(Cross posted from CloudAve)

Microsoft announced today its rollout plans for the 3rd wave of Windows Live services.

The goal of this latest release wave, according to company officials, is to simplify the use of the offered services and unify the user’s entire online experience into the Windows Live interface.
Microsoft is planning to rollout the new services, currently in beta, to the public within the 1-2 months timeframe.

Windows Live Goes Social

One of Microsoft’s main emphasis with the current wave of services is on social networking between users using its services.

Microsoft finally figured out that its Live Messenger with about 268 million users worldwide, is by far the most popular instant messaging software in the world, is actually a social networks. With the new release, your Live Messenger contacts are now your Friends and you can see aggregated information about their activities on the net.

Very much like Plaxo, FriendFeed etc. Microsoft allows users to bring into their profile content they create in all sorts of services on the web (Live Services, Flickr, LinkedIn, blogs and RSS feeds, …) and share it with their friends and colleagues.
When users add photos, write reviews, and update their profiles directly on Live.com, that content will be put into their activity stream as well.
This activity stream is exposed in all sort of ways throughout Microsoft’s services interface.

For example, Microsoft’s new Live Home portal shows the latest events in your social network. When emailing a friend or chatting on Messenger you’re also able to interact with that friend’s activity stream and more…

Not just for private consumers…

I’ve been told that all these new service updates will not skip Windows Live Domains used by universities and organizations to create a personalized version of Microsoft’s services.
If that really the case, having all these new social capabilities as part of its domain offering can be amazing for collaboration and communication inside the organization.
While Google doesn’t seem to care about its Google Applications for Your Domains customers its good to see that Microsoft is going forward with Live Domains.
This latest update may just be the final straw I need to make the switch to Live Domains…

Where’s Live Mesh?!

It will be really interested to see where Live Mesh comes into the picture in regards to all of these Live services.
Live Mesh should be the glue bridging between Microsoft’s online services and its offline applications and devices (S+S) allowing users to sync all their content- contacts, photos, events, favorites, etc. - across devices and services.
Unfortunately, there’s no clear answer for that…

During the launch we’ve only heard about Live Sync allowing users to sync photos across computers. Some sources say its an incarnation of FolderShare and in any case it doesn’t seem to be based on Live Mesh technology.
With Live Mesh being one of Microsoft’s core platform offering its really hard to understand why we need to have Live Sync too…

Other notes…

• All the services are released simultaneously in all countries and in 48 (!) languages.
• Windows Live Skydrive size limit has changed from 5GB to 25GB
• Windows Live Hotmail looks and feels a lot better to use.
• I’ve uploaded all the screenshots of the new services to my SkyDrive:
  

Tags: Google, Live Mesh, Microsoft, SkyDrive, social networks, Windows Live

MyBlogLog unveiled their new design yesterday:

Don’t worry, we still got all the features that you can’t live without; your stats, your widgets and, of course, the New With stuff. Only now everything is framed with shiny shadows and rounded edges! Also notice that on your profile we have moved the most recent visitors module, up on top, not down below the fold so you can quickly see who’s been checking you out.

If you’re a DeveloperZen reader and part of the MyBlogLog community (or just have a Yahoo ID), please join the DeveloperZen community on MyBlogLog.

Tags: MyBlogLog

Twitter is down again. Just ask http://www.istwitterdown.com/ …

It’s funny that we’re starting to take this for granted…

Tags: Twitter

It seems like Microsoft and Yahoo! are talking again to such an extent that is was either required, or in Microsoft’s interest to release the following statement:

Microsoft Issues Statement Regarding Yahoo!

Microsoft announced that it is continuing to explore and pursue its alternatives to improve and expand its online services and advertising business.

REDMOND, Wash. — May 18, 2008 — Microsoft Corp. today issued the following statement:

“In light of developments since the withdrawal of the Microsoft proposal to acquire Yahoo! Inc., Microsoft announced that it is continuing to explore and pursue its alternatives to improve and expand its online services and advertising business.  Microsoft is considering and has raised with Yahoo! an alternative that would involve a transaction with Yahoo! but not an acquisition of all of Yahoo!  Microsoft is not proposing to make a new bid to acquire all of Yahoo! at this time, but reserves the right to reconsider that alternative depending on future developments and discussions that may take place with Yahoo! or discussions with shareholders of Yahoo! or Microsoft or with other third parties.

“There of course can be no assurance that any transaction will result from these discussions.”

This comes just a day after Carl Icahn proposed to replace the Yahoo! board in an attempt to revive the Microsoft acquisition deal…

The current guess is that Microsoft will try to buy just Yahoo’s search business in an effort to prevent a Yahoo-Google deal that’ll make Google take over Yahoo’s paid search business.

I guess there will be more to come on that…

Tags: Microsoft, MSFT, Yahoo, YHOO

My friend Eran from Kampyle invited me to be the first to try out and review their new service, now in private beta stages.
The company, based in Ramat Gan, offers a new service for website owners that will help them collect and manage user’s feedback.

Reinventing the Feedback Form

According to Eran, most companies today use simple email forms to track feedback from end-users. This mailbox tends to become flooded as companies fail handling the overwhelming amount of feedback and lack the human resources required to read and analyze all the responses, to act upon these feedbacks and to respond to these feedbacks.

Kampyle aims to offer a service that can give insights that are usually only available to companies that are able to employ a large customer support organization - the ability to track, analyze, manage, act and respond to a large amount of feedbacks without requiring a significant human effort.

Making Sense of it All

Managing Feedbacks

One of the most important aspects of making sense of a large amount of comments is figuring out the similarities and grouping feedbacks according to topics.
Besides the obvious grouping by feedback type and sub-type, the Kampyle team is working on an algorithm that can also figure out similarities and group according to the actual content of the feedbacks. It can also provide an automatically generated summary for a group of feedbacks.

Besides the actual feedback, Kampyle also collects contextual information (like resolution, OS, browser version…) which may prove useful in understanding the feedback.

Analyzing Feedbacks

One of the important aspects of managing feedbacks is the ability prioritize the most important issues and analyze the possible causes.
Kampyle’s Feedback Analytics dashboard provides an overview on the site’s feedbacks. Besides the regular analytics features that illustrate the amount of feedbacks and the rate they’re being received, overview of feedbacks by grade or by type, the Feedback Analytics screen displays information to help with decision making - which topics are the most important (most reported) and require attention and an analysis on the possible causes…

Acting and Responding to Feedbacks

The whole purpose of the management and analytics screen is to allow you to figure out what is the input you’re end users are trying to provide you with, and act upon this information. End users like being listened to, and what better way to let them know you care about their feedback (which is not just thrown into a flooded unmonitored mailbox anymore) than to respond to their feedback?

Using Kampyle you can quickly respond to a group of users who gave feedback on an issue.

Final Thoughts

Every site and every new startup wants to gather feedbacks from its users. Developing such a system and dealing with the processing complexities is, by definition, not part of the company’s core. So I think a lot of site owners will appreciate Kampyle for taking that task off their shoulders and providing them with an out-of-the-box service that provides them both actual feedback and insights, allowing them to concentrate on their core product - their site.

By the way, I’ve added Kampyle’s feedback button to my blog’s side panel on the right (and to the bottom) of this post.
Let’s hear some feedback about this site… What do you think about the content?  Did you notice the new design? 

Tags: Israeli Startups, Kampyle, Web 2.0

I’ve been using Twitter quite extensively lately and I received some feedback (from my Facebook friend. my Twitter is automatically syndicated to my Facebook status) asking what’s Twitter\Twittering.

Twitter is a great way to communicate simple messages to a group of people who “follow you”. Initially, the service aimed to to answer the question “What are you doing now?” with a  short status message limited to 140 characters.
However, as its adoption became wider users found out it can be used for various other purposes - making new friends, learning of new events, getting updates as events take place…

So, if you want to make the best of this medium you should consider following these few simple rules:

• Follow Your Followers - That’s like making friends in any other social site. Twitter is not just about sending updates to your audience. You can also get feedback and engage in a conversation (of some sort). You need to follow your followers to be able to get their responses…
• Speak Up (Engage in a Conversation) - Participation is the key to letting people know you’re there, what you’re about.
• Ask (Initiate Conversation) - Ask questions. Listen to responses. Learn!
  From “Are comments working properly on my site?” to “Is this marketing approach appealing?”…  you’re followers probably have valuable input they can provide if you let them.

Got some other TwitterEthics to add?

Tags: Social Web, Twitter

I found out about this cool new text-to-speech service from Jeff’s blog. It’s called Odiogo and it converts the text I write on my blog into audio.
It also makes my content downloadable so you can listen to it as a podcast on your iPods, MP3 players and cellular phones!

From the Odiogo web site:

Turn readers into listeners, and transform your blog into a high quality, ad-supporting broadcast that can vastly expand your audience reach!

• Automatic podcast generation
• “Near-human” quality text-to-speech
• Listen Button feature deployed in next to no time for WordPress, Blogger, TypePad and Terapad platforms
• Detailed download statistics
• Make money from embedded ads

I’m pretty happy with the results I’m getting on this blog. What do you think?

Click here to subscribe to this feed with iTunes

An excellent video explaining the concept of Data Portability to non techies:

DataPortability - Connect, Control, Share, Remix from Smashcut Media on Vimeo.

A friend sent me to a new internet radio site - www.jango.com.
Basically, it lets you create different internet radio channels based on bands and songs you like.
It also adds a social dimension where you can listen to your friend’s channels

It also allows you to embed a cool widget in your site:

www.Jango.com

Check it out and add me as a friend

Scott Guthrie just published a comprehensive post detailing Microsoft’s .NET web products roadmap.
To sum up the release schedule:

• .NET Framework Source Code - No date specified in the post but should be any time now.
• ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions - Preview version will be available next week
• Silverlight 2.0 - Public beta on Q1 2008 (With Go-Live licence)
• IIS 7 - Will be part of the Windows 2008 release. The official launch is at February 27th 2008 so it’ll probably RTM before that.

I’m extremely happy to see Silverlight maturing as a web development platform with its 2.0 version that includes:

• WPF UI Framework: The current Silverlight Alpha release only includes basic controls support and a managed API for UI drawing.  The next public Silverlight preview will add support for the higher level features of the WPF UI framework.  These include: the extensible control framework model, layout manager support, two-way data-binding support, and control template and skinning support.  The WPF UI Framework features in Silverlight will be a compatible subset of the WPF UI Framework features in last week’s .NET Framework 3.5 release.

• Rich Controls: Silverlight will deliver a rich set of controls that make building Rich Internet Applications much easier.  The next Silverlight preview release will add support for core form controls (textbox, checkbox, radiobutton, etc), built-in layout management controls (StackPanel, Grid, etc), common functionality controls (TabControl, Slider, ScrollViewer, ProgressBar, etc) and data manipulation controls (DataGrid, etc).

• Rich Networking Support: Silverlight will deliver rich networking support.  The next Silverlight preview release will add support for REST, POX, RSS, and WS* communication.  It will also add support for cross domain network access (so that Silverlight clients can access resources and data from any trusted source on the web).

• Rich Base Class Library Support: Silverlight will include a rich .NET base class library of functionality (collections, IO, generics, threading, globalization, XML, local storage, etc).  The next Silverlight preview release will also add built-in support for LINQ to XML and richer HTML DOM API integration.

When evaluating Silverlight (1.0 and 1.1) a few month ago I came to a conclusion that its not mature enough for us to use it for building business UIs. Having support for only vector graphic shapes meant that any control had to be built manually which means we would have had to manually build a lot of controls ourselves.

With the new support for WPF UI Framework and Rich Controls it now seems more robust for building LOB applications.

Some ideas regarding Silverlight in LOB apps:

1. Embed Silverlight in InfoPath. InfoPath forms only support a limited set of controls and since its driven by IE it could be extended by embedding ActiveX controls. If you want rich graphics, animations, graphs, etc. as part of your form you have to embed some sort of an ActiveX.
   Of course, you can always develop you’re own ActiveX and embed a WinForm or WPF inside InfoPath but why go through all that work when Microsoft already implemented Silverlight ActivX for you?
2. Outlook folder Homepage. Folder homepages in Outlook are htmls. To display rich UI in that view the only (hacky) way (presented by Microsoft as part pf project Elixir on MSDN) is to embed an ActiveX in that html and have it connect with an Outlook addin via .NET remoting. Silverlight can be used to save the work and effort on developing (and deploying) your own ActiveX.

I guess we’ll have to re-evaluate Silverlight when the 2.0 beta comes out…

On other notes, I’m at Redmond right now attending the Silverlight 1.0 Firestarter event which should be interesting…

Tags: ASP.NET, IIS7, Microsoft, Silverlight

I just got this great video (via Facebook):

Google just announced that MySpace and Six Apart will join its OpenSocial initiative together with Orkut, Salesforce, LinkedIn, Ning, Hi5, Plaxo, Friendster, Viadeo and Oracle.

OpenSocial is an open interchange that allows users to take their social graph with them from site to site, basically unifying all the social networks supporting the initiative into one big virtual social networks.

This changes the rules for Facebook because now users have a choice of picking dozens (soon to be hundreds?) of open sites rather than choosing Facebook’s closed platform.

Google basically just redefined the rules of the game in social networking.

Will Facebook be forced to “open up” and support OpenSocial? And if so, as such a move will push its Facebook Apps platform aside, what will be its comparative advantage over the other networks out there?

I just refuse to add all these idiotic Facebook apps…

>Ayelet’s question got me thinking about all the mediums I’m using to socialize and share information online.
When I read the post only LinkedIn and Flickr came to mind. But there are lots of other mediums I’m using…

Because I want to have more interactions with my readers (I know you’re out there somewhere) I decided to list all my online
activities in a single post for your convenience…

• www.ekampf.com/blog (or www.developerzen.com)
  That’s my blog. If you’re reading this you probably already know of it
  You should subscribe to my feed if you haven’t already and a strongly encourage you to comment on posts….
  
• My FaceBook
  Just opened my account a few days ago. Seems pretty cool. My online presence page… 
  
• My Flickr Page (and feed)
  I simply love Flickr. I keep all my photos there. 
  Besides providing an easy interface for storing and organizing my photos it also helps me interact with friends and community members. Having constant feedback helps keeping things alive and vibrant… 
  
• Google Shared Items (feed)
  I’m reading tons of feeds a day so that you won’t have to!
  One of my colleagues at work asked me to send over interesting articles I encounter. I figured out the best way to do so is to share every good article\post I encounter when going over my feeds in Google Reader. This also helps me avoid the echo chamber on my blog.
  I want my blog to feature original content and opinions rather than just echo other posts (and product announcements. Aren’t you tired of all these “<product name> CTP just released!” posts on every .NET blog when a new release is out?).
  So it is my recommendation to you to
  • Subscribe to my Shared Items Feed to see what I’m reading
  • Create your own shared items feed and echoing announcements etc. on your personal blogs
• My LinkedIn Page
  I use LinkedIn as a professional presence on the net. Mainly to connect with other people in the industry.
  
  
• My Twitter Page >
  With all the buzz around twitter I couldn’t help but starting my very own twitter account. I mainly use it twitter new blog posts and maybe some other interesting events (don’t expect the usual boring “Just woke up”\”At Work”..” kind of posts…)
  
• MyBlogLog Page
  Form a community around my blog. Basically it lets see who visits my web site etc.
  
• Technorati
  • My user page - http://technorati.com/people/technorati/ekampf
  • My weblog - http://technorati.com/blogs/www.ekampf.com%2Fblog (View blog authority)

Ayelet asks Which Is Your Favorite Social Network and Why?

I think a more interesting question is to which suck social networks site people are willing to pay for use or for access to extra features.

The two social network sites I mostly use are Flickr and LinkedIn.
I Flickr Pro account. Why? Because its very very cheap and I’m willing to spend such a cost to gain all new features a Pro account has to offer (all pictures are visible, unlimited storage and upload bandwidth…)

I’m not paying on my LinkedIn account. Their cheapest plan is 20$ a month and for what?! So I could use “Who’s View My Profile”?
I don’t feel like LinkedIn is giving any value for the money they ask. At least not for me… (I guess its more useful to recruiters, HR, etc.)

So you pay to any of the social network sites you’re using?