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.

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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. 

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I’ve read a number of stories this week that highlight that interoperability between social networking sites will be a “top ask” in 2008 (as we say at Microsoft). Earlier this week I read the Wired article Should Web Giants Let Startups Use the Information They Have About You? which does a good job of telling both sides of the story when it comes to startups screen scraping importing user data such as social graphs (i.e. friend and contact lists) from more successful sites as a way to bootstrap their social networks. The Wired article is a good read if you want to hear all sides of the story when it comes to the issue of sharing user social data between sites.

Yesterday, I saw Social Network Aggregation, Killer App in 2008? which points out the problem that users often belong to multiple social networks at once and that bridging between them is key. However I disagree with the premise that this points to need for a “Social Network Aggregator” category of applications. I personally believe that the list of 20 or so Social Network Aggregators on Mashable are all companies that would cease to exist if the industry got off it’s behind and worked towards actual interoperability between social networking sites.

Today, I saw saw Facebook disabled Robert Scoble’s account. After reading Robert’s account of the incident, I completely agree with Facebook.

Why Robert Scoble is Wrong and Facebook is Right

Here’s what Robert Scoble wrote about the incident

My account has been “disabled” for breaking Facebook’s Terms of Use. I was running a script that got them to keep me from accessing my account
…
I am working with a company to move my social graph to other places and that isn’t allowable under Facebook’s terms of service. Here’s the email I received:

+++++

Hello,

Our systems indicate that you’ve been highly active on Facebook lately and viewing pages at a quick enough rate that we suspect you may be running an automated script. This kind of Activity would be a violation of our Terms of Use and potentially of federal and state laws.

As a result, your account has been disabled. Please reply to this email with a description of your recent activity on Facebook. In addition, please confirm with us that in the future you will not scrape or otherwise attempt to obtain in any manner information from our website except as permitted by our Terms of Use, and that you will immediately delete and not use in any manner any such information you may have previously obtained.

The first thing to note is that Facebook allows you to extract your social graph data from their site using the Facebook platform. In fact, right now whenever I get an email from someone on my Facebook friend list in Outlook or I get a phone call from them, I see the picture from their Facebook profile. I did this using OutSync which is an application that utilizes the Facebook platform to merge data from my contacts in Outlook/Exchange with my Facebook contacts.

So if Facebook allows you to extract information about your Facebook friends via their APIs, why would Robert Scoble need to run a screen scraping script? The fact is that the information returned by the Facebook API about a user contains no contact information (no email address, no IM screen names, no telephone numbers, no street address). Thus if you are trying to “grow virally” by spamming the Facebook friend list of one of your new users about the benefits of your brand new Web 2.0 site then you have to screen scrape Facebook.  However there is the additional wrinkle that unlike address books in Web email applications Robert Scoble did not enter any of this contact information about his friends. With this in mind, it is hard for Robert Scoble to argue that the data is “his” to extract from Facebook. In addition, as a Facebook user I consider it a feature that Facebook makes it hard for my personal data to be harvested in this way. Secondly, since Robert’s script was screen scraping it means that it had to hit the site five thousand times (once for each of his contacts) to fetch all of Robert’s friends personally idenitifiable information (PII).  Given that eBay won a court injunction against Bidder’s Edge for running 100,000 queries a day, it isn’t hard to imagine that the kind of screen scraping script that Robert is using would be considered malicious even by a court of law.

I should note that Facebook is being a bit hypocritical here since they do screen scrape other sites to get the email addresses of the contacts of new users. This is why I’ve called them the Social Graph Roach Motel in the recent past. 

O’Reilly Social Graph FOO Camp

This past weekend I got an email from Tim O'Reilly, David Recordon, and Scott Kveton inviting me to a Friends of O’Reilly Camp (aka FOO Camp) dedicated to “social graph” problems. I’m still trying to figure out if I can make it based on my schedule and whether I’m really the best person to be representing Microsoft at such an event given that I’m a technical person and “social graph problems” for the most part are not technical issues.

Regardless of whether I am able to attend or not, there were some topics I wanted to recommend should be added to a list of “red herring” topics that shouldn’t be discussed until the important issues have been hashed out.

• Google OpenSocial: This was an example of unfortunate branding. Google should really have called this “Google OpenWidgets” or “Google Gadgets for your Domain” since the goal was competing with Facebook’s widget platform not actually opening up social networks. Since widget platforms aren’t a “social graph problem” it doesn’t seem fruitful the spend time discussing this when there are bigger fish to fry.

• Social Network Portability: When startups talk about “social network portability” it’s usually a euphemism for collecting a person’s username and password for another site, retrieving their contact/friend list and spamming those people about their hot new Web 2.0 startup. As a user of the Web, making it easier to receive spam from startups isn’t something I think should be done let alone a “problem” that needs solving. I understand that lots of people will disagree with this [even at Microsoft] but I’m convinced that this is not the real problem facing the majority of users of social networking sites on the the Web today.  

What I Want When It Comes to Social Network Interoperability

Having I’ve said what I don’t think is important to discuss when it comes to “social graph problems”, it would be rude not to provide an example fof what I think would be fruitful discussion. I wrote the problem I think we should be solving as an industry a while back in a post entitled A Proposal for Social Network Interoperability via OpenID which is excerpted below

I have a Facebook profile while my fiancée wife has a MySpace profile. Since I’m now an active user of Facebook, I’d like her to be able to be part of my activities on the site such as being able to view my photos, read my wall posts and leave wall posts of her own. I could ask her to create a Facebook account, but I already asked her to create a profile on Windows Live Spaces so we could be friends on that service and quite frankly I don’t think she’ll find it reasonable if I keep asking her to jump from social network to social network because I happen to try out a lot of these services as part of my day job. So how can this problem be solved in the general case? 

This is a genuine user problem which the established players have little incentive to fix. The data portability folks want to make it easy for you to jump from service to service. I want to make it easy for users of one service to talk to people on another service. Can you imagine if email interoperability was achieved by making it easy for Gmail users to export their contacts to Yahoo! mail instead of it being that Gmail users can send email to Yahoo! Mail users and vice versa?

Think about that.

Now playing: DJ Drama - The Art Of Storytellin' Part 4 (Feat. Outkast And Marsha Ambrosius)

The folks at LiveSide have a blog post entitled Windows Live Spaces at a crossroads: will the US catch up to the world? which contains some interesting charts from ComScore. Specifically they call out the difference in the worldwide reach of various social networking services versus the North American reach. The relevant excerpt from the post is

As expected, MySpace is in a runaway lead, Facebook is coming on strong, Blogger is hanging in there, and Spaces pretty much brings up the rear.  If you read the blogs and follow Techmeme, TechCrunch, and Scoble, these numbers aren't anything surprising.

But take a look at the Worldwide numbers, and a somewhat different story emerges.

Social Networking Sites - Worldwide: Unique visitors per month (000)

While Facebook is growing steadily worldwide, here the numbers tell a far different story.  Windows Live Spaces is battling it out with Blogger and MySpace for the top spot.  Just for reference, we can see that the Worldwide usage of Social Networking sites is growing steadily:

You might quibble with the title of this blog post but it is hard to argue that Blogger is a social networking site by any definition of the term. When it comes to reach, no social networking site impacts as many users as Windows Live Spaces.

Of course, unique users aren’t the only metric Web sites are judged against and I’m sure there are many out there who will be quick to point out other charts that show our user engagement is lower than average which is a fair point. Personally, I suspect that the inclusion of the improved What’s New page will increase user engagement in a measurable way. It might just be me but I find myself visiting my What’s New page several times a day, in fact more often than I visit my Facebook news feed.

According to Facebook, the addition of the News Feed increased their page views by 70% in the first few months. I wonder if we’ll see a similar jump in the ComScore charts for Windows Live Spaces in a few months or whether FB’s results were an abberration. Only time will tell.

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There have been a number of updates to Windows Live Spaces over the past few months that have moved to emphasize using the site to communicate and connect with people as opposed to personal publishing. When Windows Live Spaces was launched about three years ago, it's sweet spot was as a way for users to publish blog posts, photos, lists of their favorite music or books and other forms of personal expression. Over the past few years, experience has thought us as an industry that providing a platform for our users to communicate and connect with each other is more valuable to them than simply providing a personal publishing platform. With that in mind, the product team has been working at a rapid clip to add more features to the site that enable people to connect and communicate with each other.

From the blog post entitled Stay in touch with friends and meet new people with Guestbook and Messaging on Spaces on the Windows Live Spaces team blog we learn

Spaces has always been a great place to express yourself and share the stuff you care about with your friends or the world at large, but there haven’t been that many options to communicate with people through your space. There are lots of ways to passively connect you’re your friends –Windows Live Messenger gleam integration, the Friends feature, and the What’s New feature which has now been incorporated into the Spaces Home, but in this release we really focused on giving you active ways to communicate with your friends and the people who visit your space through our new Guestbook and Messaging features. We know you’ve been asking for these features for a long time (particularly the Guestbook!), and we’re glad that we can finally deliver them
...
Guestbook
The Guestbook is a brand new module that you can add to your Space through the Customize menu or by clicking the “+” sign on a Guestbook in someone else’s space...Once you add the Guestbook module to your space (new spaces have it by default) you can add a custom greeting, which can include formatting, images, and even videos:..Visitors to your space can then leave and view comments in your guestbook (they can use images, video, and formatting too):
...
Messaging
Where the Guestbook is a great place for public communication the new Messaging feature is a great way to meet people on spaces or use it to stay in touch with your Spaces Friends. With Spaces messaging you can send private messages to your spaces friends or other spaces users without revealing you email address to others or having to using an outside e-mail service...You can access your messaging inbox from the Spaces Home by clicking on the “Messages” link:

On your messages page you can view and delete messages you’ve received and sent, and you can reply to these messages:

There are lots of ways you can initiate a new conversation through Spaces messaging. If you are visiting a cool space you can click send a message from the visitor tools on that person’s space:

You can also click the “Send a message” link at the bottom of a blog post to send that person a message referring to the post:

That was from two months ago. Last week there were fresh updates to the service which was announced in the post entitled Just released: Three months of new updates to Windows Live Spaces that stated

As of this evening, we finished rolling out the latest version of Spaces. Whether you or your friends are checking out what your Messenger contacts have been up to, organizing your lists, navigating around your space, or setting up a space, the latest Spaces release has a lot of new features.
...
Spaces home page updates 
We've made some slight changes to the design of your Spaces home page so it's even easier to see what your Messenger contacts are doing with their spaces.   We've also added birthday reminders!

To see birthday notifications, first share your contact information and then subscribe to a contact's information.  You can subscribe to contact information through Spaces, Messenger, or Hotmail.

• Spaces:  Roll over a person's profile picture and in the preview window, click on the “Receive contact updates” link
• Messenger:  Right-click a contact, click “Edit contact”, and check “Subscribe to updates for this contact”
• Hotmail:  Click Contacts in the lower lefthand corner, “Edit contact”, and check “Receive contact updates from this person”

If your contacts have entered their birthday information, you'll see their upcoming birthdays on your Spaces home-page, and you'll be able to send them an electronic greeting card from MSN Greetings powered by American Greetings  (currently only available in the US market).

From the blog post entitled Check out what we just added to Windows Live Spaces! on the Windows Live Spaces team's blog we learn

Videos, videos and more videos

You asked for it, we created it!  We’ve built more rich media capabilities into Windows Live Spaces so it’s easier for you to display your favorite videos on Spaces.  You can now embed videos directly into your Spaces blog entries.  Adding a visual element to your blogs can help you tell your story.  

For a long time, Windows Live Spaces has prevented users from embedding videos from video sharing sites like YouTube and MSN Soapbox because it didn't allow users to use object tags in their blog content. However it is now commonplace for users to embed Flash objects in their blog posts and even though there were security concerns, user demand has trumped them and the blogging landscape has changed.

I'm glad Windows Live Spaces now enables this but it does point to an interesting problem for me as a developer on RSS Bandit. Currently, we disable displaying embedded objects in content by default. Has the time come to change that rule? I know I changed my security settings in RSS Bandit so I can watch embedded YouTube on blogs months ago and even had to fix some bugs where it seems were a bit overzealous in blocking ActiveX controls.

It seems enabling ActiveX/Flash and Javascript in your browser are becoming mandatory if you actually want to browse the Web thanks to "Web 2.0".

Earlier today I noticed a link from Mike Torres to a press release from ComScore Media Metrix entitled The Score: Blogs Gain Favor Worldwide which states

In recent years blogs have garnered significant media coverage in the United States for their ability to reach a wide audience. With more than one-third of the online population in the United States visiting blogs within a given month, it is clear that the category has become mainstream. An analysis of blog penetration by country in North America and Western Europe shows that the popularity of blogs is a worldwide phenomenon.
...

• Windows Live Spaces is the favorite blog site among themajority of countries studied, with 37 percent of all Canadiansvisiting the site in October 2006. Blogger.com had the highestpenetration in the United States (12.4 percent) and Germany (9.7percent), while the same was true for Skyblog in France (27.4 percent).

Interesting statistics although I wonder whether ComScore is including social networking sites like Bebo and MySpace in its reckoning. Based on how ComScore usually scores things my assumption is that they are going by number of unique users instead of page views which is where heavily trafficked social networking sites like Bebo and MySpace reign supreme.

It looks like there has been an update to Windows Live Spaces with some obvious new features such as The What's New page and some not so obvious features such as fixing the fact that gadgets on Windows Live Spaces cannot save user preferences.

What does that mean for users of Windows Live Spaces?For one it means that my Embedded Video Gadget, Flickr gagdet and Photo Album browser gadget now all work in Windows Live Spaces. I'm going to be a gadget writing fool this weekend. Job #1 will be adding support for embedding SoapBox videos in my Embedded Video Gadget. The next will be porting some of the cool gadgets I saw at Widgets Live and getting them into Windows Live Gallery.  

By the way, you can see my gadgets in action at http://carnage4life.spaces.live.com. The video gadget should be playing the White & Nerdy video from YouTube and the Flickr gadget should be showing pictures from Mike Torres's public photo sets.

It looks like I'm now writing a Windows Live gadget every week. My latest gadget is a port of the Flickr badge to a Windows Live gadget. It's in the approval pipeline and should show up under the list of gadgets I've written in the next day or so. To get the gadget working, I had to use the Flickr API. Specifically, I used the flickr.people.findByUsername method to convert a username to an internal Flickr ID. Ironically Coincidentally, I had recently read something by Alex Bosworth criticizing this very aspect of the Flickr API in his post How To Provide A Web API where he wrote

Simple also means don’t be too abstract. Flickr for example chooses in its API to require the use of its internal ids for all APIcalls. This means for example that every call to find information abouta user requires a call first to find the internal id of the user.Del.icio.us on the other hand just requires visible names, in factinternal ids are hidden everywhere.

Actually, it's much worse than this. It seems that Flickr is inconsistent in how it maps user names back to internal IDs. For example, take Mike Torres who has 'mtorres' as his Flickr ID. I can access his Flickr photos by going to http://flickr.com/photos/mtorres. When I use the Flickr API explorer for flickr.people.findByUsername and pass in 'mtorres' as the username I get back the following ID; 25553748@N00. When I go to http://flickr.com/photos/25553748@N00 I end up going to some other person's page who seems to be named 'mtorres' as well.

However when I plug "Mike Torres" into the flickr.people.findByUsername method instead of 'mtorres' I get '37996581086@N01' which turns out to be the right ID since going to http://www.flickr.com/photos/37996581086@N01 takes me to the same page as http://flickr.com/photos/mtorres. Weird.

Perhaps this is a naming collision caused by the merging of Flickr & Yahoo! IDs?

Matt Mullenweg has a blog post entitled MSN Spaces Numbers where he writes

Scoble has been questioning the claimed numbers of MSN Spacesand somehow the conversation got sidetracked in the technicalities of“what’s a blog?” I’m not sure what Microsoft hopes to gain by inflatingtheir numbers so much, now claiming 70 million “blogs”, but it’s interesting to note back in March they were claiming 123 million blogs at SxSW (Flickr photo of their booth). Of course that was like 2 name changes and reorgs ago. Maybe 50 million people left the service?

I wasn't planning to blog about the recent round of player hating on Windows Live spaces certain bloggers but the above claim by Matt Mullenweg that we are 'inflating' our numbers really got my goat.

First of all, the two numbers quoted above by Matt are unrelated metrics. The count of 123 million users is explained in the press release MSN Spaces Now Largest Blogging Service Worldwide which states that comScore Media Metrix has measured the service's reach as being 100 million unique vistors a month and this number is in addition to 20 million unique visitors from using the chinese version of MSN Spaces. The 70 million number is the number of blogs spaces that have been created since inception. This number isn't particularly interesting since it doesn't correlate to how many people are actually getting value out of the service.  

For example, according to the LiveJournal statistics page their current statistics are

How many users, and how many of those are active?

• Total accounts: 10945719
• ... active in some way: 1870731
• ... that have ever updated: 7278240
• ... updating in last 30 days: 1164416
• ... updating in last 7 days: 679693
• ... updating in past 24 hours: 204465

According to those statistics only 1 out of 5 LiveJournal accounts is actually active. Of course, it would sound impressive to tout 11 million LiveJournal accounts even though the number of active accounts is much less. For that reason, the number of spaces on Windows Live Spaces isn't a particularly interesting metric to me nor is it to anyone I know who works on the product. We are more interested in the number of people who actually use our service and get value added to their lives by being able to share, discuss and communicate with their friends, families and total strangers.  

I just uploaded a few gadgets to Windows Live Gallery and thought I should share something cool I learned from Jay Fluegel, the PM for gadgets in Windows Live Spaces. If you see a cool gadget on someone's space that you'd like to add to your space or portal page, all you need to do is click the '+' in the top-right corner of the gadget as shown in the screenshot below and viola

That's pretty hot and brain-dead simple too. Definitely beats having to trawl Windows Live Gallery everytime you see a cool gadget that you'd like to add to your space or personalized home page.

Earlier this week I was showing off the new Windows Live Spaces to my girlfriend in an attempt to try and explain what I do at Microsoft all day. When I showed her the Friends list feature she was surprised that the site had morphed from a blogging service into a social networking service and wondered whether our users wouldn't react negatively to the change. Actually that's paraphrasing what she said. What she said was

If I was using your site to post my blog and my pictures for people I know, I'd be really annoyed if I started having to deal with strangers asking me to be their friend. If I wanted to deal with that shit crap I'd have just gone to MySpace.

Below is a screenshot of the page

Don't like getting friend requests as email? Disable this by unchecking 'Also send invitations and e-mails to my email address'. Don't want to deal with requests from total strangers wanting to be on your friend's list? Then move the setting on 'These people can request to be on your friends list' to something more restrictive like 'Messenger buddies' so that you only get friend requests from people on your IM buddy list who you already know.You hang out a virtual DoNotDisturb sign and we'll honor it.

Making sure that our users have total control over who they communicate and share information with is key to how we approach building social software for Windows Live. Thanks to all the users of Windows Live Spaces who have made it the most popular blogging service in the world. 

I've gotten some reports from people that they've had problems using their blogging tool of choice to post to Windows Live Spaces using the MetaWeblog API. I haven't had any problems posting using W.Bloggar but have had some issues using Blogjet recently. I'd appreciate it if anyone else who's having issues posting to their blog responds with a comment to this blog post with information about which blogging tool you are using and what error message the tool reports.

Thanks.  

Windows Live Spaces is live. This is pretty sweet since the most visible feature I've worked on while at Microsoft is now available to the general public. On the Windows Live Spaces team blog we get the post Windows Live Spaces - It’s Here! which states

1. Set-up your friends list.  Simply add the new Friends Module to your space, or click hereto automatically add it to your space, and start inviting yourfriends.  Once your friends accept your invitation, they will appear tovisitors of your space. You can also explore your contacts’ friends(and their friends too) directly from Windows Live Messenger.  Simplyclick on your contact’s Messenger icon to view their contact card, andthen click on the “View this contact’s Friends list” icon on the bottomright hand corner of the contact card.  This will launch the cool newFriends Explorer feature that will allow you to easily navigate throughlists of friends. 

2. Add gadgets.  Jazz up your space by addingcool new gadgets.  All you need to do is click on the “Customize” linkin your Space when you are in the editor mode, and then click on thelink titled “Add gadgets from Windows Live Gallery” to be taken to theWindows Live Gallery where you can select gadgets you want to add toyour space. Check out the “Updated Spaces” gadget we just added to TheSpacecraft!  You can add this gadget automatically to your space too bysimply clicking here.

The platform behind the Friend's List was one of my features and I'm glad to see it rolling out to the hundreds of millions of Windows Live Spaces and Windows Live Messenger users. You can check out my friend's list to browse my social network which currently consists of Microsoft employees.

Since most features in Windows Live Spaces are integrated with Windows Live Messenger, so also is the Friends List feature. Users of Windows Live Messenger will have three integration points for interacting with the Friends List. The first is that one can right-click on Messenger contacts and select "View->Friends List" to browse their Friends List. Another integration point is that one can respond to pending requests from people to add them to your Friends List directly from Messenger client (this is also the case with other features like Live Contacts).  Finally, one can also browse the Friends List from their Contact Card. Below is a screenshot of what happens when a Windows Live Messenger user right-clicks on one of their Messenger contacts and selects "View->Friends List".

However it is the announcement about support for gadgets in Windows Live Spaces which I find even cooler than the fact that my feature is finally shipping. With this release, one can add almost any gadget from the Windows Live Gallery to one's space. You'll find some screenshots of gadgets on a space in Mike Arrington's post entitled Windows Live Spaces Launches, Replaces MSN Spaces.

If you are a developer who'd like to build gadgets for Windows Live Spaces you should check out the post in the Windows Live Spaces developer platform blog Gadget devs, come out and play! which provides the following information for developers interested in building gadgets

How do I get started?

1.  Build a Windows Live web gadget according to the SDK available at the Windows Live Dev site. 

 

2.  If your gadget has any settings/edit UI that visitorsshouldn't see, then use the following code to detect whether Spaces isrunning the gadget in author mode and show/hide the UI accordingly. There is a p_args argument outlined in the gadgets SDK and we've addeda new method off of that called getMode().  You can do a simplecomparison of the value returned from that method call to determineauthor vs. visitor mode.  

Something like the following:

          

         foo = function(p_elSource, p_args, p_namespace)

         p_args.module.getMode() == Web.Gadget.Mode.author

3.  Add the gadget to your own space using the following Spaces API: 

http://spaces.live.com/spacesapi.aspx?wx_action=create&wx_url=URLEncodedPathToYourH ostedGadgetManifestURL

 

Switch between "Edit your space" and "View your space" to see howit behaves in both author and visitor modes.  If your manifest file,Javascript, and CSS are hosted anywhere but Windows Live Gallery (gallery.live.com), the gadget can only be added for editing/viewing by the space owner.  It will be hidden to visitors.    

4.  Zip up your manifest file and supporting Javascript/CSS files and submit that gadget package to the Windows Live Galleryso other visitors can add it to their space by going to Customize--> Modules --> "Add gadgets from Windows Live Gallery".

Now that Windows Live Spaces has shipped, I can now write that article I've been talking about for a while on building Windows Live gadgets powered by RSS for XML.com. You can expect a bunch of gadgets from me over the next few weeks.

The MSN Spaces team blog has a new entry entitled Spaces Updates! which states

Hey Spaces fans, you may havenoticed a change in the URL for your Space.  We’re excited to announcethat we released late Monday evening (Seattle time.) 

 In addition to the URL Change, we have added support for many additional modules.  Some of these are:

• Horoscope*
• Weather*
• Stock Quotes*
• Quote of the Day*
• Updated Spaces (new Map View!)
• More modules coming soon including Live Gadgets.  Learn more about building a gadget

* Available in these countries for this release:   Australia, United Kingdom, & USA

I have the weather gadget on my space at http://carnage4life.spaces.msn.com. This is a step in the right direction, although ideally I should be able to write my own gadgets to use as modules on my space. That would be killer, except that it introduces a lot of interesting security problems if I could inject mini AJAX applications into my space. A tough problem to solve that would lead to some very cool mashups if figured out. I'd love to be able to add a few of the hundreds of existing gadgets to my space. I also suspect that there'd be a lot more interest in building gadgets when they have a potential audience of tens of millions of people versus to small audience that Live.com has today. 

From the press release entitled Microsoft Hardware Advances Digital Communications Experiences we learn

Consumer research¹ has revealed that people want to stayconnected, and many would use webcams if they were easier to operateand provided better audio and video quality. To counter thosefrustrations, Microsoft Hardware and the Windows Live team have joinedforces to introduce a line of LifeCams starting with the LifeCamVX-6000 and LifeCam VX-3000.

These next-generation webcamsprovide groundbreaking video and audio quality that opens the door forricher digital communications experiences. Optimized for use withWindows Live™ Messenger, the world’s largest instant messaging network,² LifeCams meet the growing demand for easier, more meaningful connections.
...
Optimized for Windows Live Messenger

                                       

LifeCam VX-6000

Click for larger version.

The first two available webcams, the Microsoft LifeCam VX-6000 andMicrosoft LifeCam VX-3000, bring a new dimension to Windows LiveMessenger and feature exclusive industry firsts that streamline thewebcam experience:

•	Windows Live Call Button.Located on the top of each LifeCam, the Windows Live Call Button makesplacing a video call a breeze by eliminating the usual multiple steps.Just one touch brings up the Buddy Picker, a tool that shows users onlycurrent online buddies. They simply select their contact’s name andthey are on their way to making a video call.
•	LifeCam Dashboard.Built right into the Windows Live Messenger window for easy accessduring video calling, the LifeCam Dashboard provides simple access tothe controls people need most, including pan, tilt and zoom. Now users’attention stays where it should be — on their video conversation.
•	One-touch blogging.Windows Live Spaces is one of the fastest-growing blog communities inthe world, with more than 50 million individual Spaces. Now, users canpost High Definition LifeCam pictures directly to their Windows LiveSpace blog with one click from within the LifeCam window.

This is another one of the product teams I've gotten to work with in recent months. I'm sure you can guess which of the listed bits of Windows Live integration I worked on. By the way, if you are a hardware vendor or into tweaking your hardware you might be interested in http://dev.live.com/hardware/. Building mashups with Windows Live services isn't going to be limited to Web apps, we expect hardware devices to get in on the game as well.

NOTE: MSN Spaces isn't Windows Live Spaces. Yet.

The MSN Spaces team's blog has a few entries about one of the projects they've been working on in collaboration with our team. From the posts URL Changes and More info on the URL Changes we learn

All MSN Spaces Users:

Please note that your MSN Space's URL will change onJune 5 8, 2006.  As part of investments in the improvement of MSN Spaces,it we will be migrating all of the URLs from http://spaces.msn.com/<NAME> to http://<NAME>.spaces.msn.com.   (For instance, instead of http://spaces.msn.com/thespacecraft/  you will now see http://thespacecraft.spaces.msn.com.)

 On and after June 5th 8th, all viewers and users going to the "old" URL will be automatically redirected to the new URL.
...
Spaces has grown very quickly into one of the Web’s mega services. So quickly in fact that we just passed the 100MM user mark and have had to do some architectural changes to ensure that Spaces canbe deployed in multiple data centers. We needed to deliver a systemthat allows for Spaces to be distributed across multiple data centerswithout requiring a URL that included the data center name. How unkewlwould that be? Can you imagine telling your friends and family that theURL to your space was http://cluster25.dc1.spaces.msn.com/gphipps?

So we have developed a DNS (Domain Name System) basedsolution that allows us to redirect requests to the right data centerand allows us to keep a better looking URL. Moving the Space name intothe domain name is a requirement of that.
...
Doing the rearchitecture work and making the move to Live Spaces was not possible for a number of technical reasons. This is why we can’t move straight to the spaces.live.com name. However, we believe that when we do move to Live Spaces that will be the last time we have to change the URL. This really isn’t something we decided to do lightly. We have had to make a ton of tradeoffs from both a technical perspective and the impact to our users.

 

Converting a service as large as MSN Spaces and it's associated services from a single data center to be able to be deployed in multiple data centers has been a significant undertaking. One unfortunate side effect is that we've had to alter the URL structure of MSN Spaces. Doubly unfortunate is that the URL structure will change again with the switch to Windows Live Spaces.

Although these changes suck, they are necessary to ensure that we can continue to handle the explosive growth of the service across the world as well as pump out crazy new features. Thanks to all our users who have to bear with these changes.  

From the press release MSN Spaces Now Largest Blogging Service Worldwide we learn

REDMOND, Wash. — May 24, 2006 — MSN^® Spaces is the most widely used blogging service worldwide with more than 100 million unique visitors, according to data released today by comScore Networks Inc. of Reston, Va., an independent Internet audience measurement and consulting company.

comScore World Metrix’s proprietary audience report for April 2006 showed the total number of unique visitors to MSN Spaces has more than doubled in the past 12 months, from 41.65 million to 101 million.* Figures compiled by comScore Media Metrix indicate that during April 2006, nearly one in seven Internet users worldwide had visited MSN Spaces.

MSN Spaces allows consumers to create personal Internet sites where they can express themselves in a variety of ways and interact with the important people in their life. The service provides people with a place to create and update a Web log, or blog, as well as share photos, music playlists and more. For example, more than 6 million photos are uploaded to the service each day, with more than 2.5 billion photos uploaded since MSN Spaces launched as a beta service in December 2004.

It's quite cool realize that I've been working on the MSN Windows Live communications services platform team for about a year and a half building the world's most popular blogging service and supporting the worlds most popular instant messaging client to boot. I guess since we haven't rolled out the social networking features of MSN Spaces across the entire site, we can't be called the world's most popular social networking service. Yet.

Thanks to all our users who keep using our services and giving us great feedback. You rock. We have lots of good stuff planned for y'all in the coming months.

One of the reasons I like providing APIs to online services is that it gives users more control of their data. Alex Boyko, who's one of the testers on our team wrote a tool for migrating his blog from one blog service to the other using the APIs they provide. In his blog post Blog Content Transfer he wrote

Apparently, my old blogging site (Blogger) and the new one (MSN Spaces) expose some APIs that can be used to play with your content (Metaweblog API for Space and Atom API for Blogger). I spent some time over the weekend and wrote a tool that helped me to transfer my data between two sites.

In case if somebody else is excited about gleams as much as I am ;] I've decided to share a copy of BCTransfer (Blog Content Transfer).

 DOWNLOAD HERE

Please let me know if it works and especially if it does not work for your. I’ll be more than glad to help.

Please read this first. It tells your how to get a login for your space.

At this moment, it is a command-line tool written using .NET 2.0. So you need to have it installed (the easiest option for that is Windows Update). Here’s how you run it in the most basic scenario:

bctransfer -bu <old-username> -bp <old-password> -su <new-username> -sp <new-password>

Yet another reason why providing APIs for online services is a good for regular users as well as developers. Nice.

One of the cool things about my day job is that I get to work with over a dozen teams all over Microsoft who are interested in consuming our Web services. This means that sometimes I get juicy scoops which I have to sit on for months before I can talk about them. One example, is the feature described in Joe Friend's blog post Blogging from Word 2007 where he writes

We've been working late into the nights and very late into our development schedule for Word 2007 and we have a special goody for all you bloggers in Beta 2 of Office 2007. That's right blog post authoring from Word. This is a very late breaking feature and is definitely beta software.
...
This is pretty standard stuff if you've ever used one of the many blog post authoring applications. In Beta 2 we support MSN Spaces, SharePoint 2007 (of course), Blogger, and Community Server (which is used for blogs.msdn.com). You can also set up a custom account with services that support the metaweblog API or the ATOM API. All the blog providers seems to interpret these APIs a bit different so there kinks we're still working out. But the basics should work in Beta 2. We hope to add a few more services to the list before we ship. The Word blog authoring feature is extensible and we will publish information so that blog providers can insure that their systems work with Word.

I met with Joe's team a few months ago and was pleased to hear they were going to add this feature to Word 2007. I've been working with them on this feature for a while and now that we actually have an official blog posting tool coming out of Microsoft, it's time for me to start investing more time in looking at exposing more of our blog-related features via an API.

This is definitely cool news. If you are a blogger that uses Microsoft Word, you definitely need to give it a try. They've gone out of their way to build a product that is easy to use and doesn't stomp on your expectations of a blogging tool (i.e. no nasty HTML for one). Mad props to Krista, Joe Friend and all the other folks who worked on getting this out the door.