Windows Live MSN .Net Messenger Identiy Crisis

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

Convergence of Ideas and the Internet Singularity

Recently I noticed a strange convergence of ideas show up through my Blogroll, so I wanted to call out a few posts.
 
Scott Adams, of Dilbert fame, writes that if he could fix one problem in the world, he would give everyone the ability to understand when someone had more expertise than us on a given subject.  In another post he writes about making complicated decisions where many of the influencing factors are effectively unknown.
 
Malcom Gladwell (The author of Blink) writes about expert systems and how sometimes algorithms can be used to increase the probability that the average decision maker will make good choices.
 
Thirdly, and this is a bit older, Gary Flake often talks (and writes, and presents) about the idea of an Internet singularity, where humanity achieves a sort of critical mass that enables rapid forward progress.  

All of these ideas seemed to mesh together in my mind.  Scott Adams' "Universal Fix" is the event horizon to the internet singularity.  People already have access to more information than they need.  The big problem is that they have way too much information.  They don't know who to trust.  Was that Amazon review written by a paid shill, or is this product really the best?  Gladwell's post shows how we will likely get there from here.   What we need are expert systems that are designed to sift the BS from the good information.  When I need advice on how to clean a juice stain on my carpet, or get an eyelash out of my eye I need to know that I can go to a single location and find what I need.
 
The good thing is that they have been working on the BS filter for a while now.  Google has a pretty good one built.  Microsoft is getting close to feature & relevance parity with Google.  Other players are keeping pace. 
 
The winner is going to be the company that manages to build a brand that is no longer associated with searching the internet, but rather with finding knowledge and information all over the world.  It's a subtle distinction considering how much of the world's knowledge is making it's way onto the internet.  The problem is that internet search is all about research, and research isn't always fun.  While I enjoy reading specs while considering buying a new computer, most folks would rather just be able to provide information about how they plan to use the machine and get good solid recommendations back. I know Dell and Gateway and others say "Just call us, we'll tell you what you need", but that is advertising, not good advice.
 
Most people go to the search engines because they have a problem to solve.  The research that entails is a means to an end, not the end itself.  Instead of spewing out pages and pages of indexed text, I need a search engine that gives me concise, correct opinions, or which points me to experts, and/or expert systems that can solve my problems better than I can.  And I need to be able to trust that no one is paying for the privilege of getting to be my "expert" so they can make a profit off me.

Friday, December 01, 2006 9:02:39 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)      Comments [0]  Random | Search

Things the search engines can't help you find

Tonight I have something stuck in my eye.  I'm guessing it's an eyelash, but I don't know for sure because I can't get it out.  I figured that the internet would yield some tips for me, so in between opening my eyes under water and dousing with saline drops, I decided to hit up Google and Windows Live Search.  I tried various combinations of "eyelash", "eyelid", "stuck", "remove". I even through some desperate pleas at the search engines with plain language queries.

Almost every result I found had to deal with fake eyelashes, makeup, or contact lenses.  The internet failed me tonight.  The problem is that the search engines still see my queries as keywords, and they don't know what I really mean.  Either that, or there really are no tips on the internet for getting eyelashes out of your eye. I can't really believe the latter.  The internet is supposed to know everything.

I know I've had several of these "the search engines are useless for this" moments in the past.  I'll try to remember some more.  Does anyone else have any experiences with situations like this? 

 

Sunday, September 10, 2006 11:49:58 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)      Comments [3]  Random | Search

Search Champs v4 Redux

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

What Is Conversational Blogging?

What is conversational blogging?  MSN has a few relevent pages, Google does too, but the answer doesn't seem very clear.  I'm going to propose a definition.  Feel free to track-back or comment to add your 2 cents...

Conversational blogging is the act of publishing or reading blog entries in a way that groups related posts into a coherent dialogue.

There are several mechanisms that people use to build conversations in the blogosphere. 

• Comments are the simplist, and often the easiest method.  It keeps all the relevent info in one place, and anyone who visits the post page can easily find the dialogue.  Comment spam, and all the things that fight comment spam (CAPTCHA, Moderation, etc.) detract from the usefulness of comments for dialogue.
• Referrers are dead in my opinion.  Publishing referrers is just spam-bait.
• Trackbacks may be the best we have for current technology.  Spam is still a problem, but automated checking and blacklists seem to be holding back the tide.
• Tags.  Tags can be used to follow almost anything, and if they are specific enough, they can limit their results to a single conversation.
• Search.  The various blog searches have ways to subscribe to "who links to this or that" feeds, or you can follow conversations by tailoring your searches properly.

How could it be better?  From a user perspective, when I'm reading feeds and find an interesting entry that might have an good conversation surrounding it, I'd love to be able to click something and set a "follow this conversation" flag.  My feed reader should then give me some good way to visualize a threaded representation of all the chunks of information that relate to that specific entry.  Comments, links, trackbacks, whatever, I'd want it all to be available in an organized manner.  Let me un-follow the conversation later if I lose interest, but otherwise, bring me the new bits as they appear on the web, and provide some context for how they fit in to the dialogue.

This is a feed reader problem, but it's gonna need a great search back-end, and a well thought-out UI on the front.

 

 

Wednesday, January 18, 2006 10:51:23 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)      Comments [3]  Blogging | Search

Search Champs v4, I'll be there!

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

Beware of Bloggers, a Warning to the Traditional Press

The traditional press, newspapers, magazines, etc., have long enjoyed a unique power over the information that they present to their readers.  They could selectively quote, frame the discussion, and in many ways make the information portray a preconceived story.

That era is coming to an end.

Mark Jen recently posted a preemptive disclosure of a conversation he had with a Forbes Magazine fact checker.

Mark Cuban went so far as to post the entire text of an email interview he did with a NY Times reporter, who evidently twisted Cuban's words to fit his story.

Blogs are flattening the world of information.  Big media will continue to hold large amounts of power, but abusing that power will become riskier, especially in instances where you are using quotes out of context, or framing articles in ways that totally disregard the source material.  While it's true that the majority of your readers may never see the other side of the story directly, your direct competitors may pick it up, and use it to undermine your credibility.

Blogging lowers the bar.  It used to take a great deal of time & money to get a message to thousands or even millions of people.  Now, any person can start a blog for free.  Whether or not their words reach any audience will be determined by relevence, and the indexing of blogs that is being shaped by the likes of PubSub, Technorati, Google, and MSN.

Now, re-read that last sentence, and see if you can guess who the new Media Superpowers are going to be...

Tuesday, September 27, 2005 9:50:50 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)      Comments [0]  Blogging | Media | Search

Google finally launches a blog search engine (Beta)

Google has launched a Blog Search Engine (From DownloadSquad). 

It fairs pretty will for my favorite vanity searches:

Blobservations and Hallihan

Actually, I'm not being quite fair, it does awesome on those searches.  I'm pretty familiar with what those searches provide on Pubsub, Technorati, and the normal Google Search and MSN Search.  And it's fast...  Two ways.  It had a nine hour old blog post as my first result, so it's updating fairly quickly, and the UI is lightning fast.  No perceived wait (although I'm sure it's measurable).

This is Google's biggest advantage over MSN search.  Google has that perceived wait down to nothing.

While Google is late to the party on blog search, they have put together a quality offering that I'm sure will become many folks engine of choice for blog searching.

Wednesday, September 14, 2005 4:57:02 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)      Comments [0]  Blogging | Google | Search

MSN finally getting a "Developer Story"

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

RSS Search Results from MSN Search Beta
I've only had a few minutes to look at this, but it appears that you can obtain search results from the MSN Search Beta, simply by adding "&format=rss" to the end of the url. I read about this first on SearchEngineWatch.

The first thing I did was create an ego-feed on the name of my blog ("Blobservations") and one of the returned links was from dvorak.org, specifically, this post. The interesting point is that the MSN Search Beta found this, but my Technorati search for inbound links didn't pick this up. Now I know that this has to do with blog pings, and that Technorati probably would have picked it up if it had been properly notified. The point is that MSN search found it on it's own, for a post that is roughly 37 hours old. That's cool!

It'll be interesting to see exactly how quickly it can find new blog content. I've got some MSN Search Beta "Feeds" in my blogroll now, so I'll post more as I get a better feel for the performance.
Monday, January 10, 2005 9:08:52 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)      Comments [0]  Blogging | Search