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David Treadwell has a blog post on the Windows Live Developer blog entitled David Treadwell on New and Updated Windows Live Platform Services where he previews some of the announcements that folks will get to dig into at MIX 08. There are a lot of items of note in his post but there is some stuff that stands out that I felt was worth calling out.

Windows Live Messenger Library (new to beta) – “Develop your own IM experience”

We are also opening up the Windows Live Messenger network for third-party web sites to reach the 300 million+ Windows Live Messenger users. The library is a JavaScript client API, so the user experience is primarily defined by the third party. When a third party integrates the Windows Live Messenger Library into their site they can define the look & feel to create their own IM experience. Unlike the existing third party wrappers for the MSN Protocol (the underlying protocol for Windows Live Messenger) the Windows Live Messenger Library securely authenticates users, therefore their Windows Live ID credentials are safe.

A couple of months ago we announced the Windows Live Messenger IM Control which enables you to embed an AJAX instant messaging window on any webpage so people can start IM conversations with you. I have one placed at http://carnage4life.spaces.live.com and it’s cool to have random readers of my blog start up conversations with me in the middle of my work day or at home via the IM control.

The team who delivered this has been hard at work and now they’ve built a library that enables any developer to build similar experiences on top of the Windows Live Messenger network. Completely customized IM integration is now available for anyone that wants it.  Sweet. Kudos to Keiji, Steve Gordon, Siebe and everyone else who had something to do with this for getting it out the door.

An interesting tidbit is that the library was developed in Script#. Three cheers for code generation.

Contacts API (progressed to Beta) – “Bring your friends”

Our goal is to help developers keep users at the center of their experience by letting them control their data and contact portability, while keeping their personal information private. A big step forward in that effort is today’s release to beta of Windows Live Contacts API. Web developers can use this API in production to enable their customers to transfer and share their contacts lists in a secure, trustworthy way (i.e., no more screen scraping)—a great step on the road toward data portability. (For more on Microsoft’s view on data portability, check out Inder Sethi’s video.) By creating an optimized mode for invitations, it allows users to share only the minimum amount of information required to invite friends to a site, this includes firstname / lastname / preferred email address. The Contacts API uses the new Windows Live ID Delegated Authentication framework; you can find out more here.

A lot of the hubbub around “data portability” has really been about exporting contact lists. Those of us working on the Contacts platform at Windows Live realize that there is a great demand for users to be able to access their social graph data securely from non-Microsoft services.  

The Windows Live Contacts API provides a way for Windows Live users to give an application permission to access their contact list in Windows Live (i.e. Hotmail address book/Live Messenger buddy list) without giving the application their username and password. It is our plan to kill the password anti-pattern when it comes to Windows Live services. If you are a developer of an application or Web site that screen scrapes Hotmail contacts, I’d suggest taking a look at this API instead of continuing in this unsavory practice.

Atom Publishing Protocol (AtomPub) as the future direction

Microsoft is making a large investment in unifying our developer platform protocols for services on the open, standards-based Atom format (RFC 4287) and the Atom Publishing Protocol (RFC 5023). At MIX we are enabling several new Live services with AtomPub endpoints which enable any HTTP-aware application to easily consume Atom feeds of photos and for unstructured application storage (see below for more details). Or you can use any Atom-aware public tools or libraries, such as .NET WCF Syndication to read or write these cloud service-based feeds.

In addition, these same protocols and the same services are now ADO.NET Data Services (formerly known as “ Project Astoria”) compatible. This means we now support LINQ queries from .NET code directly against our service endpoints, leveraging a large amount of existing knowledge and tooling shared with on-premise SQL deployments.

The first question that probably pops into the mind of regular readers of my blog is, “What happened to Web3S and all that talk about AtomPub not being a general purpose editing format for the Web?”. The fact is when we listened to the community of Web developers the feedback was overwhelmingly clear that people would prefer if we worked together with the community to make AtomPub work for the scenarios we felt it wasn’t suited for than Microsoft creating a competing proprietary protocol.

We listened and now here we are. If you are interested in the technical details of how Microsoft plans to use AtomPub and how we’ve dealt with the various issues we originally had with the protocol. I suggest subscribing to the Astoria team’s blog and check out the various posts on this topic by Pablo Castro. There’s a good post by Pablo discussing how Astoria describes relations between elements in AtomPub and suggests a mechanism for doing inline expansion of links. I’ll be providing my thoughts on each of Pablo’s posts and the responses as I find time during the coming weeks.

Windows Live Photo API (CTP Refresh with AtomPub end point)

The Windows Live Photo API allows users to securely grant permission (via Delegated Authentication) for a third party web site to create/read/update/delete on their photos store in Windows Live. The Photo API refresh has several things which make it easier and faster for third parties to implement.

• Third party web sites can you link/refer to images directly from the web browser so they no longer need to proxy images, and effectively save on image bandwidth bills.
• A new AtomPub end point which makes it even easier to integrate.

At the current time, I can’t find the AtomPub endpoint but that’s probably because the documentation hasn’t been refreshed. Moving the API to AtomPub is one of the consequences of the decision to standardize on AtomPub for Web services provided by Windows Live. Although I was part of the original decision to expose the API using WebDAV, I like the fact that all of our APIs will utilize a standard protocol and can take advantage of the breadth of Atom and AtomPub libraries that exist on various platforms.

I need to track down the AtomPub end point so I can compare and contrast it to the WebDAV version to see what we’ve gained and/or lost in the translation. Stay tuned.

Now playing: Jay-Z - Can't Knock the Hustle

Over the past week, two Windows Live teams have shipped some good news to their users. The Windows Live SkyDrive team addressed the two most often raised issues with their service with the announcements in their post Welcome to the bigger, better, faster SkyDrive! which reads

You've made two things clear since our first release: You want more space; and you want SkyDrive where you are. Today we're giving you both. You now have five times the space you had before — that’s 5GB of free online storage for your favorite documents, pictures, and other files.

 

 

SkyDrive is also available now in 38 countries/regions. In addition to Great Britain, India, and the U.S., we’re live in Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Denmark, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Finland, France, Guatemala, Honduras, Italy, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Norway, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Puerto Rico, Portugal, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, and Turkey.

 

Wow, Windows Live is just drowning our customers with free storage. Thats 5GB in SkyDrive and 5GB for Hotmail.  

The Windows Live Spaces team also shipped some sweetness to their customers as well. This feature is a little nearer to my heart since it relies on Contact platform APIs I worked on a little while ago. The feature is described by Michelle in on the their team blog in a post entitled More information on Friends in common which states

In the friends module on another person’s space, there is a new area that highlights friends you have in common.  Right away you can see the number of people you both know and the profile pictures of some of those friends. 

Want to see the rest of your mutual friends?  Click on In common and you’re taken to a full page view that shows all of your friends as well as separate lists of friends in common and friends that you don't have in common.  This way you can also discover new people that you might know in real life, but are not connected with on Windows Live.

                                                

 

Finding friends in common is also especially important when planning an event on Windows Live Events.  Who wants to go to a party when none of your friends are going?  On the Guest list area of every event, you can now quickly see how many of your friends have also been invited to the event.  Just click on See who’s going and see whether or not your friends are planning to go.

Showing mutual friends as shown above is one of those small features that makes a big impact on the user experience. Nice work Michelle and Shu on getting this out the door.

Now playing: Iconz - I Represent

One of the biggest problems with the Facebook user experience today is the amount of spam from applications that are trying to leverage its social networks to "grow virally". For this reason, it is unsurprising to read the blog post from Paul Jeffries on the Facebook blog entitled Application Spam where he writes

We've been working on several improvements to prevent this and other abuses by applications. We'll continue to make changes, but wanted to share some of what's new:

• When you get a request from an application, you now have the ability to "Block Application" directly from the request. If you block an application, it will not be able to send you any more requests.
• A few weeks ago, we added the ability to "Clear All" requests from your requests page when you have a lot of requests and invitations that you haven't responded to yet.
• Your feedback now determines how many communications an application can send. When invitations and notifications are ignored, blocked, or marked as spam, Facebook reduces that application's ability to send more. Applications forcing their users to send spammy invitations can wind up with no invitations at all. The power is in your hands; block applications that are bothering you, and report spammy or abusive communications, and we'll restrict the application.
• We've explicitly told developers they cannot dead-end you in an "Invite your Friends" loop. If you are trapped by an application, look for a link to report that "This application is forcing me to invite friends". Your reports will help us stop this behavior.
• We've added an option to the Edit Applications page that allows you to opt-out of emails sent from applications you've already added. When you add a new application, you can uncheck this option right away.

A lot of these are fairly obvious restrictions that put users back in control of their experience. I'm quite surprised that it took so long to add a "Block Application" feature. I can understand that Facebook didn't want to piss off developers on their platform but app spam has become a huge negative aspect of using Facebook. About two months ago, I wrote a blog post entitled Facebook: Placing Needs of Developers Over Needs of Users where I pointed out the Facebook group This has got to stop (POINTLESS FACEBOOK APPLICATIONS ARE RUINING FACEBOOK). At the time of posting that entry, the group had 167,186 members.

This morning, the group has 480,176 members. That's almost half a million people who have indicated that app spam on the site is something they despise. It is amazing that Facebook has let this problem fester for so long given how important keeping their user base engaged and happy with the site is to their bottom line.

Now Playing: Lil' Scrappy feat. Paul Wall - Hustle Man

It's a testament to how busy I've been at work focusing on the Contacts platform that I missed an announcement by Angus Logan a few months ago that there had been an alpha release of a REST API for accessing photos on Windows Live Spaces.  The MSDN page for the API describes the API as

Welcome to the Alpha release of the Windows Live Spaces Photos API. The Windows Live Spaces Photo API allows Web sites to view and update Windows Live Spaces photo albums using the WebDAV protocol. Web sites can incorporate the following functionality:

• Upload or download photos.
• Create, edit, or delete photo albums.
• Request a list of a user's albums, photos, or comments.
• Edit or delete content for an existing entry.
• Query the content in an existing entry.

This news is of particular interest to me since this API is the fruits of my labor that was first hinted at in my post A Flickr-like API for MSN Spaces? from a little over two years ago. At the time, I was responsible for the public APIs for MSN Windows Live Spaces and had just finished working on the the MetaWeblog API for Windows Live Spaces.

The biggest design problem we faced at the time was how to give applications the ability to access a user's personal data which required the user to be authenticated without having dozens of hastily written applications collecting people's usernames and passwords. In general, if we were just a blogging site it may not have been a big deal (e.g. the Twitter API requires that you give your username & password to random apps which may or may not be trustworthy).  However we were part of MSN Windows Live which meant that we had to ensure that users credentials were safeguarded and we didn't end up training users on how to be phished by entering their Passport Windows Live ID credentials into random applications and Web sites.

To get around this problem with our implementation of the MetaWeblog API, I came up with a scheme where users had to use a special username and password when accessing their Windows Live Spaces blog via the API. This was a quick & dirty hack which had plenty of long term problems with it. For one, users had to go through the process of "enabling API access" before they could use blogging tools or other Metaweblog API clients with the service. Another problem was that the problem still wasn't solved for other Windows Live services that wanted to enable APIs. Should each API have its own username and password? That would be quite confusing and overwhelming for users. Should they re-use our API specific username and password? In that case we would be back to square one by exposing an important set of user credentials to random applications.

The right solution eventually decided upon was to come up with a delegated authentication model where a user grants application permission to act on his or her behalf without having to share credentials with the application. This is the model followed by the Windows Live Contacts API, the Facebook API, Google AuthSub, Yahoo! BBAuth, the Flickr API and a number of other services on the Web that provide APIs to access a user's private data.

Besides that decision, there was also the question of what form the API should take. Should we embrace & extend the MetaWeblog API with extensions for managing photos & media? Should we propose a proprietary API based on SOAP or REST? Adopt someone else's proprietary API (e.g. the Flickr API)? At the end, I pushed for completely RESTful and completely standards based. Thus we built the API on WebDAV (RFC 2518).

WebDAV seemed like a great fit for a lot of reasons.

• Photo albums map quite well to collections which are often modeled as folders by WebDAV clients. 
• Support for WebDAV already baked into a lot of client applications on numerous platforms
• It is RESTful which is important when building a protocol for the Web
• Proprietary metadata could easily be represented as WebDAV properties
• Support for granular updates of properties via PROPPATCH

The last one turns out to be pretty important as it is an issue today with everyone's favorite REST protocol du jour. More on that topic in my following post. 

Now Playing: Lil Jon & The Eastside Boyz - Put Yo Hood Up (remix) (feat. Jadakiss, Petey Pablo & Chyna White)

Pablo Castro has a blog post entitled AtomPub support in the ADO.NET Data Services Framework where he talks about the progress they've made in building a framework for using the Atom Publishing Protocol (RFC 5023) as a protocol for communicating with SQL Server and other relational databases. Pablo explains why they've chosen to build on AtomPub in his post which is excerpted below

Why are we looking at AtomPub?

Astoria data services can work with different payload formats and to some level different user-level details of the protocol on top of HTTP. For example, we support a JSON payload format that should make the life of folks writing AJAX applications a bit easier. While we have a couple of these kind of ad-hoc formats, we wanted to support a pre-established format and protocol as our primary interface.

If you look at the underlying data model for Astoria, it boils down to two constructs: resources (addressable using URLs) and links between those resources. The resources are grouped into containers that are also addressable. The mapping to Atom entries, links and feeds is so straightforward that is hard to ignore. Of course, the devil is in the details and we'll get to that later on.

The interaction model in Astoria is just plain HTTP, using the usual methods for creating, updating, deleting and retrieving resources. Furthermore, we use other HTTP constructs such as "ETags" for concurrency checks,  "location" to know where a POSTed resource lives, and so on. All of these also map naturally to AtomPub.

From our (Microsoft) perspective, you could imagine a world where our own consumer and infrastructure services in Windows Live could speak AtomPub with the same idioms as Astoria services, and thus could both have a standards-based interface and also use the same development tools and runtime components that work with any Astoria-based server. This would mean less clients/development tools for us to create and more opportunity for our partners in the libraries and tools ecosystem out there.

Although I'm not responsible for any public APIs at Microsoft these days, I've found myself drawn into the various internal discussions on RESTful protocols and AtomPub due to the fact that I'm a busy body. :)

Early on in the Atom effort, I felt that the real value wasn't in defining yet another XML syndication format but instead in the editing protocol. Still I underestimated how much mind share and traction AtomPub would eventually end up getting in the industry. I'm glad to see Microsoft making a huge bet on standards based, RESTful protocols especially given our recent history where we foisted Snakes On A Plane on the industry.

However since AtomPub is intended to be an extensible protocol, Astoria has added certain extensions to make the service work for their scenarios while staying within the letter and spirit of the spec. Pablo talks about some of their design decisions when he writes

We are simply mapping whatever we can to regular AtomPub elements. Sometimes that is trivial, sometimes we need to use extensions and sometimes we leave AtomPub alone and build an application-level feature on top. Here is an initial list of aspects we are dealing with in one way or the other. We’ll also post elaborations of each one of these to the appropriate Atom syntax|protocol mailing lists.
...
c) Using AtomPub constructs and extensibility mechanisms to enable Astoria features:

• Inline expansion of links (“GET a given entry and all the entries related through this named link”, how we represent a request and the answer to such a request in Atom?).
• Properties for entries that are media link entries and thus cannot carry any more structured data in the <content> element
• HTTP methods acting on bindings between resources (links) in addition to resources themselves
• Optimistic concurrency over HTTP, use of ETags and in general guaranteeing consistency when required
• Request batching (e.g. how does a client send a set of PUT/POST/DELETE operations to the server in a single go?)

d) Astoria design patterns that are not AtomPub format/protocol concepts or extensions:

• Astoria gives semantics to URLs and has a specific syntax to construct them
• How metadata that describes the structure of a service end points is exposed. This goes from being to find out entry points (e.g. collections in service documents) to having a way of discovering the structure of entries that contain structured data

Pablo will be posting more about the Astoria design decisions on atom-syntax and atom-protocol in the coming weeks. It'll be interesting to see the feedback on the approaches they've taken with regards to following the protocol guidelines and extending it where necessary.

It looks like I'll have to renew my subscription to both mailing lists.

Now Playing: Lil Jon & The Eastside Boyz - Grand Finale (feat Nas, Jadakiss, T.I., Bun B & Ice Cube)

From the press release entitled Microsoft Proposes Acquisition of Yahoo! for $31 per Share we learn

REDMOND, Wash. — Feb. 1, 2008 — Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ:MSFT) today announced that it has made a proposal to the Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) Board of Directors to acquire all the outstanding shares of Yahoo! common stock for per share consideration of $31 representing a total equity value of approximately $44.6 billion. Microsoft’s proposal would allow the Yahoo! shareholders to elect to receive cash or a fixed number of shares of Microsoft common stock, with the total consideration payable to Yahoo! shareholders consisting of one-half cash and one-half Microsoft common stock. The offer represents a 62 percent premium above the closing price of Yahoo! common stock on Jan. 31, 2008.

“We have great respect for Yahoo!, and together we can offer an increasingly exciting set of solutions for consumers, publishers and advertisers while becoming better positioned to compete in the online services market,” said Steve Ballmer, chief executive officer of Microsoft. “We believe our combination will deliver superior value to our respective shareholders and better choice and innovation to our customers and industry partners.”

“Our lives, our businesses, and even our society have been progressively transformed by the Web, and Yahoo! has played a pioneering role by building compelling, high-scale services and infrastructure,” said Ray Ozzie, chief software architect at Microsoft. “The combination of these two great teams would enable us to jointly deliver a broad range of new experiences to our customers that neither of us would have achieved on our own.”

WOW. Just...wow.

There's a conference call with Ray Ozzie, Steve Ballmer, Chris Liddell and Kevin Johnson in about half an hour to discuss this. This is the first time I've considered listening in on one of those.

According to the blog post entitled on Microsoft Joins DataPortability.org on dev.live.com we learn

Today Microsoft is announcing that it has joined DataPortability.org, a group committed to advancing the conversation about the portability, security and privacy of individuals’ information online.  There are important security and privacy issues to solve as the internet evolves, and we are committed to being an integral part of the industry conversation on behalf of our users.

The decision to join DataPortability.org is an outgrowth of a deeper theme that technology and the internet should be deployed to help people be at the center of their online worlds, a theme that has begun to permeate our products and services over the past few years. We believe the logical evolution of the internet is to enable the removal of barriers to provide integrated, seamless experiences, but to do so in a manner that ensures that users retain full control over the security and privacy of their information.

Windows Live is focused on providing tools and a platform to enable these types of seamless experiences.  Windows Live has more than 420 million active Live IDs that work across our services and across partner sites. 

I’m sure some folks are wondering exactly what this means. Even though I was close to the decision making around this, I believe it is still too early to tell. Personally, I share Marc Canter’s skepticism about Dataportability.org given that so far there’s been a lot of hype but no real meat.

However we have real problems to solve as an industry. The lack of interoperability between various social software applications is troubling given that the Internet (especially the Web) got to be a success today by embracing interoperability instead of being about walled gardens fighting over who can build the prettiest gilded cage for their prisoners customers. The fact that when interoperability happens, it is in back room deals (e.g. Google OpenSocial, Microsoft’s conversations with startups, etc) instead of being open to all using standard and unencumbered protocols is similarly troubling. Even worse, insecure practices that expose social software users to privacy violations have become commonplace due to the lack of a common framework for interoperability.

As far as I can tell, Dataportability.org seems like a good forum for various social software vendors to start talking about how we can get to a world where there is actual interoperability between social software applications. I’d like to see real meat fall out of this effort not fluff. One of the representatives Microsoft has chosen is the dev lead from the product team I am on (Inder Sethi) which implies we want technical discussion of protocols and technologies not just feel good jive. We’ll also be sending a product planning/marketing type as well (John Richards) to make sure the end user perspective is also being covered. You can assume that even though I am not on the working group in person, I will be there in spirit since I communicate with both John and Inder on a regular basis.  

I’ll also be at the O’Reilly offices during Super Bowl weekend attending the O’Reilly Social Graph FOO Camp which I hope will be another avenue to sit together with technical decision makers from the various major social software vendors and talk about how we can move this issue forward as an industry.

Now playing: Bone Thugs 'N Harmony - If I Could Teach The World

I was reading the blog post entitled The hard side of Mister Softie from Josh Quittner of Fortune magazine which ends with the following excerpt

Hall said that Microsoft’s main concern, and the reason it sent out Big Foot letters in the first place, was security. “If you look at what a number of sites are doing, they’re asking for your Hotmail login info, They’re storing your identity, which is not a best practices [approach] for anyone’s data from a security standpoint. We want to make sure our data is kept between our users and our servers.”

The thrust of the term sheets, he said, was to create a process whereby Hotmail and other Windows Live data could be shared securely with third parties. Added Hall: “There are models for federation where you can trust other services—and that’s what we’re trying to do with our partners.”

Thats what doesn’t make sense to me. If this is such a security problem, why do Google and Yahoo let their users take their contacts with them?

Besides the obvious observation that folks at Google & Yahoo! probably don’t think it’s a good idea for random fly-by-night social networking services to be collecting  usernames and password from users of their services (see posts like Spock sign-up flow demonstrates how to scare users away... from Jeremy Zawodny of Yahoo!), I am amused by the “if the geniuses at Google and Yahoo! think it’s OK, who are the Microsoft morons to think different” sentiment exposed by that statement.

Maybe I’m getting snarky in my old age.

Now playing: Red Hot Chili Peppers - Torture Me

In his blog post entitled Joining Microsoft Live Labs Greg Linden writes

I am starting at Microsoft Live Labs next week.

Live Labs is an applied research group affiliated with Microsoft Research and MSN. The group has the enjoyable goal of not only trying to solve hard problems with broad impact, but also getting useful research work out the door and into products so it can help as many people as possible as quickly as possible.

Live Labs is lead by Gary Flake, the former head of Yahoo Research. It is a fairly new group, formed only two years ago. Gary wrote a manifesto that has more information about Live Labs.

when I found out Greg was shutting down Findory I thought myself that he’d be a great hire for Microsoft especially since he already lived in the area. It seems someone else though the same thing and now Greg has been assimilated. Congratulations, Greg.

I seem to be bumping into more and more people who are either working for or with Live Labs. Besides Justin Rudd who I just referred to the team, there’s Mike Deem and Erik Meijer, two people I know from my days on the XML team. I wonder what Gary Flake is cooking up in those swanky offices in Bellevue that has so many smart folks gravitating to his group?

Now playing: Kool & The Gang - Celebration

Last year was the year of big changes in my personal life. I bought a house, got married and brought a very cute and lovable Shih Tzu into our household. Some time during 2007, I realized I'd been at Microsoft for over 5 years and decided that I'd also look for change in my professional life as well.

I learned a couple of lessons from the experience. The first was that looking around for a job while trying to buy a house, moving into a new home and working towards getting married is pretty stressful. The second thing I learned was that I hadn't really thought about what I want from my career in several years. Back in my college days, I had a clear idea where I wanted to be within my first year of graduation and every thing I did back then moved me closer to that goal, from the classes I took to ensuring that I interned every summer break. Since then, I haven't really had a "five year plan" to get me to the next stage in my career. I now have a much clearer idea where I want to be by 2010 than I have in the past two or three years. Finally, I realized that I actually really like working at Microsoft especially within my current job.

Ever since I came to that final realization I've wanted to blog about why this is the case but it seemed like such a corny thing to write about that I didn't want people reading this to think I was shilling for Microsoft. However this morning I was reading a blog post entitled Gone Indie by Jens Alfke which explained why he was leaving Apple Inc. after ten years and a lot of the reasons he is leaving are the same reasons I'm still at Microsoft. 

Social Software

Jens wrote

But I’m fascinated with social software. Apple isn’t. Despite some promising starts, the most I’ve been able to get accomplished in that vein at Apple was iChat [the IM part; I’m really not interested in videoconferencing], Safari RSS, and the “PubSub” [which turned out to be “RSS and Atom”] framework. There were some very promising prototypes of sexier things, but I really can’t talk about those, other than to say that they were canceled.

I looked around after Leopard was finished, and didn’t see any place in the company where I could pursue my ideas. It would have meant evangelizing reluctant executives into sharing my vision … and that’s something that I know I have little talent at.

I am similarly fascinated by Social Software and have been since I wrote down my epiphany Social Software is the Platform of the Future after a couple of conversations with my friend Mike Vernal. This epiphany is the reason I decided to start working in Microsoft's social graph contacts platform team which is where I continue to work till this day. Three and a half years later, this epiphany has been borne out by the rise of MySpace and Facebook as well as the realization by the technocrat masses that without data portability social software is the new vendor lock-in. This is all stuff Mike and I used to chat about back in 2004, and now Mike is off at Facebook and I'm here at Microsoft trying to make our visions a reality in our own little ways.

Unlike Jens, I don't have to evangelize reluctant execs into sharing my vision. A lot of our execs understand the importance of social software and have clear ideas of how Microsoft can add value to our users lives with our contributions to this space. When I talk to folks like Ray Ozzie, Chris Jones or David Treadwell about some of the problems I see in the social software space today, not only do they get it, I always leave the conversation with a strong sense that Microsoft will do the right thing.

Some people may criticize Microsoft for not being quick to jump onto every fad. However as Phil Haack mentioned in his blog post about his first few days as a new Microsoft hire, Microsoft invests for the long run and expects it's employees to think deeply about issues before acting. At the end of the day, the software we build in Windows Live impacts how hundreds of millions of people interact, share and communicate with their friends, family and loved ones. We endeavor to be good stewards of the trust they've placed in us.

Sharing Your Ideas

Jens wrote

I tend to have a lot of ideas. I’m not bragging, and that’s not always a good trait; it can be hard for me to focus on something long enough to finish it. A structured job has helped me stay on-task. On the other hand, though, the development cycle in a big company is such that every significant idea takes a year or more to finish, and during that time, more ideas pile up in my brain.

That wouldn’t be bad if there were some other channels to express those ideas. And if they took the form of songs, or novels, or scrimshaw carvings of Biblical scenes on walrus tusks, I could do whatever I wanted with them. But on software, Apple’s position (not unusually for the industry) is “All Your Idea Are Belong To Us”, and I signed onto that when I accepted the job offer. In other words, anything I do that relates in any way to Apple’s areas of business, no matter when or where I do it, belongs to Apple. [Edit: Ha! Note I’m still using present tense.]

(Again, this isn’t something particular about Apple. Most tech companies are like this, and if you work for one, you probably signed a very similar “Proprietary Rights Agreement” that they hid in the stack of paperwork beneath your offer letter. And yes, companies will enforce that if they see profit in it.)

I believe all Microsoft employees sign similar agreements with the company when hired. However, Microsoft is very good about letting employees explore their ideas in software on their own time without getting in the way. Projects like Script#, Reflector, RSS Bandit, DasBlog, Tweak UI and WiX are examples of software projects either developed or maintained by Microsoft employees in their free time that are now benefiting thousands to hundreds of thousands of end users.

However I think that more important than being able to share our ideas in code, being able to share our ideas in words is one of the coolest things about working at Microsoft. Thousands of Microsoft employees share their ideas with their coworkers, competitors and customers via blogs on a daily basis. Lots of companies would clamp down on that sort of behavior and ensure that only sanctioned company positions go out in employee communications but not Microsoft.

Even more surprisingly, Microsoft tolerates employees that may have ideas that differ from the company's ideas of how things should be done. You may wonder why that is surprisingly until you remember that even supposedly enlightened "Web 2.0" companies like Friendster and Google can fire you for disagreeing with the company's technology choices or hinting about future products or complaining about the company's benefits.

A lot of people [including Microsoft employees] wonder how I still have a job at Microsoft even though I've been critical of some of the company's strategies and products in my almost six years as an employee. Although I've had conversations with peers, middle managers and senior execs about my blog, I've never felt that my job was in danger. If anything, I've had it confirmed that Microsoft's culture is about being open and respectful. The one thing I have tried to change about my blog [and in fact all my communications] is being more respectful of other's perspectives and personal feelings especially when I disagree with them since you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar...or so I heard.

Individuality

Jens wrote

Finally — and this may seem petty — Apple’s lack of individuality bugs me. I don’t mean internally: within the company, communication is reasonably open (modulo confidentiality issues) and there’s lots of room for self-expression. But ever since the return of Steve Jobs, the company has been pretty maniacal about micro-managing its visible face, to make it as smooth and featureless as an iPod’s backside. (In my darker moments I’ve compared it to the brutal whiteness of “THX-1138”.)

It’s deeply ironic: For a company that famously celebrates individuality and Thinking Different, Apple has in the past decade kept its image remarkably impersonal. Other than the trinity who go onstage at press events — Steve Jobs, Jonathan Ive, Phil Schiller — how many people can you name who work for Apple? How many engineers?
...
And then there are blogs. Apple doesn’t like them, not when they talk about it. (Big surprise.) I’ve heard it said that there are hardly any bloggers working at Apple; there are actually a lot more than you’d think, but they mostly keep it a secret. (I could out a few people, including at least one director…) I think Apple’s policy on blogging is one of the least enlightened of major tech companies; Microsoft in particular is surprisingly open.

There really isn't much more I can add to that. The fact that you are reading my blog and know who I am is a testament to how much Microsoft encourages it's employees to express their individuality in their products and in our communications with our customers.

This may not be a big deal in 2008 when everyone is blogging but it was back in 2003 when the early community of Microsoft bloggers could all fit at a table in a single restaurant. Especially since when you consider it, Microsoft bloggers are probably a large part of the reason corporate blogging is mainstream today. That alone is a worthy legacy in my book.

I'd like to leave you with this image from Scott Hanselman's post about joining Microsoft. Everyone's goal should be trying to get to center of the picture.

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