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6/30/2009 Dublin data centre to improve Windows Live in Europe In a blog entry yesterday entitled Microsoft Brings Two More Mega Data Centers Online in July Arne Josefsberg, General Manager of Infrastructure Services at Microsoft, announced that his team were about to fire up a new data centre in Dublin, Ireland; the big switch on is tomorrow, 1st July. Speaking about this data centre back in November 2007 Microsoft's Vice President of the EMEA Online Services Group, John Mangelaars said:
Here's hoping that we in Europe see a marked improvement in Windows Live services after this new data centre comes into operation tomorrow. @Jamiet 6/25/2009 EMC Conchango’s Smart Metering envisioningYesterday Microsoft released Hohm, a service intended to help you monitor your energy usage at home. This is of particular interest to me because I was recently involved in a brainstorming session at work where we were trying to come up with some ideas about services we could provide as part of the forthcoming smart metering initiative that is soon to envelop the UK. Unfortunately I wasn’t directly involved in the work that followed but I’m glad to say that some of my colleagues (in conjunction with Microsoft UK as it happens),, managed to put together an impressive proof-of-concept that was showcased at the Smart Metering 2009 UK & Ireland conference. Here’s some of the mock-ups that they showed:
Pretty nice huh? This is how we at EMC Conchango envisage data visualisation in the home is going to progress in the future and you can read more about it on Julian Harris’ blog entry Your energy use in the eco age of thrift: smart meters, the smart grid and home automation. In it Julian asks:
Judge for yourself! 6/16/2009 Ray Ozzie blog quotesI recently wrote a blog post entitled Whatever happened to Live Clipboard? where I remarked that the blog posts that Ray Ozzie wrote soon after joining Microsoft had disappeared from view. Well as luck would have it I have since rediscovered these blog posts in Google Reader which still has them cached. There are six blog posts in total, all of them written sometime around the end of 2005/beginning of 2006. I figured people may be interested in Ray’s thoughts during those early fledgling days at Microsoft and hence have made these six posts available on my Skydrive at Ray Ozzie’s Spaces blog posts. They make for very interesting reading especially given what we now know about Live Mesh and various other initiatives that have sprouted up under his stewardship.
I have picked out some choice quotes from those blog posts for those of you who don’t want to trawl through all six of them
Comments are welcome! 6/15/2009 What’s happening with Virtual Earth 3D?In July 2008 I published a blog post entitled Is a Microsoft 3D virtual world closer than we think? where I speculated about Microsoft possibly using Virtual Earth’s 3D abilities to build a Second Life competitor, I also supplied some links to reinforce the speculation not least to a comment from 3DVia developer Matt Baron who said:
Liveside picked up on it too although the aforementioned Mr Baron replied to that post with the following comment that, in my opinion, contradicted what he had said earlier:
Today nearly a year on there hasn’t been in any new moves from Microsoft in the 3D arena but the lack of news has not dampened my conviction that they are planning something big in the not too distant future and I have since seen further “evidence” that only serves to heighten the intrigue. Namely: 3D world construction demonstrationMicrosoft’s Chief Research Officer, Craig Mundie, gave a talk at Microsoft's financial analysts meeting on 24th July 2008 (webcast available here) where he supplied the following choice quote :
What follows is a stunning demo of a 3D world that has been constructed both from 2D photos (in much the same way as Photosynth does today but with much much smoother transitions and finer detail) and 3D software-built models in a manner that really does mirror the real world. The demo starts at approximately 19 minutes and is well worth a watch. (Incidentally I find Craig Mundie to be a very engaging speaker and when he’s showing off future-gazing stuff like this its well worth taking an hour or so out of your day to check out the full video.)
Chris Pendleton at mixVirtual Earth Evangelist Chris Pendleton gave a talk at MIX09 (which I attended) about the new Silverlight map control and during QnA at the end of the session someone asked about where Birds Eye view was in the Silverlight map control to which Chris answered “We didn’t add it – we’ve got some other plans for that”. When quizzed further about 3D in the Silverlight map control Chris replied, very coyly, “We’re working on something…something big! Can’t tell you what!”. Make of that what you will. Go see the video at http://videos.visitmix.com/MIX09/T34F and fast forward to about 62 minutes to hear this little discussion.
Sneak peeks at 3D modelling using Aerial PhotosLong Zheng has posted a photo from a talk given by Virtual Earth team member Chris Sampson that appear to show how they are combining aerial photos with 3D models to provide near-photorealistic images of 3D objects such as buildings:
Also consider that in February 2008 Microsoft announced that they had acquired Caligari, a company that makes a 3D modelling program and they also have an ongoing partnership with 3DVia who produce a tool that allows one to build their own 3D model of an object and its clear that Microsoft are planning some big moves in the arena of 3D. If anyone has any more specific information than what I have here then I’d love to hear about it! Windows Live People limitsDid you know that there is a limit to the number of people that one can have in their Windows Live network? I always assumed that there was a limit but I’d never noticed it having to be enforced anywhere. Not until I tried to invite the SkyDrive team and I received the following message: “Your invitations have been sent to 0 people. We couldn’t send invitations to these people because they’ve reached the limit in the number of people they can have in their network.” Given that, I find it strange that Windows Live actually suggested to me that I should add the SkyDrive team as a network contact: Why is Windows Live suggesting contacts to me that it is impossible for me to add? That feature needs a little work methinks! Whatever happened to Live Clipboard?[This blog post was originally published on my work blog at http://blogs.conchango.com/jamiethomson/archive/2009/05/27/whatever-happened-to-live-clipboard.aspx and I thought I would publish it here because it might be of interest to readers of this blog also] Anyone out there remember Live Clipboard? It was a very interesting incubation technology that came out of Microsoft’s Live Labs group way back in 2006 (I think) and how now been open sourced under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. It was also backed from way up on high – Ray Ozzie (now Chief Software Architect at Microsoft and also the guy who took over from Bill Gates) was its chief backer. Live Clipboard was in fact one of the few technologies that Ray blogged about on his, now defunct, MSN Spaces blog but sadly that blog post is no longer available. So, what was Live Clipboard? From the site itself:
In other words, it is copy and paste for the web. You may think we already have that; after all, I can copy and paste some text from a text box on one page into a text box on another web page; but that isn’t really what this is about. Live Clipboard used XML markup to describe the data that was being copied thus if that XML was a well-known representation of the data (e.g. a microformat) then the receiving website could act upon that data accordingly. The canonical example is the one given at http://www.liveclipboard.org/:
Its not hard to envisage many other uses for such a technology, http://microformats.org has a number of fledgling microformat specifications that could all benefit from Live Clipboard: Imagine finding someone’s contact details on their website and easily being able to transport those details into your address book with a couple of clicks – that’s the promise of Live Clipboard and microformats. Copy and paste is nearing ubiquity for smart devices (e.g. just one week ago iPhone announced support for copy and paste) and I doubt anyone reading this would contemplate using a PC that didn’t support it so I’m surprised that this similar concept for the web that is based on well known and ubiquitously supported standards (i.e. Javascript and XML) hasn’t taken off. A number of large organisations have started to support Microformats most notably Google who recently announced that Googlebot would start seeking out Microformats and Microsoft themselves who have released Oomph, a microformats toolkit. Given that the use of microformats is now taking off I’m surprised that Live Clipboard hasn’t been heard of in such a long time. Here’s hoping that changes soon because it sounds like a very useful technology and to a fella like me whose primary interest is data integration anything that uses well-known standards as a method of doing that is worthy of attention. Does anyone out there have any information to share about Live Clipboard? Links: Live Clipboard main site - http://www.liveclipboard.org/ UPDATE: Ray is well known for inviting people to contact him so I did that and asked him what had happened to Live Clipboard. Paraphrasing his reply: “even though there was initial interest, once it was open sourced there was a lack of take-up within the wider web developer community.” Shame! 5/29/2009 Notes, comments, Windows Live and FriendfeedI have using Windows Live wave 3 for about 8 months now and there is one feature that I really don’t like, namely profile notes. Profile notes do what they say on the tin, they are notes that people can leave on your profile at http://profile.live.com if you allow them to. My problem with notes is that they fail in what should be their principle aim, that is encouraging and enabling conversations. The main reasons for this as I see them are:
Another gripe I have about profile notes is that there is a lot of overlap with the private message feature which is also part of our profile. Granted, notes are public and this is a key differentiator between them and private messages but still, people largely use them both in a similar way. Profile Notes have, in my opinion, degenerated into a rather useless feature of Windows Live and I wouldn’t mind if they were removed in wave 4. A similar feature to notes is commenting; comments are now strewn all over Windows Live (e.g. Skydrive, Profile, Spaces) and this wide smattering doesn’t help to engender conversations. I’ve often thought that adopting Friendfeed’s behaviour of allowing inline commenting in the What’s New feed would be a step forward because that would bring conversations front and centre of the Windows Live experience – exactly where (in my opinion) they need to be. Dare Obasanjo was one of the main decision makers on the What’s New feed commenting features and he blogged about it back in December 2008 at Some Thoughts on Inline Comments in Activity Feeds where he explained why we can’t comment directly on items in the What’s new feed and thus have conversations developing there. The two main reasons are:
Those are fair justifications but I disagree with them. Firstly, I don’t actually mind reading comments from people that I don’t know, in fact I welcome it. Comments are the lifeblood of social networks and I want to encourage commenting regardless of who is making those comments whereas I think the current behaviour (or lack of it) actually discourages commenting and thus conversations don’t happen. If those comments are appearing in my What’s new feed – so be it. At least I won’t miss them like I tend to do if they are in my profile notes. Second, with the benefit of hindsight I don’t really agree with the justification that it would take commenting away from blogs. I don’t recall anyone ever clicking from my What’s New feed to my work blog and leaving a comment there. People DO do that for my Spaces blog posts but I see no reason why comments that other people make on one of my Spaces blog posts shouldn’t show up in my What’s new feed – I WANT people to see that conversation, not be oblivious to it. This is exacerbated by the fact that there is no way to subscribe to comments on a Spaces blog post and be notified when anyone replies to that post (a feature that has been sadly lacking in Spaces for far too long in my opinion). It sometimes seems to me that the Windows Live team don’t actually want conversations to occur anywhere other than in Live Groups discussion boards and in Live Messenger (both of which I’m a big fan of by the way) and I think that’s a shame because there’s definitely something missing from the experience currently; something that I believe Friendfeed has captured very nicely.. The issue of comments in the What’s new feed though is slightly different to my main gripe which is that of profile notes which I would be happy to see disappear. I’d be interested to read Dare’s thoughts on these matters so hopefully he takes this rather blatant bait and leaves a comment down below! -Jamie Its been a big week for Microsoft followersA big week indeed, I can’t remember when this much news came out in such a short space of time. Let’s review:
Plus there’s promise of more exciting Zune/XBox related news at E3 next week (my money’s on remote streaming of recorded TV from XBox direct to your Zune) That’s a hell of a lot of news for just one week, in fact it was actually just in the space of three days. A lot of this stuff has only been announced and is not yet available but its all going to be here before the end of 2009 so when you couple that with the upcoming Windows 7 and Windows Live Wave 4 plus general availability of Windows Azure and SQL Data Services (which, again, none of you will care about – but I do!) then you realise that there’s a big 6 months coming up. Bring it on! -Jamie 5/28/2009 Bing and Windows LiveI’m sure many of you reading this will be aware that Microsoft today announced a new search engine called Bing (not live at the time of writing). I’ve been checking out the videos at http://www.discoverbing.com/behindbing/videos.aspx and was excited to see a very cool new feature that integrates with Windows Live. You can now save the results of your searches into your Windows Live Skydrive so that you can access those results at a later date or, if you think those results might interest other people, you can share the results with your Windows Live network via Windows Live Favorites. Here’s a shot from the video that shows that happening: And here’s the whole video: (If the video doesn’t appear here then go and check it out at http://www.discoverbing.com/behindbing/videos.aspx and find a video called “Kumo Session history”) Cool stuff. Paul Dawson who heads up the User Experience team at EMC Conchango (my place of work) often talks about using search engines as “scrapbooks” and this new feature in Bing is a great example of that. I’ve talked at length in the past about how Skydrive could be used by 3rd parties for online storage and here is the first really great example of that although unfortunately it won’t be available to anyone outside of Microsoft until an API appears which, as I’ve said before, I am pretty sure will happen when Live Mesh fully arrives. In the meantime its fun to consider the capabilities that online storage of search results could deliver. The aforementioned Mr Dawson often gives the analogy of teenagers tearing cuttings out of clothing brochures and taking them with them on shopping sprees; what if they didn’t have to take those cuttings with them, instead they just stored them from Bing and were later able to access them on a mobile phone? That’s the sort of compelling experience that should be available in the not too distant future and I’ll bet that mobile access to stored search results is high on the agenda of the Bing team (think app stores and mobile marketplaces, people). Interesting stuff. I’m really looking forward to playing with Bing when it becomes available in 6 days time! -Jamie 5/12/2009 Welcome to VineI awoke today to find an invitation to Microsoft Vine sitting in my inbox which was a nice surprise at 6 in the morning. Hence I’ve spent part of today (during my lunchbreak of course) poking and prodding at it to see whether it was worth my paying attention to. The answer to that one is “When they start supporting the UK then….maybe”. The install experience was very pain free. A 5MB download, 30second install and I was done. Let’s take a look at some screenshots. The first screen you see when you login to Vine (using your Windows Live ID) is this:
Turns out I made a slight mistake. Hovering over does indeed show you very little information but what I didn’t know was that right-clicking on the news item brings up something more useful:
The main facets of Vine are “Vitals”, “Places” and “People” and for each one of those there is an additional screen that pops out when selected; I have so far discerned that this additional screen is called a drawer and hence we have a people drawer, a places drawer and a vitals drawer. The Vitals drawer is where you enter your personal information such as address, telephone number and all that paraphernalia. The Vitals drawer is also the place from where we tell Vine which social networks we are a part of; currently those available to choose from are Facebook, LinkedIn and Windows Live:
The real interesting parts of Vine are the Places and People drawers. Places is where you tell Vine which parts of the world you want to get information for. So far I’ve chosen my (a) home town, (b) my current place of work and (c)Seattle seeing as I figured there would be more information there than for any other city (for reasons that should be obvious). Sure enough there’s news items a plenty available in Seattle as you can see on this screenshot of the Places drawer: In the People drawer I build of groups of contacts that I may wish to share information with:
Back to the main screen. You may have noticed from the screenshot at the top of this page that we can post alerts and reports to our contacts:
We can send alerts either to a group or individual recipients. This is where Vine really starts to differ from services such as Twitter (which it has been mercilessly compared to) because alerts are directed to particular people rather than being broadcast. Moreover, those alerts won’t just get sent to the recipients Vine software, every Vine user can opt to get alerts and reports sent to their email or mobile phone (via SMS/text message). The last section to draw your attention to is “People I care about” on the main screen:
That sounds very interesting indeed and I’m eager to see how this metaphor of visually arranging your network’s priority to you plays out; its certainly a unique feature that I have never seen on any other social networking site so far. Some last observations before I finish:
All in all I’m very interested to see where Vine goes even though I have no use for it right now due to it being wholly US centric. I’ve said before in my post Untangling the Vine that I believe there is a lot of untapped potential in the usage of groups and locales in social networks and I’m looking forward to seeing if Vine can exploit that. -Jamie 5/10/2009 What next? Future predictions for the next 40 years.I have a hobby which those of you who read my post Future gazing with Wired magazine in November 2008 will be aware of; I enjoy recording predictions that people make and returning to them on the date for which the prediction is made to see if the prediction came true. For example in the afore-mentioned article I noted a prediction that said on 24th November 2020 polar bears and bees will be extinct; I have set myself a reminder for that date to check whether or not the prediction came true. At the moment its a rather one-sided hobby because as yet we have not reached any of the dates for the predictions that I’ve recorded but trust me, in about 10 years there’s going to be a lot to talk about :) The inaugural edition of Wired UK magazine in May 2009 contained an article called “What next?” which was awash with future predictions and I’ve had a great time recording them in my calendar so that I can revisit them in the future. Here is the list of predictions that I have recorded:
Anyone out there willing to stay with me until 2048 to see how many come true? By then I shall be 71 years young and one of the predictions above gives me confidence that I will still be around to pass judgement. Personally I’m still holding out for a cure for baldness before my locks completely fall out; seriously, has no-one come up with that yet? Incidentally, for future reference here are the main headlines from today’s BBC News: Cameron says MPs must say sorry David Cameron says MPs must say sorry over expenses claims, as his own party's claims come under the spotlight. 'Steep rise' in Sri Lanka deaths An official in northern Sri Lanka says 378 people have been killed in 24 hours, but the government denies shelling the area. Seven further UK swine flu cases King 'regrets' nightclub incident Obama jokes about his next 100 days at White House dinner Tevez inspires Man Utd derby win Lions show their bite Passions run high as Millwall take a slender play-off lead against Leeds at the New Den -Jamie 5/1/2009 More information on VineI’ve been watching the interwebs for information on Microsoft Vine since it was announced three days ago and here’s what I’ve found out so far:
More when I hear/read/see it… I’ll continue to update this post throughout! 4/30/2009 Where is my invitation to join Microsoft Vine?I just got the following email from Vine.net which I spoke about yesterday in Untangling the Vine:
Make of that what you will! 4/29/2009 Untangling the VineYesterday Microsoft announced a new service called Vine at http://www.vine.net and it caused quite a stir both in the blogosphere and Twittosphere. As one might expect of a web-centric product announcement from Microsoft it took quite a lambasting on Twitter, the general attitude there being “its a Twitter clone – typical Microsoft, late to the game as usual” although the reaction on various blogs was a little kinder (even Michael Arrington at TechCrunch was relatively upbeat about it). Some of the more reasoned and objective comments that I saw included:
I totally agree with those opinions, Vine is definitely not intended to compete with Twitter. Given that Vine collects information from many sources (including Twitter) it seems to be closer to Friendfeed than Twitter although even that is not an apples-to-apples comparison; anyone that took the time to read the fact sheet that Microsoft provided would have learned that with Vine one can:
Communities. Causes. Stay informed. Send Information. None of those phrases spring to my mind when I think of Twitter; Twitter is a mass-broadcast mechanism which Vine, clearly, is not intended to be. From what I’ve read so far the central premise of Vine is to organise content per group and that is what really excites me about it. I talk about the power of groups quite a lot on this blog and fundamentally believe that the notion of self-organising affinity groups has much more potential for how we use the web in the future than is currently prevalent in the plethora of social networking tools out there right now. That’s the point that I was trying to make when in February 2009 I wrote:
Reading between the lines it seems as if Vine is intended to be used on a locality basis and that’s a great example of where the power of a group (in this case a group of people that live in the same locale) can join together to provide an overall better experience by sharing information pertinent to that locale. I have long believed that the potential of locality-based services and networks has not been tapped and I confidently predict that such services will be the cornerstone of the next evolution of the web. Whether or not Vine is a key to unlock the latent power of affinity groups only time will tell and I myself will not be able to learn much for a long time yet given it is only going to be available in the US initially. Nonetheless I’ll be keeping a keen eye on developments -Jamie 4/28/2009 Fix for Network spamIn amongst all the web activities and other new features in the April Windows Live update there was one small but significant update that has gone unheralded but which has fixed a problem that has plagued many Windows Live users since wave 3 went live in November 2008; the scourge of network invite spam.
I’m sure many of you will have experienced the same problem that I have, that of recurring network invites from people that you have never met and who don’t even bother to introduce themselves. I used to routinely decline the invites but the problem became so prevalent that instead I chose to simply ignore the requests which has resulted in my having a pretty big backlog of 704 invites at the time of writing:
You will need to visit http://profile.live.com/Communication/ to set your preference accordingly even if you have done so in the past. I set mine to “People in your extended network” this morning and the seemingly endless flow of network invites has now, happily, ceased. Now all I need is a means to ignore my existing 704 invites in one fell swoop so to anyone reading from the Windows Live team, consider that a feature request! -Jamie Strange goings-on in Windows Live web activity worldf you’ve checked your What’s New feed at http://home.live.com or your profile at http://profile.live.com in the last few hours then you may have noticed that many new web activities have been introduced and the headline grabber is most definitely Facebook which I have added to my profile:
Notice how the list of web activities appears in alphabetical order but Facebook aint there, neither is it in the “Most popular” box whereas it was earlier on today. Looks as though there are some teething problems. Let’s check later! -Jamie UPDATE. Apparently when you add a web activity to your profile then it disappears from the list at http://profile.live.com/WebActivities/. Thanks to Dare who replied in the comments to let me know. 4/25/2009 New home.live.com enhancement spottedI’ve just spotted a small new feature at http://home.live.com. You can now update your personal status message (PSM) at http://home.live.com without a full postback (i.e. without a page refresh). In other words, its quicker.
-Jamie 4/18/2009 Linked Live IDsLinked Live IDs are a little known feature of Windows Live so now that the Windows Live community clubhouse is in full swing I thought I’d draw some attention to them and perhaps suggest some ways that the feature could evolve in the future. Linking Live IDs enables you to seamlessly switch between them while on Windows Live web properties. Once you have linked together your Live IDs (more on that in a minute) you can easily switch between them using the dropdown menu that appears in the top-right of every Windows Live page. Observe: This is a very useful feature if you have multiple Live IDs (which many of us do). I also have my mum’s Live ID as one of my Linked Live IDs which means that when I’m giving her IT support on Windows Live over the phone (as I frequently do) then I can pretend that I am logged on as her and see exactly what she is seeing which is very useful indeed. So, how do you link your Live IDs together? Well, its very simple. You can either select “Link other accounts” from the menu depicted above or simply click on this link: https://account.live.com/managelinks.aspx which (at the time of writing) will take you straight to the page where you manage your Linked Live IDs. Once there the process is self-explanatory.
So that is Linked Live IDs. They’re very useful and I use them a lot however there’s potential for them being used a lot lot more across Windows Live and other Microsoft properties than they are today. Currently Linked Live IDs are only accessible via Windows Live; I can’t, for example, access my Linked Live IDs from www.mesh.com which would be rather handy. Neither can I do the same from any of the Windows Live Essentials tools (i.e. Messenger, Toolbar, Photo Gallery, Mail, Writer). Moreover I’d like the ability to switch between my Linked Live IDs on my Windows Mobile phone; I have Windows Live for Windows Mobile installed which enables me to get full syncing for my email and log into Messenger, it would be cool if I could simply switch to my Linked Live IDs there as well. -Jamie 4/15/2009 “View all photos of Dave” is comingBack in January I posted a blog entry called Laundry list of wants for Windows Live wave 4 where I said:
Well, it seems someone might have been listening because yesterday the SkyDrive team announced the following feature (arriving in a few days time):
Awesome! I’m really looking forward to seeing this! I was very surprised and disappointed when this feature didn’t arrive in wave 3 but am now delighted that I don’t have to wait until wave 4 for it. -Jamie |
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