In the past three months, I’ve seen three moves by Google that highlight that not only is their strategic vision becoming more questionable but their engineering talent has also begun to show signs of being seriously deficient

This year is going to be a watershed year for the company. They are eroding a lot of the geek cred they’ve built up over the past decade. That will be hard to regain once it is lost.

In the meantime, I’ve noticed an uptick in the quiet smart folks you don’t see heralded in blogs turning down offers from Google and picking another horse when the job offers come knocking. Watershed year, indeed.

Now playing: John Legend - I Can Change (feat. Snoop Doggy Dogg)


 

December 19, 2007
@ 03:14 PM

I’m now at the point where I really, really, really want to blog but have too much going on at work and at home to take the time out to do it. To deal with this I’ve created a Twitter account. You can follow me at http://twitter.com/Carnage4Life.

Things I’ll eventually write about in my blog

  • Amazon Simple DB
  • A new release of RSS Bandit shipping this weekend
  • Thoughts on integrating RSS Bandit and Google Reader based on information found from the pyrfeed documentation 
  • Expressiveness of Python vs. C# 3.0

In the meantime, you can get my thoughts on various topics in 140 characters or less from Twitter.

PS: I’m amazed at how obnoxious Twitter is about collecting the password to your GMail/Yahoo/Hotmail/etc account so it can spam your friends. At first glance, it looked as if it wouldn’t even let me use the service until I gave up those passwords. This crap has gotten out of hand.

PPS: Anyone got decent recommendations for a Twitter client that works on Vista and XP?

Now playing: N.W.A. - Real N*ggaz Don't Die


 

Categories: Personal

December 17, 2007
@ 05:52 PM

Recently my Cingular 3125 crapped out and I picked up an AT&T Tilt (aka HTC Kaiser) which I've already developed a love<->hate relationship with. I'd originally considered getting an iPhone but quickly gave up that dream when I realized it didn't integrate well with Microsoft Exchange. When you attend 3 - 5 meetings a day, having a phone that can tell you the room number, topic and attendees of your next meeting as you hop, skip and jump from meeting room to meeting room is extremely useful.

There's a lot I like about the phone. The QWERTY keyboard and wide screen make writing emails and browsing the Web a much better experience than on my previous phone. In addition, being able flip out the keyboard & tilt the screen is a spiffy enough effect that it gets ooohs and aaahs from onlookers the first time you do it. Another nice touch is that there are shortcut keys for Internet Explorer, your message center and the Start menu. When I was trying out the phone, the AT&T sales person said I'd become hooked on using those buttons and he was right, without them using the phone would be a lot more cumbersome.

There are some features specific to Windows Mobile 6 that I love. The first is that I can use any MP3, WAV or AAC file as a ringtone. After spending $2.50 for a 20 second snippet of a song I already owned and not being able to re-download the song after switching phones, I decided I wanted no part of this hustle from the cell phone companies. All I needed to do was download MP3 Cutter and I have as many ringtones as I have songs on my iPod. They've also fixed the bug from Windows Mobile 5 where if your next appointment shown on the home screen is for a day other than the current day, clicking on it takes you today's calendar instead of the calendar for that day. My phone also came with Office Mobile which means I can actually read all those Word, Excel and Powerpoint docs I get in email all the time.

So what do I dislike about this phone? The battery life is ridiculously short. My phone is consistently out of battery life at the end of the work day. I've never had this problem with the half dozen phones I've had over the past decade. What's even more annoying is that unlike every other phone I've ever seen, there is no battery life indicator on the main screen. Instead I have to navigate to Start menu->Settings->System->Power if I want to check my battery life. On the other hand, there are redundant indicators showing whether I am on the EDGE or 3G networks where the battery indicator used to be in Windows Mobile 5. Another problem is that voice dialing is cumbersome and often downright frustrating. There is a great rant about this in the post What's Wrong With Windows Mobile and How WM7 and WM8 Are Going to Fix It on Gizmodo which is excerpted below

the day-to-day usage of Windows Mobile isn't what you'd call "friendly," either. In fact, it'd probably punch you in the face if you even made eye contact. Take dialing, for instance. How can the main purpose of a phone—calling someone—be so hard to do?

...

If you're using a Windows Mobile Professional device, you have a few options, none of which are good:

• You can pull out the stylus to tap in the digits. This requires two hands.

• You can try and use your fingertip to call, which doesn't normally work, so you'll use your fingernail, which does work but, as it results in many misdialed numbers, takes forever.

• You can slide out the keyboard and find the dialpad buried among the QWERTY keys and dial, which requires two hands and intense concentration.

• You can try and bring up the contact list, which takes a long-ass time to scroll through, or you can slide out the keyboard again and search by name. Again, two hands.

• Voice Command has been an option for years, but then again, it kinda works, but it doesn't work well.

• Probably the best way to go is to program your most important numbers into speed dial, as you'll be able to actually talk to the correct person within, say, three button presses.

Compare that to the iPhone, which has just a touchscreen, but gets you to the keypad, your favorites, recent calls or your contact list, all within two key presses of the home screen.

It's amazing to me that there are five or six different options if you want to dial and call a number yet they all are a usability nightmare. One pet peeve that is missing from the Gizmodo rant is that when a call is connected, the keypad is hidden. This means that if you are calling any sort of customer service system (e.g. AT&T wireless, Microsoft's front desk, your cable company, etc) you need to first tap "Keypad" with your fingernail and then deal with the cumbersome dialpad.

So far, I like the phone more than I dislike it.  **** out of *****.

I'd love to see the next version of the iPhone ship with the ability to talk to Exchange and support for 3G, and see whether the next generation of Windows Mobile devices stack up.

Rihanna - Hate That I Love You (feat. Ne-Yo)


 

Categories: Technology

DISCLAIMER: This post does not reflect the opinions, thoughts, strategies or future intentions of my employer. These are solely my personal opinions. If you are seeking official position statements from Microsoft, please go here.

Last week, Microsoft announced Office Live Workspace which is billed as an online extension to Microsoft Office. Unsurprisingly, the word from the pundits has been uniformly negative especially when comparing it to Google Docs.

An example of the typical pundit reaction to this announcement is Ken Fisher's post on Ars Technica entitled Office Live Workspace revealed: a free 250MB "SharePoint Lite" for everyone where he writes

Office Live Workspace is not an online office suite. The aim of OLW is simple: give web-connected users a no-cost place to store, share, and collaborate on Office documents. To that end, the company will give registered users 250 MB of storage space, which can be used to store documents "in the cloud" or even "host" them for comments by other users equipped with just a web browser (you will be able to manage the access rights of other users). However, and this is important: you cannot create new Office documents with this feature nor can you edit documents beyond adding comments without having a copy of Microsoft Office installed locally.

As you can see, this is not a "Google Docs killer" or even an "answer" to Google Docs. This is not an online office suite, it's "software plus service." Microsoft's move here protects the company's traditional Office business, in that it's really positioned as a value-add to Office, rather than an Office alternative. Microsoft has seen success with its business-oriented SharePoint offering, and Microsoft is taking a kind of "SharePoint Lite" approach with OLW.

The focus of pundits on "an online office suite" and a "Google Docs Killer" completely misses the point when it comes to satisfy the needs of the end user. As a person who is a fan of the Google Docs approach, there are three things I like that it brings to the table

  • it is free for consumers and people with basic needs
  • it enables "anywhere access" to your documents
  • it requires zero install to utilize

The fact that it is Web-based and uses AJAX instead of Win32 code running on my desktop is actually a negative when it comes to responsiveness and feature set. However the functionality of Google Docs hits a sweet spot for a certain class of users authoring certain classes of documents. By the way, this is a textbook example of low-end disruption from Clay Christensen's book "The Innovator's Dilemma". Taking a lesson from much another hyped business book, Money Ball, disruption often happens when the metrics used to judge successful products don't actually reflect the current realities of the market.  

The reality of today's market is that a lot of computer users access their data from multiple computers and perhaps their mobile device during the course of a normal day.  The paradigm of disconnected desktop software is an outdated relic that is dying away. Another reality of today's market is that end users have gotten used to being able to access and utilize world class software for free and without having to install anything thanks to the Googles, Facebooks and Flickrs of the world. When you put both realities together, you get the list of three bullet points above which are the key benefits that Google Docs brings to the table.

The question is whether there is anything Microsoft can do to stem what seems like inevitable disruption by Google Docs and if so, does Office Live Workspace improve the company's chances in any way? I believe the answer to both questions is Yes. If you are already a user of Microsoft's office productivity software then Office Live Workspace gives you a free way to get "anywhere access" to your documents without having to install anything even if the computer does not have Microsoft Office installed.

As I mentioned earlier, a number of pundits have been fairly dismissive of this and declared a no-contest victory for the Google Docs approach. Steven Burke has an article entitled Five Reasons Google Docs Beats Office Live Workspace where he lists a number of ways Google Docs compares favorably Microsoft Workspace. Of his list of five reasons, only one seems like a genuine road block that will hurt adoption by end users. Below are his reasons in bold with my comments underneath.

Steven Burke: Office Live Workspace Does Not Allow You To Create And Edit Documents Within A Web Page. Google Docs Does

This is a lame restriction. I assume this is to ensure that the primary beneficaries of this offering have purchased Microsoft Office (thus it is a software + services play instead of a software as a service play). I can understand the business reasons why this exists but it is often a good business strategy to cannibalize yourself before competitors do it especially when it is clear that such cannibalization is inevitable. The fact that I am tethered to Office in creating new documents is lame. I hope competitive pressure makes this "feature" go away.

Steven Burke: Microsoft Office Live Workspace Has A 250 Mbyte 1,000 Average Office Documents Limitation. Google Docs Does Not.

I don't worry to much about space limitations especially since this is in beta. If Microsoft can figure out how to give people 5GB of space for email in Hotmail and 1GB file storage space in SkyDrive all for FREE, I'm sure we can figure out how to give more than 250MB of storage to people who've likely spent hundreds of dollars buying our desktop software.  

Steven Burke: Microsoft's Office Live WorkSpace Is VaporWare. Google Docs is Real.

The vaporware allegation only makes sense if you think (a) it is never going to ship or (b) you need a solution today. If not, it is a product announcement like any other in the software industry meant to give people a heads up on what's coming down the line. If industry darlings like Apple and Google can get away with it, why single out Microsoft?

Steven Burke: You're Better Off Trusting Google Than Microsoft When It Comes To Web 2.0 Security Issues.

I don't know about you, but over the past year I've heard about several  security flaws in Google's AJAX applications including Cross Site Request Forgery issues in Gmail, leaking people's email addresses via the chat feature of Google presentations, cross site scripting issues that allowed people to modify your documents in Google Docs & Spreadsheets, and lots more. On the flip side, I haven't heard about even half as many security issues in Microsoft's family of Web applications whether they are Office Live, MSN or Windows Live branded.

In fact, one could argue that trusting Google to keep your data secure in their AJAX applications is like trusting a degenerate gambler with your life savings. So far the company has proven to be inept at securing their online services which is problematic if they are pitching to store people's vital business documents.

Steven Burke: Office Live Workspace Is Optimized For Microsoft Office Word, Excel and PowerPoint Data. Google Is Optimized For Web 2.0.

I guess this means Google's service is more buzzword compliant than Microsoft's. So what? At the end of the day, this most important thing is providing value to your customers not repping every buzzword that spews forth from the likes of Mike Arrington and Tim O'Reilly.  

Tomoyasu Hotei - Battle without Honor or Humanity


 

Categories: Technology

Jeff Atwood has a blog post entitled Sorting for Humans : Natural Sort Order where he writes

The default sort functions in almost every programming language are poorly suited for human consumption. What do I mean by that? Well, consider the difference between sorting filenames in Windows explorer, and sorting those very same filenames via Array.Sort() code:

Implementing a natural sort is more complex than it seems, and not just for the gnarly i20n issues I've hinted at, above. But the Python implementations are impressively succinct

I tried to come up with a clever, similarly succinct C# 3.0 natural sort implementation, but I failed. I'm not interested in a one-liner contest, necessarily, but it does seem to me that a basic natural sort shouldn't require the 40+ lines of code it takes in most languages.

Since I’m still in my “learning Python by mapping it to C#” phase I thought this should be a straightforward task. Below is the equivalent IronPython code for natural sort which is slightly modified from the code posted in Jeff’s post along with what I hoped to be a succint version in C# 2.0. It would definitely be shorter in C# 3.0 [which I don’t plan to start using for another year or so]. The Python snippet below takes advantage of some interesting rules around comparing lists of objects which don’t exist in C#. I’m sure I could reduce the size of the C# code while maintaining readability but my procrastination time is over and I need to get to work. Wink

Natural Sort in IronPython

import re

def sort_nicely( l ):
  """ Sort the given list in the way that humans expect. """
   
  convert = lambda x: x.isdigit() and int(x) or x
  alphanum = lambda key: [ convert(c) for c in re.split('([0-9]+)', key) ]
  l.sort( key=alphanum ) #serious magic happens here
  return l

print sort_nicely(["z22.txt", "z5.txt" , "z.txt", "z10.txt", "z300.txt", "z2.txt", "z11.txt", "y.txt", "z", "z4.txt", "za.txt" ])

Natural Sort in C# 2.0


using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Text.RegularExpressions;


public class Test {


   ///<summary>Compare two lists of strings using Python rules and natural order semantics</summary>
  public static int NaturalCompare(IList<string> a, IList<string> b) {
    int y, z, len = (a.Count < b.Count ? a.Count : b.Count);

    for (int i = 0; i < len; i++) {
      if (a[i].Equals(b[i])) continue;

      bool w = Int32.TryParse(a[i], out y), x = Int32.TryParse(b[i], out z);
      bool bothNumbers = w && x, bothNotNumbers = !w && !x;

      if (bothNumbers) return y.CompareTo(z);
      else if (bothNotNumbers) return a[i].CompareTo(b[i]);
      else if (w) return -1;
      else return 1; //numbers always less than words or letters
    }
    return (a.Count.CompareTo(b.Count)); //subset list is considered smaller 
  }

  public static List<string> SortNicely(List<string> list) {
    Regex re
= new Regex("([0-9]+)");
    list
.Sort(delegate(string x, string y) { return NaturalCompare(re.Split(x), re.Split(y)); });
    return list;
  }


  public static void Main(string[] args) {
    List<string> l = new List<string>(new string[] { "z.txt", "y.txt", "z22.txt", "z5.txt", "z10.txt", "z3.txt", "z2.txt", "za.txt", "z11.txt", "z400.txt" });
    foreach (string s in SortNicely(l)) Console.WriteLine(s);
  }
}

Now playing: Notorious B.I.G. - Real N*ggas Do Real Things


 

Categories: Programming

Yesterday I read about the Opening up Facebook Platform Architecture. My initial thoughts are that Facebook has done what Google claimed to have done but didn't with Open Social. Facebook seems to have provided detailed specs on how to build an interoperable widget platform unlike Google who unleashed a bunch of half baked REST API specs with no details about the "widget" aspect of the platform unless you are building an Orkut application.

As I've thought about this over the past few weeks, building a widget platform that is competitive with Facebook's is hard work. Remember all those stories about OpenSocial apps being hacked in 45 minutes or less? The problem was that sites like Plaxo Pulse and Ning simply didn't think through all the ramifications of building a widget platform and bumped up against the kind of "security 101" issues that widget platforms like Netvibes, iGoogle and Live.com gadgets solved years ago.  I started to wonder exactly how many of these social networking sites will be able to keep up with the capabilities and features of platforms like Facebook's and Orkut's when such development is outside their core competency.

In fact let's take a quote from the TechCrunch story First OpenSocial Application Hacked Within 45 Minutes 

theharmonyguy says he’s successfully hacked Facebook applications too, including the Superpoke app, but that it is more difficult:

Facebook apps are not quite this easy. The main issue I’ve found with Facebook apps is being able to access people’s app-related history; for instance, until recently, I could access the SuperPoke action feed for any user. (I could also SuperPoke any user; not sure if they’ve fixed that one. Finally, I can access all the SuperPoke actions - they haven’t fixed that one, but it’s more just for fun.) There are other apps where, last I checked, that was still an issue ( e.g. viewing anyone’s Graffiti posts).

But the way Facebook setup their platform, it’s tons harder to actually imitate a user and change profile info like this. I’m sure this kind of issue could be easily solved by some verification code on RockYou’s part, but it’s not inherent in the platform - unlike Facebook. I could do a lot more like this on FB if Facebook hadn’t set things up the way they did.

At that point I ask myself, how useful is it to have the specs for the platform if you aren't l337 enough to implement it yourself? [Update: It looks like Google is well aware of this problem and has launched an Apache project called Shindig which is meant to be an Open Source widget platform that implements the Open Social APIs. This obviously indicates that Google realizes the specs are worthless and instead shipping a reusable widget platform is the way to go. It’s interesting to note that with this move Google is attempting to be a software vendor, advertising partner and competitor to the Web’s social networking sites. That must lead to some confusing internal meetings. Smile ]

For now, Facebook has definitely outplayed Google here. The most interesting part of the Facebook announcement to me is

Now we also want to share the benefits of our work by enabling other social sites to use our platform architecture as a model. In fact, we’ll even license the Facebook Platform methods and tags to other platforms. Of course, Facebook Platform will continue to evolve, but by enabling other social sites to use what we’ve learned, everyone wins -- users get a better experience around the web, developers get access to new audiences, and social sites get more applications.

it looks like Facebook plans to assert their Intellectual Property rights on anyone who clones their platform. This is one of the reasons I've found Open Social to be worrisome abuse of the term "open". Like Facebook, Google shipped specs for a proprietary platform whose copyrights, patents, etc belong to them. Any company that implements Open Social or even GData which it is built upon is using Google's intellectual property.

What's to stop Google from asserting these intellectual property rights the way Facebook is doing today? What exactly is "open" about it that makes it any less proprietary than what Facebook just announced?


 

danah boyd writes eloquently about the slippery slope we are now headed down thanks to way Facebook is influencing the design of social software applications when it comes to privacy. She writes in here post entitled Facebook's "opt-out" precedent

I've been watching the public outcry over Facebook's Beacon (social ads) program with great interest…For all of the repentance by Facebook, what really bugs me is that this is the third time that Facebook has violated people's sense of privacy in a problematic way.

In each incident, Facebook pushed the boundaries of privacy a bit further and, when public outcry took place, retreated just a wee bit to make people feel more comfortable. In other words, this is "slippery slope" software development.

I kinda suspect that Facebook loses very little when there is public outrage. They gain a lot of free press and by taking a step back after taking 10 steps forward, they end up looking like the good guy, even when nine steps forward is still a dreadful end result. This is how "slippery slopes" work and why they are so effective in political circles. Most people will never realize how much of their data has been exposed to so many different companies and people. They will still believe that Facebook is far more private than other social network sites (even though this is patently untrue). And, unless there is a large lawsuit or new legislation introduced, I suspect that Facebook will continue to push the edges when it comes to user privacy.

Lots of companies are looking at Facebook's success and trying to figure out how to duplicate it. Bigger companies are watching to see what they can get away with so that they too can take that path.

I’ve stated before that one of my concerns about Beacon is that it legitimizes what is truly worrying behavior when it comes to companies respecting people’s privacy on the Web. As it stands now we have companies thinking it is OK to send out information about money you are loaning to your friend and that it is OK to violate federal legislation and share information about movies you have rented to watch in the privacy of your home without user consent.

This is an unprecedented degree of violation of the sanctity of the customer’s private Web experience. What I find sad is that not only are the technology unsavvy giving up their privacy on the Web in a way that they would never accept in meat space, but that even the technological savvy who know what is going on just assume it is par for the course. For example, see comments by John Dowdell of Adobe who implies that we were already led down this slippery slope by DoubleClick in the 90s and this is just the natural progression.

I actually worry less about Facebook and more about what happens when the Googles, DoubleClicks, Microsofts, and Yahoos of the world decide that “If Facebook can get away with it, we should do it too especially if we want to stay competitive”. In that world, your privacy and mine becomes collateral damage in the chase after the almighty dollar euro.

Now playing: Ashanti - Unfoolish (feat. Notorious B.I.G.)


 

Categories: Social Software

Things have been progressing well with RSS Bandit development recently. Some of our recent changes seem so valuable to me that I’ve been flirting with throwing out all our plans for Phoenix and shipping a new release right away. That’s how much I like the personalized meme tracking feature. I also fixed a bug where we continually fetch favicons for all your feeds if one of the sites in your subscriptions gives us an invalid image when we fetch its favicon. This bug affects me personally since a lot of RSS Bandit users are subscribed to my site and are polling my favicons several times an hour instead of once every startup or less. 

Despite those thoughts, we will continue with our plan to add the top 5 features for the next version of RSS Bandit which I blogged about last month. I need to do some fit & finish work this weekend on the meme tracking feature and then it is on to the next set of tasks. Torsten will be looking at ways to add UI for managing your pending and downloaded podcasts. I will be working on adding support for treating the Windows RSS platform and Newsgator Online as “Feed Sources”. This will mean that you can use RSS Bandit in standalone mode and as a desktop client for feeds that you are either sharing with Newsgator applications  (FeedDemon, NewsGator Online, Net News Wire, etc) or Windows RSS platform applications (Internet Explorer 7, Outlook 2007, etc).

For a long time, people have been asking for me to treat services like Newsgator Online in the same way an email client like Outlook treats mail servers like Exchange instead of the arms length degree of integration I’ve done in the past. It’s taken a while but I’m now going to go ahead and do just that.  

With that done, we’d probably have enough new features to ship an alpha and start getting initial feedback. I estimate that this will happen sometime in the first quarter of 2008. I also plan to go over our backlog of bugs during the holiday season and will knock out as many as I can before the alpha.

If you have any questions or comments, fire away. I’m all ears.

Now playing: Scarface - Diary of a Madman


 

Categories: RSS Bandit

The top story in my favorite aggregator today is the announcement on Scott Guthrie’s blog of the ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions CTP Preview. Normally, announcements related to ASP.NET would not interest me except this time is an interesting item in the list of technologies being released

ADO.NET Data Services: In parallel with the ASP.NET Extensions release we will also be releasing the ADO.NET Entity Framework.  This provides a modeling framework that enables developers to define a conceptual model of a database schema that closely aligns to a real world view of the information.  We will also be shipping a new set of data services (codename "Astoria") that make it easy to expose REST based API endpoints from within your ASP.NET applications.

Wow. It looks like Astoria has quickly moved from being an experimental project to see what it would like to place RESTful interfaces on top of SQL Server database to being very close to shipping a production version.  I dug around for more posts about Astoria ADO.NET Data Services so I could find out what was in the CTP and came across two posts from Mike Flasko and Andy Conrad respectively.

In his post entitled ADO.NET Data Services ("Project Astoria") CTP is Released on the ADO.NET Data Services team blog Mike Flasko writes

The following features are in this CTP:

  • Support to create ADO.NET Data Services backed by:
    • A relational database by leveraging the Entity Framework
    • Any data source (file, web service, custom store, application logic layer, etc)
  • Serialization Formats:
    • Industry standard AtomPub serialization
    • JSON serialization
  • Simple HTTP interface
    • Any platform with an HTTP stack can easily consume a data service
    • Designed to leverage HTTP semantics and infrastructure already deployed at large
  • Client libraries:
    • .NET Framework
    • ASP.NET AJAX
    • Silverlight (coming soon)

This is sick. With Astoria I can expose my relational database or even a local just an XML file using a RESTful interface that utilizes the Atom Publishing Protocol or JSON. I am somewhat amused that one of the options is placing a RESTful interface over a SOAP Web Service. My, how times have changed…

It is pretty cool that Microsoft is the first major database vendor to bring the dream of the Atom store to fruition. I also like that one of the side effects of this is that there is now an AtomPub client library for .NET Framework. Smile

Andy Conrad has a blog post entitled Linq to REST which gives an idea of what happens when you combine the Astoria client library with the Language Integrated Query (LINQ) features of C# 3.0

    [OpenObject("PropBag")]
    public class Product{
        private Dictionary<string, object> propBag = new Dictionary<string, object>();

        [Key]
        public int ProductID { get; set; }        
        public string ProductName { get; set; }        
        public int UnitsInStock { get; set; }
        public IDictionary<string, object> PropBag { get { return propBag; } }
    }

        static void Main(string[] args){
            WebDataContext context = new WebDataContext("http://localhost:18752/Northwind.svc");
            var query = from p in context.CreateQuery<Product>("Products")
                        where p.UnitsInStock > 100
                        select p;

            foreach (Product p in query){
                Console.WriteLine(p.ProductName + " , UnitsInStock= " + p.UnitsInStock);
            }

        } 

If you hover over the query variable, you will actually see the Astoria URI which the Linq query is translated into by the Astoria client library:

http://localhost:18752/Northwind.svc/Products?$filter=(UnitsInStock)%20gt%20(100)

So, there you go.  Linq to Astoria's RESTFUL API.  In other words, Linq to REST. 

Like I said earlier, this is sick. I need to holla at Andy and see if there is a dependency on the Atom feed containing Microsoft specific extensions or whether this Linq to REST capability can be utilized over any arbitrary Atom feed.

Now playing: Jay-Z - Success (feat. Nas)