Jamie's space

As Brandon LeBlanc noted a couple of days ago Windows Live for Windows Mobile is now available. In fact, its supposedly been available for a long time but sometime back in April I browsed to http://wl.windowsmobile.com and was told that the download site was down until 5th May. I went back on 5th May and was told it was down until 15th May. Still...at least its there now.

Before I installed I was worried about how the various features were going to manifest themselves. I already sync my mail and contacts from my company's Exchange server and I was worried that my work and personal mail were going to get mixed in together. No such worries - WL for Windows Mobile creates a completely separate email account for your personal mail - good news.

As for contacts, well I was too scared to sync those. I'm pretty sure that contacts from both work and my personal life would get mixed in together so initially I chose to not sync contacts from my personal account. Thinking about it though mixing them in together could be advantageous - I quite like the idea of a single unified contacts store that incorporates my work contacts and my personal contacts. If anyone has any experiences to share in this area let me know.

Not all is rosy however. After installing WL for Windows Mobile for the first time and then shutting down I wasn't able to get back into the phone so I had to do a hard reset (check manual for details) which meant that I lost all my data (ultimately not a problem because everything is synced elsewhere - but a minor annoyance) and all of my installed programs (again only an irritation because I can reinstall everything). I hoped it was an isolated problem but unfortunately not because when I came to reinstall it exactly the same thing happened. Grrrr... My phone is a Vodafone v1615 by the way, otherwise known as an HTC Kaiser, HTC TyTN II, AT&T Tilt and by various other names too.

I submitted a ticket to http://support.live.com about this and they were as useless as ever; the response basically being "Not our fault guv, get in touch with Vodafone!!!"  Ta very much!!!

Has anyone else out there experienced this problem with the kaiser?

-Jamie

On my way to work this morning I was, as usual, sat on the train listening to podcasts that got synced to my Zune overnight. I looked around me and noticed that everyone else was either listening to their iPods or, in the case of the majority, reading a newspaper. That's when I had a brainwave. Wouldn't it be cool if I picked up my Zune every morning and it had all the latest local and international news stories synced to it ready for me to read or watch on the way in?

The days of dead-tree-based "newspapers" are numbered. If you want proof of that then consider that I walked into work yesterday and I was the only person there that knew about the earthquake in China that had happened about 30 minutes earlier. Why was that? It was because I was reading about it on Twitter before the news agencies even knew anything about it. Newspapers have it even worse - by the time you're reading about something in a newspaper its already old news - the newspaper got printed hours ago. Up to the minute, free, news feeds are the future and my startling realisation this morning was that I already had a device that was capable of being that digital news reader. The only thing required to fill the gap now is software.

Live Mesh could fill that gap very nicely. Imagine a software application that collected news stories for me that it thinks I would be interested in (based on my interests and previous reading habits) while I'm busy at work or even as I sleep. Now imagine that those news stories are available to me on whichever device I happen to have in my hand next. That's the promise of Mesh.

Traditional bricks-and-mortar media companies should be very scared indeed. If they aren't already.

-Jamie

P.S. I originally published this idea on the Zune forums before I realised that, actually, this is more about Mesh than about Zune.

In a recent blog entry Steve Lombardi from the Virtual Earth team spoke about Live Search for Mobile and said:

"the forthcoming release packs my favorite feature which I'm not allowed to tell you about just yet"

I'm a big Live Search Mobile user so I'm very intrigued about what this feature might be. I strongly suspect that it will be along the lines of sharing your location back up to the cloud either for the purposes of publishing your GPS location to your friends or for the purposes of using data from many people to derive useful information (a form of crowdsourcing). One oft spoke of use of this type of crowdsourced data would be in determining real-time traffic conditions. For example, if you know that a lot of people are travelling slowly along a particular road then you can be pretty sure that the traffic conditions on that road are in the red zone. This would make a very neat tie-in with the AI engine that is currently powering Live Maps' Directions.

Personally though I hope that the feature he speaks of is that of being able to share your location with your friends (or groups of your friends). The lack of this feature in Live Search for Mobile has bothered me since well before I talked about it back in August 2007 in my blog entry Track my location please (and I've mentioned it many times since then). This feature would make Live Search for Mobile very compelling; at the moment the only people that I know of that are attempting to do something in this space are Mologogo although I downloaded their client and, whilst it works, there are too many foibles for me to use it permanently.

-Jamie

(Someone told me it was the first anyway)

This weekend is Radio 1's big weekend. If you head to the website and click on "Big Zoomy Photo Thing" you'll be directed to a Silverlight Deepzoom app which will, over the weekend, have loads of photos from the event added to it.

Oh yeah, bit of a disclaimer. I should tell you that it was built by the guys I work for, Conchango, hence why I'm telling you about it.

Can you find the set list in the teaser collection?

I wonder how long it will take until Popfly allows you to publish your applications into the Mesh? Don't be surprised to see Popfly offer this ability sometime around the end of this year. Perhaps even around the time of the PDC in october.

Incidentally, that PDC is going to be all about Mesh I am quite sure of that. I'm not, strictly speaking, a developer but if my boss is watching ... PLEASE can I go?  (No harm in asking right?)

-Jamie

I read a good article today on Business Week regarding Microsoft's moves in the online advertising arena and figured it would interest fellow Microsoft watchers. The article is here: http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/08_20/b4084036492860.htm. Its very thorough, objective, revealing (I didn't know Microsoft were quite as prominent in banner advertising as this article leads you to believe) and to my mind it emphasizes why they wanted Yahoo so bad - they need somewhere to put all those ads.

Should take about 10 minutes to read and its well worth it. Let me know what you think in the comments.

-Jamie

SQL Server Data Services (SSDS) and Live Mesh are the two technologies that are uppermost in my mind at the moment. [My thoughts on SSDS are here and on Live Mesh here.] Hence then it didn't take me long to start wondering about the value of the two of them being integrated together. SSDS is a data storage platform and Live Mesh is a data synchronisation platform so put them together and you have the ability to synchronise data stored in SSDS to...well...anywhere that Live Mesh can run. Perhaps Mesh could even be used to synchronise data from one SSDS authority to another?

In order for this to happen an adapter would need to be written that exposes an SSDS data store as a "virtual" device. I sent a message to the SSDS team via their blog site The Long Term Storecast and I got a reply basically saying they would consider it so here's hoping that this gets implemented. I suspect they have got plenty of time because I don't expect SSDS to get released out of beta until 2009.

What sort of applications do you envisage being built on an SSDS-Mesh tag team? I have a couple of embryonic ideas that need fleshing out a wee bit (euphemistically speaking) but in the meantime I have no doubt there's going to be some killer apps built on these platforms.

-Jamie

[crossposted here]

Live Mesh was released to some of the general public seven days ago and luckily I was able to get an invite. I know there has been many many comments on the web passing opinion on Live Mesh thus far so one more can't hurt can it?  Hence this blog entry, although perhaps I can offer a slightly different perspective.

Foldershare

The first question I asked myself when I saw Live Mesh was "What now becomes of Foldershare?" Prior to Live Mesh's release I was assuming that there would be a heavy tie-in with Foldershare ("Foldershare would seem to dovetail quite nicely with [Live Mesh]") but I was very wrong about that. Now I find myself asking what happens to Foldershare and, moreover, why did Microsoft buy it? I'm guessing that they bought it for the skills of the Foldershare staff and the established customer base which they will now hope will migrate over to Live Mesh. I expect Foldershare to die a slow death eventually. This would explain why the recent release of Foldershare didn't support login with Live ID - that would be stepping too far into Mesh's territory.

Skydrive

Is Skydrive going to die as well? I suspect not. For now, Skydrive has two important features that Mesh does not have:

• The ability to share a file with any anonymous person on the internet
• The ability to link to a file with a URL (OK, under the covers Mesh has this because every object is a RESTful resource but it is not exposed to the general user)

For those reasons Skydrive still has an important role to play. I suspect that synchronisation between Skydrive and Mesh will occur at some point.

Windows Live Groups

I was very excited by the words of Mike Zintel over on the Live Mesh blog:

Live Mesh provides the building blocks to support the notion of groups, or communities (member lists) of people associated with a mesh object. These lists are managed via the simple email-web confirmation exchange that is popular on the web. Member lists provide both a simple permission model and a natural scoping for the collaboration features of Mesh. The basic group mechanism can be trivially extended to add entities such as organizations to participate (in an assigned “role”).  Similarly, you might invite a SpellChecker bot into a group.

By mention of a bot its very clear that Mike is talking about forming groups of Windows Live IDs (bots are identified by Windows Live IDs). Hey, that sounds very much like my Active Directory In The Cloud idea that I keep banging on about. Defining groups of users and assigning permissions to those groups is an immensely powerful paradigm and even more so when you consider the propensity for collaboration that Mesh will inherently foster. I believe that this is what Windows Live Groups will bring rather than being a like-for-like replacement for MSN Groups and am really looking forward to finding out if I am right.

The future platform

As we all move to a more web-centric world Mesh is a portent of things to come from Microsoft. They seem to have realised that in order to compete in the future they need to do more than rely on the cash cow tag team of Windows and Office, and Live Mesh will be the platform for this web-centric world. As applications move into the cloud the operating system moves back to what it was always meant to be, software that manages your hardware rather than app-ridden, feature-heavy bloatware. Operating systems are going to get more and more commoditised hence I hereby re-assert my belief that Windows will, one day, be free.

Making Money

How are Microsoft going to make money off this thing? The simple answer at this point in time would seem to be "Advertising" about which I asked on the Live Mesh forum the other day:

• When Live Mesh gets released will it contain advertisements?

The unsurprisingly non-committal answer was:

• Business terms for the platform are still being determined; we will provide additional information as we approach a beta release.

Don't be surprised to see ads appear on Mesh when it gets released in some way shape or form. This would prove to be a huge money spinner because the amount of time spent with eyeballs on Mesh will be much longer than on, say, a page of search engine results. As VP of Windows Live Platform, Blake Irving, said last summer search accounts for only about 5% of what people do on the web. I'll stick my neck out here and say that in, ooo... let's say, four years from today Microsoft will be making more from online advertising than anyone else and Mesh will be the driver for that.

[Actually these interviews with Blake Irving are well worth watching now because its clear that Mesh is the realisation of a lot of what he is talking about. He even talks about Mesh in video 2 without actually putting a name on it]

Applications

Its been stated all over the internet to anyone who'll listen; Mesh isn't a product, its a platform and I'm excited to see what applications people are going to build on this in the near future. I wonder whether we will see traditional desktop apps such as Office deployed upon it - I suspect that one day we will.

Here are some ideas that could be realised by leveraging Mesh:

• The ability to always have any-time access to your banking transaction history along with the ability to set up personal alerts for possible fraudulent activity is detected
• Monitor your utility (i.e. gas, electricity, water) bills and energy consumption in real-time
• You may have seen those huge iPod vending machines that are now appearing in various airports around the world. Well instead of the flogging of tangible devices, imagine the ability to approach a digital kiosk in a similar fashion and purchase digital content (e.g. songs or films), save that content to your Mesh, and have it automatically sync to your mp3 player when you get home and plug-in. Or even better, immediately sync to your mobile phone over the airwaves.
• Know about breaking news stories as and when they happen regardless of which device you are on

Those are just some ideas that allude to the potential of this sync platform. I'm sure there are plenty of killer apps that nobody has thought of yet.

If you want to get some idea of where Microsoft want to go with applications on Mesh then Ori Amiga's video "Programming the Mesh" is essential viewing.

Live Mesh forum

Don't forget that if you have questions about Mesh or feature requests the place to go is the Live Mesh forum.

-Jamie

...but then I read stuff like this and it brings me down to earth with a bump.

I didn't want a cabinet. I wanted a cab, innit?

It had four wheels and cost a lot of money but, sadly for one impatient teenager, the similarity ended there.

A teenager was greeted by a display cabinet instead of a taxi because her 'Ali G-style' slang confused a series of phone operators.

The girl hurriedly dialled directory inq­uiries to book a taxi from her home in London to Bristol airport, using the cockney rhyming slang Joe Baxi.[Read more]

Without wanting to sound too much like my dad....why don't people talk properly these days?

<Sigh...>

Six or seven weeks ago I wrote a blog entry entitled Speculating about Horizon where I made some wild predictions about what would constitute Horizon (aka Live mesh) when it got released. Let's see how I did:

• "Given that Ray Ozzie talked about a way of connecting all of your PCs I'm wondering if Horizon will incorporate some sort of web-based remote access to your various PCs, a little bit like GoToMyPC.com, maybe through the form of a web-based RDP client. Terminal Services for the masses if you will."
  Yep, I was correct about this. And RDP is indeed the underlying technology that is allowing it.

   

• "Horizon seems to promise anytime access to your personal data hence I am wondering if Skydrive synchronisation will be incorporated into Foldershare. I hope so."
  Mesh does indeed promise anytime access to your data however they seem to have built another platform for this rather than leveraging what Skydrive and Foldershare provide. Certainly there is no syncronisation between Skydrive and Foldershare at this point in time.

   

• "Windows Live Favorites already allows us to synchronise our web favorites to the cloud and across different PCs so I would assume that there would be some sort of interface to view those Favorites from within Horizon as well. And why stop at Favorites? Why not make ALL of your desktop settings such as menubar setup, IE and Windows security settings, and word lists sync across all computers as well."
  I still believe that this will happen, and I have definitely heard talk over the past few days about Favorites synchronisation, but there is no word on this as yet. I'll stick my neck out and say synchronising your Windows settings from one machine to another will be a big theme of Windows 7 and Live Mesh is going to be the enabler. 

   

• "Microsoft make money from building software that acts as a platform so I would assume that Horizon will also be a platform of sorts. In other words I would expect that there will be a way for 3rd party vendors to build Horizon add-ins; for example, Salesforce might provide an add-in to display your sales leads on Horizon. Of course, in the web world add-ins are known as "widgets" or "gadgets" so Microsoft are going to have to make a much better stab at this than the largely ignored Live.com and Live Gallery. "
  I was definitely correct about the platform bit; it seems that not a single Live Mesh presentation or video goes by without them mentioning "Microsoft is a platform company and Mesh is a new platform". A platform for what though? Well Microsoft have not been shy about saying that 3rd parties will be able to build applications for Live Mesh and I have no qualms about saying that this will be a bigger better version of Facebook apps. Of course there will be the usual anti-Microsoft tirades about Facebook getting there first but that will miss the important point about Mesh - that those apps will run offline as well.

   

• "Horizon" is the brand name for Windows Live wave 3.
  No. I was wrong about this.

   

• "Feedsync is going to be the standard that powers Horizon."
  Yes, I was right about this although I can't claim too much credit given that they had all but announced it anyway.

So, yeah, in many ways I was pretty close but most of it was pretty obvious anyway. I'll have more to say about Live Mesh in the next few days.

-Jamie