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David Treadwell has a blog post on the Windows Live Developer blog entitled David Treadwell on New and Updated Windows Live Platform Services where he previews some of the announcements that folks will get to dig into at MIX 08. There are a lot of items of note in his post but there is some stuff that stands out that I felt was worth calling out.

Windows Live Messenger Library (new to beta) – “Develop your own IM experience”

We are also opening up the Windows Live Messenger network for third-party web sites to reach the 300 million+ Windows Live Messenger users. The library is a JavaScript client API , so the user experience is primarily defined by the third party. When a third party integrates the Windows Live Messenger Library into their site they can define the look & feel to create their own IM experience. Unlike the existing third party wrappers for the MSN Protocol (the underlying protocol for Windows Live Messenger) the Windows Live Messenger Library securely authenticates users, therefore their Windows Live ID credentials are safe.

A couple of months ago we announced the Windows Live Messenger IM Control which enables you to embed an AJAX instant messaging window on any webpage so people can start IM conversations with you. I have one placed at http://carnage4life.spaces.live.com and it’s cool to have random readers of my blog start up conversations with me in the middle of my work day or at home via the IM control.

The team who delivered this has been hard at work and now they’ve built a library that enables any developer to build similar experiences on top of the Windows Live Messenger network. Completely customized IM integration is now available for anyone that wants it.  Sweet. Kudos to Keiji, Steve Gordon, Siebe and everyone else who had something to do with this for getting it out the door.

An interesting tidbit is that the library was developed in Script#. Three cheers for code generation.

Contacts API (progressed to Beta) – “Bring your friends”

Our goal is to help developers keep users at the center of their experience by letting them control their data and contact portability, while keeping their personal information private. A big step forward in that effort is today’s release to beta of Windows Live Contacts API . Web developers can use this API in production to enable their customers to transfer and share their contacts lists in a secure, trustworthy way (i.e., no more screen scraping)—a great step on the road toward data portability. (For more on Microsoft’s view on data portability, check out Inder Sethi’s video .) By creating an optimized mode for invitations, it allows users to share only the minimum amount of information required to invite friends to a site, this includes firstname / lastname / preferred email address. The Contacts API uses the new Windows Live ID Delegated Authentication framework; you can find out more here .

A lot of the hubbub around “data portability” has really been about exporting contact lists. Those of us working on the Contacts platform at Windows Live realize that there is a great demand for users to be able to access their social graph data securely from non-Microsoft services.  

The Windows Live Contacts API provides a way for Windows Live users to give an application permission to access their contact list in Windows Live (i.e. Hotmail address book/Live Messenger buddy list) without giving the application their username and password. It is our plan to kill the password anti-pattern when it comes to Windows Live services. If you are a developer of an application or Web site that screen scrapes Hotmail contacts, I’d suggest taking a look at this API instead of continuing in this unsavory practice.

Atom Publishing Protocol (AtomPub) as the future direction

Microsoft is making a large investment in unifying our developer platform protocols for services on the open, standards-based Atom format ( RFC 4287 ) and the Atom Publishing Protocol ( RFC 5023 ). At MIX we are enabling several new Live services with AtomPub endpoints which enable any HTTP-aware application to easily consume Atom feeds of photos and for unstructured application storage (see below for more details). Or you can use any Atom-aware public tools or libraries, such as .NET WCF Syndication to read or write these cloud service-based feeds.

In addition, these same protocols and the same services are now ADO.NET Data Services (formerly known as “ Project Astoria”) compatible. This means we now support LINQ queries from .NET code directly against our service endpoints, leveraging a large amount of existing knowledge and tooling shared with on-premise SQL deployments.

The first question that probably pops into the mind of regular readers of my blog is, “What happened to Web3S and all that talk about AtomPub not being a general purpose editing format for the Web?”. The fact is when we listened to the community of Web developers the feedback was overwhelmingly clear that people would prefer if we worked together with the community to make AtomPub work for the scenarios we felt it wasn’t suited for than Microsoft creating a competing proprietary protocol.

We listened and now here we are. If you are interested in the technical details of how Microsoft plans to use AtomPub and how we’ve dealt with the various issues we originally had with the protocol. I suggest subscribing to the Astoria team’s blog and check out the various posts on this topic by Pablo Castro. There’s a good post by Pablo discussing how Astoria describes relations between elements in AtomPub and suggests a mechanism for doing inline expansion of links. I’ll be providing my thoughts on each of Pablo’s posts and the responses as I find time during the coming weeks.

Windows Live Photo API (CTP Refresh with AtomPub end point)

The Windows Live Photo API allows users to securely grant permission (via Delegated Authentication) for a third party web site to create/read/update/delete on their photos store in Windows Live. The Photo API refresh has several things which make it easier and faster for third parties to implement.

• Third party web sites can you link/refer to images directly from the web browser so they no longer need to proxy images, and effectively save on image bandwidth bills.
• A new AtomPub end point which makes it even easier to integrate.

At the current time, I can’t find the AtomPub endpoint but that’s probably because the documentation hasn’t been refreshed. Moving the API to AtomPub is one of the consequences of the decision to standardize on AtomPub for Web services provided by Windows Live. Although I was part of the original decision to expose the API using WebDAV, I like the fact that all of our APIs will utilize a standard protocol and can take advantage of the breadth of Atom and AtomPub libraries that exist on various platforms.

I need to track down the AtomPub end point so I can compare and contrast it to the WebDAV version to see what we’ve gained and/or lost in the translation. Stay tuned.

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According to the blog post entitled on Microsoft Joins DataPortability.org on dev.live.com we learn

Today Microsoft is announcing that it has joined DataPortability.org, a group committed to advancing the conversation about the portability, security and privacy of individuals’ information online.  There are important security and privacy issues to solve as the internet evolves, and we are committed to being an integral part of the industry conversation on behalf of our users.

The decision to join DataPortability.org is an outgrowth of a deeper theme that technology and the internet should be deployed to help people be at the center of their online worlds, a theme that has begun to permeate our products and services over the past few years. We believe the logical evolution of the internet is to enable the removal of barriers to provide integrated, seamless experiences, but to do so in a manner that ensures that users retain full control over the security and privacy of their information.

Windows Live is focused on providing tools and a platform to enable these types of seamless experiences.  Windows Live has more than 420 million active Live IDs that work across our services and across partner sites. 

I’m sure some folks are wondering exactly what this means. Even though I was close to the decision making around this, I believe it is still too early to tell. Personally, I share Marc Canter’s skepticism about Dataportability.org given that so far there’s been a lot of hype but no real meat.

However we have real problems to solve as an industry. The lack of interoperability between various social software applications is troubling given that the Internet (especially the Web) got to be a success today by embracing interoperability instead of being about walled gardens fighting over who can build the prettiest gilded cage for their prisoners customers. The fact that when interoperability happens, it is in back room deals (e.g. Google OpenSocial, Microsoft’s conversations with startups, etc) instead of being open to all using standard and unencumbered protocols is similarly troubling. Even worse, insecure practices that expose social software users to privacy violations have become commonplace due to the lack of a common framework for interoperability.

As far as I can tell, Dataportability.org seems like a good forum for various social software vendors to start talking about how we can get to a world where there is actual interoperability between social software applications. I’d like to see real meat fall out of this effort not fluff. One of the representatives Microsoft has chosen is the dev lead from the product team I am on (Inder Sethi) which implies we want technical discussion of protocols and technologies not just feel good jive. We’ll also be sending a product planning/marketing type as well (John Richards) to make sure the end user perspective is also being covered. You can assume that even though I am not on the working group in person, I will be there in spirit since I communicate with both John and Inder on a regular basis.  

I’ll also be at the O’Reilly offices during Super Bowl weekend attending the O’Reilly Social Graph FOO Camp which I hope will be another avenue to sit together with technical decision makers from the various major social software vendors and talk about how we can move this issue forward as an industry.

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When I first saw the Meebo Me widget, I thought it was one of the coolest things I’d ever seen on the Web. I immediately went to chat with some folks on our team and the response was that they were already way ahead of me. After a bunch of hard work, I’m glad to say that you can now embed the world’s most popular IM client into any Web page [including your blog or favorite social networking site] and let anyone who’s visiting that page chat with you while you’re online.

More details can be found in Casey’s post on the Windows Live Messenger team’s blog entitled Who wants IMs from the web? I do! I do! where she writes

The Windows Live™ Messenger IM Control lets people on the Web reach you in Messenger by showing your Messenger status on your web site, blog, or social networking profile. The Windows Live™ Messenger IM Control runs in the browser and lets site visitors message you without installing Messenger first. The IM Control is supported in IE6, IE7, and Firefox 2.0 on Windows and Firefox 2.0 on Mac OS. The IM Control is supported in 32 languages.

This is a nice addition to the IM button functionality announced in Ali's post.  An important difference between the two is that the new Windows Live™ Messenger IM Control allows people to send you IMs without installing Windows Live™ Messenger, and the IM button requires that they have it installed and are logged in.

I’ve already thrown it up on my Windows Live Space at http://carnage4life.spaces.live.com so anyone who wants to chat with me in real time can holla at me without having to install any bits.  I expect it won’t be long before someone figures out how to port it to the Facebook platform which is something I’d love to see. I’d do it myself but I have RSS Bandit feature planning to work on in my free time.

To prevent IM spam (aka SPIM), there is a Human Interactive Proof (HIP) challenge before a conversation can be initiated from the Web. For users concerned about privacy and wondering if anyone can just copy & paste some HTML, change some values and then spam you from the Web…rest assured this has been considered. In order for your online presence to be detected or IM conversations begun from the Web, you first have to turn on this feature. Safe defaults and making sure our users are always in control of their Web experience is key. 

So what are you waiting for? Come over and say hello.    

Now playing: Jodeci - Come & Talk To Me

Via Greg Linden I found the the summary of a recent survey 1,001 US adults conducted by Kelton Research. The summary was posted on Search Engine Land in an article entitled Report: 7 Out Of 10 Americans Experience 'Search Engine Fatigue' which states

The report discusses user frustration with clutter and the content of search results:

When asked to name their #1 complaint about the process, 25 percent cited a deluge of results, 24 percent cited a predominance of commercial (paid) listings, 18.8 percent blamed the search engine’s inability to understand their keywords (forcing them to try again), and 18.6 percent were most frustrated by disorganized/random results.

There was also a desire among many users that search engines be able to "read their minds":

Kelton asked survey respondents whether they wished that search engines like Google could, in effect, read their minds, delivering the results they were actually looking for. . . That capability is something that 78 percent of all survey-takers “wished” for, including 86.2 percent of 18-34 year-olds and 85 percent of those under 18.

That sounds like an argument for search personalization.

Search personalization is just one of the many ways to deal with end user frustrations with search results. For example, no amount of search personalization will be as effective as statistical analysis to discover and automatically fix mispellings in search queries (e.g. all the misspellings of britney spears Google has to deal with). Without spelling correction, a user will leave frustrated because they get few or no results when in truth they typed a misspelling into the search box.

The folks on the Live Search team have a first in a series of blog posts about how they tackle the problem of determining a user’s intent from their search queries entitled “Do what I mean, not what I say!” [Part 1 of 2]. It contains the following excerpt

We've been working on returning the very best search results for your intent, not just for the particular search terms that you happen to have chosen as a vehicle to transmit that intent.  There's an important difference there and it's been our focus for quite some time.

…

AutoSpell Correction

The first example of this is our new AutoSpell feature.

If we are absolutely, completely, totally, "no doubt about it" confident you misspelled one of your search terms, we automatically deliver a page that includes spell-corrected results, rather than a page of misspelled results accompanied by a "Did you mean _______?" link at the top.

For example, there's this pizza place near Microsoft called Pagliacci Pizza that is fantastic.  The problem is that I can never remember the correct spelling of the place.  My misspelled attempts are usually something along the lines of Pagliaci Pizza, Pagliaccis Pizza, or Paggliacci Pizza...

…

Stemming 

Another improvement in the "Do what I mean, not what I say" category is stemming.  Stemming means matching on the "stem" (or root) of the word rather than the exact word.

For example, users told us that the search half price book Redmond returned horrible results.  Searching for half price books Redmond produced much better results.   In our new release of Live Search, searches for half price book Redmond automatically include results with books in them as well.

Our team knew that tackling stemming would give us the improvements we needed for searches like these.  But we had to be careful, because you can't just stem all the time-you have to be smart about it.  An example of this is the word cable.  When you search for "cable," you could be looking for information on cable TV providers.  When you search for "cables", you could be looking for power, telephone, or network cables. 

These are just two techniques beyond just personalization which gives users better satisfaction with their search results and the impression that the search engine is “reading their mind”.

The main problem I have with personalization is that you need to give the search engine a private, personal information amount of information before it has tangible effects on search results. In the recent past, Marissa Mayer has pointed out that user studies have shown that location is the only significant factor which impacts perception of the relevance of search results when it comes to personalization. I suspect that true personalization will come from doing things like analysing my profile or my social graph friends list instead of the approach popularized by Google Personalized Search where previous search queries are analyzed.

Of course, we live in an era when 10% of the Internet population doesn’t see anything wrong with brain implants to connect them to the Web so maybe I’m being paranoid when I worry that the next major leap in search engine relevance will only occur after we allow search engines to spy on us.

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Two things I worked on over the past year or so shipped today. The first is Windows Live Events. You can learn more about in the post entitled Introducing Windows Live Events and new Windows Live Spaces updates by Chris Keating and Jay Fluegel which reads

Easily create a great-looking website for your next event
To offer you more ways to connect and share memories with the people you care about most, the team that brought you Spaces would love to hear your feedback on Windows Live Events, our new, free social event planning service.  With Events you can easily:

• Plan that next baby shower, birthday party, or family reunion
• Create a great-looking event invitation and website using one of over 100 fantastic templates
• Invite anyone with an e-mail address and track who’s coming
• Make your event unique with familiar customization features - choosing a friendly web address (like http://kates1stbirthday.events.live.com), using custom colors, fonts, and background images, or adding modules and Windows Live web gadgets
• Let guests and organizers share photos and stories before and after the event

Click on Events from the new navigation and then click Create event to get started!

My contribution to this release was working on modifying aspects of our contacts and storage platform to understand the concept of groups of users that can be treated as a single entity [especially with regards to joint ownership of objects, sharing and access control lists] instead of being centered on a single user. I expect that Windows Live Events will be just the first of many ways in which this capability will manifest itself across Windows Live.

Unfortunately, I didn't work on the final stage of getting the platform ready for the product to ship. Instead I went on to work on my next feature that shipped today while Ali took over working on the platform support for Windows Live Events including cleaning up my design hacks doing a better job of future proofing the design than I did. Mad props to Bob Bauman, Mike Newman, Jason Antonelli, John Kountz, Lalit Jina, Neel Malik, Mike Torres and everyone else who worked on this release across Windows Live. You guys rock.

The second thing I was a part of building which shipped today is the updated “What’s New” page in Windows Live Spaces which is also described in detail in the aforementioned post by Chris Keating and Jay Fluegel . Before you say anything, Yes, its re-design has been influenced by the Facebook News Feed feature. Below is a screen shot of the old design of the page from the previous release

and now contrast that with the new version of the page

I'm pretty jazzed about getting to work on this feature since it is something I've wanted do for a quite some time. A few years ago, I remember talking to Maya about building a “friends page” similar to the Live Journal friends page in MSN Spaces and at the time the response was that I was requesting that we merge the functionality of an RSS reader with a blogging/social networking site which was at cross purposes. In hindsight, I realize that although the idea was a good one, the implementation I was suggesting was kind of hokey. Then Facebook shipped the News Feed and it all clicked.

I worked with a lot of great folks on this feature. Paul Ming, Deepa Chandramouli, Rob Dolin, Vanesa Polo Dominguez, Jack Liu, Eric Melillo and a bunch of others who I may have failed to mention but still deserve lots of praise. This feature was the most fun I've had working in Windows Live. Not only did I get a deeper appreciation of designing for scalability but I also got to see what it is like to be responsible for components on the live site. All I need now is a pager and I'm good to go. :)

I'd be remiss in my duties if I didn't point out that in the second screen shot, the first item on the What's New page is less than 5 minutes old. If you use other systems that have similar features, you may have noticed a much longer delay than a few minutes from posting to showing up in your news feed. As the saying goes, a lot of effort went into making this look effortless.

I also noticed some initial feedback on this feature in the blog post by Jamie Thomson entitled new spaces home page where he writes

There's a lot of potential for this activity list given that it could capture any activity people commit using their Live ID. Every live property has the potential for being able to post activity on here so one day we may see notifications of:

• change of messenger status
• posting of photos on Live Space
• addition of gadgets to Live Space
• items placed for sale on Expo
• questions asked or answered on QnA
• collection shared from Live Maps
• video posted on MSN video
• changes to XBox gamer card
• changes to Zune Social (after it launches)
• items posted to the Live Gallery
• an event being planned
• purchased a song from Zune marketplace
• posts in MSN groups (soon to be Live Groups)
• posts to online forums (forums.microsoft.com)
• downloads of public files from Skydrive

Its all pretty good but let's be honest, this is basically a clone of of what Facebook already have. Given Facebook's popularity though Microsoft didn't really have a choice but to copy them. If Microsoft really want to differentiate themselves in this arena then one option would be to provide avenues for interacting with other online services such as Flickr, Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce,  etc... This list could then become an aggregator for all online activity and that's a pretty compelling scenario. One really quick win in this area would be to capture any blog entry that is posted from Live Writer, regardless of whether it is posted to Live Spaces or not.

Posting of photos already shows up on the "what's new" page. Downloads of files will likely never show up for privacy reasons, I'm sure you can guess why it may not be wise to broadcast what files you were downloading from shared folders to all your IM buddies and the people friends list if you think about it a little. As for the rest of the request, thanks for the feedback. We'll keep it in mind for future releases. 

PS: If you work for a Microsoft property that would like to show up on the "what's new" page, host it or just wanna plain chat about the feature then give me a shout if interested in the platform or holler at Rob if it's about the user experience.

Chris Jones has a blog post on the Windows Live Wire blog entitled Test drive the new Windows Live suite where he writes

You’ve probably already read about some changes we’re making to Windows Live, and have seen some of your services change over the past few weeks. Starting now, you can test out the new suite of Windows Live software at http://get.live.com/wl/all. 

Windows Live makes it easy to store and manage your communications and information, and share what’s going on in your life with the people who mean the most to you. Many of you have already tried out new versions of our web services – Windows Live Hotmail, Windows Live Spaces, Windows Live SkyDrive beta, and the new Windows Live Home page beta. These have been designed to work together with a common navigation, so it is easy to switch between your e-mail, your space, your files, and your photos—from any browser.

Today we’re releasing beta versions of a new generation of Windows Live software designed for your Windows PC that makes it easier than ever to get connected to Windows Live or other services. This suite of software includes e-mail (Windows Live Mail), photo sharing (Windows Live Photo Gallery), a great publishing tool that lets you post directly to your blog (Windows Live Writer), parental controls (Windows Live OneCare Family Safety), a new version of Windows Live Messenger (8.5), and more.

As you can tell, Windows Live is coming together and there is growing clarity around the brand. All the talk of being a “suite” and unified installers struck me as anachronisms from an executive team that came from the world of Office and Windows but now that I’ve begun to see some of the fruits of their labor it looks like a good thing. An integrated set of desktop and Web apps that play well together makes a lot of sense.

I’ve also surprised myself by liking the more consistent UI across [some of] the various Windows Live sites but would like to see us do more integration of the Web applications. For example, the integration between SkyDrive and Windows Live Spaces is cool  but it seems we are last out of the gate with integration between IM and email (unlike Yahoo! Mail and GMail). I’d also like to see a couple more Windows Live services being available from http://home.live.com and sharing the same consistent UI such as Windows Live Expo and Live QnA. I guess I’m hard to please.  :)  Kudos to all the folks that worked on the current releases.  

The unified installer is one of those things that seems weird but after using it I wonder why we didn’t provide one sooner. It’s pretty convenient to be able to grab the latest Windows Live apps at a single go. It’s definitely worth trying out especially if you haven’t tried out Windows Live Photo Gallery or Windows Live Mail yet. So what are you waiting for? Get it now.

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