February 15, 2007
@ 04:21 PM

I feel like I've been getting a little complacent about trying out new experiences in recent years. My new year resolution was to learn new technologies outside my comfort zone and try out new experiences. So far I think I'm doing OK on the new experiences front. I've had a podcast interview with .NET Rocks show (Show #218, Scheduled Air Date: March 13th 2007) , I've tried to buy a house and learned why so many people rave about Zillow, and will be going to the happiest place on earth next week.

To keep my programming chops fresh I'd like to spend the next couple of months of my hobby time learning a new programming language and perhaps catching up on old ones which have evolved since I last paid them any attention. But first I have to get a Jubilee release of RSS Bandit out of the door. Torsten and I have been fixing bugs like mad over the past few weeks and I think we're about done with any more major code changes for this release. The last major issue is the fact that the RSS Bandit installer crashes on some versions of Vista. I've talked to Rob Mensching about this issue and my conclusion was to move a bunch of code out of the installer and into the first run experience. I'll be making that change this week and then will publish a Release Candidate 2. This RC 2 of the Jubilee release is to validate that we've fixed all of the issues that were found by our early adopters in the previous release candidate. I estimate that should take about two weeks and then we'll publish the release version of Jubilee release on March 3rd 2007.

Once this release goes out I plan to take 2-3 months off of working on RSS Bandit. During the first month and a half I plan to catch up on changes in Java and C# I haven't been keeping up on by updating my C# From a Java Developer's Perspective article I wrote when I was in college. I'm also interested in catching up on recent debates on concurrency models in programming languages such as the ones references in posts like Neil Mix's What Mean You, Threads?, Brendan Eich's Threads suck and Patrick Logan's Misguided: The Road Not To Be Travelled. I need to resubscribe to Lambda the Ultimate.

During the second half of my RSS Bandit sabbatical I plan to learn the Python programming language, specifically IronPython. To make sure I actually learn the language I need an actual programming project. I plan to build a meme tracker in Python hopefully by combining code from RSS Bandit and [OSS licences permiting] Sam Ruby's Mememe code

Once the summer hits, it'll be time to start work on the Phoenix release of RSS Bandit. My goal with this release is to solve the problems I have with http://blogs.msdn.com due to the monstrous number of posts a day. I'll tackle this in multiple ways including incorporating meme tracking as well as introducing a page model to newspaper view so that I don't have to deal with slowdowns when the embedded browser tries to render the content of 500 - 1000 blog posts at once. There will also be UI work done such as adding a podcast inbox as well as jumping on the Office 2007 ribbon bandwagon.

Now that I've actually written this down in public, I have to actually get it done. :)


 

Categories: Personal | RSS Bandit

February 15, 2007
@ 03:36 AM

The MSN SoapBox team has a blog post entitled Soapbox Now in Public Beta which states

We just flipped the switch from an Invitation Only, to a Public Beta.
 
No need to request an invitation and sign in to watch videos on Soapbox anymore!

Cool. I guess it's now OK to start petitioning the developers of Bloglines and Google Reader to show embedded MSN Soapbox videos like in my those in my post Ads: Vista vs. Mac OS X.

I'm still not sure how I feel about MSN SoapBox. Besides the obvious branding questions, I question the wisdom of building a YouTube clone as opposed to building an experience more like MySpace Video which would leverage our existing brand and investments in offerings like MSN Windows Live Spaces. Whatever, I guess.

The site is still a rather snazzy use of Flash and there are a couple of things in the interface I think existing sites like Google Video and YouTube could learn from. Check it out at http://soapbox.msn.com.


 

Categories: MSN

February 15, 2007
@ 03:15 AM

I've been using Live Search for Mobile for the past 24 hours and it is hot, hot, hot. I was in the car just now and wanted to call the Metropolitan Grill to confirm our dinner reservations. Usually this involves calling 411, talking to some lame voice recognition system and then repeating myself to a human while getting charged mucho dinero for this "service". With Live Search for Mobile, it was dead easy to select "Seattle, Washington" from the canned list of metropolitan areas, type my search term ("metropolitan grill") and then call the number in the search results.

I thought this was cool but was going to criticize the product for only supporting major metropolitan areas but it seems I was mistaken. There is a comprehensive list of the major cities in every U.S. state. For Washington state they have local listings from Aberdeen to Yakima. Crazy.

Seriously, if you have a Windows Mobile or J2ME phone, you should go to http://wls.live.com. This is the coolest download I've gotten from my phone since Smartphlow. Kudos to team for creating such a useful product. It's rare for me to blog about one of our product announcements and follow it up with another blog post so soon afterwards but this product is that good.  


 

February 14, 2007
@ 03:24 AM

Danah Boyd has a blog post entitled Facebook's little digital gift where she writes

Last week, Facebook unveiled a gifting feature. For $1, you can purchase a gift for the person you most adore. If you choose to make the gift public, you are credited with that gift on the person's profile under the "gift box" region. If you choose to make the gift private, the gift is still there but there's no notice concerning who gave it.
...
Unlike Fred, i think that gifts make a lot more sense than identity purchases when it comes to micro-payments and social network sites. Sure, buying clothes in virtual systems makes sense, but what's the value of paying to deck out your profile if the primary purpose of it is to enable communication? I think that for those who actively try to craft a public identity through profiles (celebrities and fame junkies), paying to make a cooler profile makes sense. But most folks are quite content with the crap that they can do for free and i don't see them paying money to get more fancified backgrounds when they can copy/paste.
...
Like Fred, i too have an issue with the economic structure of Facebook Gifts, but it's not because i think that $1 is too expensive. Gifts are part of status play. As such, there are critical elements about gift giving that must be taken into consideration. For example, it's critical to know who gifted who first. You need to know this because it showcases consideration. Look closely at comments on MySpace and you'll see that timing matters; there's no timing on Facebook so you can't see who gifted who first and who reciprocated. Upon receipt of a gift, one is often required to reciprocate. To handle being second, people up the ante in reciprocating. The second person gives something that is worth more than the first. This requires having the ability to offer more; offering two of something isn't really the right answer - you want to offer something of more value. All of Facebook's gifts are $1 so they are all equal. Value, of course, doesn't have to be about money. Scarcity is quite valuable. If you gift something rare, it's far more desired than offering a cheesy gift that anyone could get. This is why the handmade gift matters in a culture where you can buy anything.

As usual I agree 100% with Danah. A few years ago Ze Frank was here at Microsoft talking to some folks in the Social Computing Group of Microsoft Research and he talked about a service that allowed users to give virtual gifts to each other which was making money hand over fist. I can't remember the name of the service but the logic for why virtual gifts were popular on the service made sense. As Danah points out, paying to pimp out your profile (i) gets old quick and (ii) is something that most people don't care much for. On the other hand gifting is an activity that a user can perform repeatedly since there are milions of people out there they can give gifts to compared to only having one avatar/profile to pimp out.

As Jamie Zawinski pointed outed out in his rant Groupware Bad,

"How will this software get my users laid" should be on the minds of anyone writing social software.

and Facebook which is primarily used by people who are still indulging in the mating rituals of early adulthood needs to keep this foremost in their minds. The gifting feature meets this need of their users quite well. A "virtual gift" is the equivalent of eye contact or a wink in a crowded bar that shows your interest in another. It makes the receiver feel special because someone thinks they are cool enough to spend money on [even if it is a micropayment] and the sender feels good because it is an almost risk-free gesture of sexual interest which doesn't cost much economically or socially. After all getting dissed by someone at a bar or dance club is a lot more damaging to the ego than someone not reciprocating your virtual gift or ignoring your friend request after you bought them a $1 "virtual rose bouquet".

I also agree with Danah that Facebook should stratify the gifts. Hot chicks would compete with each other for how many $5 gifts of "virtual bling" they had compared to $1 gifts of virtual flowers. Flirting guys trying to stand out in the crowd would throw down a $10 virtual gift of a 'cadillac escalade with spinners' to show that they were ballers. If this sounds outlandish to you, then you probably haven't looked at online dating sites like Match.com whose "browse for free but pay to message those you like" highlights the demand for this in online mating rituals. As well as the fact that "virtual gifts" are actually a staple of dating sites like such as MatchDoctor and Cheeky Flirt.

Making it easy for college kids to hook up and party is what Facebook is about and this move is a step in the right direction by facilitating a new kind of online mating ritual for many of their users. Good move on their part.


 

Categories: Social Software

February 13, 2007
@ 10:25 PM
Vista Ad

Mac OS X Ad

Which do you prefer and why?


 

From the press release Microsoft Announces Three New Windows Live Products for Mobile Devices we learn

Today at 3GSM World Congress 2007, Microsoft Corp. announced three new Windows Live™ for mobile services that provide search and communications capabilities to help people access their world of relationships, information and interests from their mobile device. Now available in the United States and the United Kingdom, Live Search for Windows Mobile® and Live Search for Java provide customers with advanced local search and mapping capabilities on their mobile device. In conjunction with the availability of Windows Mobile 6, Microsoft also introduced Windows Live for Windows Mobile — a rich set of Windows Live services including e-mail, instant messaging and search — uniquely designed to work with Windows Mobile powered devices.

You can download the search clients for Java or Windows Mobile phones by going to http://mobile.search.live.com/ from your desktop or http://wls.live.com/ from your phone. I downloaded the client app onto my Cingular 3125 and it is quite snazzy. Traffic and local business search in my phone, all for free. My only gripe is that there doesn't seem to be GPS integration in the local results presented which may be a limitation of my phone as opposed to the software.

It looks like you can only get Windows Live for Mobile with integration with Windows Live Spaces, Windows Live Hotmail and Windows Live Messenger when you get a new Windows Mobile phone with Windows Mobile 6.0 or can figure out how to upgrade your phone's OS. In the meantime, you can drool over the features at official website for Windows Live™ for Windows Mobile®.


 

Categories: Windows Live

February 12, 2007
@ 11:59 PM

Via the LiveSide post entitled Live.com to get social - share your own pages I noticed that we've finally shipped Live.com collections. The official description of the feature is excerpted below

Collections are Live.com pages of gadgets and feeds created and shared by users. Add your favorite Collections to your own Live.com page, or share one of your Live.com pages with the community.

This is a pretty sweet feature because it allows people to build 'templates' which others can use. For example, I can create a Live.com page which has  subscriptions to TechCrunch, Mashable, Read/Write Web and http://del.icio.us/tags/web20 as well as a couple of relevant gadgets then share that with coworkers who are interested in subscribing to the latest goings on in the Web 2.0 blogs. Much better than sharing OPML files, isn't it?

There is more about this feature and others in the Windows Live Gallery team's blog post entitled Another release goes out the door!. So far, it seems that user-created Live.com collections haven't yet been enabled although you can try out some of the collections that have been published by Microsoft. If you are interested in when this feature will be enabled for all Live.com users to share their customized and pimped out homepages with others, then head over to the Gallery and Live.com team blogs with your questions. 


 

Categories: Windows Live

February 12, 2007
@ 08:13 PM

A couple of weeks ago I read a blog post by Matt Cutts entitled What did I miss last week? where he wrote

- Hitwise offered a market share comparison between Bloglines, Google Reader, Rojo, and other feed readers that claimed Bloglines was about 10x more popular than Google Reader. My hunch is that both AJAX and frames may be muddying the water here; I’ve mentioned that AJAX can heavily skew pageview metrics before. If the Google Reader team gets a chance to add subscriber numbers to the Feedfetcher user-agent (which may not be a trivial undertaking, since they probably share code with other groups at Google that fetch using the same bot mechanism), that would allow an apples-to-apples comparison.

As I was thinking about the fact that Google Reader can't make changes to the FeedFetcher user agent without tightly coupling a general platform component that likely services Google Reader, Google Homepage, Google Blog Search and other services with their own. I realized that by using one user agent for all of this servides, it pretty much makes it impossible for Web masters to exclude themselves from some of Google's crawlers.

Exactly how one would go about creating a robots.txt file that limits your feed from showing up in Google Blog Search results but doesn't end up exlcuding you from Google Reader and Google Homepage as well? I can't think of a way to do this but maybe it's because my kung fu is weak. Any suggestions? 

PS: This isn't work related.


 

Categories: Web Development

February 12, 2007
@ 07:55 PM

Nick Carr has a blog post entitled Googlegate in North Carolina where he writes

North Carolina's Senate Finance Committee is hastily arranging hearings for next week on the state's use of tax incentives to lure businesses, as public outrage mounts over disclosures that Google was granted as much as a quarter billion dollars in secret tax breaks for a plant expected to employ approximately 200 workers. There's no word yet on whether any Google officials will be asked to testify.
...
The Googlegate controversy is unlikely to abate any time soon. Troubling new details of the secret deal-making continue to emerge. Today's Charlotte Observer features a long article describing how public officials leaned on some local residents to sell their homes to make way for the Google plant. The mayor of the town of Lenoir, Davis Barlow, and the county commissioner, Tim Sanders, were among the officials who, according to the paper, went "door-to-door on behalf of the Internet giant Google. In some cases, officials returned to homes four or five times. Barlow and Sanders effectively used the personal touch, avoiding a drawn-out public debate that Google was secretly telling them would scuttle the deal. That personal touch enabled some residents to feel comfortable in selling their property."

This reminds me of a comment I once heard about why the deal makers at GOOG are such hardball players. It goes back to the Google Founders' Awards which were intended to be a way to significantly reward people who add value to the company's bottom line.  Since this award is worth millions of dollars, there is a lot of stiff competition and I'd heard that it ended up the sales folks, acquisitions experts and other deal makers who end up as the primary contenders for the award.

I guess it makes sense, which other job functions can say that they directly save or benefit the company a quarter of a billion dollars on the bottom line? Not the lead developer of Google Calendar or the PM who wrote the spec for Google Base, that's for sure. :)

Unfortunately, when you put millions of dollars in incentives in front of your employees you shouldn't be surprised if they start cutting ethical corners to make things happen. Even CEOs and CFOs aren't immune from this which is why we have Sarbanes Oxley today.