From the Microsoft press release entitled Microsoft Rallies Developers to Build Next-Generation Applications we learn

LAS VEGAS — Nov. 6, 2006 — Microsoft Corp. today unveiled new technologies that enable developers to build next-generation interactive applications for Windows Vista™, the 2007 Microsoft^® Office system and the Web. The new technologies are designed to help developers build Web services and connected, service-oriented applications that deliver the levels of security, reliability and differentiation that business and consumers expect.
...
The technologies announced today include the following:
•    The release to manufacturing of Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0, which provides advances for building rich, interactive client applications (Windows Presentation Foundation), communication and workflow (Windows Communication Foundation and Windows Workflow Foundation) and online identity management (Windows CardSpace).

So it looks like v1 of Avalon, Indigo and InfoCard are finally out. Congratulations to all the people who've been working on these technologies for the last couple of years. It'll be interesting to see what kind of changes to Windows GUI applications comes from the availability of WPF and also whether the developer community agrees that WCF supports building RESTful Web services as much as some folks have been telling me.

 

Torsten created a mockup of the Options tab for Attachments & Podcasts in the next version of RSS Bandit which is currently codenamed Jubilee and we've gotten into quite a debate about it. The Attachments/Podcasts tab of the Options dialog is shown below

So what are the points of contention?

1. Dare: We shouldn't have two download locations, one for podcasts and one for attachments
   Torsten: What about people who want to copy supported file formats to their hardware device (e.g. MP3s) but have everything else go to local folders?

2. Torsten: My MP3 player doesn't handle subfolders well so all podcasts need to be placed in the same folder.
   Dare: Most podcast clients create a folder structure where each podcast goes into a subfolder that is named after the feed. Perhaps we need an option for 'place podcasts in subfolders named after the feed'?

3. Dare: When creating playlists in iTunes or WMP, should we create one über-playlist with all podcasts or one playlist per feed? Perhaps we need an option for this as well?

4. Torsten: With all these additional options perhaps we need an 'Attachments' tab and a 'Podcasts' tab?
   Dare: Wouldn't that be weird given that most of the settings from the 'Attachments' tab would apply to podcasts as well?

Let us know what you think about the various points of contention and feel free to let us know if there are other points of contention that you have with the above dialog and the discussion around it.
 

From the press release entitled Microsoft Adds 3-D City Models to Live Search we learn

REDMOND, Wash. — Nov. 6, 2006 — Microsoft Corp. today announced U.S. availability of Virtual Earth™ 3D, a new online mapping interface that is part of the Live Search offering, providing consumers with a three-dimensional experience to search, browse and explore the real world online.

When people visit Live Search (http://live.com), type a query into the search box and click the “Maps” tab, they get their search results in a map context that offers the option to explore the area using two-dimensional views (aerial and bird’s-eye) or three dimensional models with Virtual Earth 3D. This new technology compiles photographic images of cities and terrain to generate textured, photorealistic 3-D models with engineering level accuracy.

Again the VE team proves why they are my favorite team at Windows Live. The team has also blogged about the changes in their blog post entitled Spaceland is Live! which includes a screenshots. This is hot. I'm off to a launch party in a few hours here in SF and I can't wait to high five some of the folks behind this feat of technological sweetness. 

 

These are my notes from the session on Success Story: PhotoBucket.

PhotoBucket is a video and image hosting site that sees 7 million photos and 30,000 videos uploaded daily. They serve over 3 billion pieces of media a day. The site has 15 million unique users in the U.S. (20 million worldwide) and has 80,000 new accounts created daily. There is now a staff of 55 people whose job it is to moderate content submissions to ensure they meet their guidelines.

The top sites their images used to be linked from used to be eBay and LiveJournal but now the key drivers of traffic are now social networking sites such as MySpace and Xanga. There is 30% - 40% overlap between their user base and social network website users

There was some general advise about widgets such as being careful about hosting costs which may pile up quick if your widgets become popular and also about trying to monetize users via your widgets because some sites frown upon that behavior such as eBay. However well designed and compelling widgets can drive a lot of traffic back to your site, the best example of this to date being YouTube.

The speaker then gave a timeline of notable occurences in the MySpace widgets world such as MySpace blocking Revver & YouTube to the recent explosion of new widgets in the past few months from MeeboMe to a number photo slideshow widgets from the major image hosting services.

Pete Cashmore over at Mashable.com has compiled some statistics on the most popular widgets on MySpace which shows the relative popularity of PhotoBucket's widgets in comparison to other services.

So what's in a name? They've renamed the feature from BucketFeatures to Widgets and now to 'Slide Shows' because none of their non-Silicon Valley users knew what widgets were. After the rename from 'Widgets' to 'Slide Shows', the usage of the feature almost doubled within a month.

They've also designed a JWidget which allows people to log-in to their PhotoBucket account to access their videos and images. Users can upload images and videos . This way people can outsource both image upload and content moderation to PhotoBucket. Now have 16,000,000 logins a month via JWidget from about 500 partner sites. It is amed JWidget because the developer's name begins with 'J'. :)

During the Q&A someone asked if they support you have tagging & open APIs. The response wa sthat they don't do tagging and their user base has never asked for tagging. With 2500 support tickets a day, none of them have ever been about tagging. Also, since it is just image hosting service, tagging is probably more appropriate for the blog post or profile the image is appearing in than on the hosted image. They don't have an No API primarily due to resource constraints, there are only 40 people at the company working on it.

 

These are my notes from the session on Success Story: MeeboMe.

Meebo started as a way for the founders to stay in touch with each other when they were at places where they couldn't install their IM client of choice. They realized that Instant Messaging hadn't really met the potential of Web and decided to create a startup to bring IM to the Web. Today they have grown to a site with 1 million logins daily, 4 million unique users a month and 64 million messages sent a day.

MeeboMe is an embeddable IM windows you can drop on any webpage. People can see your online status. Even cooler is that it allows the Meebo user to see people who is viewing that page and then they can send an IM to the page in real time while they are viewing the page. That is fucking cool. I'm so blown away that I've decided to figure out a way to get MeeboMe on Windows Live Spaces and will start looking into how to get that to happen when I get back to work..

There are three main reasons they built the MeeboMe widget; It meets their core mission of bringing IM to the Web, it drives use of Meebo.com and their users asked for it. :)

Their design principles have been quite straightforward. They have used Flash and protocols like Jabber/XMPP that already exist and that they are familiar with to ease development. They try to keep features to a minimum and focus on making Meebo.com act like the traditional IM experience. They have had t deal with performance issues around sending/receiving messages and showing changes to a user's online presence without significant lag. They are also very driven by user feedback and the Meebo blog is embedded in the Meebo web experience when users sign in. User feedback is how they determined that being able to show emoticons in instant messages was more important to users than being able to add IM buddies from Meebo.

MeeboMe is used in a lot of places such as education by high school teachers and college professors as way to give students a way to contact them. Librarians have also used it as a way to have patrons contact the librarian about questions by placing the MeeboMe widget on the front page of the library's website. There is a radio DJ takes requests from the MeeboMe widget on his site. There are also retail sites that use MeeboMe for customer support. One trend they didn't expect is that people place different MeeboMe widgets on different pages on their site si they can have a different buddy list entry for each page.

During the Q&A someone asked if MeeboMe drove account creation on Meebo.com and the answer was "Yes". They had their largest number of new accounts up to that date when they launched the widget.

 

These are my notes from the session on Fox Interactive Media by Dan Strauss.

Fox Interactive Media (FIM) is the parent company of MySpace. Also owns MySpace, IGN, Fox.com, FoxSports.com, AskMen.com, Rotten Tomatoes and Gamespy. They have 120 million visitors across all the sites.

They are buying small dev teams like Sidereus and Newroo as well as big companies like MySpace & IGN. They created FIM Labs so that some of the small dev teams can coninue to be innovative. FIM Labs focuses on incubation of new technologies, product development and technology evangelization to FIM properties. The folks from Sidereus worked on the Spring Widgets platform. Announcing a new platform named Spring Widgets.

Why widgets? They have a goal of to cross-pollinating users across the various FIM properties and also create a platform that can tie their businesses together. Widgets have been gaining traction and seemed like the right vehicle for furthering their goals.

Sidereus had a desktop background and researched Konfabulator, Dashboard and Vista gadgets.They also looked at Web widgets specifically AJAX and Flash widgets being used by MySpace users. They want users to be able to add widgets for FIM websites to their MySpace profiles and their desktop. From the Sping platform site a user can find a widget then add it to my MySpace. No more cutting and pasting code, the experience is similar to Windows Live Gallery for MySpace. Users can also drag and drop widgets from the Web onto the desktop. Only the Windows desktop widgets are supported for now but Mac support is on the way.

The Spring Widgets platform is 100% flash. Adding a desktop widget requires installing the Spring widgets runtime in addition to having Flash installed. This runtime is less than 2MB. There is an SDK so widget developers get APIs that can tell if the user is onlne or offline, store some persistent state, tell certain UI conditions such as the widgets window size and more. There is also a Web simulation tool developers can test their widgets without having to upload them to a Website.

The talk was followed by a demo showing how easy it is to build a Spring widget using WYSIWYG Flash development tools. They also announced a partnership with FeedBurner.

There were several questions during the Q&A that resulted in an answer of "we're still figuring things out". It was clear that although the technology may be ready there are a number of policy questions that are still left to be answered such as whether there will be integration of the Spring Widgets site into the MySpace UI (similar to how Windows Live gallery is integrated into Windows Live Spaces or what the certification process will be for getting 3rd party widgets hosted on the Spring Widgets site?

Despite the open questions this is definitely a very bold move on the part of Fox Interactive Media. It does the question though that if every widget platform has its own certified widgets gallery that use their own platforms (e.g. Flash in the case of Spring Widgets, DHTML and XML in the case of Windows Live Gallery and proprietary markup in the case of Yahoo! Widgets Engine there is either going to have to be some standardization or else there may be a winner takes all where widget developers target one or two major widget platforms because they don't have the resources to support every homebrow Flash or AJAX platform out there.

 

These are my notes from the session on Konfabulator by Arlo Rose.

He started with answering the question, why name them 'widgets'? At Apple, a UI control was called a widget. He thought the name meant something more and has always wanted to build widgets that do more.

He was the creator of Kaleidoscope which was one of the key customization and theming applications on the Macintosh. The application was so popular that the CEO of Nokia mentioned it as the inspiration for customization in cell phones.

When Apple announced Mac OS X, he became nervous that this would spell the end of Kaleidoscope and it was because they couldn't make the transition to Cocoa so they killed the product. Arlo then looked around for a new kind of application to build and came across the Control Strip and Control Strip Modules on the Mac which he thought were useful but had a bad user experience. He had also discovered an MP3 player for the Mac named Audion which used cool UI effects to create little UI components on the desktop which seemed transparent. Arlo thought it would be a great idea to build a better Control Strip using Audion-like UI. He talked to his partner from Kaleidoscope but he wasn't interested in the idea. He also talked to the developers of Audion but they weren't interested either. So arlo gave up on the idea and wandered from startup to startup until he ended up at Sun Microsystems

At Sun, he was assigned to a project related to the Cobalt Qube which eventually was cancelled. He then had time to work on a side project and so he resurected his idea for building a better Control Strip with an Audion-like user interface. He originally wanted to develop the project using Perl and XML as the development languages but he soon got some feedback that creative types on the Web are more familiar with Javascript. So in 2002 he started on Konfabulator and released version 1.0 the following year. They also created a widget gallery that enabled developers to upload widgets they've built to share with other users. However they didn't get a lot of submissions from developers so they talked to developers and got a lot of feedback on features to add to their platform such as drag and drop, mouse events, keyboard events and so on. Once they did that they started getting dozens and dozens of develper submissions.

After they got so much praise for the Mac version, they decided to work on a Windows version. While working on the Windows version, he got a call from a friend at Apple who said while he was at a design meeting and he heard "We need to steamroll Konfabulator". He started calling all his friends at Apple and eventually it turned out that the Apple product that was intended to steamroll Konfabulator was Dashboard. The products are different, Dashboard uses standard DHTML while Konfabulator uses proprietary markup. Arlo stated that their use of proprietary technologies gave them advantages over using straight DHTML.

Unfortunately, even though they got millions of downloads of the Windows version not a lot of people paid for the software. There were a number of reasons for this. The first was that in general there is a less of a culture of paying for shareware in the Windows world than in the Mac world. Secondly, there were free alternatives to their product on Windows that had sprung up while there was only a Mac version. In looking for revenue, they sought out partnerships and formed one with Yahoo!. He also talked to people at Microsoft in Redmond who let him know that they were planning to add gadgets to Longhorn Windows Vista. Microsoft made him an offer to come work on Windows Vista but he turned it down. Later on, he was pinged by a separate group at MSN that expressed an interest in buying Konfabulator. Once this happened, Arlo contacted Google and Yahoo! to see if theyd make counter offers and Yahoo! won the bidding war.

They started working on the Yahoo! Widget Engine and the goal was to make it a platform for accessing Yahoo! APIs as part of the Yahoo! Developer Network. However consumers still wanted a consumer product like Konfabulator and eventually they left the YDN and went to the Connected Life group at Yahoo! which works on non-Web consumer applications such as desktop and mobile applications.

There are now 4000 3rd party widgets in the Yahoo! widget gallery and they are the only major widget platform which is cross platform. Also they are the only widget platform that has total access to Yahoo! data.

Q & A

Q: What's next?
A: The next question is to see how far widgets can scale as mini-applications. Can a picture frame widget become something more but not a full replacement for Flickr or Photoshop?

Q: What do you think of the Apollo project from Adobe?
A: Doesn't know what it is.

Q: Did he ever figure out a business model for widgets?
A: He planned to make deals with companies like J.Crew, Staples, and Time Warner for movie tie-ins.

Q: Why move from YDN to Connected Life?
A: They were 3 people and they couldn't do both the developer side & the consumer application. Also it turned out that the Yahoo! Developer Network turned out not to have the clout that they thought they would in that Yahoo! applications would refuse to provide APIs that could be accessed by 3rd party developers but would create special APIs for writing Konfabulator widgets.

 

My girlfriend's iPod Mini seems to have a corrupted file system after the kids unplugged and restarted the PC with it attached. This seemed like a good opportunity for her to get a new MP3 player and I suggested that suggested that she get a Zune. She liked the idea and was almost completely sold until she remembered that we'd already spent a couple of hundred dollars iPod-enabling her car. Since I haven't heard any rumors that Zunes will be compatible with the iPod connectors I lost that argument.

When we went to the mall, the Apple store was busy so we got her new iPod from the iPod vending machine at Macy's instead. I'm not sure which was the most mind boggling thing about the purchase. The fact that iPod vending machines exist? The fact that there was actually a line at the iPod vending machine? Or that the machine seemed to be getting enough regular usage to be sold out of iPod Nanos? Wow.

The Zune is definitely going to have an uphill battle for mindshare. It's from the same folks who brought us XBox so they've gone up against a deeply entrenched incumbent in the personal electronics game before. This will be interesting to watch. 

 

Jason Calacanis has a blog post entitled New views of Netscape Homepage/Hive where he writes

The Netscape homepage has been taken over by political stories. I hate politics, and seeing 1/3rd of the stories on the home page related to "Bush Sucks/Is Great" stories has really burned many of the users out.

You see, people vote 2-3x as much on political stories and they comment 10-30x a much on those same stories. So, we're gonna change the home page to be one of the two below (descriptions by CK from his post on the issue):

I remember the same thing happening to Kuro5hin during the 2000 U.S. elections and the site never recovered. The site went from a more democratic version of Slashdot to being the precursor to DailyKos. As Jason points out, the reason is that people are more likely to comment on or post stories about politics especially during an election year than they are to post about AJAX design patterns or which startup got flipped to Google this week.

Imposing a quota on how many stories from a particular topic/section can show up on the front page sounds like a good way to enforce diversity on the front page. However it is likely to hide the true culture of the site which may actually be heavily tilted to being a political news site than a technology or general news site despite Jason Calacanis's best efforts. Time will tell if this was a good move or not. Either way, it is clear that the community is going in a different direction from what Calacanis and his cohorts at AOL would like. Welcome to the world of user-generated content. ;) 

 

A couple of days ago Ross Mayfield started a blog post entitled Abundance, and Five Years of Blogging with the following

When I sat down in my first economics class at UCLA, the professor wrote on the blackboard all we would learn, in really big letters:

SCARCITY

I've been blogging for five years as of this month, and here's what I've learned:

ABUNDANCE

From this intro, he directs us to a blog post by David Hornik entitled Chris Anderson Strikes Again: The Economy of Abundance which contains the following excerpt

Continuing in his role as shirpa of the new economy, Chris has moved on from the Long Tail to a related but distinct idea that he is calling the Economy of Abundance. In a talk he just gave at the PopTech conference (a fantastic event in the unbelievably beautiful but remote town of Camden Maine), Chris described this new economy. The basic idea is that incredible advances in technology have driven the cost of things like transistors, storage, bandwidth, to zero. And when the elements that make up a business are sufficiently abundant as to approach free, companies appropriately should view their businesses differently than when resources were scarce (the Economy of Scarcity). They should use those resources with abandon, without concern for waste. That is the overriding attitude of the Economy of Abundance -- don't do one thing, do it all; don't sell one piece of content, sell it all; don't store one piece of data, store it all. The Economy of Abundance is about doing everything and throwing away the stuff that doesn't work. In the Economy of Abundance you can have it all.

The same businesses that are the poster children for the Long Tail, are the poster children for the Economy of Abundance. And the same businesses that are the victims of the Long Tail are the poster children for the Economy of Scarcity. With bandwidth and storage approaching free, iTunes can offer three million songs (P2P offers nine million). In contrast, with limited shelf space, Tower Records can only offer fifty- or sixty-thousand tracks. The end result, consumer choose abundance over scarcity (something for everyone) -- Tower Records gets liquidated while iTunes grows dramatically

All this talk of Abundance being the new Economy misses the point that Scarcity is still what drives all economic endeavors. What has happened with the advent of the Web is that certain things that were traditionally considered scarce are now abundant (e.g. shelf space, editorial content, software, etc) which means that the new economic lords are those that can exploit scarcity along another axis.

Most successful Web companies today are exploiting the scarcity of attention and time that plagues all humans. In a world where there a hundred million websites the problem isn't lack of content, it is finding the right content. Similarly, in a world where there are competing media for people's attention from television and radio to the Web and print magazines, advertisers need to be able to find the right audience and medium for their sales pitches. Both of these are examples of scarcity that companies like Google have exploited in the 'new economy'. Scarcity of attention also points to how companies like eBay and Amazon have risen to the top not 'abundance of shelf space' because simply having infinite shelf space doesn't explain why eBay and Amazon have been more successful than Yahoo! Auctions and Barnes & Noble online.

Even the example of the iTunes Music Store is another story of the economics of scarcity. The key to its success has been the fact that it is tied to the iPod and is the only music store that is tied to the world's most successful portable music player. The economics of abundance is a good fairy tale to scare people in traditional bricks & mortar businesses like Tower Records but at the end of the day simply moving online does not change the fact that you are always battling scarcity when you are engaging in business. Just ask the folks at MSN Music how the economy of abundance worked out for them.