from our competitors is our people, our talent," Lay, Enron's former chairman and C.E.O., told the McKinsey consultants when they came to the company's headquarters, in Houston.
...
Among the most damning facts about Enron, in the end, was something its managers were proudest of. They had what, in McKinsey terminology, is called an "open market" for hiring. In the open-market system--McKinsey's assault on the very idea of a fixed organization--anyone could apply for any job that he or she wanted, and no manager was allowed to hold anyone back. Poaching was encouraged. When an Enron executive named Kevin Hannon started the company's global broadband unit, he launched what he called Project Quick Hire. A hundred top performers from around the company were invited to the Houston Hyatt to hear Hannon give his pitch. Recruiting booths were set up outside the meeting room. "Hannon had his fifty top performers for the broadband unit by the end of the week," Michaels, Handfield-Jones, and Axelrod write, "and his peers had fifty holes to fill." Nobody, not even the consultants who were paid to think about the Enron culture, seemed worried that those fifty holes might disrupt the functioning of the affected departments, that stability in a firm's existing businesses might be a good thing, that the self-fulfillment of Enron's star employees might possibly be in conflict with the best interests of the firm as a whole.

Interesting juxtaposition, huh? I've talked to people who've come to Microsoft from Google (e.g. Danny Thorpe) and it definitely is as chaotic as it sounds there. For some reason, the description of life at Google by Steve Yegge reminds me a bit of Microsoft where there were two huge money making projects (Office & Windows in the case of Microsoft and AdWords & AdSense in the case of Google) and then a bunch of good to mediocre projects full of smart people dicking around. Over the years I've seen a reduction of the 'smart people dicking around' type projects over here and more focus on shipping code. I suspect that it's just a matter of time before the same thing will happen at Google as investors seek a better return on their investments once they hit their growth limits in the online advertising space.

There's just one more thing that Steve Yegge wrote that I want to comment on, which is

The thing that drives the right behavior at Google, more than anything else, more than all the other things combined, is gratitude. You can't help but want to do your absolute best for Google; you feel like you owe it to them for taking such incredibly good care of you.

I remember interning at Microsoft five years ago and hearing someone say how grateful he was for "the things Microsoft has done for me" and thinking how creepy and cult-like that sounded. A company pays you at worst 'what they think they can get away with' and at best 'what they think you are worth', neither of these should inspire gratitude. Never forget that or else you'll be on the road to heartbreak.

 

Kevin Briody has an excellent analysis of the recent move by Facebook to branch out beyond the college crowd in his post entitled where he writes

I actually started writing this a few weeks back, when news first broke of Facebook branching out from an exclusive membership model, presumably to take on that Wild West of social networks, MySpace. But given the news that this move is a reality, today, thought I would throw my commentary into the mass that is no doubt being written.

This is a Bad Idea. A classic example of inappropriately twisting a business model to justify investor demands and market expectations.

As I have said before, I love the original Facebook business model. It takes a reasonably cool set of social networking features and a clean UI, and marries it with a hyper-social, hyper-active, local, offline set of communities, i.e. college students clustered on their real-world campuses.
...
For that community, Facebook didn’t force them to separate their social interaction between online and offline - it married the two in a nearly seamless manner.

The site became a way of life for US college students, and even faculty, with use and stickiness numbers that would make most Web-based businesses drool. Facebook nailed the campus social networking experience and achieved fantastic audience penetration, and needed to take the next step.

That next step should have been development of their monetization strategy (deeply targeted advertising for US college students). Focusing on revenue and profit, while continuing to enhance the user experience of their core market.

I agree 100% with what Kevin has written. The Facebook folks have a lock on a very lucrative audience and should be spending cycles figuring out how to (i) keep this audience happy and (ii) monetize such a juicy demographic instead of trying to justify their billion dollar valuation by going up against the MySpaces and Friendsters of the world. Now they have to deal with the potential backlash from their core customer basse as well as the fragmentation of their user base. These are both tough problems to deal with if they crop up.

I suspect the best thing that could happen is for this to fizzle like the move to open up the site to corporations. Otherwise, things could get ugly. I wish them luck, especially now that I know at least one person who works there.

 

Leah Pearlmann has a blog post entitled The Final Chapter: Messenger + Yahoo which announces

And this month, this chapter of the story comes to a close. ANYONE using the latest version of Windows Live Messenger or Yahoo! Messenger (in most countries) will be able to add friends, send messages and select emoticons with those from either network like crazy – and we encourage you to do so!

 

People should be able to reach all their friends and family using just one IM service. Students should not have to use two IM services. NO ONE should have to give up watching American Idol for any reason.

Moral of the story: Windows Live and Yahoo! Messenger, holding hands to make the world a happier, better connected, Idol-istic place.

I've been taking a look at some of back end of how Yahoo! Messenger and Windows Live interop works as part getting my intern on how our platform works. I've been impressed by how smoothly this has been implemented as well as how some of the user interface complexities have been handled (e.g. what happens when you add a buddy who uses the same email address on both IM networks).

Kudos to Kitty and the rest of the team for getting this out of beta and bringing the dream of complete interoperability across the major IM networks closer to really.

 

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

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

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

I was expecting an AJAX site but was surprised to see how much Flash is used instead. I'm still trying out the features of the site but so far it looks good for a beta.
 

Mike Arrington has a blog post entitled Microsoft Spinoff Wallop Launches where he writes

Wallop, previously a semi-forgotton Microsoft Research “sandbox” social network and photo sharing project, was spun off into a new, independent, venture backed business earlier this year (details here). Tonight at 9 pm California time, Wallop is launching a semi-public beta.

Wallop is a Flash based social network that will compete with Myspace, Facebook and others that I mentioned in a post yesterday. It includes free unlimited storage for people to upload photos, videos and music.

Unlike the other social networks, Wallop CEO Karl Jacob says he has no plans to ever put advertising on the site. It just lessens the user experience, he says. Instead, Wallop wants a piece of the $3 trillion per year U.S. market for self expression items (clothes, furniture, beauty supplies, etc.). As sites like Cyworld have shown, people are willing to spend money for online expression items, too (Cyworld brings in a reported $300,000 per day in microtransactions to its users).

So Wallop has created a marketplace for “self expression” items on the site. Flash developers can create items and sell them to users. Music clips, animated widgets, artwork, avatars, clothing for avatars, etc. will all be for sale. Wallop handles payments and DRM, and takes 30% of the sale price. The rest goes to the seller.

This is an interesting business model and one I remember being mentioned by Ze Frank a few years ago in a presentation he gave to the Wallop team when the site was still part of Lili Cheng's Social Computing Group at Microsoft Research. This business model has been shown to work for various online services including QQ, Cyworld and Second Life. I also wonder what would have happened if MySpace had started off charging for "personal expression" content. Imagine if it cost a $0.50 to add a widget to your MySpace page or $0.25 to change your theme? It sounds ridiculous but so does the cell-phone ringtone market turning into a multibillion dollar industry. The only problem is figuring out how to deal with microtransactions...perhaps if it is tied to to a prepaid card instead? Anyway, enough speculation.

I do find the quote "$3 trillion per year self expression market" an amusing stretch though. It's like starting a taco stand and caling it an attempt to grab a piece of the trillion dollar food service industry. Anyway, I'm glad to see that Wallop is going to continue, it was a very innovative Social Network service even two years ago and it looks like it is in good hands now. 

PS: Is it me or did TechCrunch just switch to partial feeds? That sucks.

 

A: Very. If you've upgraded to iTunes 7 and now have regular problems with the application such as dIsTORted soUnD, you should read the article Apple Support docs address some iTunes 7 bugs which shows how to get around some of the more egregious bugs in this release.
 

Via Greg Linden's blog post entitled R.I.P. Froogle? I found out the CBS MarketWatch article entitled Google's latest could be aimed at eBay listings which informs us that

In a report for Bear Stearns clients, analyst Robert Peck described a new feature that's based on Google Base, a feature Google launched last October that lets people freely list items for sale.

Simultaneously, Google intends to "de-emphasize" its own Froogle shopping search engine, a Web site featuring paid listings from eBay and other online retailers. Google intends for Froogle to no longer be a standalone Web site; instead its listings would be absorbed by other search features, Peck wrote in his report.

There are a number of things I find interesting about this decision [if it is true]. The first point of interest is that this is another step by Google to move from a world where they crawl the Web to where content is submitted to them to be added to their search index directly. This furthers the trend started by offerings such as Google Webmaster tools (formerly Google Sitemaps) and Google Base. Another point of interest is that it seems Google considers product search to not be its own vertical but instead something that should be included automatically in search results via Instant Answers-type functionality (e.g. search for "movies 98052" exposes entry point into movie search page).

Finally, it looks like this is will be the first instance of Google killing a product that was out of beta highlighted on their main page. What product do you think they should kill next? Here's my list of top 3 Google services that should be sent to the product grave yard

1. Google Reader: I remember how scared people were when this service first debutted, however it's slow and unintuitive UI has made it unusable by anyone except die hard Google fans. It's a testament to its crappiness that it doesn't even make the top 20 list of aggregators used by TechCrunch readers which means that even the early adopter crowd is shunning it.

2. Google Video: Am I the only one that thinks that this entire service should be replaced with a "site:www.youtube.com" based search similar to what they've done with http://www.google.com/microsoft? The site has a decent search engine but almost every other part of the video sharing experience on the service is subpar. Then again, Youtube has set the bar very high.

3. Orkut: I was talking with a fellow Microsoft employee last week about the fact that when it comes to community sites, it takes more than features for a site to become popular, it takes people. Sites like Facebook, MySpace and even Friendster managed to be chosen by the right set of influencers and connectors to make them hit critical mass. This never happened with Orkut and it never will [except in Brazil]. My suggestion would be to fold the features of Orkut into Blogger, perhaps as a new service as the SixApart folks have done with Vox (aka LiveJournal + TypePad)

That's my list. I'm sure y'all have reasons to agree or disagree, holla at me in the comments. Also, turn about is fair play so if you want to create a list of services you think Yahoo! and Microsoft should kill for similar reasons I'd definitely find it an interesting read.

 

Cesar Menendez has a blog post entitled Zune and DRM (or "My Bad; I mis-Blogged") where he addresses some of the concerns around the Wi-Fi sharing features of the Zune. He writes

I misspoke (mis-blogged) on last week’s post. We don’t actually “wrap all songs up in DRM:” Zune to Zune Sharing doesn’t change the DRM on a song, and it doesn’t impose DRM restrictions on any files that are unprotected. If you have a song - say that you got “free and clear” - Zune to Zune Sharing won’t apply any DRM to that song. The 3-day/3-play limitation is built into the device, and it only applies on the Zune device: when you receive a song in your Inbox, the file remains unchanged. After 3 plays or 3 days, you can no longer play the song; however, you can still see a listing of the songs with the associated metadata.

So, to answer the direct question, Zune doesn’t have “viral DRM.” And mea culpa on telling everyone that we impose DRM.

In reading this, it seems that although Cesar has clarified the implementation the behavior [to end users] is still the same whether the music files are wrapped in DRM or the Zune knows that any song it gets over Wi-Fi can no longer be played 3 plays or 3 days without having to alter the files. I'm curious to see what the answers are to some of the questions asked by Joshua O'Madadhain about the 3 play/3 day feature since this is currently the most interesting feature of the device.

PS: I finally got to play with a Zune device at work and I like what they've done with album art in the music experience. The wider screen for watching videos is also a nice touch. I did have some difficulty with the controls because I kept trying to treat the D-pad as a scroll wheel due to my over-familiarity with the iPod. Check out the videos of playing music and videos on the Zune and Zune to Zune music sharing on Youtube if you want to see what it's like.

 

Julien Couvreur has a blog post entitled Cross-document messaging hack where he writes

The Dojo and Windows Live Platform teams have both recently released DHTML hacks that allow two iframes in different domains to communicate, bypassing the notorious same-domain policy implemented in browsers. I'm surprised by the relative lack of response in the AJAX blogosphere, as this opens lots of possibilities for mashups.

The basics:
The hack relies on dynamically created iframes, using the fragment identifier to leak/communicate information to the other domain and timers to check for iframe changes.

For example, if you have page A containing an iframe B in a different domain, then B can create a new iframe and load it with a url in the same domain as A. The url that is loaded doesn't generate a request to the server if it is properly cached and only the fragment identifier is used to pass changing information. Page A can now get the DOM handle on the new iframe and successfully retrieve the information transmitted in the url by B.

Although the hack goes around the same domain policy, you should realize that it does not constitute a significant security threat, as it requires both frames to cooperate. Additionally, this mechanism allows for control of which domains can work together.
...
The applications:
...
Windows Live goes into a more specific proof of concept, with the Windows Live Contacts Gadget, an embeddable contact picker. It explores the problem of cross-domain interactions deeper than the Dojo work, specifically around authentication, access control and privacy.

Like Julien, I'm surprised that there hasn't been more discussion about this technique in the AJAX blogs. I first learned about this technique from Yaron Goland while he was working with Danny Thorpe and others on the Windows Live Contacts Gadget. With this technique I can embed a widget gadget hosted on my domain on a page from another domain and then later on exchange data or otherwise communicate between the widget gadget and the hosting page.

This is how the Windows Live Contacts Gadget allows you to embed a control that opens a portal to a user's Hotmail address book and then communicates the contacts the user has picked back to the hosting page. It's a really sweet hack.

 

It looks like Kurt, Samir and the rest of the Windows Live Expo team has been busy the past couple of months. From the blog post entitled on their team blog we learn

The team has spent the past 2 months working on features that were either gathered from end user feedback or were part of our long-term roadmap, so we are excited to share our work with you. As part of this update we wanted to highlight the following new features:

Integrated payment service:  Paypal’s 150 million registered users can now easily reference their account in order to complete secure person-to-person transactions on Windows Live Expo.  Buyers can purchase items from sellers on Expo with a credit card thru Paypal or using their Paypal debit accounts. Additionally, sellers can specify their preferred method of shipping and declare the cost for doing so.

 New high quality job listings: Expo now allows users to search and browse thousands of local and national job listings which are supplied by our partner CareerBuilder.

 Featured ads: The new featured ads area (provided by AdMission) allows you to generate a lot more interest in your listing by offering a fun, rich media experience that highlights your classified listing. The featured ads module will initially appear in the real estate and autos sections (example).

I chatted with Samir about the addition of integrated payments and a job listing service a few weeks which led an interesting line of thinking on my part. Besides identity, the most important pillar of social software is reputation. In Windows Live, we are building all these notions of a user's reputation which don't really overlap but tell you more about the user. For example, a user who Hotmail considers a spammer (i.e. has a bad reputation as an email user) may also be an awesome seller on Expo to whoever responds to his V1@gr@ spam (i.e. has a good reputation as a seller). Then there are the various notions of expertise being built up in Windows Live QnA. A person who is great at answering questions about Marvel and DC Comics may suck at answering other kinds of questions. How should all these aspects of a users reputation be represented in our various services? Should they be unified in some way? Is it interesting to be able to click on my profile and get an overview of all aspects of my reputation in Windows Live? Do we need a Reputation Metasystem to go along with the Identity Metasystem so we can enable federated/interoperable reputation systems?

Anyway, I digress. Check out Windows Live Expo, the newest changes to site make it an even more compelling service than before.