Angus Logan's Blog

[read this post on the Live Mesh blog (feed)]

We mentioned in the Mesh forum that the Live Mesh technology preview is being opened up for US Live IDs to join up – many bloggers quickly picked up on this thanks to Liveside (go Sunshine!).

One clarification is we aren’t quite opening up to the 303 million people on the internet in the US YET… but we have doubled the number of participants who can sign up for the technology preview and are going to open more slots in the next couple of months.

To make signup for the preview easier, we cut the requirement of going to connect.microsoft.com.

Get your Mesh on

Firstly – I’ve gone on record saying “Maps are sooo 2001” – because they are.  This is just something I found interesting - I was riding the subway in New York today. When I looked up I saw an ad for the new www.mta.info site which gives better directions on how to use the subway and busses.

They actually printed a powered by Microsoft Virtual Earth on the in-train ad!

The site itself is somewhat slick, I’d love for all of that data to get exposed so developers could easily pull into your own apps.

The Live Mesh crew have announced a few updates to their CTP – the features I really are about are:

• You don’t need to sync to the cloud now – you can do peer-to-peer only – this is awesome because it means you keep the cloud storage for things you need anywhere access to.
• Conflict management on the Live Desktop
• Additional news events for New Live Mesh and Deleted Live Mesh

Check it out (or check out the Liveside post)

The WPC is a huge event for MSFT – there will be 10k+ people there – lots of fun;

I’m not here for the crowds though – I just want to meet some cool MSFT partners doing great stuff on the web;

Or… if you are in Houston and you aren’t even attending WPC – drop me a line.

SMS me +1 425 753 7987 or email or twitter direct message me @anguslogan

Over at identi.ca  there was a status update saying How do I find friends?

That’s easy – someone should update the laconi.ca source to use the Windows Live Contact API. So when you are the first person on the scene, your contacts could be stored (in accordance with the privacy statement) – then when your friends show up, it asks if they want to friend you – bam! you look cool for already being there; you get the friend relationships and everything is groovy.

Relationships delivered – and when it comes to Microblogging sites, its all about the people.

Travel is both a passion and a necessity for me, anything which can make it easier is something I’m interested in.

TechCrunch just posted about ExpertFlyer – this site looks like it has the most potential of any travel site I’ve seen – definitely subscribing to their blog (feed).

When I was booking my travel on point with Qantas back to Australia in August it was a real pain – flights not being available, tricks like changing destination and planning to jump off the plane in a lay-over, etc. – booking international flights on points is a massive time drain – but you are happy to spend the time as its a cheap flight.

Few thought about biz model:

• I’m guessing ExpertFlyer is betting on the free trial being such a benefit you’ll subscribe next time – and they have great verification of who you are as you’d give them your Frequent Flyer number so duplicate accounts may be hard.
• The service is so compelling that paying $foo is something you would do.
• I’m not sure 250 is enough queries as running a query to find 0 results would burn through the queries a little fast I think, but if you do go through the $4.95 i’m assuming you’d just pay the 9.95 to get unlimited.
• Booking flights on points isn’t something you’d always do, so having a subscription model is probably the best approach – unless the advertising is super high value – if you look at the home page there are 0 external ads.
• you can buy gift certificates for your friends – great idea – if you know someone with lots of points saved up its an easy way for you to get indirect benefit from the joy they get from their trip

security - Do airlines expose Delegated Authentication end points? probably not, its bad to share your credentials.

help/sales - Finally the interactive tour is an awesome feature if you are going to have a subscription only model.

On travel sites in general

ExpertFlyer definitely gets up there in my must have travel utilities: TripIt and Dopplr in my travel utilities bag ;

I am wondering when there will be massive consolidation of the travel utility market; with so many great focused portals like Kayak/FareChase/FareCast/ExpertFlyer, TripIt/Dopplr, SeatGuru and then destination information portals like Lonely Planet.

How does this relate to Windows Live Platform? There are lots of services which can be used such as Alerts (for sale notifications), Virtual Earth for geographic visualization, Agents for an alternative input source instead of just via the web, and Messenger Library for collaborative planning.

At TechEd 2008 in Orlando Dan Fernandez (the Non-Pro Developer product management guy who quit to become a Tv show host) interviewed me about the Windows Live Platform.

Aside from clearly having a [coffee] buzz on, I talked about:

• The APIs we are exposing
• tooling and what we are doing for all Microsoft centric developers
• how non Microsoft centric developers can use WL Platform services;
• I try to dodge a question on Live Mesh
• Silverlight Streaming;
• general social networking space.

Check it out here

TechEd: Angus Logan on Windows Live

Debra Chrapaty runs global foundation services (i.e. our data centers – but so much more than just data centers)

Om Malik interviewed Debra after Structure 08 conference – great video to watch;

Read Om's post here

Scott Lovegrove is the outside/community the god of writer plugins; the inside god is Charles Teague;

Catherine Heller interviewed him about writer plugins and its now posted on the c9 site – watch below.

Catherine Heller interviews Charles Teague on Windows Live Writer, a free and extensible desktop blogging applicatoin that can work with practically every blogging service available.

Charles discusses the Windows Live Writer SDK which includes a managed API for extending Live Writer. He demonstrates the Polaroid Picture Plug-in and also shows how to build a "Hello World" plug-in in Visual Studio. You can find more information including SDK updates on the Windows Live Writer blog.

Charles Teague: Building Windows Live Writer Plug-ins

A long time ago I posted about PIFEM – its called Pay it forward because it will save your life, and after you learn how to use it, you need to tell someone else how to use it.

A massive part of my job is email, talking w/ engineers on many different campuses or dealing with our WW marketing teams; or 100% email when I work from Australia :)

The biggest email month I’ve had this year is February with 3800 out going emails.

Over at techmeme there is an interesting thread started by the New York Times article by Luis Suarez, I freed myself from e-mail’s grip.

Luis cut down the number of emails he sent by 80% in 1 week – if I tried this people would think I died or I’d have one hell of a next week.

When I was in Australia my wingman quit, leaving me cover the entire country for all enterprise SharePoint deals (for tech presales) I worked with a few colleagues in a similar situation and we invented PIFEM – read the docs over here.

I still get stuck in email holes like I had 450 untriaged on Friday afternoon and now i’m down to 268 – still a bad scene but much better than it could have been.

Download it here (btw – you need OneNote or a trial version to use it and Outlook 2007)

Thursday I’m off to the OAuth summit and Friday I’ll be kicking it in the bay area.

Ping me if anyone wants to catch up alogan @ microsoft.com or sms +1 425 753 7987 or http://twitter.com/anguslogan (direct msg)

thx

There been some chatter around about us upgrading the Silverlight Streaming service to be Silverlight 2 Beta 2 compatible.

We said we would, and we did:

My 3rd most favorite feature in SLS (after the smoking low latency download speed, and the direct video upload) is the XAP uploads so you can just package your app as an XAP – no repacking etc.

Check it out http://silverlight.live.com

You should head over here to check out the pilot episode of theSocialWebTv which has “an revolving cast of characters” – primarily social web personalities talking smack about a range of stuff.

This week’s episode had John McCrea, David Recordon & Joseph Smarr talking about the face off between Dave Morin & Kevin Marcs

The production quality is fairly high which is a plus but the content is what rocks – if you want to know what’s new in terms of the social web and can’t be make it to all the conferences/panels: check it out.

Several years ago I worked with Leon Bambrick (aka SecretGeek) and he asked for an invite to Live Mesh;

The easiest way to hook him up was to invite him to a folder, my Windows Live Platform Public Presentation folder – which contains every presentation which is done publicly on WL Platform.

The funny thing is, every time I go into that folder I see him in there (indicated by the orange box), either he loves Live Mesh or loves the content :)

Martin H Normark has written a post on how to use Windows Live ID Web Authentication – the post is an excellent tutorial:

In this blog post I'm going to cover how to authenticate users of an ASP.NET application against Windows Live, using the SDK for Windows Live ID. I'm going use the built-in ASP.NET Membership mechanism and go from there.

The one thing he didn’t mention is if you are using Windows Live ID for authentication, the primary goal should be authenticate people for Microsoft online services (as I mentioned in this Bangkok Post article) - if you implement Live ID Web Auth it gives you single-sign-on to other Windows Live Services such as the Messenger Library or Contact Control.

Check it out here

Another tidbit from Martin’s post is Scott Hanselman has a post on how to integrate Open ID into ASP.NET he says “The dotnetopenid source includes source for sample sites. It actually includes three samples, two WebForms and one ASP.NET MVC.“

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ps. with posts like these, Alex van Herwijnen (a Microsoft MVP) is still the guru of all things Windows Live ID