The folks at LiveSide have a blog post entitled Windows Live Spaces at a crossroads: will the US catch up to the world? which contains some interesting charts from ComScore. Specifically they call out the difference in the worldwide reach of various social networking services versus the North American reach. The relevant excerpt from the post is

As expected, MySpace is in a runaway lead, Facebook is coming on strong, Blogger is hanging in there, and Spaces pretty much brings up the rear.  If you read the blogs and follow Techmeme, TechCrunch, and Scoble, these numbers aren't anything surprising.

But take a look at the Worldwide numbers, and a somewhat different story emerges.

Social Networking Sites - Worldwide: Unique visitors per month (000)

While Facebook is growing steadily worldwide, here the numbers tell a far different story.  Windows Live Spaces is battling it out with Blogger and MySpace for the top spot.  Just for reference, we can see that the Worldwide usage of Social Networking sites is growing steadily:

You might quibble with the title of this blog post but it is hard to argue that Blogger is a social networking site by any definition of the term. When it comes to reach, no social networking site impacts as many users as Windows Live Spaces.

Of course, unique users aren’t the only metric Web sites are judged against and I’m sure there are many out there who will be quick to point out other charts that show our user engagement is lower than average which is a fair point. Personally, I suspect that the inclusion of the improved What’s New page will increase user engagement in a measurable way. It might just be me but I find myself visiting my What’s New page several times a day, in fact more often than I visit my Facebook news feed.

According to Facebook, the addition of the News Feed increased their page views by 70% in the first few months. I wonder if we’ll see a similar jump in the ComScore charts for Windows Live Spaces in a few months or whether FB’s results were an abberration. Only time will tell.

Now playing: Raekwon - Guillotine (Swordz) (feat. Ghostface Killah, Inspectah Deck & GZA/Genius)

Today I saw a pretty useless product announced on TechCrunch called FriendCSV which extracts your Facebook friends into a CSV file sans their PII (i.e. no email address, no IM screen names, no telephone numbers, no street address). Amusingly enough, the authors of the application brag about using the Facebook platform as it was designed to be used as if they have figured out some major exploit.

However it did remind me of a pretty cool desktop application that I found via Bubba called OutSync. It synchronizes the photos of your contacts in Outlook with those of any matching people found on your friends list in Facebook. If you have a Windows Mobile smartphone that is synchronized with your Exchange server like I do, it means that you get all your friends photos on your phone which is pretty sweet especially when you get a call from that person. Screenshots below

There’s that user-centric authentication model where the user grants the application access without giving the application their username/password. Again, I’m glad OAuth is standardizing this for the Web.

When I think of the Facebook platform embracing the “Web as a Platform” I want to see more applications like this enabled. Instead of only utilizing my Facebook social graph in the Facebook Marketplace or the Buy.com Facebook application, why can’t it be utilized on eBay or Craigslist? I want all the applications I use to be able to utilize my social graph to make themselves better without having to be widgets on a particular social networking site before they can take advantage of this knowledge. 

Back in 2004, I wrote

Basically, we've gotten rid of one of major complaints about online services; maintaining to many separate lists of people you know. One of the benefits of this is that you can utilize this master contact list across a number of scenarios outside of just one local application like an email application or an IM client. For example, in MSN Spaces we allow users to use their MSN Messenger allow list (people you've granted permission to contact you via IM) as a access control list for who can view your Space (blog, photo album, etc). There are a lot more interesting things you can do once the applications you use can tell "here are the people I know, these are the ones I trust, etc". We may not get there as an industry anytime soon but MSN users will be reaping the benefits of this integration in more and more ways as time progresses.

It’s unfortunate that almost 3 years later we haven’t made much progress on this across the industry although it looks like the Facebook platform has gotten people finally thinking about unified social graphs. Better late than never, I guess. 

The one mistake I’ve been making in my thinking has been narrowly defining the applications that should have access to your Windows Live social graph as Microsoft or Windows Live applications. My thinking has since evolved as has that of lots of folks in the B0rg cube. It will be an interesting couple of months with regards to social graph APIs especially with Google’s November 5th announcement coming up.

PS: Anyone else noticed that the installer for OutSync is hosted on SkyDrive?

PPS: I got a phone call from Rob Dolin earlier this evening and the pic from his Facebook profile showed up my phone. Sweet!

Now playing: Soulja Boy - Crank That (Soulja Boy)

For a while, I’ve been jealous of the Flickr API Explorer and the Facebook API Test console. So I started building one for the Windows Live Contacts API last week only to find out that there was already one out there which hadn’t been sufficiently publicized.

If you’re a developer interested in seeing what the Windows Live Contacts API offers and already have a Windows Live ID (formerly Passport account) then mosey on down to the the Live Data Interactive SDK page. Once you get there, click on the link that says Click to Request Permission , scroll down and hit [Give Access] to give the page access to your Windows Live address book. Once redirected, click “Work with Contacts” and then you can create, retrieve, update and delete people from your Hotmail and Messenger contact lists using a simple RESTful protocol with direct access to the XML responses. 

Below is a screenshot of me retrieving my Messenger contact using the interactive SDK.

Now playing: Baby Bash - Cyclone (feat. T-Pain)

I recently read two blog posts on Microsoft's VisitMix site recently which show how conflicted large Web players can be about embracing the fact that The Web is the Platform. The first is a blog post by Scott Barnes entitled Rich Interactive Applications which contains the following excerpt

When you think of RIA what is it your mind casts an image to first?
...
RIA isn't about attention/eyeballs, it's supposed to be focused on empowering end users of a defined type, to carry out mundane task through an enriching user experience. User Experience is the key, in that a true RIA solution has the power to abstract complexity through aggregation or 360 degree view(s) of content without altering context.
...
That is Rich Interactive Application (RIA) shifting the paradigm. It had nothing to do with the Internet, suffice to say it's housed within an agent which is connected to the Internet - or - Intranet.

This blog post was the first time I've seen the term RIA defined as Rich Interactive Application instead of Rich Internet Application. Digging a little, it becomes obvious that Scott Barnes's post is just one of many in an ongoing flame war war of words between developer evangelists at Microsoft and developer evangelists at Adobe.

Redefining a term in such a way that it becomes all-inclusive is a recipe for devaluing the term [which might be Scott's purpose]. This is the lesson from the all-inclusive definitions that started to swirl around industry terms like Service Oriented Architecture and Web 2.0. More importantly, the problem with using the term "Rich Interactive Application" to define what developers commonly describe as RIAs is that it completely misses the point. Developers and end users are not excited about the ability to build and use rich interactive applications, they are excited about being able to build and use rich interactive applications on the Web. They've had the former for as long as desktop computers have existed, the latter is what is currently jazzing people up (e.g. all the hype around AJAX, Flickr, YouTube, the Facebook platform, etc).

Don't fight the Web. People don't get excited about "interactive" desktop applications. When was the last time your best friend, mom, daughter, sister, co-worker, etc told you about some cool desktop app they just found or use regularly? How does that compare that to the amount of times they've told about cool Web sites they found or use regularly?

Think about that for a second, Mr. Rich Interactive Application. Embrace the Web or you will be left behind.

Onto Joshua Allen's post entitled Web is THE Platform? SRSLY? which states

Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch reports on Google's presentation today at Web 2.0 Conference.  Jeff Huber of Google, trying to slam Facebook and MySpace, said "A lot that you have heard here is about platforms and who is going to win. That is Paleolithic thinking. The Web has already won. The web is the Platform. So let’s go build the programmable Web."

I was rather surprised, because I heard that same line just two days ago, from Dare Obasanjo.  Jeff apparently reads Dare's blog, and was in a hurry to prepare his speech.
...
When I hear someone talk about the web as a platform, I have a pretty clear picture:

• Utilizes open standards, preferably mature specifications and preferably from W3C
• Utilizes web client runtime that has massive deployment; depends only on functionality that can be found in the majority of browsers
• Runs the same no matter who is hosting the code

This is non-negotiable!  When any normal person writes "for the web", this is what she means! 

Joshua goes on to cite Google for hypocrisy because it's widget platform is every bit as proprietary as those of MySpace and Facebook, and Google's doesn't use any of the ad-hoc standards for exposing social graph data in a shareable way (FOAF, XFN, etc).

Although all the things Joshua lists are important, they aren't what I was really harping on when I wrote the post referenced by Joshua. The problem with the Facebook platform is that although you can use it to build Web applications, they are not on the Web. What do I mean by being on the Web? Here's a sampling of writings from across the Web that does a better of job of explaining this than I ever could

Tim Berners-Lee

When I invented the Web, I didn't have to ask anyone's permission. Now, hundreds of millions of people are using it freely.

Jason Kottke

Faced with competition from this open web, AOL lost...running a closed service with custom content and interfaces was no match for the wild frontier of the web. Maybe if they'd done some things differently, they would have fared better, but they still would have lost. In competitive markets, open and messy trumps closed and controlled in the long run.

Anil Dash

It's not true to say that Facebook is the new AOL, and it's oversimplification to say that Facebook's API is the new Blackbird, or the new Rainman. But Facebook is part of the web. Think of the web, of the Internet itself, as water. Proprietary platforms based on the web are ice cubes. They can, for a time, suspend themselves above the web at large. But over time, they only ever melt into the water.

I’ve been reading recently that a number of social networking sites are rushing to launch [or re-launch] a widgets platform given the success of the Facebook platform. There have been announcements about a MySpace platform which claim that

it will essentially be a set of APIs and a new markup language that will allow third party developers to create applications that run within MySpace. Developers will be able to include Flash applets, iFrame elements and Javascript snippets in their applications, and access most of the core MySpace resources (profile information, friend list, activity history, etc.). Unlike existing widgets on MySpace, developers will be able to access deep profile and other information about users and bake it into the applications.

Advertising can be included on the application pages (called control pages) and developers will keep 100% of the revenue. Ads may not be placed within widgets that appear on MySpace pages, however.

There have been similar announcements from LinkedIn and Google. The problem is that every one of these widget platforms being proposed by the various social networking sites are incompatible. This means that Web developers has to build a separate application for each of these sites using proprietary technologies (e.g. FBML) and proprietary APIs (e.g. FQL). Since very few Web developers or Web companies will be able to support significant applications on every one of these platforms, the question then becomes “Which platform should you bet on?” and “How do you make the decision to bet on a platform.”

Right now the gold standard in widget platforms for social networking sites is the Facebook platform. There are several reasons for this and competitors planning to build similar platforms need to meet the following criteria.

1. Monetization: Facebook encourages developers to monetize their widgets by placing ads in their widgets. Although Facebook has not actively helped developers by providing an ad platform, there is now a healthy marketplace of Facebook ad networks that developers can choose from. It has even been rumored that Google will be getting in the Facebook ad provider game. +1 to Facebook.

2. Distribution and Reach: A big problem you’ll face when you’ve built a great product is that it is a lot harder than you expect for people to actually find out about and try your product. This means any avenue that increases the potential reach and distribution of your product is bringing money in your pocket. Not only does Facebook have several million active and engaged users, the Facebook platform also provides several mechanisms that encourage the viral spread of applications which developers consistently rave about. No other social networking site’s widget platform even comes close. +1 to Facebook.

3. Access to User Data: Social networking sites are all about connecting people to the people they care about and their interests. This means that applications built on these platforms should be able to determine a user’s friends and interests to be able to give an optimal experience. The Facebook platform is unprecedented in the arena of widget platforms when it comes to the amount of user information it exposes to applications with methods like friends.get, users.getInfo, photos.get and even marketplace.getListings. +1 to Facebook.

4. Ability to Build an Integrated and Immersive Experience: One place where the Facebook platform really changed the game is that widgets weren’t just relegated to a tiny box on the user’s profile like they are on other social networking sites but instead developers could build full blown applications that integrated fully into the Facebook experience. It’s a lot easier to keep users engaged and build non-intrusive advertising into your application if your entire application doesn’t have to fit in some 4” X 4” box on the user’s profile. +1 to Facebook.

5. Applications Shielded from the “Winner’s Curse” of Web Development: The more successful your application becomes on the Web, the more money you have to spend on server related resources. Everyone knows the story of iLike scrambling to borrow money and servers because their Facebook application was more successful than they anticipated. Since a lot of widget developers are not richly funded startups or big companies, they may not be able to bear the costs of actually building a successful Web application without help from the platform vendor. A number of platform vendors provides hosting for static files and data storage APIs although none go as far as full blown application hosting...yet.  +0.5 to Facebook.

From my perspective, if a social networking site’s widget platform doesn’t meet all criteria, then it can’t be considered a real competitor to Facebook’s platform. And as a developer if I had to choose between that platform and Facebook’s, there would be no choice to make.

Now if you can afford multiple development efforts building widgets/applications for several disparate social networking site platforms, the list above is a good starting point for prioritizing the which social networking site’s to build widgets/applications for first.   

Now playing: T.I. - U Don't Know Me

It looks like my favorite team in Windows Live scored another hit with their recent release. You can see it for yourself by going to http://maps.live.com. The product team has a huge list of the new changes in their post Live Search Maps v2 is out! Gemini Launches which list a number of significant features including

• generic directions to a specific location (e.g. if coming from I-5 North vs. if coming from I-5 South) without a specific starting point. I believe this is formally called 1–click directions.
• the ability to have the directions route around bad traffic
• the ability to import GeoRSS, GPX and KML files as collections
• increased metadata about businesses from partner companies like InfoUSA, CitySearch, and Gayot.

Surprisingly, my favorite features of the new release don’t seem to have been mentioned. The removal of dual search boxes along with some of the other user interface niceties such as suggesting “Work” or “Home” when a user attempts to save a location are just great.

There was also a bug in the driving directions to my house from Redmond which was also fixed in this release. I never even got around to mentioning it to the team. Now that’s what I call service.  

Now playing: Lil Wayne - Go DJ (Remix) (feat. Slim Thug & Mannie Fresh)

Disclaimer: Although I work on the What’s New feed in Windows Live Spaces this should not be considered an announcement or precursor to an announcement of upcoming features of any Windows Live service.

I spend a lot of my time these days thinking about digital lifestyle aggregators such as Facebook and FriendFeed. One of the things I wonder about is how to make them more relevant to users as a way to stay connected to each other without seeming confusing, overwhelming or just plain spammy.

For instance, I look at the Facebook News Feed as the first significant implementation of this concept to hit the mainstream and I try to see what we can learn from their mistakes and where there is room for improvement. Below are two mistakes and one place I see room for improvement in the news feed as currently implemented by Facebook. The screenshot below is provided as a reference point.

Wall Posts

I’m now quite convinced that having wall posts show up in the news feed is a mistake. In general, Facebook already indulges in bad design by having a Wall-to-Wall posting which means that you can be viewing a friend’s wall and may only see one half of the conversation. So there is always a confusing loss of context when reading a wall on Facebook. This loss of context is exacerbated by adding wall posts to the news feed since now we not only have to deal with hearing one side of a conversation. Instead a user logs in and is confronted with a statement from the middle of a conversation, clicks through and only sees half the conversation, tries to click through to that and may not have access to both user’s walls.

More than once I’ve logged into Facebook and been confronted with wall posts that would have been embarassing to the posters if they realized that their banter on some person’s guestbook wall was being broadcast out of context to all their co-workers, their manager and even their VP/CxO via the news feed.

Application Installations

Although I don’t agree with Kara Swisher for criticizing Facebook applications as being mostly trivial time wasters instead of professional tools, I do agree with her that most apps on the site aren’t of value. This means that using up my screen real estate to tell me that a buddy has installed the Pink Ribbon application or the ProductPulse application is spam almost every single time you do it. One should also consider that Facebook limits the amount of updates from your friends they show in your news feed to ensure a good mix of updates. I suspect most users would gladly trade the slots taken up by notifications of application installs for more personally relevant updates from their social network.

The notifications about application installs showing up in the news feed is nice for developers but I question it’s value to users. Especially when you consider that Facebook applications already have ways to spread virally via application requests which has unfortunately led to Facebook Application Fatigue by their users.

Groups and Events

Today, a lot of groups on Facebook are there primarily as a way to declare affiliation as opposed to being an active community of users such as you’d find on sites like MSN Groups or Yahoo! Groups. I joined groups like I Dont care How Comfortable Crocs Are, You Look Like A Dumbass, I Am Fluent in Sarcasm, and If Wikipedia Says It, It Must Be True because I thought joining them would look funny on my friend’s news feeds as opposed to wanting to be part of these groups either as a lurker or as a regular discussion participant.

One question is why Facebook uses the news feed to drive user to user traffic but not user to group traffic besides the “Dare has joined People Who Always Have To Spell Their Names For Other People” which encourages people to join the group but doesn’t encourage them to participate in the group. It may be that they don’t want users creating online groups within the site like you find in services like MSN Groups or Yahoo! Groups or it could just be that their platform can’t support that scale of activity. I wonder…

The same questions apply for events as well. It would be cool if after I was invited to an event, I also got news feed updates via my news feed later on telling me if my friends were attending or that the event was getting lots of attendees which may influence my attendance. Again, you have to wonder why such obvious enhancements haven’t made it into their service.

Now playing: Three 6 Mafia - Late Nite Tip

Mary Jo Foley has a delightful post entitled Are all ‘open’ Web platforms created equal? where she wonders why there is more hype around the Facebook platform, Google’s muched hyped attempt to counter it on November 5th and other efforts that Anil Dash has accurately described as the new Blackbird as opposed to open API efforts from Microsoft. She posits two theories which are excerpted below

Who isn’t mentioned in any of these conversations? Microsoft. Is it because Microsoft hasn’t opened up its various Windows Live APIs to other developers? Nope. Microsoft announced in late April its plans for opening up and providing licensing terms for several of its key Windows Live APIs, including Windows Live Contacts, Windows Live Spaces Photo Control and Windows Live Data Protocols.

So why is Microsoft seemingly irrelevant to the conversation, when it comes to opening up its Web platform? There are a few different theories.

“I think the excitement about the Facebook platform stems from the fact that it addresses the problem of building publicity and distribution for a new application. Any developer can create an application for Facebook, and the social network will help propagate that application, exposing it to new users,” said Matt Rosoff, an analyst with Directions on Microsoft.

…

Microsoft, for its part, believes it is offering Web platform APIs the way that developers want, making them available under different business terms and permitting third parties to customize them inside their own sites, according to George Moore, General Manager of Windows Live. But Moore also acknowledges Microsoft has a different outlook in terms of which data it exposes via its APIs.

“Facebook gives you access to your social-graph (social-networking) data. We don’t do that. We have a gallery that allows users to extend Live Spaces,” Moore said.

Moore declined to comment on when or if Microsoft planned to allow developers to tap directly into user’s social-graph data like Facebook has done.

I see GeorgeM all the time, so I doubt he’ll mind if I clarify his statement above since it gives the wrong impression of our efforts given the context in which it was placed. If we go back to the definition of a social graph it’s clear that what is important is that it is a graph of user relationships not one that is tied to a particular site or service. From that perspective the Windows Live Contacts API which provides a RESTful interface to the contents of a user’s Windows Live address book complete with the list of tags/relationship types the user has applied to these contacts (e.g. “Family”, “Friends”, “Coworkers”, etc) as well as which of these contacts are the user’s buddies in Windows Live Messenger is a social graph API. 

On the other hand, this API does not give you access to the user’s Spaces friends list.  My assumption is that Mary Jo’s questions were specific to social networking sites which is why George gave that misleading answer. In addition, Yaron is fond of pointing out to me that the API is in alpha so there is still a lot that can change from now until we stamp it as v1. Until then, I’ll also decline to comment on any future plans.

As for the claim made by Matt Rosoff, I tend to agree with his assertion that the viral propagation of applications via the Facebook’s social graph is attractive to developers. However this attractiveness comes with the price of both the users and developers being locked in Facebook’s trunk.

I personally believe that the Web is the platform and this philosophy shines through in the API efforts at Microsoft. It may be that this is not as attractive to developers today as it should be but eventually the Web will win. Everyone who has fought the Web has lost. Facebook will not be an exception.

Now playing: Tony Yayo - I Know You Dont Love Me (feat. G-Unit)

Erick Schonfeld from TechCrunch writes in his post Windows Live SkyDrive Doubles Storage to 1GB, Still Can’t Keep Up With Gmail that

Microsoft doubled the online storage consumers can get for free in Windows Live SkyDrive. It’s hard to get excited about that when Gmail is already giving me 2.9 GB of storage, with more on the way—4GB by the end of the month, and 6GB by early January, according to one estimate.

You’d think that someone who works as a pseudo-journalist on a popular technology website would be able to tell the difference between an email service and a file storage service. You’d think he’d want to compare apples to apples and compare GMail’s 2.9 GB of Storage with Windows Live Hotmail’s 5 Gigabytes of Storage or compare the capabuilities of Microsoft’s SkyDrive with Google’s GDrive. 

Except Google hasn’t figured out how to ship GDrive for over 5 years so it would be an apples to vaporware comparison. 

Much love to my SkyDrive peeps on their new release. The champagne and ice cream yesterday was much appreciated. You can learn more about their release from the post Updates to Windows Live SkyDrive! on their team blog.  

Now playing: Foo Fighters - My Hero

Via Robert Scoble, I stumbled on Kara Swisher’s post entitled The Children’s Hour: Facebook Apps Are for Toddlers (There, We Said It) which has the following gem which is excerpted below

But, so far, as popular as those apps have become, what Zuckerberg and the widget-makers have wrought is mostly silly, useless and time-wasting and the kazillion users of these widgets are pretty much just acting like little children.

I never thought I would call the often frivolous AOL back in the day–very simply, a Neanderthal version of Facebook–a mature offering in comparison.

While I will admit when I am not chewing nails that a lot of these apps are somewhat fun, I can’t help but ask myself that lyric from the old Peggy Lee classic: “Is that all there is?”

This is like criticizing the Incredible Hulk for being green. You sound more ridiculous than what you are criticizing. The fact is Facebook is a site that was designed as an online version of the places where college students kill time in between classes. It’s a virtual place for “chilling in front of the library” or “maxing in front of the frat house”, so what do you expect from applications targetted at its users?

Next thing you know, Kara Swisher will be pointing out that most of the videos on YouTube aren’t worthy of being nominated for any academy awards in the short film category and that most of the widgets on MySpace are time wasting frivolities gadgets instead of professional tools.  .  

If you want a sophisticated widget platform that is intended for knowledge workers and business professionals, I’ve heard SalesForce AppExchange is exactly what you are looking for. Enjoy.

Now playing: Fabolous - Baby Don't Go (feat. Jermaine Dupri & T-Pain)