Jamie's space: Blog

Bad boy Chris!

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 17:48:56 GMT

I just got home, flipped open my laptop to scan for my wireless network and saw the following:

I don't know who Chris is but my guess is he's not flavour of the month if someone is advertising such facts on his wireless network SSID.

Well it made me laugh!

Attachments? Pah!

Sun, 17 Aug 2008 20:13:27 GMT

"Am I the only person that is bothered by email attachments? I ask the question because I'm of the opinion that the proliferation of word documents, PDFs, installer binaries and other such detritus that litters my and many other people's inbox is an unnecessary and unjustified cancer on the technical infrastructure of enterprises and of the web."

I just posted this slightly inflammatory comment on my work blog in an entry entitled Attachments must die! Click-through if you want to read my justification of it. Or if you just want to flame me.

-Jamie

More on storing Messenger conversations on the Mesh

Mon, 11 Aug 2008 18:06:28 GMT

3 weeks ago I wrote a blog entry Storing Messenger conversations on the Mesh where I said:

Currently I don't save my Live Messenger conversations ... Wouldn't it be cool if all of our Messenger conversations were automatically saved to the Mesh? That way every conversation I have would be recorded and I would be able to search through them all as well.

I made the same suggestion on the Live Mesh forum along with some reasons why this would be a good idea and whilst there was general support for the idea it was suggested that instead I configure Messenger to automatically store all of my conversations and then sync the "C:\Users\jamie\Documents\My Received Files\<ID>" folder using Mesh. This I did and its been working pretty well for me (I recommend trying it for yourself) and now, as you can see below, I have a history of all of my Messenger conversations synchronised across all of my machines:

After using this for a few weeks now though I have realised that there are some fallacies to this approach that could be alleviated by having Messenger automatically store conversations to Mesh; those being:

All conversations with the same person are stored in the same file thus if you have a conversation with the same person on different machines then there will likely be a file conflict. When you resolve that conflict then at least one of the conversations gets lost.
The Mesh client is a pre-requisite.
Conversations done on the web using a Messenger web interface don't get captured anywhere.
Files that are transferred don't get stored.
Anything done in the Activity window is lost.
Audio conversations are lost.
Video conversations are lost.

All of these could be alleviated if Messenger was "Meshified". Let me just clarify what I mean by that; it does not mean that all your Messenger conversations need to be conducted on www.mesh.com, it means that the Messenger service in the cloud (the one through which orchestrates all Messenger conversations) becomes responsible for storing your conversations on the Mesh.

I'm going to be actively campaigning for the Messenger team to implement this. Is anyone with me?

-Jamie

In the clubhouse: clubhouse, Messenger, How-to, Mesh

What does your desktop look like?

Sat, 09 Aug 2008 16:52:32 GMT

That's the question that technogran posed on her blog entry My Desktop. Well, here's mine:

A photo doesn't really it justice though given that there are moving parts here so I've done a video of it as well:

Very bare I think you'll agree. I'm not a fan of having much on my desktop although I do rather like my dreamscene wallpaper and my Rocketdock.

Anyone else?

-Jamie

In the clubhouse: Clubhouse, Story, Vista, Windows, My Desktop

10 more secrets of Windows Live

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 21:15:30 GMT

My last post 10 hidden secrets of Windows Live was quite well received so I thought I would write another one. Here are 10 more time-and-money-saving tips from Windows Live.

If you're like me then you've spent a lot of time over the last few years having instant messenger conversations with people and that means a lot of typing. Why not give your fingers a rest and communicate as god intended - by talking. If you're computer is equipped with a microphone and a speaker then simply hit the 'Call a contact' button in your conversation window and talk talk talk away. Its cheaper than a phone call.

In the clubhouse: Messenger

At the top of this blog post I linked to my previous blog post 10 hidden secrets of Windows Live. Ordinarily that would involve going out to the internet to find the URL but with Windows Live Writer there's no need to do that. All you need to do is simply select the text that you want turn into a link, hit the hyperlink button on the toolbar, and from the "Link To" box select 'Previous Post...' at which point you'll see a list of all your previous posts. Just pick the one you want. Its ridiculously easy!

In the clubhouse: Writer

Hotmail has got a very good and very simple search feature. Simply type your search term into the search box in the Windows Live header bar and hit enter [or click the green 'Mail' button]. Any emails containing the search term will be returned for you. Simple as that!

In the clubhouse: Hotmail

Received an interesting email that you want to talk about on your Windows Live Space? Hit the 'Blog' button in Windows Live Mail and have the blog entry pre-prepared for you right inside your Space.

In the clubhouse: Spaces, Mail

Even with the proliferation of photo sharing services such as Flickr, Smugmug, Photobucket and Windows Live Spaces still the most popular way of showing someone else your photos is to email them. This invariably makes emails rather hefty but Windows Live Mail is here to help. By sending a photo email the photos will be uploaded to your Live Space and the email will contain a thumbnail and a link to the photo on your Space. You can even put frames around your photos or make one of many other assorted amendments. Jazz them up a bit!

In the clubhouse: Mail, Spaces

You can configure Windows Live Mail to automatically log you on to Windows Live Messenger when you open it up. Just go to Tools-->Options and you'll find the option on the 'General' tab. No point in emailing someone when you can just send them an instant message instead, right?

In the clubhouse: Mail, Messenger

Wouldn't it be cool if people could send you instant messages even if they weren't Live Messenger users? Well now they can using the Messenger IM control. Using the wizard you can generate a small piece of code that can be embedded into any web page that then allows any visitor to that website to IM you. All from a web browser. You can see in the picture on the right that I've embedded the IM control into my work blog.
This one is seriously cool. Go check it out.

In the clubhouse: Messenger

Did you know that your Windows Live ID can log you in to many more web sites and services than just Microsoft ones. All of the sites shown on the right allow you to login using your Windows Live ID. Click on any of the logos to go to the site and login.

In the clubhouse: Windows Live ID

If you don't like switching windows to do different things then you'll be glad to know that many Windows Live products can be controlled from within Windows Live Mail. Did you know for instance that you can set your Messenger status from within Windows Live Mail?

In the clubhouse: Mail, Messenger

Do you ever wish you could have the same list of Favorites on any computer? Well now you can, just install Windows Live Toolbar and use the 'Sync Favorites' function to sync your list of favorites between all your devices and to http://favorites.live.com as well.

In the clubhouse: Toolbar, Favorites

As before let me know in the comments how many of those you knew about. Or if you don't want to tell me, leave a comment anyway - my blog can never have enough comments. And if you have 10 Windows Live secrets of your own, blog about them and tag it 10 secrets.

-Jamie

In the clubhouse: Toolbar, Mail, Messenger, Spaces, Favorites, Windows Live ID, Hotmail, Writer, Clubhouse, How-to, 10 secrets

Evernote - Your memory downloaded

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 08:43:03 GMT

I recently discovered Evernote and I'm glad that I did. Have you ever heard of it? According to the blurb Evernote "allows you to easily capture information in any environment using whatever device or platform you find most convenient, and makes this information accessible and searchable at any time, from anywhere".

I've got a more succinct tagline for them

"Your memory. Downloaded."

Evernote's USP is that it can read text inside photos and then index it for you so that you can easily find it later, so let me show you an example of that. Yesterday I was strolling through London Waterloo station and I snapped one of the departure boards using my Windows Mobile smartphone and then, using the Evernote client, uploaded it. That is all I had to to do and now I can now go to http://www.evernote.com, search for one of the stations listed on that departure board and hey presto...it finds it. Check out the results of my search for "Clapham Junction":

I think that's genius. I'm going to be snap happy with my camera phone now, every single bit of information that I see is going to be photographed and put straight into Evernote; my new favourite web service. If I meet you, you can be sure I'll be photographing you holding your business card in front of your face.

-Jamie

10 hidden secrets of Windows Live

Wed, 06 Aug 2008 16:08:38 GMT

Some things you might not know about Windows Live

1	If you use multiple Windows Live IDs then you can link them together so that you can easily swap between them using the dropdown list in the top right-hand corner of every online Windows Live service. Go to https://account.live.com/managelinks.aspx to set them up. Windows Live Tags: Windows Live ID

2	If you receive instant messages when you are offline then you can pick them up in Windows Live Mail and reply to them via email Windows Live Tags: Mail, Messenger

3	If you choose to keep a history of your Live Messenger conversations then you can see a record of all your conversations with one of your buddies all in the same place. Go to Tools-->Options-->Messages and check the box next to 'Automatically keep a history of my conversations'. Windows Live Tags: Messenger

4	If the 5GB storage limit on SkyDrive isn't enough for you simply sign-up for multiple Windows Live IDs and set your primary Windows Live ID up as an Editor to those other SkyDrives. Voila. Effectively infinite storage, just make sure that all your accounts stay active. Windows Live Tags: SkyDrive, Windows Live ID

5	Live Writer makes it easy to advertise your blog to the world by letting you add tags that automatically tell blog search engines what your posts are about. Windows Live Tags: Writer

6	Even better, you can tell Windows Live Writer to tell all the blog search engines about your post as soon as you publish it using the "Ping Servers" feature. Go to Tools-->Options-->Ping Servers to configure. Windows Live Tags: Writer

7	Using Windows Live Photo Gallery you can stitch multiple photos together to make a great multi-megapixal panoramic image like the one I've done here looking northwards from the top of the Empire State Building (click on the image for a larger version). Windows Live Tags: Photo Gallery

8	You can see all of the comments on someone's Live Spaces blog in one place by going to the blog summary and clicking on the comments link for each blog. For example see all comments on my blog by going here. Windows Live Tags: Spaces

9	You can search the web using Live Search, preview the results, and share the search results with your friends all from within Windows Live Messenger. Just select 'Search' from the activities menu. Windows Live Tags: Messenger

10	Writing a blog entry? Why not see what the blog entry will look like BEFORE you publish it. All from within Windows Live Writer. Just hit the F12 button for a web preview. Windows Live Tags: Writer

How many of those did you know about? Let me know in the comments (but be honest now).

Do you have any tips to share of your own? Again, put 'em in the comments. Better still, do you have 10 of them? If so blog about them on your Space and tag it 10 secrets.

-Jamie

Windows Live Tags: clubhouse, how-to, Spaces, Messenger, Photo Gallery, Writer, SkyDrive, Mail, Windows Live ID, 10 secrets

SkyDrive is integrated into the Spaces experience then?

Sun, 03 Aug 2008 17:55:57 GMT

Earlier today one of my Messenger buddies, Jack, uploaded a photo to his SkyDrive which I commented on. He immediately IM’d me and here’s the conversation that ensued:

Jack says:
I've just seen your comment on my skydrive picture
Jack says:
how did you know that i'd uploaded it?
Jamie   says:
cos it appears on my spaces newsfeed
Jack says:
ooo how do i get one of those
Jamie   says:
http://made-up-URL.home.services.spaces.live.com/default.aspx
Jack says:
cool
Jamie   says:
same as FB really. 'cept less useful cos no-one is on Spaces
Jack says:
i've not really properly got into windows live
Jamie   says:
you and many others.
Jack says:
skydrive is integrated into the spaces experience then
?Jamie   says:
yeah
Jack says:
nice

Sounds as though Jack had a lightbulb moment. He didn’t know how well all of these services are built to work together – the fact that him uploading a file to his Skydrive caused a message in my Spaces newsfeed was news to him, in fact just knowing that the Spaces newsfeed actually exists was news to him as well.

Jack’s a very smart tech-savvy guy who likes to get his hands dirty with web-based “stuff” so the fact that he as a SkyDrive user didn’t know about this was very interesting to me. If people like Jack don’t know that these things then how is the average joe on the street meant to know about it? That’s a big challenge (and a big opportunity) for Windows Live – they need to get the network effect that worked for Jack to work for many many other people too.

-Jamie

Windows Live Tags: clubhouse, story, Spaces, Live Spaces, Skydrive

"Loving Outlook Connector"

Fri, 01 Aug 2008 14:44:01 GMT

Those aren't my words, they're the words of my fiancee Helen who yesterday installed the Outlook Connector that can:

Read and send your Office Live Mail/Windows Live Hotmail e-mail messages.
Manage your Live Mail Contacts.
Use advanced options for blocking junk e-mail messages.
Manage multiple e-mail accounts in one place.
Manage, share, and synchronize your calendar in Hotmail from Outlook.
Access your Tasks and Notes.

I'm often sending things Helen's way to get her to try them and usually she drops them either through exasperation or boredom. With Outlook Connector though its different, she actually likes this one. I asked her for a soundbite and she came back with "a neat and easy way to share and manage my personal email with the same effectiveness as I manage my professional email using Outlook functionality, superb!"

Yep, she definitely likes this one :)

One minor downside was that she has Outlook 2003 which only allows you to view view multiple calendars side-by-side. Outlook 2007 allows you to overlay them which is a much better experience.

-Jamie

Windows Live Tags: clubhouse, windows live, story, Live Calendar, Hotmail, Live Contacts, Outlook Connector

Mesh application startups in Boston

Fri, 01 Aug 2008 14:37:24 GMT

An interesting little titbit of Mesh news here. Microspotting has interviewed Reed Sturvenant who heads up Microsoft Startup labs in Boston. Here's what the group do (taken from the interview)

The idea is to create an internal, Boston-based development group that can build products and launch them to market the same way that start-ups do.

What is of most interest to me though is this quote:

We’ve been asked to focus on two things: products that will attract a large enthusiastic audience, and to help drive new strategic platforms. So for example we’re using the Live Mesh SDK and building a set of applications on top of that.

So Microsoft are setting up a Silicon-Valley-esque enclave in Boston with the express purposes of building applications for Mesh. Can't wait to see what they come up with.

-Jamie

The first vertical service in Windows Live wave 3 rears its head

Thu, 31 Jul 2008 11:15:52 GMT

Back in November 2007 I wrote a blog entry called "Windows Live's vertical offerings" where I said:

I am interested to see what will constitute Windows Live wave 3. Microsoft's success is built upon providing platforms and that is exactly what Windows Live now is - its a platform. A platform for what though? Well clearly Microsoft want third parties to build upon that platform but I wouldn't mind betting that Microsoft themselves will be providing their own applications on top of this myriad of services and that's what I think wave 3 will be all about. This is what I like to refer to as vertical offerings on the horizontal platform.

Another way to think of Windows Live as it is today is that it forms an infrastructure on which other applications can be built. I use the term "vertical offerings" to refer to applications that are built using this infrastructure that have a specific purpose in mind and today we saw the first incarnation of one such application with the preview release of Windows Live FrameIt (as usual Liveside have all the details).

FrameIt allows us to specify stuff to be displayed on a digital photo frame. What I find really compelling about this idea isn't that we can display a carousel of digital photos in our living room (we've been able to do that for years) but that we can display other content as well. For example, I can have the morning's news headlines presented to me which I can read while I'm eating my cornflakes whilst in the evening the photo frame can show the evening's TV listings. There are a lot of form factors other than digital photo frames that could leverage FrameIt, Epigraph is one obvious example. Photo frames are just the start.

Like Liveside I suspect that Microsoft will be partnering with hardware manufacturers to produce digital photo frames that specifically leverage FrameIt and those I expect those to be with us before too long.

-Jamie

Windows Live Tags: clubhouse, windows live, frameit, story, Epigraph

Mesh’s hidden agenda

Mon, 28 Jul 2008 23:19:37 GMT

I’m sat on my train home listening to last Friday’s (25th July 2008) episode of The Gillmor Gang; for those that don’t know The Gillmor Gang is a conglomerate of technology pontificators based in Silicon Valley that are headed by Steve Gillmor. On this particular episode they’re talking about what they think Microsoft are doing and are going to do in the online space - well worth a listen if you’re interested in such things (as I am).

They talk a lot about Mesh, XBox, Ray Ozzie, Live Search and the relative relevancy (or not) of each. They didn’t come to any conclusion about any of it but it was fun nonetheless although I do think they missed an important point about Mesh and search. Its something that’s been rolling around my head for a while and the point is this. If Mesh is a success (and I believe that it will be) then there is going to be a lot of information (gigabytes worth) per person stored in the cloud and across a multitude of devices that crucially only Microsoft has access to. And what is the best way of making sense of information of that magnitude? Search, that’s what!

Hence I predict that we will see a new kind of search engine from Microsoft. One that shows information from the web alongside and interspersed with your own content and that which your friends have chosen to share with you. If you are logged into http://search.live.com then Microsoft can return to you search results of YOUR OWN STUFF and that is a game changer in search. As Joe Wilcox said earlier today “Search should be about what's important to you.”

Let’s take an example. Imagine you remember that you had recently been reading a Word document about balaclavas; you don’t know whereabouts you have the document but you know its in your Mesh somewhere. Instead of hunting around for it you head for http://search.live.com and search your Mesh from Microsoft’s own search engine. In your results you find the document that you’re looking for and also get back helpful information from Live Search including where you can buy the cheapest balaclavas and all the information you ever wanted to know about them too. Ever wonder why in Microsoft Office 2007 all the documents are saved as XML files? Simple…it makes it easier to search them.

Want another reason? How about being able to search through all of your Messenger conversations from http://search.live.com.

There are other ways that Mesh and Live Search can be mutually compatible too. As my colleague at Conchango Paul Dawson points out in his blog entry Live Services - Social Search - Collaborative research social search is evolving:

Using the Live Messenger services, and the Live Search services to create 'social search' - or in my book, a nice way of being able to share online research with someone - or a group.
it's what we've been talking about for many of our clients. You can see this being used for a group, or a couple, planning a holiday or a trip, sharing their early research, and testing ideas on where to go with each other.

Paul and I have spoken about this a lot lately as we try and cook up some ways that we can use Mesh in the future. Mesh presents a great opportunity for conducting your research via a search engine and “shelving” your search results so that you or someone else can view them later.

Live Search and Live Mesh– a winning combination. You heard it here first.

-Jamie

Windows Live Tags: clubhouse, live search, live mesh, story

A great new feature for Windows Live Photo Gallery

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 11:28:16 GMT

There's an exciting blog entry on Liveside today which states:

Windows Live Photo Gallery - the main new feature in the current M1 build is facial recognition. Photo Gallery will automatically recognise people's faces in your photos, and users will be able to add tags to each person

That's very interesting because in a blog entry entitled "Auto-tagging in WL Photo Gallery" from November 2007 I asked for that very same feature:

...wouldn't it be better if Windows Live Photo Gallery suggested tags to us and we just pick the ones that we want. For example, I take a lot of photos of my fiance, Helen. It would be useful if, when importing more pictures of Helen, Windows Live Photo Gallery were intelligent enough to realise that one of the faces appearing in my new batch of photos were similar to those I had already taken and thus infer that any tags from those existing photos might be applicable to some of the new ones

I waste a lot of copy on this blog fantasizing about future enhancements to Windows Live products so I'm delighted that something I want is making it into one of the products.

I now wonder whether this feature will make it into a future Flickr compete from Windows Live? It would be great if tagged photos in Windows Live Photo Gallery got automatically synced to an online photo-sharing service.

Oh look, there's that word again. Sync. Can you spell "Mesh"?

-Jamie

Big month for Windows Live

Wed, 23 Jul 2008 08:53:46 GMT

August is shaping up to be a big month for Windows Live judging by stuff I've picked up from around the web. I happen to know that there is a new product release coming on 4th August; Mary-Jo Foley hinted yesterday that a new private beta for Windows Live wave 3 is due very soon, Windows-Live-senior-tech-product-manager-marketeer-cum-evangelist-type-guy Angus Logan said in an overnight Twitter "we have some stuff FINALLY being made available next week"; and to top it all the $300m marketing blitz that was promised for Windows Live should soon be seeing the light of day.

Something else that has hit the webwaves overnight is a new podcast from Windows Live community manager Marcus Schmidt. Read what Marcus has to say about it on his blog entry Podcast: What is Windows Live. I've told Marcus that he needs to make this available as a podcast feed so that we can subscribe to it through our iPods and Zunes so hopefully we'll see that soon.

-Jamie

Update: Marcus has made a podcast feed available: http://marcussc.web.officelive.com/Documents/winlivemp3feed.xml

Inside “Inside Messenger”

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 22:52:59 GMT

I’m on a Live Messenger tip tonight.

I’ve been checking out the Inside Messenger bot (otherwise known as a Windows Live Agent) and having a lot of fun with it. As you can see below I’ve been checking out the new House of Cards video from Radiohead. Its hosted on Youtube but I’ve no need to go to Youtube to watch it because I can watch it right from within Live Messenger using Inside Messenger and, not only that, I can twitter about it at the same time. All from the same conversation window.

If you want to do the same then its dead simple, just go and add chat@insidemessenger.com to your Messenger buddy list and you’ll be away.

Cool stuff.

-Jamie

Windows Live Tags: clubhouse, how-to, Messenger, Live Messenger, Agents, Live Agents

What is the UK’s most popular web application?

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 22:10:37 GMT

In terms of minutes spent online, what do you suppose is the UK’s most popular web-based website or service? Google? Facebook? iTunes? eBay? Maybe Second Life? MySpace perhaps? Well if you said one of those you’d be wrong on all counts, its actually Windows Live Messenger….and by some distance too.

Check out the latest standings as gathered from a report by Nielson Online.

I was quite shocked when I saw that, I never expected Live Messenger to top all that lot but I’m happy that it does. I’m a big believer that Messenger is an incredibly underused tool and I said so in my blog post I believe that Agents are our future... back in December 2007:

I look forward to the day when I am able to view my bank balance, pay my bills, purchase things from Amazon, book flights, view live flight information, update personal details that people may have about me and do countless other things that I haven't thought of yet all from within my Live Messenger window.

Thanks to Riann for the tip. You can catch Riann on Twitter by the way at http://twitter.com/riaanvs, he’s got quite a lot to say about Messenger.

-Jamie

Windows Live Tags: Clubhouse, Story, Live Messenger, Messenger

Storing Messenger conversations on the Mesh

Thu, 17 Jul 2008 08:57:10 GMT

As I interact more and more with Live Mesh I'm having more and more ideas about how it could be leveraged. Even if you have access to www.mesh.com right now you really haven't been a party to the full Mesh experience; no-one outside of Microsoft has. Its intriguing though to think about what will be possible when the platform really hits its straps.

With that in mind here's a feature request for the Live Messenger team. Currently I don't save my Live Messenger conversations but often I'll think to myself "Ahhh...I once talked about that with someone in a Messenger conversation, pity I don't have a record of it". I'm sure I'm not the only person that does that. Wouldn't it be cool if all of our Messenger conversations were automatically saved to the Mesh? That way every conversation I have would be recorded and I would be able to search through them all as well.

Furthermore, once our conversations are stored on the Mesh then we can access them all programatically using the Mesh APIs that will soon be delivered and take that content, our content, and share it to wherever we want to share it to. Perhaps we could choose that our conversations are searchable for other people; perhaps http://search.live.com/messenger becomes a window onto a wealth of thoughts and ideas that until now simply don't exist because they're not recorded anywhere. There's lots of possibilities here when you start to think of Mesh as more than just a file sync engine.

Better still, it wouldn't just do this with typed conversations. My audio and/or video conversations would be recorded too. And THEY become searchable as well.

I think this is a pretty exciting possibility. What do you think?

-Jamie

UPDATE: More discussion of this here: http://jamiethomson.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!550F681DAD532637!5132.entry

Cosmos: The infrastructure for Windows Live

Wed, 16 Jul 2008 22:12:09 GMT

Yaron Goland doesn’t say very much on his blog but when he does its usually something well worth reading. Today he wrote one such blog What is Microsoft's Cosmos service?.

I don’t pretend to understand all of what Yaron is talking about (his brain is on a higher plane to mine) but as a data guy by trade I’m fascinated by Cosmos which is, according to Yaron:

…Microsoft's internal data storage/query system for analyzing enormous amounts (as in petabytes) of data
…the architecture Microsoft uses to store and query petabytes of data
…a very successful system that is growing at a breakneck pace both in terms of the number of customers we support and the size of the clusters we run

I don’t want to jump to too many assumptions but I wouldn’t mind guessing that Cosmos is the infrastructure that is underpinning the massive amounts of data that Live Mesh will need to store.

Yaron mentions that Cosmos runs upon Dryad which is a system from Microsoft Research that runs computationally heavy processes over parallel architectures. Dryad is particularly interesting to me because its first outing was as a means for speeding up the processing of massive data volumes using SQL Server Integration Services (otherwise known as SSIS, the product for which I gained my MVP award and earn my corn). I previously talked about SSIS and Dryad here: http://blogs.conchango.com/jamiethomson/archive/2007/11/13/Dryad.aspx where I pick out the following quote:

Dryad is an infrastructure which allows a programmer to use the resources of a computer cluster or a data center for running data-parallel programs. A Dryad programmer can use thousands of machines, each of them with multiple processors or cores, without knowing anything about concurrent programming

Fascinating stuff. The worlds that I inhabit (SQL Server and Windows Live) are growing closer and closer together. When you read about infrastructure of this magnitude then you start to realise why there is only a handful of companies in the world that have anything like the capacity for building a tool like Live Mesh. Just to put it into context for you a petabyte is 1,000,000,000,000,000 bytes. Or 1,000,000 gigabytes. Whichever way you cut it words can’t really describe the enormity of “petabytes of data”.

-Jamie

Live Calendar gets an update

Wed, 16 Jul 2008 09:16:56 GMT

I woke up this morning to find that Windows Live Calendar had had an update overnight but short of a few UI tweaks I'm finding it really difficult to find anything that's particularly new about it. I was hoping for a plethora of new features but the only one I've managed to find so far is the ability to receive an email at the beginning of every day with your agenda for that day.

Unfortunately the setting is per calendar which isn't particularly useful to me because I have 7 different calendars. I would prefer to receive a single email for all of my calendars or, even better, have the ability to choose a subset of my calendars to be included on the email.

Apart from that I really can't see much else. If I find anything I'll update this post; likewise if you find anything else let me know by posting a comment would you? Thanks!

Its very strange for a software team to to the trouble of rolling out an update to their service unless there is a very good reason to do so therefore given the lack of UI changes I suspect there's quite a lot that has gone on under the covers. I wonder if we'll be getting a Calendar API any time soon?

Jamie

UPDATE: Paul Storm noticed one very very important new feature. We can now subscribe to calendars that exist out on the web. That means you can now go to icalshare, find a calendar on anything that interests you and view it at http://calendar.live.com. Data portability lives - great stuff!

This was my #2 request for Live Calendar when it first got released.

A tour around Live Desktop

Sun, 13 Jul 2008 17:26:14 GMT

2 days ago the Live Mesh team released an update to Live Mesh that enables us to sync files peer-to-peer (i.e. device-to-device) without syncing them to the cloud. I’ve produced a video that shows how this manifests itself in the Live Desktop which I’ve embedded below.

Let me know your thoughts. Do you want more of these types of short show-and-tell videos? If so I’ll see what I can do.

-Jamie

P.S. The video is hosted on Silverlight Streaming. You will need Silverlight installed in order to view it.Windows Live Tags: Clubhouse, Live Mesh, How-to

I’ve broken 100000 page views on Spaces!

Sun, 13 Jul 2008 00:50:55 GMT

Is that good? I have no idea. How many page views do other Spaces users out there have? I’ll bet Chris Webb has me beat hands down!!!

New photo on www.live.com

Fri, 11 Jul 2008 21:39:01 GMT

It looks like we’re in for a few more of these photos-as-search-backgrounds. This ones all about glacier hiking.

What do you think about these photos? I’m not sure quite how useful they’re going to be fr selling Live Search but I like the two photos that they’ve used so far.

If you go to www.live.com and you don’t see the above photo then its probably because you’re not in the US – I get around it by having my regional settings set to US (I need to in order for my Zune plays to upload). You could try going to http://www.live.com/?mkt=en-us

-Jamie

Peer-to-peer device sync comes to Mesh

Fri, 11 Jul 2008 19:06:31 GMT

News has just reached me that an update to Live Mesh will be appearing today and its got a feature that loads of people have been asking for; peer-to-peer syncing. With this new version we’ll be able to sync files across multiple devices without syncing to the cloud and being hit by the 5GB limit.

So now you'll be able to sync your multi-gigabyte media library across multiple devices without it filling up your cloud storage. Great news!

Will Mesh become my web touchpoint?

Thu, 10 Jul 2008 13:58:56 GMT

I read with interest Tim Anderson's piece entitled MobileMe steals Live Mesh thunder. There was a couple of inaccuracies but it was generally a good article.

Here are 2 choices quote from the article that largely sums up Tim's point:

"Now, Live Mesh is great for file synch, but how do I synch email with it? Where is the Live Mesh calendar? Ah no, for that you need Live Mail."
"An it-just-works solution to PIM synchronization across all devices and on the web will be a winner."

Apart from the fact that Live Mail doesn't contain a calendar I wholeheartedly agree.

Microsoft released some good and some not so good products and services as part of Windows Live waves 1 and 2; by and large I'm a fan as you've probably noticed if you read this blog regularly. Therein though lies the rub; Windows Live is a suite of disparate offerings such as Spaces, Hotmail, Messenger, Live Mail, Calendar, Messenger and Photo Gallery. When I use these things I never get the impression that I am accessing one seamless Windows Live experience. http://home.live.com is a commendable attempt to alleviate some of this disparity but we still have a situation where on the PC my photos reside in Live Photo Gallery, email resides in Live Mail, instant messaging resides in Live Messenger, my calendar resides in errrr... nowhere. This isn't the seamless experience that we thought we were going to get.

My hope is that Live Mesh ushers in a new era of cohesion for Windows Live products and other services besides. You want to read your email? Go to Mesh. You want to communicate with your friends in real-time? Go to Mesh. Want to Twitter? Go to Mesh. Want to see your bank balance? Go to Mesh. Want to see an up to date electricity bill? Go to Mesh.

If all of these personal services become accessible in one single place using one single login then that makes my life much easier. I hope that place is http://www.mesh.com.

-Jamie

Is a Microsoft 3D virtual world closer than we think?

Tue, 08 Jul 2008 12:49:49 GMT

I have remarked in the past about the possibility of Microsoft producing a virtual world along the lines of Second Life or World of Warcraft. Now, here's some quotes for you:

"Microsoft and Google are taking a different approach [from that of Second Life] to the virtual world with their Virtual Earth and Google Earth products. First they are building the real world, and step by step they are coming closer to a fully immersive environment" - Matt Baron. Excerpted from a comment on Robert Scoble's blog. Matt works for www.3dvia.com, the company that enables individuals to build 3D models on http://maps.live.com

"We have a big release coming up this Fall " - Mark Brown, Virtual Earth evengelist (http://blogs.msdn.com/markbrown/archive/2008/07/05/virtual-earth-at-pdc.aspx)

"[Dan Schiappa] explained that Microsoft is heavily involved in gaming as a virtual space, but also continuing to get involved more heavily in traditional virtual worlds. “Hopefully next year you’ll know why I’m here,” he said. " - excerpted from a blog entry on http://www.virtualworldsnews.com in October 2007. Schiappa is General Manager in Microsoft's Strategy Entertainment and Devices Division.

"Microsoft E&D GM Daniel Schiappa has hinted that a PlayStation Home-like virtual world will be coming to Xbox 360 within the next year." - http://www.computerandvideogames.com/article.php?id=173714

So:

In Fall (I call it Autumn) 2007 a Microsoft exec said to expect big things in about a year or so.
There's a big Virtual Earth release coming up in fall 2008 so says a Virtual Earth evangelist.
Someone involved with building 3D models in Virtual Earth has come out and said that Microsoft are building a virtual world using Virtual Earth.

Throw Photosynth, Silverlight and Deepzoom into the mix and this could be very very interesting indeed.

What do you think? Is there going to be some big news about a Microsoft virtual world coming up this Autumn or not? You be the judge, I'm just speculating...

-Jamie

A day in the life of "non digital man"

Mon, 07 Jul 2008 11:16:14 GMT

Derek Dunlop, a colleague of mine at Conchango, has written an amusing account of his encounter with what he calls "non-digital man". Check it out at A Day In The Life of... NDM - "Non-Digital Man". He compares his own commute (with his wireless device and 2 USB keys) to NDM's commute, ladened down with 2 full bags of assorted paraphernailia

In a way his post echoes part of my weekend just finished. I recently bought myself a printer/scanner (a rather nice HP Photosmart C7280) and spent part of my weekend scanning loads of my old paperwork such as bank statements, life assurance agreements, mortgage deeds, insurance schedules etc. Now, instead of a hulking filing cabinet in the corner of my home office I have approximately 1GB of PDFs nicely synchronised (using Live Mesh of course) to wherever I want it.

Life is going digital. Get with the program people!

-Jamie

Windows Live Tags: clubhouse, story, mesh

Live Search background idea

Sat, 05 Jul 2008 19:45:58 GMT

I have just been having a typed-conversation with Joe Medford and he had a great idea that Live Search could adopt which I hope he won’t mind me mentioning here.

Those in the US may remember that recently Live Search displayed a photo background. It was a nice photo too as you can see here:

Joe’s idea was that Live Search should use themed backgrounds for seasonal events in a similar way that Google changes their logo on different days of the year. What a fantastic idea, my irish fiance and I would love to (for example) head to Live Search on St Patrick’s Day and see a suitably themed background.

This is too good an idea for Live Search not to do it. Let’s hope this idea gets through to them somehow.

-Jamie

P.S. Naturally I used Live Image Search to turn up the above photo.