Alex Barnett's blog : MSN API

Moving my blog

alexbarn — Sat, 02 Sep 2006 21:38:00 GMT

OK, so I moved my new Alex Barnett blog to here for a number of reasons, explained here at my, er, new blog.

Virtual Earth Interactive SDK

alexbarn — Mon, 26 Jun 2006 04:35:00 GMT

How cool is this? Carter Maslan points to the Virtual Earth Interactive SDK:

"The SDK is organized by the things you want to do, and each of those things is correlated to a live running sample, source code, and reference documentation - all one tab click away."

You might provide the most wonderful APIs to the coolest app ever, but if it is hard to use or hard understand it won't be used. I think the Virtual Earth team have done a really great job of providing usable developer experience. API usability in action:

In this case, want to Use a callback to this point on the map:

I then click on the 'Source Code' tab and it shows me this code that I can copy and paste:

And / or click on the 'Reference' tab to show me documentation related to that function:

So simple, so sweet.

Have a play.

Create BOT for Live Messenger, win cool stuff.

alexbarn — Wed, 21 Jun 2006 17:25:00 GMT

Via Frank La Vigne - if you're into AIs and help / KB systems here is just the challenge for you (devs and ISVs from around the world are eligable, not just US, which is nice...)

"Robots or "BOTs", are software programs that you can add to MSN® Messenger and Windows Live™ Messenger. If you add a robot to your contact list, it can chat, give you customer service support, perform searches, make suggestions, play games and more.

We’re looking for the best new robot ideas for Messenger. And $40,000 in fantastic prizes go to the top BOTs!"

The prizes are cool - top prize is this Alienware MJ-12 7550 Workstation (worth around $10K). There are some sample BOTs to play with. Check out "W" BOT ...

Now, if IM BOTS ain't your thang and Robotics is, then check out Ernie Booth's post with a bunch of links to Microsoft Robotics Studio stuff (btw, I never thought I'd see this url: msdn.microsoft.com/robotics/ !)

Feedback on Live Messenger

alexbarn — Tue, 20 Jun 2006 19:48:00 GMT

Some cool demos at On 10 of the new Live Messenger.

Chris has some more great feedback for our product teams. Don Dodge sees Live Messenger as further evidence of Ray Ozzie's infuence. AMCP Tech blog agrees.

Jesse asks the team about plugins, given the Yahoo IM plugin news:

"I quickly browsed to the developer documentation of Yahoo messenger and it’s nice to see that you can create plugins using javascript and flash. Yahoo! focusses on the web developers and I think they see a messenger plugin as an extension to a web platform.

So let’s hope microsoft has the same plans for windows live messenger."

I hope so too.

Windows Live Developer Center, now live

alexbarn — Wed, 22 Mar 2006 03:02:00 GMT

The Windows Live Developer Center site is now live at MSDN, where you can find stuff on the MSN Messenger API, MSN Search Web Services and more...

Ajax and Virtual Earth tutorial

alexbarn — Wed, 08 Feb 2006 19:41:00 GMT

The Virtual Earth blog has posted some info on the first of a three part tutorial on Ajax and Virtual Earth.

"Upon completing this simple tutorial you’ll have a mapping application built with the Virtual Earth map control that utilizes AJAX to asynchronously do a reverse geocode for the center point of the map. We’ll build the application in three logical parts, each building upon the previous."

Tags: Ajax, Virtual Earth, Web 2.0

Skype chats as RSS feeds

alexbarn — Sat, 04 Feb 2006 19:56:00 GMT

I love this.

Jaanus, a Skype employee, listened to the Attention podcast I recorded with Nick Bradbury of FeedDemon and Kevin Burton of Tailrank.

"At Skype, we’ve always been toying with the idea of attention management. You already see elements of that in the current interface, such as the "Recent Chats” concept or event management. But a lot remains to be done."

So it really struck me when I listened to this attention podcast. A lot of work is happening in the attention management space there, such as attention.xml and other initiatives. So if we had Skype chats available as RSS feeds and had people read them with an attention-supporting feed reader, we could perhaps track attention for chats, and do a whole lot of fun things based on that. But obviously, beyond any attention stuff, you should just get the chats into an RSS, and that’s what this post is about."

In his own time, Jaanus has developed an experimental Windows app (in Python) called Chat Channels that can publish Skype chats as RSS feeds and / or web pages. There are two parts to the app: a 'collector' that talks to Skype over the Skype API and pulls the chat messages into a database. The second part is a 'renderer' that reads the database and publishes the chats as RSS feeds or web pages. He has written up more design details and has the bits to download and install (note: Jaanus stresses that Chat Channels is not an official Skype product nor supported by Skype).

Microsoft Mashup videos

alexbarn — Thu, 02 Feb 2006 18:42:00 GMT

John Musser over at Programmable Web has a bunch of links to some developer-focused videos covering Start.com gadgets (Live.com), MSN Search APIs, MSN Search Toolbar, Virtual Earth and some Atlas Ajax goodness.

Tags: MSN, APIs, Mashup, Web2.0, Microsoft, VirtualEarth, AJAX

Mashup Feed

alexbarn — Thu, 12 Jan 2006 08:19:00 GMT

John Musser:

"ProgrammableWeb’s ‘mashup-only’ site is live:

http://www.mashupfeed.com

What is it? As the name implies it’s a site, a very small one-page site for now, that is only about mashups: recent mashups, popular mashups, mashup tag clouds, and some other miscellaneous stats about mashups"

Includes pointers to apps mashed using Virtual Earth, MapPoint and MSN Messenger APIs.

Tags: Mashup, Web2.0

Virtual Earth v2 APIs for Windows Live Local

alexbarn — Thu, 08 Dec 2005 08:01:00 GMT

Alex Daley has posted news that the MSN Virtual Earth site (now called Windows Live Local) will go 'live' on the web tomorrow (Thursday, December 8th).

Press release here, coverage here and here.

When it goes live ~~(it hasn't yet!)~~ you'll find it at local.live.com.

I'm looking forward to playing with the first few experiments and services to take advantage of new Virtual Earth API that goes along with it (V2). Apparently this enables 'a bird’s eye view' imagery at high res (more on the user experience here). Alex has info on non-commercial use too and will update his post with links to documentation as things happen.

Tags: API, web2.0

How to make your own web mashup

alexbarn — Mon, 05 Dec 2005 17:58:00 GMT

John Musser:

"Have you ever looked at a mashup and thought you’d like to try your hand at making one someday? But perhaps you weren’t entirely sure where to begin, or, since you’re busy, how to get from concept to completed mashup quickly? Then you may want to checkout this site’s new guide: How to Make Your Own Web Mashup."

MSN Search - searching for your input

alexbarn — Wed, 30 Nov 2005 02:53:00 GMT

Brady Forrest of the MSN Search team is actively searching for anyone who wants to shape the future of their product.

"A little over a year ago we began inviting groups of academics, bloggers, siteowners, and technologists out to Redmond to talk about search. We call them Search Champs. We usually select this group based on who we are reading and we think would provide us great insight. We spend a couple of days with the group showing them our future plans, getting their input and making connections. Every time we hold these sessions we inevitably hear from people who want to be included, but we had never heard of them or didn’t know that they would be interested in MSN Search. It’s always with regret that we have to turn people away."

You want RESTful MSN Search APIs? What else would you like to see? Now's your chance to apply.

MSN Messenger World's Best App Contest

alexbarn — Sun, 20 Nov 2005 05:19:00 GMT

John Musser:

"a number of entries for MSN Messenger’s World’s Best App Contest are now listed here under the Messenger API page. These extensions are built using their new Activity API and many of them pull and mash online data into the Messenger chat experience."

John points out one of the entries, t4im: Translator for Instant Messenger:

"This application automatically translates sent as well as received messages. At the moment, it supports English, Japanese, Chinese, French and German. I hope you will enjoy instant messenging by using this convenient tool with your friends all over the world!"

Is this Star Trek's Universal Language Translator for IM?

Closing date for entries is 31st December.

Ajax / Atlas / Virtual Earth screencast

alexbarn — Wed, 16 Nov 2005 18:07:00 GMT

Dan Goldfarb:

"Dan has put together a very cool video tutorial for ASP.NET "Atlas" -- definitely worth checking out..."

The sceencast shows use of Virtual Earth APIs too.

Tags: ajax atlas virtualearth

eBay APIs: Innovation without barriers

alexbarn — Tue, 15 Nov 2005 07:57:00 GMT

Just days after announcing its RSS news, now eBay has confirmed that it is dropping their charges for use of their APIs.

This is big news, and as Josh says, a huge Web 2.0 announcement.

eBay's developer program is already hugely successful. Today, there are 2 billion API calls a month and something like 22% of all of eBay's listings revenue comes from third party developers. They have 10,000 affilitates, and 22,000 developers. After 5 years of providing their APIs to third parties and creating an amazing ecosystem - 10,000 affiliates and 22,000 developers - they are a true Web 2.0 posterchild.

According to News.com, up until today developers paid eBay between $1.25 to $2.90 per 1,000 items listed and an annual fee of $500.

This is now zero.

Adam Trachtenberg of eBay explains:

"For a long time, eBay’s offered up our API for both commercial and non-commercial usage, but we’ve always hampered ourselves by charging for access. The fees were low enough for commercial companies to write applications, but in a world where information wants to be free, we’ve been pricing out all the people who want to play with our data to see what interesting things they can build, remix, and give away.

Breaking down those barriers has been one of my primary goals since I joined eBay last summer. We got partly there in June, and we’ve completed the journey today. Now all I need is to do my job and convince you to start writing eBay applications because I can’t use the pricing excuse with my boss anymore."

Innovation without barriers

As Robert Scoble puts it:

"We’re in the middle of a new war for getting developer’s attention. Any API that tries to limit developers, or charge for its use, is just going to have slower growth than ones that are freely available."

Chris Law has an interview podcast with Greg Isaacs, Director Developers Program for eBay confrims the move:

"Greg - "We want to do two things by making the APIs free – number one to all of our developers who have been with us for a number of years say thank you and the second is around new developers, our motto is innovation without barriers. We want to remove as many barriers as possible. Let’s get rid of them and let developers do what they do best."

We'll start seeing many more eBay mash-ups now the cost of playing with eBay's APIs is now down to zero. Students and hobby developers, as well as the hardened pros that want to tinker will play have a chance to play for free and therefore create so many more new business opportunities for eBay and others. And this indeed is the whole point.

Examples eBay mash-ups:

Other more traditional software developers leveraging the eBay platform:

Alex Barnett's blog : MSN API

Moving my blog

Virtual Earth *Interactive* SDK

Create BOT for Live Messenger, win cool stuff.

Feedback on Live Messenger

Windows Live Developer Center, now live

Ajax and Virtual Earth tutorial

Skype chats as RSS feeds

Microsoft Mashup videos

Mashup Feed

Virtual Earth v2 APIs for Windows Live Local

How to make your own web mashup

MSN Search - searching for your input

MSN Messenger World's Best App Contest

Ajax / Atlas / Virtual Earth screencast

eBay APIs: Innovation without barriers

Virtual Earth Interactive SDK