I was just having some trouble signing in to Live Messenger and decided to use that little "Server Status" link.  I was a little surprised to be hit with 3 different brandings for the same service in the span of a few seconds.

I know there has been some brand confusion in the land of MSN, but I'd hope that they could at least pick one and try to make things consistant.

Friday, March 16, 2007 2:10:45 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)      Comments [0]  Internet | Microsoft | MSN | Search

Ok, I'm not going to claim to have researched the feasibility of this, but I've been eyeing various models of the MSN Direct (SPOT) watches for years now, but every year I check the coverage maps, and every year I am disappointed that coverage hasn't yet expanded anywhere near my location.  I was wondering if it would be possible for Microsoft to design and build a personal USB connected Low-Power Unlicensed FM transmitter that could provide sync and data to these watches.  

My understanding is that these watches already get all of their data over FM radio data channels, so it would probably only require minor changes if any to make it work with a "MSN Direct Base Station".  Most of us spend the majority of our days near one or two internet connected computers, so this solution would keep the watch almost as up to date as if we were in a real coverage area.  And since the personal base station would only be syncing our data, it might even provide faster updates of the information we care about.

Friday, December 01, 2006 4:11:26 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)      Comments [0]  Mobiles | MSN

More brand confusion is on-tap from the MSN/Live.com folks.  They are slowly opening up the beta of their Soapbox.msn.com video site.  Now many folks are going to be confused as to why this isn't Soapbox.live.com.  It's for user-generated content right?  That's kinda like spaces.live.com.  It's for sharing with your friends & family.  And strangely, the beta invitation signup appears to be handled through ideas.live.com.
 
Back when the whole live.com branding thing was new, there was a lot of discussion about what it all really meant.  Sanaz Ahari posted some clarifications, and then later a bit of a mea culpa on behalf of Microsoft. 
 
The original explanation points to the reasoning for why Soapbox is an MSN site.  MSN is about supposedly about content, and Live.com is about services.  Unfortunately, there are many problems with trying to make this distinction.  Blogging is all about content.  95% of the value of a service like spaces.live.com is the content!  Gallery.live.com? Content as well.   Yes there is a services aspect to spaces, gallery and soapbox, but after seeing the flury of live.com announcements, I was totally expecting Warhol to come out under the live.com banner.  Maybe you at least put an CNAME record in the live.com DNS to redirect Soapbox.live.com to Soapbox.msn.com.
 
On a lighter note, was everyone else as disturbed as I was by the disco/robot/etc butterfly?

Tuesday, September 19, 2006 7:00:04 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)      Comments [0]  Marketing | Microsoft | MSN

Let me set up a pointer to a Blogger API or MetaWeblog API endpoint (or any other endpoint that a significant number of people use), and then mirror any content I post to my Space to that endpoint.  That's it.  This solves the "Let me have my own domain name" request that has caused many bloggers to turn away from Spaces.  If this feature was implemented, I could use Spaces as my Editor and still keep my blog on my own server using dasBlog.  It would also enable me to us all of the Spaces-integrated goodness of Live messenger, Expo, etc., while still maintaining control of my blog.

Just a thought...

Thursday, April 06, 2006 4:52:29 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)      Comments [0]  Blogging | MSN

Search Champs was a great experience, and I wanted to capture a few thoughts:

1. The Microsoft employees that we interacted with are very passionate about making great services, and part of that is listening to criticism.  They invited folks who were very likely to provide hard critical feedback, and they received plenty of very vocal feedback.
2. If you put a bunch of geeks in a bar, the conversations can be pretty interesting.  The evening after we all arrived, they took us all out to a bar in Seattle for a reception.  It was weird to be shouting over the music, discussing technical details of this or that service.  The next evening, it was the same story at the restaurant.
3. Search Engine Optimizers (SEO’s) and Search Engine Marketers (SEM’s) are people too.
4. Robert Scoble is NOT an edge case.  Just ask him ;-)  ( I was two seats over when this audio was taken ).  As a corollary, Robert Scoble is a good sport.
5. When they say to meet your driver at 7:00am, don’t wait until 7:02am to be in front of the hotel.  I ended up taking a cab to the airport.

My brain is still full from the experience.  I’ve got some thoughts on Live Labs, Expo, and MSN’s stance on privacy.  Hopefully I’ll find some time to get those written out soon.

Tuesday, January 31, 2006 10:56:24 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)      Comments [0]  MSN | Random | Search

Sweet!

I'll be participating in Search Champs v4 later this month.  It looks like I'll be working with the local.live.com team, so if you have any feedback, use the contact link (->) and drop me an email.  I'll do my best to take as much constructive feedback to the team as I can!

Wednesday, January 11, 2006 8:17:07 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)      Comments [1]  Internet | Mapping | Microsoft | MSN | Search

Dare Obasanjo has two great posts with some background and details on Microsoft's entry into the classified ad service space.  Microsoft's Fremont (formerly know as Casbah, later to be known as Classifieds.Live.com?) is an atypical classified ad website that allows you to limit viewing to trusted persons in your social network.

Of all of the recent entries into the social networking space, this is one that I think I might actually use, and encourage my friends to use.  I really like the idea of being able to limit my posts, and reading, of ads to trusted or semi-trusted people.

Dare's post talks about social circles, and tribes based on email and buddy lists.  I think an important part of the success of Fremont is going to be the ability of users to build, manage and share circles that are based on more than just email addresses.  Let me build a circle that includes all of my college classmates that currently live in the Washington D.C. area, or a different circle may include any friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend.  After I build cool, useful circles, I want to share them with my friends.  That way I could build a circle for a model airplane club, or a Scout troop, and then share it with the members who could then use it to post relevent information or items for sale to the entire circle.  Hrm, seems to have come full-circle to MSN Groups eh?  Merge Groups with Fremont, and now you have a ton of "Special Interest" tribes, ready built, and ready to make use of the new service. Cool...

The major drawback to this social model is that one of the biggest features is based on limiting visibilty of ads.  The only way that Fremont will come out ahead is if Microsoft can build users' trust high enough that they are willing to post more ads, enough more ads to make up for the limited visibility.  Building more interesting circles will also require that users are willing to include personal details in their profiles. Again, this will come down to trust.

This is going to be interesting.  Microsoft's ability to integrate this accross Messenger, email, groups, and maybe Spaces is going to make it unique in the field.  Yahoo! can play this game, AOL can play too.  Google is still playing catch-up with their application base, but they're closing fast.  Whoever makes it easy & seamless wins.

Thursday, December 01, 2005 10:16:40 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)      Comments [0]  Internet | Microsoft | MSN

In a previous post, I pointed out that having multiple Hotmail accounts is a bit of a pain.  This lead me to think about all the places we have some level of lock-in in our online life.  Getting my email out of my Gmail requires clunky setup of POP email.  Can I get that email into my new Hotmail account (rick@this-domain) ?  Not right now because I don't have enough space, and I'm not certain if I can setup Hotmail to retrieve POP.  I could setup Outlook express with a POP connection to Gmail, and a Webdav to Hotmail, and then...  We've already gone way past what a "normal user" is going to be willing to do. 

Here's what I propose.  Hotmail, (MSN, Live.com, whoever you are now) could add an option to import Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, and any other service that has a user-base that Hotmail would like to have for its own.  They could make use of published API's where possible, and use POP otherwise.  The kicker is, I want a wizard that everybody's brother, sister, and grandma can use.  Just require a username & password.  Your servers can do the rest. 

Does this sound a little one-sided?  It does so far.  And Google, etc, could disrupt this functionality by changing APIs, blocking the Hotmail servers from using POP, many different ways.  How do you guard against this?  Provide open easy methods for people to transition _away_ from your service as well.  That way, if Yahoo! shuts you down, you can say: We're providing a way for users to take their data with them, if you don't do the same, you are mistreating your customers, and furthermore if you are disrupting their efforts to retrieve their own data, you are abusing your users.

What would be a good way to share this data back out?  Maybe Microsoft's new SSE for RSS.  In the end, I can invision a utopia where I have an SSE link between my GMail and my various Hotmail accounts.  All of my email is in every account, and I can use whichever interface happens to be better this month.  All of my contacts sync back and forth.  Unread/Status information flows quickly and easily from one service to the other.  Consumers are happy because they have choice, and the services can compete on thier merits.  Maybe let me apply a filter to the SSE links too, so I'm in control of what information gets passed to each service.  Control & choices == good for consumers == happy consumers.

This same idea applies to RSS.  I know I can export/import opml with most services, but in my mind that doesn't pass the "normal user" test either.  just let me build SSE links between the various clients.  It'll make me a happy customer.

Wednesday, November 23, 2005 6:36:25 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)      Comments [0]  Google | Microsoft | MSN

Sweet.   I've been toying with the idea of giving up my gmail account and just going with an email address on one of my own domains, but I didn't want to have to worry about spam catching, remote access, or learning how to efficiently use the webmail interface that my hosting providers uses.  I've already signed up my family domain and blobservations.net.  I wasn't previously using any accounts on these domains, so I don't mind expirementing with them on a new service.  I'm expecting gmail to have this functionality soon as well, but I've recently become disenchanted with the gmail experience.  It's still feels too "beta" for as long as it's been out, and the occasional service outages come at inconvenient times.

So far I've got some gripes/wishes with domains.live.com (the mail component.  I'm guessing they'll be hosting other stuff under this moniker given the generic name).

The first account I signed up, I activated before going to accountservices.msn.com and setting a country.  This account ended up with a 2MB space limit.  Not cool.  I tried resetting the country at accountservices, but it was still at 2MB.  It may have changed if I was patient, but I tried deleting & recreating the account only to find out that there's a waiting period to use a previously used account.  This is a pain.  And the other account that I set the country properly first ended up with a 25MB space limit.  In the current landscape of multi-gig mailboxes, Hotmail should just suck it up and keep pace.  I know, it's hard to scale when you're as big as Hotmail, but seriously, at least get your guinea pigs up to 1 Gigabyte from the start!  (We won't really use that much space, we just like to know it's there!  It's marketing, not technology!)

These new accounts are adding to my passport account soup.  I think I'm up to about 6 accounts that I actually still care about!  I'd love some mechanism to merge passport accounts, or at least let me open all my Hotmail accounts under one login with a unified interface. 

That's it for now.  I've still got lots of opinions about the classic Hotmail interface, but many are probably already addressed by the Kahuna / mail.live.com beta.  If someone were nice enough to hook me up with a beta invite on that front, I'll gladly share my opinions!  (just use the contact link on this blog ;-) )

Friday, November 18, 2005 8:00:19 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)      Comments [1]  Google | Microsoft | MSN

Dare Obasanjo lays some pretty heavy hints about MSN's upcoming developer story.  He includes several session descriptions for MSN related content at the PDC, and provides a link to a teaser page at http://msdn.microsoft.com/msn

Read the post for more details, this could get interesting...

Thursday, September 08, 2005 6:42:16 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)      Comments [0]  Development | Microsoft | MSN | PDC05 | Search