Jamie Thomson's space

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:
Well that all sounds like good news. Over the past few months I've found myself getting more and more frustrated with page load times on Windows Live which seem, to me, to be getting worse and they wre never particularly speedy in the first place. The login process at http://login.live.com is particularly troublesome which often takes 4 or 5 seconds (an age in internet time) and which, in the worst of cases, sometimes ends up in what I can only describe as an infinite loop of page redirects.

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

Yesterday 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:

Is a standard statement that says something like, ‘832 units used’ that arrives every 3 months a satisfactory relationship for an energy company to have with its customers?

Judge for yourself!

@JamieT

I 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

“A couple of weeks ago, Bill and I brought life to a new initiative that, over the course of the months and years ahead, will catalyze and deliver a number of things that I'm very excited about.  At that event, I said that unlike many other stealth projects I've/we've done, in this case many of our plans and offerings will evolve progressively and in the open, shaped in good measure by a dialog with you.” – This sounds like the forerunner of Live Mesh.

“I'll be tracking the conversation by watching inbound links, rather than by enabling comments on the site.  The "link mesh of conversation" is a key distinguishing characteristic of this medium” – Sadly Ray didn’t believe in the “link mesh of conversation” enough to keep the blog going but I reckon this will be the first time he used the word “mesh” publicly.

“As an industry, we have simply not designed our calendaring and directory software and services for this “mesh” model. The websites, services and servers we build seem to all want to be the “owner” and “publisher”; it’s really inconsistent with the model that made email so successful, and the loosely-coupled nature of the web.”

“Shortly after I started at Microsoft, I had the opportunity to meet with the people behind Exchange, Outlook, MSN, Windows Mobile, Messenger, Communicator, and more. We brainstormed about this “meshed world” and how we might best serve it - a world where each of these products and others’ products could both manage these objects and synchronize each others’ changes. We thought about how we might prototype such a thing as rapidly as possible – to get the underpinnings of data synchronization working so that we could spend time working on the user experience aspects of the problem – a much better place to spend time than doing plumbing.” – the conversations that foresaw the development of FeedSync

“look forward to using more and more Windows Mobile devices. Months ago I pulled the plug on my blackberry and went cold turkey to an HTC Typhoon-class device. A great device that is much more useful for triaging email than I’d imagined, but I really do need a thumb keyboard. As of last week I’m now using/testing the upcoming Treo 700w, and it’s great! The pipeline of cool devices about to emerge is stunning, and the software platform incomparable.” I wonder if “stunning” and “incomparable” are still in Ray’s Windows Mobile lexicon these days?

“what was the most fundamental technology enabling “mash-ups” of desktop applications? The clipboard. And a set of common clipboard data formats.”

“But each site is still in many ways like a standalone application. Data inside of one site is contained within a silo. Sure, we can cut and paste text string fragments from here to there, but the excitement on the web these days is all about “structured data” such as Contacts and Profiles, Events and Calendars, and Shopping Carts and Receipts, etc. And in most cases, the structured form of this data, which could be externalized as an XML item or a microformat, generally isn’t. It’s trapped inside the page, relegated to a pretty rendering.

So, where’s the clipboard of the web? Where’s the user model that would enable a user to copy and paste structured information from one website to another? Where’s the user model that would enable a user to copy and paste structured information from a website to an application running on a PC or other kind of device, or vice-versa? And finally, where’s the user model that would enable a user to “wire the web”, by enabling publish-and-subscribe scenarios web-to-web, or web-to-PC?” – Ray spent a lot of time in these blog posts talking about Live Clipboard and I still consider it to be a great shame that the technology has not taken off.

Comments are welcome!

@JamieT

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:

"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"

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:

“How quickly misinformation spreads.  My comment on Robert Scoble's blog was pure conjecture and I have no inside knowledge of MS's strategy in this arena.”

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 demonstration

Microsoft’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 it does is it actually moves me into a 3-D world. And this world is something that Ray Ozzie and I, when we have talked about this, call first life. Many of you may be familiar with this second life idea where people are building a wholly synthetic world on the Web, but very few people really have an appetite to help build a synthetic world and then have avatars and other things in that environment. And it's already begun to taper off a little bit.

We think that the idea of first life, where there's a mirror world of 3-D that everybody can participate in constructing and maintaining and which gives us a navigational metaphor that's completely consistent with the world we already live in would allow many more people to get into this environment and operate there.”

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 mix

Virtual 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 Photos

Long 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!

@Jamie

Did 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!

@Jamie

[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:

“Live Clipboard uses JavaScript and standard XML formats to easily move data from one web site to another, or between the web and standard applications. It extends the clipboard concept (familiar to most computer users) to the web.”

(http://www.liveclipboard.org/)

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/:

“Let's say you have two sites both of which understand calendar data. I want to move an appointment from one site to another. With Live Clipboard, there is now an icon on each site, next to each piece of data that can be transported. Bring site A to the front, click on the icon and choose Copy, then bring site B to the front, click on the icon and choose Paste.“

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:

• Tags
• Contact records
• Recipes
• CV/Resume
• and many more…

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?

@Jamie

Links:

Live Clipboard main site - http://www.liveclipboard.org/
Live Clipboard on Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Live_Clipboard

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!

I 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:

• The notes are marooned at the bottom of the profile page, usually below the fold. Who is ever going to see them there let alone reply to them?
• The notion of reply doesn’t really exist. There is nothing that ties 2 notes together and indicates that one is a reply to another and hence there are no threaded conversations between multiple people. In fact, there really isn’t anywhere on Windows Live that ad-hoc, informal, threaded conversations actually get persisted for other people to view them; Live Messenger conversations aren’t public and thus have a different purpose whereas conversations on Live Groups discussion boards aren’t really what I would call ad hoc.
• If someone DOES want to reply to a post then its not obvious where they should to it. For example, when I leave a post on someone else’s profile should they reply with another note on their profile or by putting one on mine? I’ve seen people do both and its not obvious which is the better course of action.

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:

• They don’t want the What’s New feed filled up with comments from people you don’t know
• They don’t want to take comments away from where they deserve to be (e.g. on a person’s blog post)

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

A big week indeed, I can’t remember when this much news came out in such a short space of time. Let’s review:

• Zune HD is announced
• Zune Marketplace is coming to XBox
• Bing, a new search engine has been getting some rave reviews
• SKY TV is coming to XBox (If you don’t live in the UK then this won’t mean much to you but believe me, its big!!)
• Windows Azure storage announces transaction support (not many people reading this will care but this is important news to me)

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

I’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

I 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:

The map is a Virtual Earth map although for some reason its in black and white. The blue boxes overlaid on the map are news items from various content suppliers; news is only available for the USA currently folks. Strangely, hovering over one of these news items does not actually tell you what the news item is all about:

In order to discover what the news actually is you have to double-click on the blue box which then launches a web page where you can read it. (In my early experiences the majority of the news items are from Reuters.) I find this process ridiculously laborious – I shouldn’t have to open the web page to see what the news item is actually about but with Vine, sadly, I do. It doesn’t even tell me the headline. I assume this will change in the future.

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:

I’d prefer if that popup appeared when hovering rather than right-clicking but at least its available.

 

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:

I haven’t so far been able to tell what the benefit is of adding your social networks into Vine other than being able to switch between them in the same web page. Observe:

Maybe that’s useful for some, I’m not sure!

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:

The people drawer is also where I see updates (“reports” or “alerts” in Vine terminology) from my contacts and I suspect over time this is where we shall see such things as Facebook and Twitter status updates. I’m disappointed that there is no integration with the contacts and groups in my Windows Live contact list but I am told that this is being considered for the future.

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:

Remember that one intended use of Vine is the ability to keep in touch with people during times of crises and the “Send Alert” feature is here for just that purpose:

    

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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:

Each of those pushpins represents either me or one of my contacts and when I right-click on one of them I get the option to send them an instant message, an email or view their Facebook page (if they have registered it with Vine). Here’s where it starts to get interesting. The pushpins can be moved about which ostensibly appears to have no value whatsoever but upon enquiry it transpires that the relative distance of each contact’s pushpin from your own will (one day) determine how prominently that person’s updates are displayed to you. To quote Vine team member Oren Trutner:

The metaphor is that if you pull someone closer, you hear more. If you push them to the back, you only "hear" the urgent messages. That would add a dimension of volume control over the communications. It also lets you pull someone closer temporarily. For example, if a remote relative is suddenly in trouble, I might pull them closer for the duration, even if I'm not normally all that involved in their daily life.

(http://social.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/vine/thread/3fd9d97c-7b49-4b9a-9e46-5bbeb3414721)

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:

• It would be nice to have keyboard shortcuts for opening and closing the drawers.
• Everything within Vine (address entry, phone number entry, news sources) are currently intended for use in the US and nowhere else. If you don’t reside in the US then you’re not yet going to get much value out of this.
• I don’t like that news items get opened in a separate browser, I’d like to view them within Vine.
• I would also like to be able to comment on and annotate news items and have those comments/annotations be viewable by my contacts
• Location based services (i.e. based on GPS information or mobile phone triangulation) are being considered for the future so says Vine team member Chris Mitchell.

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