Seadragon on iPhone

From the very-cool-files: http://livelabs.com/blog/seadragon-goes-mobile/

It’s great to see us participating across the broad set of mobile platforms available to consumers today.

Social Virus

This is a serious issue nobody is looking at – not just for Facebook – but for all social experiences: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/the_facebook_virus_spreads_no_social_network_is_safe.php

Windows Live: The Napkin Sketch

I love pictures. As an adult, it’s the only way I can still learn in a meaningful way Really simple pictures can distill complicated concepts into easily understandable ideas.

My friends across the hall just passed on this video, which explains some of the great work being done in aggregation for the new Windows Live…in simple pictures. Check it out (note: these features will be available in the coming weeks. /jamie

What’s New on Windows Live?

Late last night, we began publicly discussing upcoming changes to Windows Live. This is  an exciting time as it represents an enormous effort by product engineering, management and marketing to deliver an exceptionally simple web experience that connects your complex digital life. The Windows Live Spaces team has a great blog, as does Live Wire. Screenshot goodness and details abound.

What I love about the new Windows Live is not just the product itself, but the significance of the customer problem it solves.

“Did you get my message?”
I have a couple different e-mail accounts. I have a Windows Live Profile  and a Twitter account, some photos on Flickr and contacts on various other sites from Facebook to Bebo. Altogether, I count nearly 12 points of presence (including this WordPress blog) that I actively use online. Oh, and I check them on my home PC, my work PC, my cell phone, in my existing software and on the web. I check them on Windows, and on my MacBook. And yet, how many times have you answered “No, not yet,”  to the age-old question of “Did you get my message?”  Too many times.

In other words, keeping pace with my increasingly complex digital life isn’t easy. It should be simple. Communicating and sharing should be seamless. My online conversations should span across services and devices.  Updates and activities that I care about should come to me, not the other way around. We can do better. Enter the new Windows Live. Said simply, this was our goal: to help keep your life in sync.

This starts with a more complete and integrated social experience – and you will see this in the updated Home (above) and Profile (below)  services. Home provides a summary of your digital world – essentially a “What’s New” feed across your entire network. Profile also provides a view into solely your activities, and allows friends to easily keep in touch. Personally, I love “Notes”  for its simplicity (below) where you can leave short-form messages for friends.

 

There a couple entirely new experience as well, such as Windows Live Groups (below) which allow you to quickly collaborate online with the people you choose – be it family, friends or other associations. Your group will get a shared calendar, shared storage, a shared e-mail address, and shared instant messaging. The group itself is private and updates are exposed in my personal What’s New feed. My homeowners assocation is going to be hearing about this one…

 

A couple additional things I love about the new Windows Live: the experience is beautiful. The design is user-centric and you can see how this is woven throughout each Windows Live service. In addition, the potential of the “What’s New” feed. It’s powerfully simply  and I think people will be taken back by its practical approach to simplifying the web. The list goes on …. more as we get closer to public launch.

So when is public launch? From the press release: This next generation of Windows Live, available at http://www.windowslive.com, will begin rolling out to customers in the U.S. over the coming weeks and will be made available globally in 54 countries and in 48 languages by early 2009.

Hungry for some digerati speculation? Tech Crunch has a nice summary, and I love the New York Times coverage. Get the full dish at techmeme.com.

Till next time, /jamie

Windows Azure & the Social Web

In the week since Windows Azure was announced, the tech media has has been disecting it’s function, implications and of course, it’s marketing. I’ve been absorbing the product announcements like everybody else. To put it simply, last week, the Blue Monster roared.

Hyperbole is fun. But what does Azure mean, practically, to the social web? Let’s start with some common understanding of what ‘cloud’ computing means...(humor me)

I think we can agree that the term ‘cloud computing’ has come to encompass everything & anything delivered over a wire. This is very broad. Why? Well, historically, cloud computing is a new term for old concepts: time-sharing, application service providers, the paradigm that thin-client computing embraced…the list goes on & on. Based on this history, I could argue that the only requirement for being called ‘cloud’ computing is having a server plugged-in somewhere As a fun exercise, I sometimes replace the word ‘cloud’ with, ‘internet’ to see how often it breaks the meaning. It usually doesn’t.

So what makes the context different this time? What trends explain why cloud-based innovation is so exciting? A few thoughts:

• Standards are expected, interoperability is a requirement
• Computational capacity that far exceeds today’s computing utilization
• Broadband penetration is reaching sufficient mass
• The web has increasingly mirrored our social world – with more transparency

In other words, new software running on server hardware that exposes the power of these trends to developers and users. The beauty of Windows Azure is that it provides this power in the context of the real-world software development, service hosting and management expectations that most developers operate within.

This is not simple stuff. A complete solution should not  only offer the ability to create or mashup services, but secure, documented and consistent interfaces for storage, compute, permissions, access control,  workflow, data manipulation, etc. – all over wires, across heterogenous platforms.  Nutty complicated.

So 310 words later, we have a frame for cloud computing & Windows Azure within that context. In Part 2, we’ll look at social trends associated with the cloud, and how Windows Azure adds value.

Till next time, /jamie

Political Streams

Timely: If you’re interested in tracking the presidential election like you track the stock market, I reccomend visiting Political Streams.

Political Streams comes from Microsoft Live Labs, a research and development organization charged with creating state-of-the-art Internet technologies. One of these is Social Streams, a project that mines social media from across the Internet and visualizes popularity. In this case, the system tracks political news articles, documents and social media, as well as the people and places within that content. It keeps track of these links within certain time periods and provides a ranking, which you see on the home page. In addition to crawling, the system overalys data from Freebase, an open database of shared knowledge.  Try it (note: expect pre-release behaviors.)

Live Labs is run by Gary Flake, who has a nice write-up in this month’s Fast Company. Personally, I’m setting this as my home page between now & Election Day. /jamie

Welcome to Up/On Social

This past month, I took a position at Microsoft focused on Social Networking, specifically how Microsoft can provide the best social experience for customers through Windows and Windows Live. It’s a great opportunity with some continuity for me: I’ve just spent the last three years driving Microsoft’s open source strategy and thinking deeply about how to increase participation and broaden inclusion of individuals and communities across diverse patterns of behavior and beliefs. 

Both of these roles uniquely inspire me: I’m a big believer that technology has untold potential to change the world many times over. It has has done this (and will continue to) by connecting, and then increasing the transparency of relationships, processes and markets. Social networking is one application of that model, and examples like Facebook, LinkedIn and others prove this out. In other words, comparatively, how much more or less would I know about the relationships graphed in these services compared to a world without them? For me, the answer is much less. In this case, technology not only increases my awareness of these connections, but also allows me to rapidly discover new, valuable, connections. 

I’ll be working hard to champion these beliefs into Windows Live – not that Live hasn’t gotten the bug. Support for OpenID in Windows Live is significant: It puts the end-user in control of their online identity, and does so by reducing the proliferation of identity schemes while simultaneously increasing choice. This is great work from the Live Platform team – more at dev.live.com. Over time, I’m optimistic that we’ll continue to see announcements like this coming from across Windows Live —  in how we build our web apps for consumers, our participation in the industry and the underlying platform we provide to developers. 

This blog is one small step towards making that happen – “Up On Social” is intended to increase transparency and start a dialogue on how to weave the best social web possible. What should you expect to find here? This will be a place where I’ll not only blog, but also share some analysis and perspective on the industry, share and connect at conferences & show other parts of Microsoft that are doing just plain cool work. Social is everywhere and there will be much more to discuss. In fact, there’s a lot of news coming out of Microsoft this week at PDC. More on that later. 

For now, thanks for dropping in and don’t hesitate to provide feedback and comments on what you want to see here. /Jamie

Photo Friday: San Diego/Ocean

 

San Diego/Ocean, originally uploaded by jmcannon.

Ocean hitting the sea wall in La Jolla, San Diego. This is a couple yards down from the harbor seal beach, and south of the Torrey Pines Cliffs.