Angus Logan's Blog

I’ll be at the Data Sharing summit to talk about MSFT’s views on Data Portability – come on down – www.datasharingsummit.com

Leveraging the Windows Live Platform for Your Organization

Listen to TechNet Radio and learn how you can leverage the benefits of the Windows Live platform for your organization. We discuss Windows Live ID; Microsoft Silverlight Streaming; and the Windows Live Admin Center, which allows you to manage a slice of Windows Live.

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Participants

Eric Ostrowski Your Show Host and TechNet Radio Producer

Angus Logan Senior Product Manager, Windows Live

Nam Ng Senior Security Strategist

Bill Sisk Response Communications Manager, Trustworthy Computing

I saw the press today on Zoho announcing they would be consuming Google & Yahoo accounts as an authentication source for their system.

It’s really cool that I can now auth using one of my existing accounts from Goog/Yhoo.

Our primary goal with allowing web sites to become relying parties for Windows Live ID is single sign on, that when you sign into a web site you are automatically authenticated into other Windows Live services – not to be the username/pwd store for the Internet – I would hope the other large identity stores had the same intention.

It does make me wonder why didn’t Zoho become a Relying Party of Windows Live ID so the 400m+ active accounts per month could be used to sign in?

From a contact importing point of view Zoho could have also tapped into the 30 billion relationships in the Windows Live Contacts store via the Contacts API.

What are your thoughts?

I’ve been a fan of these guys ever since they hooked up their service to our Photo API CTP (its a preview!) – really slick service.

Today Eye.fi seems to be getting coverage on their announcement of a new products (Share/Explore & Home).

One of the things I think the previous product was missing was connecting to any wi-fi and being able to upload photos…. that is now possible! if you can get a clear signal on an open wifi connection your photos can be uploaded to the web, its really cool because youdon’t need to plug in your laptop to configure the hotspots.

Announcement is below (from their blog):

As you may have seen, we announced new products and new capabilities today at the O’Reilly Where 2.0 conference here in the San Francisco Bay Area. You can learn all about the products and services here on our freshly redesigned website and discover why an event all about the “geospatial web” is the right place for Eye-Fi to unveil where we’re headed. The new products will be available in the next few weeks.

Obviously we’re excited. The new products not only reflect some of what we heard from early users but are also another leap in what we set out to do with the first Eye-Fi Card. Simply put, we’re trying to help you manage, save and share your digital memories by making effortless what is otherwise a hassle. Today, all you have to do is turn on your camera and the Eye-Fi Card will automatically upload photos to your computer or share them to the web. Soon, the Eye-Fi Explore will add geotags to your photos to show where they were taken and allow you to upload from a Wi-Fi hotspot so you can save or share those memories on the go.

Of course, none of this is possible without a pretty sophisticated combination of the card’s wireless technology and our Internet systems. Yet, it remains as easy for the every-day photographer as the first Eye-Fi Card. As it should be.

This just crossed my desk : a web site trashing their reputation one address book at a time. In essence, it raises the issue of when someone grants you permission to their data what will you do with it. If you are going to email everyone - it had better be pretty clear you will be doing that (both from your Privacy statement and in clear UX) - the line gets blurry on what is clear enough or what isn't clear enough, and this is a case where a company has now tainted their reputation.

From: <redacted>
Sent: Sunday, May 11, 2008 7:46 AM
To: <redacted>
Subject: PLEASE DO NOT RESPOND TO AN EMAIL ASKING YOU TO JOIN <redacted>

I apologize if you received an email asking you to join <redacted>.com recently.  I did not send it.

The way it works is 'you think' another friend has sent you an invite to connect with him/her via <redacted>.com and when you go to their website and join - that's when it happens.  Unbeknownst to me, the site automatically (without my permission) went out to my address book and grabbed ALL my addresses.  It then sent the following message out:

Hi,

I looked for you on <redacted>.com, but you weren't there. I use <redacted>.com to search for lost friends and contacts, and to stay connected with people I know, so please connect with me.

and they sign your name.

If you joined, please let your address book individuals know of this spam scam.  Again, I am so sorry that you received this type of email - Please report it as spam and delete.

So I reached out to them, wondering how long until I get a response:

From: Angus Logan
Sent: Monday, May 12, 2008 10:35 AM
To: support@redacted.com
Subject: Engineering or Product Management contact re. Invites
Importance: High

Hi,

I’m Angus Logan, the Senior Technical Product Manager from the Windows Live Platform team. I’d love to have a quick chat with an engineering or product management contact regarding the invite friend functionality on your web site.

You may not be aware that in March we announced the Windows Live Contact API is now in Beta and you can use it commercially under these terms. The Contact API is the preferred way to access a person’s address book as it provides a richer set of information such as preferred email address, and the user never shares their credentials with your web site (currently you are collecting these credentials over HTTP so anyone could sniff them).

Can you please drop me a line on my cell +1 425 753 7987 or email back so we could discuss the use of this API.

I’m in NYC if you want to meet up and talk smack – shoot me an email alogan @removethis microsoft.com and we can grab a coffee.

One thing I like about twitter which I haven’t done until now, is setting a cool background image.

The picture below is a stitch of about 24 images which were taken over the North Pole (flying from Seattle to Korea) (you can even see the original here)

Whilst I take lots of photos, I’m far from a pro, perhaps Microsoft Pro Photo Tools will hook me up :)

At only 6.32 MB to download & install its much more welcome than other packages which are 300MB-700MB (granted, the functionality is probably less).

Getting & setting up

Go to here and download the bits and install.

Opening images and browsing

Setting the metadata on the images

To set the metadata you just go to thumbnail view, highlight all and then on the left hand side select metadata

After you add the metadata to every image you need to save that data back into the image (I guess)

Publishing the images to online services

There isn’t any editing or publishing capabilities in Pro Photo Tools, but all you do is double click on an image and it opens Photo Gallery (or WL Photo Gallery). Also, these images are based on your hard drive so you can use WL Photo Gallery to publish them to a service in the sky i.e. Windows Live Spaces Photos or Flickr.

Right now Spaces Photos does not consume metadata based on the images so you won’t get any great mapping capabilities, but hopefully in the future that will change, if you publish to Flickr you should be able to put that metadata to use with Mapping and other searches.

Alex Mallet posted @ the Live Mesh blog about how the Live Mesh cloud services run, how we think about the services, deployment, monitoring, connectivity – check it out.

Our general philosophy when building our cloud services was to adhere to the tenets of Recovery-Oriented Computing (ROC): programs will crash, hardware will fail, and they will do so regularly, so your system should be prepared to deal with these failures.

One gem in this post was a linked document written by James Hamilton, “On Designing and Deploying Internet-Scale Services” which collected the best practices from the Windows Live/MSN organizations – it is definitely worth a read, the abstract is:

The system-to-administrator ratio is commonly used as a rough metric to understand administrative costs in high-scale services. With smaller, less automated services this ratio can be as low as 2:1, whereas on industry leading, highly automated services, we’ve seen ratios as high as 2,500:1. Within Microsoft services, Autopilot is often cited as the magic behind the success of the Windows Live Search team in achieving high system-to-administrator ratios. While auto-administration is important, the most important factor is actually the service itself. Is the service efficient to automate? Is it what we refer to more generally as operations-friendly? Services that are operations friendly require little human intervention, and both detect and recover from all but the most obscure failures without administrative intervention. This paper summarizes the best practices accumulated over many years in scaling some of the largest services at MSN and Windows Live.

Live Mesh is both a platform and a platform experience. One of the first applications to demonstrate what the Live Mesh platform can do is a folder/file synchronization solution.

Typically when you create or consume a Mesh enabled folder it gets dropped onto your desktop. I don’t have anything against the desktop, but I do think there are some things you can do to make it easier to browse to.

What am I talking about? Windows Vista Favorites!

In Explorer (the Windows shell) and throughout lots of different applications (like the Save File dialog) a special group of folders lives on top left corner – favorites.

How do I get my Mesh enabled folders in there?

Create the Mesh enabled folder on your desktop (or anywhere else) and then drag it up into the favorites area (top left corner).

Now its fast to access my mesh enabled folders

These favorites now get surfaced on all Explorer windows or in the Save As dialog in most programs.

Reconfiguring the existing folders

You can also right click on Document and Pictures and point those to the location where you’ve created a Mesh enabled folder to store the content.

I just got a new Flip Video camera and needed to play with it.

Our photo guy (JP Wollersheim) always hooks me up with goodies to play with, and a few months he dropped off a Samsung photo frame which I have hooked up to my photos on Windows Live Spaces.

I can take some photos using my eye.fi and they up up to Spaces and then over Wi-fi (via a router and direct tap in my office) the photos get displayed.

The photo frame is useful when I’m on the road, I can take photos on my cellphone or camera and they go up to Spaces and get pointed down the hall so people can see what I’m upto.

A while ago I saved a PowerPoint deck as images and pushed them into Windows Live Spaces (kinda like DIY SlideShare) – anyway it looks awesome – super cheap way to display presentations – save them to the cloud and point a photo frame at them.

The video I shot is below (no that music isn’t overlayed, that was what was on in my office from Last.fm) – I just grabbed the AVI from the Flip Video device and uploaded to Silverlight Streaming by Windows Live

Recently I’ve been more and more amazed by the ecosystem being built around Twitter.

Three things have made an impact:

• TweetScan : When we announced the Live Mesh Technology Preview tweetscan was one of the key things we used to monitor the vibe and engage with interested parties.
• TwerpScan (thx for headsup DownloadSquad) :
  • When third parties start to clean up your spam/fraud problem you know you either have a nasty environment or a great ecosystem; in this case I think it just shows twitter has some killer developers following them.
  • If everyone ran TwerpScan I suspect that would fix a lot of the recent instability, someone who was following me was also following 60,000 other people, there is no way that is a real person, it is just someone wanting to get their name in an inbox (or a sympathy follow to push ads). When there are edge cases like this I’m guessing they add to the load of the system – TwerpScan should be built in.
• Twistory : puts your tweets in your calendar.

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No wonder this apparently happened (note: could just be a rumor).

Check out the video and the site www.RoboChamps.com

They use Windows Live ID and Silverlight Streaming by Windows Live

Tonight we introduced Live Mesh go and see www.mesh.com – follow it on TweetScan. I’m sitting in the ship room right now and this is really exciting.

Microsoft Resources

Read the blog | Welcome to Live Mesh | Live Mesh as a Platform | What is a platform experience (and why do I care?) | Videos

Videos

Platform Experience Quick Tour | Quick tour for developers | Overview of Live Mesh Architecture | Overview of Platform Experience

Bloggers & Press

Below are links to all the views from lots of bloggers & press (follow on Technorati or Techmeme)

I just landed in Orlando and I’m flying out Tuesday morning – if you want to meet up and talk about Windows Live services email me (alogan atREMOVETHIS microsoft.com)