I'm almost caught up on my blog reading since getting back from vacation and I've spotted a couple of items I'd have blogged responses to if I was around. Since I don't have the time to write full blog posts on each of these items, here are links to the posts and brief outlines on what I thought about them

• Harish Mallipeddi has a blog post entitled Measuring efficiency of tagging with Entropy links to the paper Understanding Navigability of Social Tagging Systems by Ed Chi and Todd Mytkowicz of Xerox Parc which excerpts the key findings from the paper. One result of their research which seems obvious in hindsight and shows one of the issues that social software has to deal with as its community of users grows was

  The way he does that is to measure entropy (yup that same old same old Claude Shannon’s information theory which you learned in one of the CS courses) of entities like documents (D), users (U) and tags (T). His research group crawled the entire del.icio.us archive and then calculated the entropies. Here’s what they found:

  • H(D|T) specifies the social navigation efficiency. How efficient is it for us to specify a set of tags to find a set of specific documents? We found that in del.icio.us that it is getting less and less efficient.

  This makes sense when you think about it. Let's say the first set of users of del.icio.us came from a homogenous software development background and started applying the tag "xml" to mean items about the eXtensible Markup Language. Later on as the community grew, a number of gamers joined the site and they now use the tag "xml" to refer to items about the game X-Men Legends. Now if you are one of the original geek users of the site, the URL http://del.icio.us/tag/xml no longer is just about markup languages but also about video games. To actually find items strictly about the eXtensible Markup Language you may have to add other tags as refinements such as http://del.icio.us/tag/xml+programming.

  What this means is that to the oldest users of the site, the quality of the tagging system will seem to degrade over time even though this is a natural consequence of growth and diversifying its user base. Of course, this is only a problem if a lot of people use del.icio.us to find all items about a topic (i.e. browsing by tags) as opposed to just storing their individual bookmarks or subscribing to the bookmarks of people they know and trust.

• It seems Google announced some sort of Microsoft Office killer last week. You can read Don Dodge's Why Microsoft will not fall into the Innovators Dilemma and Robert Scoble's Microsoft has no innovator’s dillema? for two conflicting opinions on how this affects Microsoft. Personally, I think I've overdosed on the amount of times I've read the words innovator's dilemma in association with this announcement while catching up on email and blogs. What is funny about this situation is that almost everyone I've seen who throws the term around doesn't seem to have read the book. It is quite interesting to see Don Dodge write sentences like

  Microsoft will do everything possible to preserve these businesses while transitioning to the new Live strategy.

  and then follow that up with "No Innovators Dilemma here" without seeing the obvious contradiction in his words. Lots of  doublethink at work it seems.

  A side effect of reading this set of blog posts is that I found Don Dodge's Innovate or Imitate...Fame or Fortune? which praises being a fast follower as being more valuable than being an innovator. I've found that a lot of people at Microsoft point to past and recent successes such as XBox, Microsoft Office and Internet Explorer as proof that being a "fast follower" is the best strategy for Microsoft. There are three key problems with this kind of thinking

  1. It assumes your competitors are incompetent. This may have worked in the old days but with competitors like Google and Apple Inc, it isn't the case anymore.
  2. It requires that you have an ace up your sleeve that significantly one ups the competitors when you ship your knock off (e.g. integrating disparate applications into an Office Suite and pricing it lower than competitors, integrating product into the operating system, integrating a rich and social online experience into what was previously a solitary experience etc).
  3. It ignores the fact that "first mover advantage" is actually true for applications that have network effects which is definitely the case for social software which a lot of software has become today.

• The "diversity in conferences" recurring debate was kicked off again by a blog post by Jason Kottke entitled Gender Diversity at Web Conferences which encouraged the interesting responses from folks like Eric Meyer, Anil Dash and Shelley Powers. They are all good posts with stuff I agree and disagree with in them but I wasn't moved to write until I read the post Why are smart people still stuck on gender and skin-color blinders? by Tantek Çelik where he wrote

  Why is it that gender (and less often race, nay, skin-color, see below) are the only physical characteristics that lots of otherwise smart people appear to chime in support for diversity of?

  E.g. as long as we are trying for greater diversity in superficial physical characteristics (superficial because what do such characteristics have to do with the stated directly relevant criteria of "technical expertise, speaking skills, professional stature, brand appropriateness, and marketability" - though perhaps I can see a tenuous link with "rainbow" marketing), why not ask about other such characteristics?

  Where are all the green-eyed folks?

  Where are all the folks with facial tattoos?

  Where are all the redheads?

  Where are the speakers with non-ear facial piercings?

  Surely such speakers would help with "hipness" marketing.

  I found this post to be disingenious and wondered how anybody could downplay the gender and racial bias in the "Web 2.0" technology conference scene by equating it to a preference for green eyed speakers. So I decided to throw in my $0.02 on this topic...again.

  After the last ETech, I realized I was seeing the same faces and hearing the same things over and over again. More importantly, I noticed that the demographics of the speaker lists for these conferences don't match the software industry as a whole let alone the users who we are supposed to be building the software for.

  There were lots of little bits of ignorance by the speakers and audience which added up in a way that rubbed me wrong. For example, at the 2005  Web 2.0 conference a lot of people were ignorant of Skype except as 'that startup that got a bunch of money from eBay'. Given that there are a significant amount of foreigners in the U.S. software industry who use Skype to keep in touch with folks back home, it was surprising to see so much ignorance about it at a supposedly leading edge technology conference. The same thing goes for how suprised people were by how teenagers used the Web and computers. Additionally, there are just as many women using social software such as photo sharing, instant messaging, social networking, etc as men yet you rarely see their perspectives presented at any of these conferences. 

  When I think of diversity, I expect diversity of perspectives. People's perspectives are often shaped by their background and experiences. When you have a conference about an industry which is filled with people of diverse backgrounds building software for people of diverse backgrounds, it is a disservice to have the conversation and perspectives be homogenous. The software industry isn't just young white males in their mid-20s to mid-30s nor is that the primary demographic of Web users.

  Personally, I've gotten tired of attending conferences where we heard more about technologies and sites that the homogenous demographic of young to middle aged, white, male computer geeks find interesting (e.g. del.icio.us and tagging) and less about what Web users actually use regularly or find interesting (hint: it isn't del.icio.us and it sure as fuck isn't tagging).

Every once in a while someone asks me about software companies to work for in the Seattle area that aren't Microsoft, Amazon or Google. This is the first in a series of weekly posts about startups in the Seattle area that I often mention to people when they ask me this question.

Jott is described as voice-powered, hands-free messaging and to do lists on the front page of the site. Jott is primarily a voice to text service with two main features

1. You can call 1 877 568 8486 and leave a voice memo that is converted to an email and sent to your email address.
2. You can call 1 877 568 8486 and leave a voice memo that is converted to an email or SMS text message and sent to one of your contacts

I don't have much use for the first feature but the second is quite useful for sending text messages while in traffic instead of trying to futz around typing with T9.

The founders of Jott are John Pollard and Shreedhar Madhavapeddi who are both ex-Microsoft folks. I worked with Shree briefly as part of the MSN Windows Live Messenger server team before he left Microsoft. He was a smart guy and someone I regretted not working with more before he left the company. 

Press: Seattle Times on Jott Networks

Number of Employees: 5

Location: Fremont, WA

Jobs: jobs@jott.com, current open positions are for a VP of Marketing and a Software Development Engineer

Twice this week, I've been impressed by how some rant I made in my blog turned into an implemented feature in Web software that hundreds of thousands of people use. The first incident comes from my blog post Why Feedburner Doesn't Count Outlook 2007 Subscribers where I wrote about the fact that FeedBurner doesn't track subscribers to my feed who're using Outlook 2007 because it uses the same user agent string as Internet Explorer 7. Thus I was pleasantly surprised when I logged into FeedBurner and saw the following

It seems that while I was on vacation the folks at FeedBurner decided to implement a solution to the problem I pointed out even though it isn't their fault. Nice.

The second incident comes in response to my post MSN SoapBox in Public Beta where I mentioned that neither Google Reader nor Bloglines would display videos from MSN Soapbox embedded in a blog post. Yesterday Mihai Parparita who works on Google Reader let me know that they added support for that while I was on vacation. That means if you are reading this in Google Reader you should see a video on the next line

Thanks to the Google Reader team for implementing this so quickly.

I'm back from vacation at Disneyland. My pictures are at http://www.flickr.com/photos/carnage4life

What did I miss?

I should be on my way to the airport but this was just too good to share. Below are the opening paragraphs of a LiveJournal post by chalain entitled So Beautiful, So Disturbing

I wake. For a moment, I stare at the ceiling trying to remember something. Something important. Something important happened last night, but the details escape me. Something fascinating yet sinister, like touring the CIA offices. Something exotic yet somehow familiar, like putting hot sauce on meatloaf. I wonder if I have a hangover. I wonder why I am thinking about the CIA and meatloaf. I roll onto my side.

There is a strange woman in bed with me.

A lot of things happen at once. First, I realize that this is the most beautiful woman I have ever seen, and I am a lucky, lucky man. Second, I realize that this is not my wife, and I panic. Third, I realize that she's awake, has been watching me sleep. Fourth, before I can really react to thoughts 1 and 2, she smiles at me and speaks with a lovely accent I can't quite place: "So. You like new wife, yes? Yes. Up now, I make breakfast."

She gets out of bed and stretches, perfect curves sliding under silky lingerie and momentarily making me forget about breakfast, meatloaf, and whoever it was I was married to before last night. She seems to know this, and smiles at me again, but apparently she's serious about making breakfast. She turns and strides confidently from the room. As she does, I see for the first time the large Microsoft logo splayed across her back. My stomach lurches as I suddenly remember everything.

Windows Vista. I bought a new computer yesterday... and it came with Windows Vista.

Read the entire thing here. It's pretty good stuff and is kinda cool that software can invoke such positive and negative emotions from its users.

Mary Jo Foley has a blog post entitled Ballmer’s list: Microsoft’s CEO shares his top nine Microsoft growth picks where she writes

Ballmer's guaranteed nine growth spots:

1. Windows client revenues from OEMs (PC makers and system builders)

2. "Desktop value" revenues derived from corporations (big enough to have an IT department). This sounded like Office revenues

3. Server revenues — Windows Server, database, security products. Ballmer said he sees this as an arena where Microsoft has a good opportunity to grow its business vis-a-vis Linux

4. "Mature desktops" — i.e., add-on revenues in corporations where there's already some penetration of Windows and Office. Client-access licenses are a key growth driver here.

5. Emerging market savings — especially due to Genuine Advantage Initiative anti-piracy crackdown campaigns/mechanisms

6. Advertising — especially via adCenter, Microsoft's online ad system — and the properties fueled by it

7. Xbox, particularly in dollars derived from Xbox Live, attached hardware and attached software

8. Sales of Office to small businesses and consumers

9. Windows Mobile operating system sales to cell-phone and PDA makers

...
I was surprised that Windows Live — supposedly one of Microsoft's most important strategic efforts — didn't make either of Ballmer's lists. Ballmer did mention services, but talked about it more from a platform perspective, than as a bunch of individual point products.

Am I the only one who's wondering why Mary Jo Foley didn't realize that #6 refers to Windows Live?

While everyone else was raving about the fact that Feedburner can now count RSS subscribers coming from Google reader I've been noticing that there was another discrepancy in the Feedburner data that didn't seem to be accounted for. Below is a screenshot of number of hits from Web browsers on my RSS feed

It seems pretty unlikely that people have clicked on my RSS feed over 5000 times today. At first I thought Feedburner was miscounting feeds that had been subscribed from IE 7 but a quick look in Fiddler shows that IE 7 requests feeds using Windows-RSS-Platform as the User-Agent and is correctly counted by Feedburner.

So I sent some mail to Eric Lunt who's a co-founder and the  CTO of Feedburner to see if he knew what was wrong. He let me know that the problem is that Outlook 2007 doesn't identify itself in the User-Agent string and instead pretends to be Internet Explorer 7. This means there is no way to separate out accesses of your feed from Outlook 2007 from people clicking on your feed in IE 7.

This seems like a fairly rookie mistake to ship in a bigtime product like Outlook. I don't have the latest version installed so I can't confirm that this is truly the case but if it is I hope they plan to fix this soon. It's really lame to not identify your product correctly in the User-Agent string.
...
Oops. I should have done a search before sending out mail. It looks like this was already covered in a blog post entitled Outlook, RSS, & the user-agent string by Michael Affronti who was the PM for RSS in Outlook 2007. He wrote

For Outlook 2007 we will unfortunately not be able to report any custom user agent string for our RSS aggregation.  Due to the way we integrate with IE across many parts of the application (the WININET stack is the underlying infrastructure for all of Outlook’s internet communication), we cannot easily and safely change the way we broadcast ourselves when connecting to external servers.  To do so would require a fundamental change in the way the WININET stack is called from Outlook and could affect all of the Office applications.  The scope of this fix is unfortunately outside of what we can provide this release.

I guess this won't be fixed anytime soon, if ever. Anyway, I hope this post helps out other users of Feedburner who've also been curious about their weird number of hits supposedly from IE 7. 

Mini-Microsoft has a blog post entitled Where's Ray? Where's the Vista Campaign? where he claims that Ray Ozzie has been AWOL when it comes to presenting a vision for Microsoft as it's Chief Software Architect. There is an interesting comment in response to his post from an ex-Microsoftie which is excerpted below

>We need more engagement from Ray and his brigade about what's happening and what kind of coherent vision is coming about.

I'm sorry, but this is NOT what you need. You do NOT need vision from Ray. At this point, what you need from Ray is code!

I have a very long history with Microsoft, and I am no longer a softie. One of the reasons I left is the whole vision/strategy vs. code problem. In the old days, production quality code really mattered a ton. In the new Microsoft, from Forum 2000 onward, code was much less important. What really mattered was laying down a vision and a strategy.

I wrote a longish post in response to this comment then realized no good could come from posting it here. Suffice to say I agree with the sentiment in the comment. Somewhere along the line VISION became more important than SHIPPING CODE at Microsoft. This really became a problem when the gap between our vision (or should I say BillG's vision) and our ability to ship code widened a lot more than we realized leading to unpleasant results (e.g. Longhorn). 

What the company needs now is more focus on shipping code and less focus on vision. Quite frankly, I'd be quite happy to never get another vision memo or speech from Ray as long as I'm sure he's out there making sure we aren't working on any more obviously bad ideas. One of the reasons I'm still at Microsoft [specifically Windows Live] is that I believe that our current leadership believes in shipping code. I've also gotten the same vibe from Ray which is also goodness in my book. Time will tell whether my confidence is warranted or not.

A few weeks ago I announced the availability of the release candidate for the Jubilee release of RSS Bandit. We got a lot of good feedback from our users on that release and have fixed a ton of bugs based on that feedback. With the addressing of these bugs we believe the product is now stable enough for a final release. Thus we have refreshed the release candidate installer and made it available at http://downloads.sourceforge.net/rssbandit/RssBandit.1.5.0.9.Jubilee.RC2.zip. Our plan is to watch for feedback on this release candidate and if there are no major issues left, then we will release a final version with a version number of v1.5.0.10 on March 3rd, 2007.

Below is an exhaustive list of the bugs that have been fixed in the past three weeks. Since there are quite a number of them, I've highlighted the fixed issues that were particularly annoying to users based on the amount of feedback we got on them.

Change Log for RSS Bandit 1.5.0.9 (Jubilee Release Candidate 2)

• Fixed: RSS 0.91 DTDs now fetched from local machine instead of http://my.netscape.com/publish/formats/rss-0.91.dtd to cope with announcement made by Netscape that the file will stop being available on July 1, 2007.
• Fixed: Custom actions in installer prevent installation on Windows Vista.
• Fixed: security exception on opening Options dialog if UAC is activated or a user does not have admin privilegs
• Fixed: Scrolling through newspaper can mark items unread if they were marked as read outside the newspaper view(bug 1641219)
• Fixed: Selecting multiple items then right-clicking on them, deselects them (bug 1642463)
• Fixed: Size limit on podcast folder wasn't being honored (bug 1642923)
• Fixed: The search index somehow becomes corrupted then every couple of minutes a dialog box would pop up with the error message "Unexpected Exception on SaveApplicationState() ---> System.IO.FileNotFoundException"
• Fixed: Marking an item as read in a search folder doesn't mark it as read in the main feed.
• Fixed: Some feeds refuse to display with the following error message - "Error retrieving feed ... from cache: Item has already been added".
• Fixed: Save Search button was not working in the search panel
• Fixed (completed): Back button chevron should be removed when web browsing
• Fixed: Feed Subscriptions Panel width was not remembered on restart (bug 1647343)
• Feature: search folders now have a context menu entry to toggle display of full item texts (somewhat slower than show summaries)
• Feature: the font style and color used for watched news items are now configurable via Options|Fonts dialog
• Feature: the font style and color used for unread counters in the subscription tree is now configurable via the configuration file options (sample enables rendering similar to outlook express)
• Feature: Open browser tabs are remembered on restart
• Fixed: Newly launched browser tabs grab the focus instead of opening in the background (multiple related bugs reported at sourceforge)
• Fixed: Url combobox not always in sync. with the current displayed tab
• Partially fixed: Back button chevron should be removed when web browsing (bug 1638805)
• Fixed: Feed with initial focus is always refreshed on startup (bug 1634694)
• Fixed: Sometimes the toolbars replaced by giant red 'X' while browsing the Web from within the application.
• Fixed: Option "Initiate download feeds at startup" was not being honored
  
• Fixed: Restore from system tray doesn't always re-display window (bug 1641837)
• Fixed: Upgrade IE 6 to 7: cannot use ALT-Tab to switch tabs anymore (bug 1602232)
• Fixed: mouse wheel support for treeview re-activated (wheel-scroll while not focused)
• Fixed: The "On initial subscription: Only download X items" setting was not obeyed.
• Feature: Can now drag multiple urls separated by newlines to the treeview for "batch" subscribe

The intrepid investigators over at LiveSide seem to have stumbled upon a Digg-like site created by Microsoft called MSN Reporter. From their post MSN enter social news arena with Digg competitor - MSN Reporter we learn

As an ongoing part of MSN's efforts to increase the amount of user generated content on its network, the Dutch MSN team has created MSN Reporter, a social news site similar to the likes of digg and reddit. Available in beta since October 2006, currently MSN Reporter has launched only in three markets, Netherlands, Belgium and Norway.

Allowing users to share and rate news on the site, it has a simple interface, much like the Digg of old. It also has Windows Live integration, with Alerts, add to Live.com and with a BlogIt! option sending posts straight to Windows Live Spaces. With buttons that says "Kicken!" and "Dumpen!" who doesn't feel the urge to participate?

So far there has been considerable interest in the new service, with reportedly 500,000 and 800,000 users visting the site in the 1st and 2nd months respectively.  With articles getting upto 10,000 votes and 1,000 comments, this is a on a completely different level to most existing social news sites.

This is a pleasent surprise. I've been wanting Microsoft to do a Digg-like site for a while but gave up on it after I stopped being able to figure out whether I should be pitching the idea to folks at MSN or Windows Live. It looks like the folks at MSN have not only taken the initiative and built a social news site but it seems to be capitalizing on the popularity of the MSN brand in Europe given some of those stats above.

PS: In other Windows Live MSN news LiveSide is claiming that Windows Live Wifi Suite will rebrand to MSN. They even post a link to http://hotspot.msn.com which is still Windows Live branded at the moment. It looks like they even scooped the product team's blog. I'm not sure if this is just a rumor or a leak since I have no insight into what goes on at MSN but it would make sense if the LiveSide story is true. .