James Senior's Blog

Earlier this month the creative geniuses over at Information Architects in Japan recently released a new version of their famous Web Trend Map, a really slick visualization of the players in the web today, how they compare based on success and stability and the themes that connect them throughout the industry.  You can download the full size image from Flickr here, but I found this a little tough to navigate and explore, so I uploaded the image to DeepZoomPix.com where you can zoom and pan until your heart’s content!

Wow it seems that the search innovation trend that Bing kicked off a couple of weeks ago has been picked up by Photobucket who today announced a new Visual Search feature that takes searching for images and sharing them with friends to the next level. They’ve created a slick experience using Silverlight to search, browse and interact with images and then used the Windows Live Messenger Library to add a whole new vector – sharing via IM! Try the app out here!

I’m intrigued by the social side of the app (aka the sharing) and it’s a great conversation starter to the discussion that Angus and I have been bouncing around for the last few weeks; do users want to swim around in the stream looking for interesting information (i.e. a news feed) or do they want to be pushed information by their close friends and get it front of mind (i.e. an IM chat). Perhaps it’s a mixture of both with more value being attributed to the latter rather than the former.

Looking at the same choice, which is valuable for publishers of information? By that I mean the Photobuckets of this world who are interested in getting new users to party on their websites. Perhaps the answer to this question is an amicable, both, or put another way, different strokes for different folks. What’s clear is that it’ll be really interesting to advertisers and publishers to find out which is more effective when it comes to pushing their product or service.

On the tech side what’s behind the scenes here? Well the Windows Live Messenger Library is a very slick set of javascript libraries that provide programmability into the Messenger Service (our big datacenter in the cloud) that powers the client experience across Windows, Mac, Xbox and WinMo for 330m users every month. Incidentally it’s nearly Windows Live Messenger’s 10th Birthday!

The Library allows ANY website on ANY platform using ANY language to integrate IM capabilities and provide instant sharing of content to Messenger users. To get started head over to the Interactive SDK where you can get a feel for what you can do with it, then check out our demo website Pulse that has the full capabilities baked into a sample.

If you are interested in seeing screenshots of the whole flow of user acquisition Angus has a great post on that.

Facebook announced today that they will be rolling out new search functionality in beta that allows people to find content (including status updates) that users have decided to share with “everyone”.  This functionality is similar to the broadcast power of Twitter.  (As a side topic its been interesting to see that Facebook have been positioned as the enemy by Michael and Eldon).

There is opportunity for Facebook here, Twitter currently is adored for the way it spreads news faster than anything on the planet, but there are risks too.  Let’s not forget that they need to provide a user experience to match and cater for the inevitable flood of information that broadcast distribution will bring.  For the main part, Twitter has left it up to the developer ecosystem, with the likes of Tweetdeck and Seesmic addressing this problem, but this might just be its Achilles heel.

*If* this turns out to be a race to real-time, then the winner will eventually be decided by a balance of user experience and developer opportunity.  Twitter became successful because of its developer opportunities but so too have Facebook and they offer a far broader set of services to program against – not just a feed.  This could prove key.  Let’s not forget the 1st party experience of Facebook.com and Twitter.com where Facebook have arguably iterated faster than Twitter trying out new designs (for better of for worse) where Twitter seem to have focused their attention on support their exponential growth and trying to avoid downtime by building out their datacenter.

The balance, and this has been proven by the success of Microsoft (with boxed software), is to build out a platform that provides business opportunities for developers, support them in creating their own software, and in parallel incrementally improve the 1st party experience for people.  The prime examples being Windows and Office. 

It’s not rocket science but I do feel like Twitter has dropped the ball when it comes to their .com experience.  It is hard to execute on though, we’re still getting it right (some would argue we are just starting) when it comes to 1st party experiences on Windows Live vs. the developer ecosystem.  Nobody’s perfect but as in any business, it’s survival of the fittest.

Oh yeah, and Facebook, your A/B Testing is pretty cool.

Windows Live Messenger is the world’s most popular instant messaging service and is going to be 10 years old this summer and we’ve just announced that the service has over 330 million user every month.  In commemoration of the big birthday bash the team are asking you to join in the party and share any fun, emotional, or personal stories so we can tell people how important Windows Live Messenger is to all of you.

We want to learn about those very personal stories and moments and we would ask you to share your story with us. What was your funniest, most unexpected or most emotional moment with Messenger? If you have a great story and you would like to share it with others, please send it to us! Please note that we will publish the best anecdotes in our Windows Live Messenger marketing or public relations communications. Of course we will do that anonymously, only mentioning your first name and home country (and maybe a related picture if you decide to add one).

If you want to share your story and let others participate in your special moment with Messenger, please send your short story in English to [email protected] by June 28th. Please add your first name and home country – you can also add a related photo if you like. We will share the best stories during the month of July, right here on the blog.

Full details are available on the Windows Live Messenger Blog.

Don’t forget that as a web developer you can also use the Windows Live Messenger Library to quickly and easily add Instant Messaging capabilities to your website and connect it to those 330 million users.

After we penned a deal with PayScale.com, Bing has incorporated average salary information into its search results so that you can get a glimpse of the lower and upper bounds of salaries in a chart, and options to drill into salaries by city.  I just searched for the occupations below and got some useful results – nice to see the “decision engine” in action!

CEO Salary

Doctor’s Salary

Customer Services Salary

Story courtesy of Fav.Or.It

Importing an RSS feed (aka a blog) into my Facebook News Feed is really easy to do, you just hit settings on the top right of your News Feed and add your feed URL to the list.  When you do this each new blog entry is placed in my News Feed – you are probably reading this now in Facebook!

What I don’t like is how Facebook takes your whole blog post and sucks it into their site displaying the blog post as a Note in your profile.  You see, the value for the content publisher in this transaction is if I get people to visit my blog – www.jamessenior.com however if people can read each post without leaving Facebook then I lose that value.  What is not clear to the reader, is that this content originates from my blog and Facebook simply importing the content.  The only reference to my blog is down the bottom of the Post where I see a “View Original Post” link – in all honesty if people read all the way to the bottom of the post why on earth would they click to view the original post – they’ve just read it! To add salt in the wound you can also comment on the blog post right within Facebook, what would be really is if those comments were syndicated back to my blog, but that’s not possible right now.

You might think that I’m unhappy because of the loss of ad revenue – I’m not.  The real value I lose it tracking the number of people who have read my content – i.e. the statistics and analytics.  Facebook choose not to surface any of that information to me, so tracking readers/visitors is impossible.  Funnily enough, like other content publishers, this kind of information is kind of important to me.

I much prefer the model that Windows Live currently uses to aggregate Web Activities in my News Feed.  Here, they have chosen to just include a short excerpt of the blog post along with a prominent link back to the original article, thus ensuring that I get traffic to come back to my website. 

My content deal with Facebook is a little one sided right now, whereas with Windows Live it seems a little more even.  One solution would be to only publish excerpts on blog posts in the RSS feed but then my feed reader friends wouldn’t be able to read the full article.  Ideally, I could configure how Facebook displays the blog post and whether you want the whole article published as a Note or a more prominent redirect to the original blog entry.  Either that or give me analytics!

Aha – so that’s what the beam of light was for the other night – it was the official Bing launch at the Seattle Center.  You could see the beam of light for miles and it made for great late night viewing from the top of my building!  You can click below for the full Photosynth experience too.  There are some stunning photos on Flickr too, so that’s where some of that $100m marketing budget went :)

Last month Seattle picked up Fast Company’s City of the Year 2009 on the basis of its “divine geography, frontier spirit and an abundance of both artists and geeks” and also got labeled as the 2nd hottest place for startups outside the valley in a recent study.

In the article Fast Company interviewed John Cordell – an Internet Explorer architect – who claimed that Seattle is the best place for software engineers because of the climate:

"You go into a hole and work 80 hours a week for eight months, then come out of the hole and take a break to recharge your batteries. Seattle has eight months of bad weather and four months of absolutely beautiful weather. It's the perfect place for software engineers."

But what might be right for software might not be right for services or “cloud computing” where agility is the name of the game and you’re considered old hat if you’re not shipping code every night and playing Four Square by 6pm and tweeting about how you just assassinated your best friend whilst sipping a frappacino.

I’ve seen it first hand, now the lovely weather is here in Seattle – and it is lovely – people change, there’s less time spent in the office, more time down by the lake or hiking in the mountains - these Seatteites love their good weather and their outdoor activities.  I can’t blame them.  For most of the year the weather is a little on the dull side so once the sunshine arrives you just want to get out and make the most of it.

Is a more stable climate more conducive to agile software and rapid releases?  Would a climate where people are accustomed to the sunshine be better, where programmers don’t mind residing in the air conditioned office whilst they finish their code check in for the day which automatically is published to the cloud?

Does California and specifically Silicon Valley have the upper hand in this climate battle over the clouds, or will Aesop have the final say as the Tortoise and the Hare is replayed?

Photo courtesy of AdagioatMSN from Flickr

A natural extension to the social web is played out on mobile devices.  Be this a version of the website that has been designed specifically for a smaller screen (e.g. http://m.playfoursqaure.com) or an application that runs natively on the device (e.g. Facebook App on Windows Mobile). 

These extensions are invaluable to the success of a social website for they allow the experience to travel with the user and continue the flow of data wherever they are, and as the value of a website is found in the content, it’s critical to provide as many input points as possible and keep them open at all times.  Mobile is an example of such an input point.  Couple the mobile input point to a mobile device with GPS capability and data flowing to and from the network becomes exponentially more valuable and the experiences both for the mobile user and consumers of their information becomes extremely customized.

Apps are by far the better option over a mobile (wap) version of the website because they provide a richer user experience, allow better integration with the mobile operating system for sharing of content and also a way for developers to monetize their application ($25bn market by 2014).  Remember that the flow of data is key so having an app that makes this happen quicker and more easily for the user is imperative. 

Examples of where this is true include the success of Twitter, due in no small part to the client applications running on devices – particularly mobile – and also new social games are emerging like www.playfoursquare.com whose adoption of amongst iPhone users is much greater than other mobile platforms – because they have a really nice app.

It’s not just about the software either. With companies like www.modu.com delivering modular phones that allow you to quickly change the physical build of a device for different scenarios, the type of data that flows to/from the network will be dictated by the configuration of phone you have on your person at the time.

Back to the software though, and where all this is going.  Windows Mobile 6 – the current version - is not the best for social applications, because it’s difficult to write apps that people love to use.  With Windows Mobile 6.5 that will change with support for touch gestures and a widget framework that allows web developers to build application-like experiences outside of the browser without having to write native code.  Microsoft are also launching (a well publicized) Marketplace where developers can sell the applications they build.

We’ve just released an SDK for Windows Mobile 6.5 which also includes emulators for testing – you can download it here. Rob Cameron has more information in his blog post on the SDK.

Looks like the TweetDeck crew have a money making plan and it consists of branding their Twitter client as reported by ReadWriteWeb.  Their first skinnable version is Blink182 and not only includes visuals but alerts from the band.

It reminds me of the Pandora.com approach to advertising where the whole page becomes an advert.  Pandora have more whitespace to play with compared to TweetDeck, but on the flip side people spend less time in Pandora. 

I’m not sure how I feel about my client app being branded - it does feel a little strange - but I guess I could get used to it.  It would be great if I could get exclusive content according to the skin I installed. For example, with the Blink 182 skin I get interviews with the band or a video download from a recent concert.  Getting content could be obvious but also be in the form of Easter eggs which make the user explore the app more to unlock the exclusive content.