Carnage4Life's Space

The place to find the most recent comments on your photos, blog posts, profile, files and shared favorites is http://profile.live.com/recentcomments.

If you are like me and prefer to navigate from a central place like http://home.live.com, the screenshot below shows where to find the link to recent comments on that page

Giving users complete control of their online experience has always been a core tenet of Windows Live and this hasn't changed with the What's New list feature in Windows Live. This feature enables users to view an activity feed of what members of their social network are doing AND to provide an activity feed of what the user has done recently. You can see an example of the latter on my Windows Live profile.

Listed below are the various ways we keep users in control of their online experience related to this feature.

In Control of What You See

By default a user sees activities from members of their network and from groups they are in. However users can opt out of getting activities from any member of their network or from any group they are in without breaking their relationship with that user or group. In addition, users can also opt out of getting activities of a specific type (e.g. friend additions or Twitter updates) from members of their network.

We provide two entry points for managing what updates you get from your network. First of all, users can manage updates from a particular user or update type by hovering over the item in the dashboard and clicking on the gear icon. The users, groups and applications that are currently blocked can be viewed on the What's New settings page at http://profile.live.com/whatsnewsettings. This is what that page looks like for me at the current time. 

As you can see from the above screenshot, I haven't hidden any update types from my What's New list. I did add the "Paintballers" group to my list of hidden groups though. Although I like getting paintballing events in my calendar, I'm not interested in discussions or photos about paintball on a regular basis.

In Control of What Others See About You

Some times, users may want to retract updates that have gone out to their social network. For example, a reference to inappropriate content that may offend people in their social network or pictures of streaking or similar nude pranks which inadvertently go out to the wrong people. For this reason, we give users the ability to delete such items from their profile which immediately deletes it from the what's new lists of their friends as shown below

It should also be noted that each update type typically has a permission associated with it. This means that a user can control who has access to a particular photo album, their shared favorites or even their Twitter stream (as shown below). That way you can still broadcast updates to your friends on Windows Live without worrying that you are accidentally sharing inappropriate content with your boss or coworkers.

In addition there is an options page where users can completely opt out of broadcasting updates from Windows Live to members of their social network.  For example, I know someone who'd rather not have it broadcasted whenever he changes his status message in Messenger since he believes they should ephemeral thoughts and not captured for posterity. This options page also allows configuring updates from other web sites that are being aggregated on the user's profile. The What's New with you settings page can be found at http://profile.live.com/WhatsNewWithYouSettings.

A screenshot of the settings page is shown below

Conclusion

So you can see when it comes to activity feeds in Windows Live, our mantra is to keep users in control. Let me know what you think of our approach in the comments.

Now Playing: Kanye West - See You In My Nightmares (feat. Lil Wayne)

Chris Jones has a blog post entitled Building Windows Live where he talks about the what all of us on Windows Live have been working on over the past year. He writes

We have spent the last year working on our next major wave of releases for Windows Live. This wave is part of our ongoing work to build a great set of communication and sharing experiences that help keep your life in sync. This wave includes significant updates to our software applications for your Windows PC, and in the next few hours, we will release public betas of the latest version of the Windows Live suite of PC applications, including Messenger, Mail, Photo Gallery, Movie Maker, Writer, Toolbar, and Family Safety. You’ll find new features across the products and most notably, Windows Live Messenger has been almost entirely redesigned. I’m sure many of you will have questions, and, over the coming weeks, we’ll have individuals from the engineering team share more about what we have built and why we made the investments we made. Our intent is to post regularly to this blog, and if there are topics you think we should cover, please leave a comment or send me an e-mail at chris.jones@microsoft.com.

It seems the download links were found early by those intrepid correspondents over at LiveSide and a number of people have already started trying the new versions out. The download URLs are http://g.live.com/1rebeta3/en/wlsetup-web.exe and http://g.live.com/1rebeta3/en/wlsetup-all.exe depending on whether you want to download a subset of the Windows Live desktop applications or all of them.

I probably won't be blogging in detail about what I've worked on over the past few months until the products are out of beta but I will leave with this screenshot from Darren Neimke's post Loving the new Live Beta’s.

I'm sure you can guess which of the features called out above I worked on.

PS: My favorite thing about the new wave of Windows Live products is that the world now has a seamless calendar sharing solution that works. If Omar doesn't write something similar first, I'll probably throw a blog up about how my wife and I plan to use Outlook + Outlook Connector and Windows Live Mail + Windows Live Calendar to share our schedules so I no longer miss birth center appointments. :)

Now Playing: DJ Khaled - Go Hard (Feat. Kanye West & T-Pain)

Last week my blog was offline for a day or so because I was the victim of a flood of SQL injection attacks that are still hitting my Web site at the rate of multiple requests a second. I eventually managed to counter the attacks by installing URLScan 3.0 and configuring it to reject HTTP requests that resemble SQL injection attacks. I found out about URLScan in two ways; from a blog post Phil Haack wrote about Dealing with Denial of Service Attacks where it seems he's been caught up in the same wave of attacks that brought down my blog and via an IM from Scott Hanselman who saw my tweet on Twitter about being hacked and pointed me to his blog post on the topic entitled Hacked! And I didn't like it - URLScan is Step Zero.

This reminded me that I similarly found another useful utility, WinDirStat, via a blog post as well. In fact when i think about it, a lot of the software I end up trying out is found via direct or indirect recommendations from people I know. Typically through blog posts, tweets or some other communication via a social networking or social media service. This phenomenon can be clearly observed in closed application ecosystems like the Facebook platform, where statistics have shown that the majority of users install new applications after viewing them on the profiles of their friends.

One of the things I find most interesting about the Facebook platform and now the Apple App Store is that they are revolutionizing how we think about software distribution. Today, finding interesting new desktop/server/Web apps either happens serendipitously via word of mouth or [rarely] is the result of advertising or PR. However finding interesting new applications if you are a user of Facebook or the Apple iPhone isn't a matter of serendipity. There are well understood ways of finding interesting applications that harnesses social and network effects from user ratings to simply finding out what applications your friends are using.

As a user, I sometimes wish I had an equivalent experience as a user of desktop applications and their extensions. I've often thought it would be cool to be able to browse the software likes and dislikes of people such as Omar Shahine, Scott Hanselman and Mike Torres to see what their favorite Windows utilities and mobile applications were. As a developer of a feed reader, although it is plain to see that Windows has a lot of reach since practically everyone runs use it sometimes I'm envious of the built in viral distribution features that come with the Facebook platform or the unified software distribution experience that is the iPhone App Store. Sure beats hosting your app on SourceForge and hoping that your users are blogging about the app to spread it via word of mouth or paying for prominence on sites like Download.com.

A lot of the pieces are already there. Microsoft has a Windows Marketplace but for the life of me I'd have never found out about it if I didn't work at Microsoft and someone I know switched teams to start working there. There are also services provided by 3rd parties like Download.com, the Firefox Add-Ons page and Tucows. It would be interesting to see what could be stitched together if you throw in a social graph via something like Facebook Connect, an always-on well integrated desktop experience similar to the Apple App Store and one of the aforementioned sites. I suspect the results would be quite beneficial to app developers and users of Windows applications.

What do you think?

Now Playing: Metallica - The Day That Never Comes

I've been using the redesigned Facebook profile and homepage for the past few days and thought it would be useful to write up my impressions on the changes. Facebook is now the the world's most popular social networking site and one of the ways they've gotten there is by being very focused on listening to their users and improving their user experienced based on this feedback. Below are screenshots of the old and new versions of the pages and a discussion of which elements are changed and the user scenarios the changes are meant to improve.

Homepage Redesign

OLD HOME PAGE:

NEW HOME PAGE:

The key changes and their likely justifications are as follows

• Entry points for creating content are now at the top of the news feed. One of the key features driving user engagement on Facebook is the News Feed. This lets a user know what is going on with their social network as soon as they logon to the site. In a typical example of network effects at work, one person creates some content by uploading a photo or sharing a link and hundreds of people on their friend list benefit by having content to view in their News Feed. If any of the friends responds to the content this again benefits hundreds of people and so on.  The problem with the old home page was that a user sees their friends uploading photos and sharing links and may want to do so as well but there is no easy way for her to figure out how to do the same thing without having to go two or three clicks away from the home page. The entry points at the top of the feed will encourage more "impulse" content creation.

• Left sidebar is gone. There were three groups of items in the left nav; a search box, the list of a user's most frequently accessed applications and an advertisement. The key problem is that the ad is in a bottom corner of the feed. This makes it easy for users to mentally segregate that part of the screen from their vision and either never look there or completely ignore it. Removing that visual ghetto and moving ads to being inline with the feed makes it more likely that users will look at the ad. Ah, but now you need more room to show the ad (all the space isn't needed for news feed stories). So the other elements of the left nave are moved, the search box to the header and the list of most accessed applications to the sidebar on the right. Now you have enough room to stretch out the News Feed's visible area and advertisers can reuse their horizontal banner ads on Facebook even though this makes the existing feed content now look awkward. This is one place where monetization trumped usability.

• Comments now shown inline for News Feed items with comments (not visible in screen shot). This may be the feature that made Mike Arrington decide to call the new redesign the FriendFeedization of Facebook. Sites like FriendFeed have proven that showing the comments on an item in the feed inline gives users more content to view in their feeds and increases the likelihood of engagement since the user may want to join the conversation.

Profile Redesign

OLD PROFILE:

NEW PROFILE:

The key changes and their likely justifications are as follows

• The profile now has tabbed model for navigation. This is a massive improvement for a number of reasons. The most important one is that in the old profile, there is a lot of content below the fold. My old profile page is EIGHT pages when printed as opposed to TWO pages when the new profile page is printed. Moving to a tabbed model (i) improves page load times and (ii) increases number of page views and hence ad impressions.

• The Mini-Feed and the Wall have been merged. The intent here is to give more visibility to the Wall which in the old model was below the fold. The "guest book" or wall is an important part of the interaction model in social networking sites (see danah boyd's Friendster lost steam. Is MySpace just a fad? essay) and Facebook was de-emphasizing theirs in the old model.

• Entry points for creating content are at the top of the profile page. Done for the same reason as on the Home page. You want to give users lots of entry points for adding content to the site so that they can kick off network effects by generating content which in turn generates tasty page views.

• Left sidebar is gone. Again the left sidebar is gone and the advertisement is moved closer to the content, and away from the visual ghetto that is the bottom left of the screen. Search box and most accessed applications are now in the header as well. The intent here is also to improve the likelihood that users will view and react to the ads.

Now Playing: Da Back Wudz - I Don't Like The Look Of It (Oompa)

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)