Windows Live Platform – Making Better End User Experiences: David Dumler & Angus Logan
David Dumler and Angus Logan, both from the Windows Live Platform Group, gave a presentation on leveraging Windows Live technology to create community driven web applications.
David Dumler: Thanks for coming to our session. For the next hour or so we’ll talk to you about a new offering Microsoft is working on called Windows Live Platform. How may use hotmail, IM, Spaces? How many use Face Book? Reason I ask about those is Live Platform is really a new offering that Microsoft is working on to enable third party and developers take the best we are offering in Live to use in your solutions. So we’ll talk about what’s going on in the web, show demos, talk about where we’re going and other applications we’re working on to provide to third parties to use. How many using Silverlight? Few people? OK. Using Silverlight streaming? Impressions of that?
Attendee: Good.
David Dumler: OK. Great. Today we’ll go over the evolving web, our platform commitment, driving business value, demos terms of use, Windows Live Platform Scenarios, and next steps. We have very different terms of use from our competitors. Lot of it is free. Also demo is a high-level set of examples to use for free.
<The Evolving Web>
In terms of history, web has been around for a long time. It was always about information and content. To keep people informed. Mostly first party delivery of content. This was a very one-way pipe. Could not get much feedback, etc. The web then became much more transactional in two dimensions. First, with electronic commerce, like Amazon. Since then, we've moved forward to the web becoming very personal. A lot of people use search engines and put links in their favorites. Soon you get this large vat of information and lose touch. You already have a personalized experience in your IM list. So what are users really looking for?
<Individuals Want Personalized Experiences>
People want to personalize their relationships, interactions, memories, and locations. So how do you interact with folks? Email, web page, etc. then memories is about storing photos, etc. then ultimately, locations that you want to spend a lot of time in and access. So very popular applications for third parties. End users basically revolve around all of this.
<Businesses And The New Web>
Businesses have to stay in the game and build applications that keep people engaged in your experiences. So if you have a large enterprise and put out applications, you go through a similar set of experiences. So this means that as a business you need to provide sticky services – those that keep people coming back for more. Microsoft has a portal in place called MSMarket. It is hugely used and has not been updated in ten years. Today I simply go to the site to open a PO. So ability to create sticky investments is very important. Also Optimizing for the right end-user goals is important. Using someone else’s services is often better than you trying to do it on your own. You will need to optimize your investments in terms of what you do best. Also you want to continue to attract new people to use your tools. 1. It gives you more feedback. 2. You get more relevancy. 3. You capture new networks for segments you may have never thought about. So these are the type of services that MSMarket could use to build an even better solution.
<Enablement: Technology Evolution>
Massive first party sites, Google, Yahoo, etc, are finding out that the y can expose new services to have developer platforms. What they’re doing is becoming operating systems. For example, Facebook. Everyone is taking the best of what they have and giving them to third parties. Example is Zillow.com from Seattle. You can go in and provide information on your home. Zillow uses our Virtual Earth mapping technology and mash it up onto a map. They wouldn’t have been able to do this without our mapping technology. So the evolution is that serious web services are making it with these applications. So benefits for third parties is shorter time to market. can build mash ups in weeks rather than months to years. Also worldwide syndication. More monetization options as well. Ninety percent of the way the web is paid for right now is via ads. More and more applications trying to get people to come in to view ads. Also paying for services. Sales Force is a great example of this. Most important, when building for the web, you need to have different ways to monetize your solution. Also building more compelling experiences is shown with Zillow. About eighty percent of the world is not sitting in front of a computer with a browser. They are on a mobile phone. So nice to be able to see it on mobile phones.
<Windows Live Platform Services>
We have literally just got out of the gate with our platform offerings. We have basically taken a set of services that we have provided and put them in a number of containers. Silverlight Streaming provides high definition in video. Storage and sharing is important for sharing photos and people sharing their contact information. So ability to invite people into network. Also communicate and stay connected ac an allow people to see IM and presence right from your site. Finding and locating is important and Virtual Earth is used for that. Also Live ID provides Identity and Authentication.
Attendee: How do you take SkyDrive and turn it into an API set?
David Dumler: We have customers say, "Can you do this for us?" We will become more predictable with our offerings. So ability to share information, communication of different sites, etc. So Mix 08 we’ll offer a lot more. You’ll have the capability to embed it in your site. We are very committed to making authentication as easy as possible for making third parties to adopt.
Angus Logan: Previously, the platform was a derivative of the services we had. Now we’re starting to create new ones.
<Creating Value With Windows Live Services>
David Dumler: Virtual Earth, search, photo store, etc. we are going to allow you to utilize our Live Network. We have about 400 Million users now. we have no way for third parties to get access to these folks. We are going to literally crack open the network to build compelling experiences that users can get access to. we are going to provide better ways for users to get access. You will have the ability to start learning more about them. Then you can place better, higher value ads. So important when Facebook came out last week with an announcement about their Facebook ad space. Finally, you can do extended monetization opportunities. Us doing co-branding and co-promotion with you.
<Demos>
We have some demos to show you. A Membership Organization (Silverlight and Virtual Earth), Professional Services (messenger and RM), and Hospitality (community).
<Demo>
Angus Logan: Contoso Bicycle Club. A membership organization which has no database. Club of cyclists. All of this content here is driven from Windows Live Spaces. There are about 93 million spaces created. In Spaces, we have an API, because it has an RSS feed. You can fetch and filter that content, depending on what you want to do. This map is from Microsoft Virtual Earth. The video is done with someone riding around London with a GPS in one hand and camera in the other. Then striped it into a Silverlight video. So we are watching the video and watching the map get updated. Meanwhile, they are doing zero bytes from their server. It’s all from Microsoft. You can also click on the bird’s eye view and with zero additional coding, flips into this mode. So even thought this demo won’t apply to your org, think about what’s happing here. Website is static html, and all of the content is coming from our data center. And they’re not paying a dime for this. http://dev.live.com/quickapplications/
<Demo>
Adventure Works Resorts. A hospitality site. You see experiences before and after, not anything tangible. So through social networking. They don’t want to manage all these names and passwords. They want to use Windows Live ID. We get a lot of heat from web developers and designers about the look and feel of this screen. It’s experience-interrupted. We’re working on making this experience better. To show you what we can do with the ID capabilities, here is the Xbox site. We never want users to enter their credentials anywhere but login.live.com. but we are doing some things to make experience nicer.
Attendee: Anybody can create one of those ID’s. Is there any way to prequalify people to do that in your environment?
Angus Logan: Couple of things you can do there. Windows Live ID as a whole , has a way to carve off your own name space. I could carve off the Angus.com ID space and start creating ID’s for people programmatically. So we don’t tell you who the ID is. We hand off a pair wise identity for that user. So if you were an org that already had a set of user names and passwords, you could get user to sign in with live ID and do an association. So signing in now. with Live ID, you can sing in with info cards now. asks for some credentials. Can go to media tab to see media, photos, videos. Now I’m uploading video to this site. Adventureworks has a queue. They’ll push it up to Silverlight Streaming by Windows Live to post the video.
Attendee: So only the Live ID aspect, so far, you have no benefit from us using it. How are you monetizing it?
Angus Logan: We don’t want to be a user name and password store in the sky. Bad business for us to be in. we want to be a provider of online services. So as we open them up through a set of controls or set of client side API’s, you need to have a valid cookie on your machine.
Attendee: But Microsoft is not receiving any compensation. Is the benefit to you that it’s more likely that I would use something else in the Live Network?
David Dumler: The whole game plan in the web is audience now. so the reason we are giving away a lot of our services for free is two reason. First we have a lot of it. Second, we want to build out our audience, investing seriously in end-user privacy and control of data. So more affinity to our brand. Also need to have authentication to give away these rich series. We have given away services that require no auth. Virtual Earth. But in time, will require people to log in. The end game, a long ways away, we together, can share on the ad revenue that is generated from a public site. An authenticated user using services is worth more than a Search user. So it is a higher value person, and everybody is trying to reach for that person. We now have the biggest group of users in the world.
Angus Logan: This widget is a photo-picking widget. What it’s doing on this website is allowing me to upload a photo. When it loads, it should display my photos.
David Dumler: One thing is that economies of scale are changing quickly. so there will be the ability to build new markets. Five years ago, this would cost millions of dollars to build. As we move forward the job of an architect will change. Better to use the service than to build it.
Angus Logan: David talked about creating a new business. Here’s a photo I took in Japan. Kind of panoramic. Using Windows Live Photo Gallery allows me to stitch it together. It adds a whole lot of new stuff in terms of videos and photo manipulation. Can go to “publish,” and say publish to Windows Live Spaces. Provide album title and it publishes. The more content, the more eyeballs, and the more eyeballs, the more advertising. Now I’ll show you what we’ve done with the platform. Here is Contoso. A photo demo website. Imagine the next wave of photo companies. The next wave is they should start fixing your photos. On Pixoo, this is exactly what they’re doing. I have said, "Pixoo, where are you? I want to talk to you, because you should use our stuff.” Previously people handed out their user name and password to all these services willy-nilly. Bad thing to do. Se we created a delegation environment for all the data on Windows Live. It posts a token back to Contoso photo lab. Now you see a list of all my albums. What's different between this and Spaces? 30-50% of all the Spaces in Windows Live Spaces are private and secured. You have to explicitly go and share that. There is a massive amount of content that’s locked down. So not many eyeballs with a locked down space. In fixing the photo, you can see high res version. It can be fixed and pushed back up using that API. As a user of MySpace, Facebook, High Five and LinkedIn, when I had a friend in Facebook, I should have them added in MySpace or my buddy list, etc. We want to create a HUB in the sky to broker a whole lot of data.
David Dumler: We are literally in the first step of this journey. A lot of this capability that Angus just did was right within the third party site using our services. These could very easily be converted to a more corporate scenario.
Attendee: Challenge is the ad space, and I can’t turn those off.
Angus Logan: You can turn them off. If you have Live.edu, We don’t advertise to kids.
David Dumler: But about using that container, we’re getting to that. It’s a container to build all sorts of things in. you’ll start to have more decisions about what to do in it. We do not require you to use ads. If you want to use them to offset some costs, we’ll have that discussion. But if you want to pay a fixed fee, that’s fine with us.
Angus Logan: Here is a cool website, Quicksilver, for surfing fanatics. You can see videos, etc. a whole lot of the traffic here is coming out of the Windows Live data center. Here is what we’ve done with the Windows Live messenger network. It’s a massive network. I want to share this video with my buddy Scott. It’s asking me to sign into Messenger. Now I’ll try my boss’s boss. Hey, Scott and Brian are both here. So this uses a thing called Messenger Activity. You get a certain amount of space inside the messenger client, and you can specify applications to run in there. I can hit share and change the video that Brian’s watching. He can also change it at my end. Kind of an interesting scenario.
Attendee: When is this entire experience going to be in Silverlight so that I can use it on a Mac? Integrated IM works extremely well for Windows users.
Angus Logan: There is a Mac messenger client, but I’m not sure if it supports activities like this.
David Dumler: There are some investments being made there, I don’t have a time frame on that.
Angus Logan: So great question. I'm not sure if activities work on a Mac. The last thing I want to show you is something we’ve released. We are opening the Live network in a light way here. Here is the Contoso ISV professional services company. So I’ll send a message here that will start a conversation back into my messenger client. So we have an I Frame. What happens here, is that as I’m typing in the client, it’s actually updating the information here. If you’re starting a webpage in January, then don’ build it yourself. So here, I can pick a diary date, get directions to their location, then send one of my sales reps the appointment. In North America it does SMS. We Alerts, it’s a pretty cool framework you can hook it up to one or many RSS feeds. So users can sign up for these. We send out millions of alerts at 9 a.m.
<Demo>
CodePlex. It’s actually team foundation server running out in a cloud. U can log an issue here. I have two and a quarter developers dedicated to this. We’ll test it and package into a release. If you look at Microsoft Permissive License, you can see that you can do whatever you want with this code.
David Dumler: These are all for people to see what you can do with the platform.
<Innovative ROI And Business Model>
So how does this exactly work when it comes to cost? For other web services providers, they're going to charge you on a per API call. So very difficult to predict costs. One month a lot, next month a little. But a lot of websites today track unique users. So when a unique user comes in, you can have up to a million of those enough without being charged for most of our services.
Angus Logan: But maps and Silverlight streaming have a different way of working.
David Dumler: So based on a 25 cents per unique user per year charge. Then you can say I’d like to offset my costs with adds. A million users is a very high threshold.
Angus Logan: There are only 5000 websites in the world that reached the million users.
David Dumler: You can also call us and do a negation around not changing the API schema. Also, it covers comprehensive services. In time, it will cost a lot more. But now in beta, none of these charges apply.
Angus Logan: A tip from me to you is if you’re using video right now, go use Silverlight streaming.
<Next Steps>
Visit http://dev.live.com. Visit Silverlight.net as well.
Angus Logan: For people doing Microsoft development with visual studio 2008, have released tools that are super easy. Some of these things allow you to drag it on. There is a lot of cool stuff we’re doing on the demo end, tooling end, and scalability.
