One of the pieces of feedback we got from the launch of the Web Bar was “give me some pre-defined themes so I can make the end-user experience smooth”.
Steve Gordon the development lead on the Web Toolkit heard you and has posted a few basic themes and explained how you can build them yourself.
Since the Web Bar and all of the UI Controls are constructed using HTML and CSS, web sites have complete control over how the controls appear to the user. With this flexibility, there is a wide range of customizations that a web site can do, ranging from simply changing the font color, to providing a completely custom experience akin to some of the creations you might find on the CSS Zen Garden.
Check out his post.
We had a whopping 8 sessions about identity/safety, messaging and the Live Framework at MIX - below are links to all of the sessions about Live Services which you can view online.
Messaging / Presence : On Wednesday we announced the Windows Live Messenger Web Toolkit which is a set of controls and libraries that enable you to connect Windows Live Messenger users and their friends with users of your Web site.
Identity & Safety : Microsoft are in a unique position to be running one of the largest services in the world, with over 500 million people signing in every month.
Live Framework – we unveiled the Live Framework at PDC and have been working away taking feedback, hardening and evolving it.
Learn how Microsoft provides a range of identity solutions for helping developers more easily build seamless user experiences that include Federation, Authentication, UX Customization, Open Standards, Open ID and more.
Come hear how Microsoft protects content and identities as servers and users become more distributed worldwide.
See how to add IM to a site with the Windows Live Messenger Library and UI Controls, and how to build new relationships around content with Messenger social capabilities. Also hear how top sites and marketers are using the social connections of Windows Live users to grow and …
Come learn how to make your site more engaging with the Windows Live Messenger Web Toolkit.
Learn how to add instant stickiness and drive new users to a Web site while uncovering the hidden social network within. Hear how Effective UI quickly and easily added these capabilities to its customers' existing Microsoft Silverlight projects using the Windows Live Messenger …
Learn about the Live Framework including new and future services (such as Mesh Services), protocols, APIs, and tools which enable your Web, service, or client applications to access, store, and synchronize user data with Live Services, obtain audience analytics data, and more.
Come learn how to extend your existing Web applications and get them to live and breathe within Live Mesh. See how Mesh-enabled Web applications can be accessed from anywhere through a Web browser as well as run locally (and offline) on a user's desktop. Also see how Web …
Learn how to use Live Services to light up rich client applications or to extend Web applications to the desktop. See how to easily access Live Framework to produce and consume data that automatically syncs with the cloud and the devices in a user's digital life.
Get it here!
From James’ post:
At PDC back in October we launched the Live Framework into CTP and with that we provided a cool tool called the Live Framework Resource Model Browser which you could use to explore the data that you stored in the Mesh. The tool was good but limited. It was difficult to navigate the data, find what you were looking for and also make changes to the data itself. Furthermore, it was a separate tool so I had to jump out of Visual Studio to navigate the data in Mesh. We worked with Wygwam to build a cool tool for Visual Studio 2008 that allows you to tap into the Mesh and browse the data in your Live Framework apps. Here’s what you can do with the Live Framework Explorer: Integrates seamlessly with Visual Studio 2008 Read, Edit, Delete easily stored in the Mesh Upload/Download files into the Mesh Search for strings in the Mesh and more… The Live Framework Explorer is a CodePlex project which you can download and also check out the source code for. If you’ve got feedback or ideas for the Live Framework Explorer then let us know in the Codeplex! Get it here: http://lfe.codeplex.com/ Watch Greg from Wygwam demo the Live Framework Explorer in his rock star Mix Session online (here)
At PDC back in October we launched the Live Framework into CTP and with that we provided a cool tool called the Live Framework Resource Model Browser which you could use to explore the data that you stored in the Mesh. The tool was good but limited. It was difficult to navigate the data, find what you were looking for and also make changes to the data itself. Furthermore, it was a separate tool so I had to jump out of Visual Studio to navigate the data in Mesh.
We worked with Wygwam to build a cool tool for Visual Studio 2008 that allows you to tap into the Mesh and browse the data in your Live Framework apps. Here’s what you can do with the Live Framework Explorer:
The Live Framework Explorer is a CodePlex project which you can download and also check out the source code for. If you’ve got feedback or ideas for the Live Framework Explorer then let us know in the Codeplex!
Get it here: http://lfe.codeplex.com/
Watch Greg from Wygwam demo the Live Framework Explorer in his rock star Mix Session online (here)
For users of the Web, being able to connect to friends and build social networks is becoming more important every day. Today, we are releasing the Windows Live Messenger Web Toolkit--a set of controls and libraries that enable you to connect Windows Live Messenger users and their friends with users of your Web site.
Watch my attempt at a Common Craft video
Windows Live Messenger is the most used instant messaging services world wide, with more than 320 million monthly active accounts in over 50 countries and in 36 languages.
The Windows Live Messenger Web Toolkit provides Web sites with three core benefits:
The Windows Live Messenger Web toolkit provides these key benefits to your users:
Web developers can choose the level of customization by using the pre-built and skinnable Web Bar control, using the 16 modular UI Controls, or building the entire experience from the ground up using the Windows Live Messenger Library.
We have many cool samples in multiple languages (C#, VB.NET, PHP, Ruby, Java, Python and Perl) that show you how simple it is to integrate the Windows Live Messenger Web Toolkit. So, no matter what your style, you’ve got the help you need to kick start your development and get these new capabilities on your Web site in a snap.
The easiest way to begin is to use this tool, which provides a step-by-step guide and sample code to get you started.
Watch on Viddler
We’ve heard from developers that they “want to control the entire experience, just give us APIs and we’ll build it”. To provide the best experience for everyone using Windows Live Messenger there is a certain baseline of functionality that needs to exist. Building this functionality was a lot of effort and while some great implementations were built, most developers felt the effort required was a lot so they asked for tools to make it easier for them to develop faster.
We decided to deliver a set of 16 JavaScript/HTML controls that can be skinned using CSS and extended using the Windows Live Messenger Library. These controls make it very fast for Web developers to let their users connect and share with their friends no matter where they are.
From v1 to v2.5 we also got some great feature requests and we have delivered a bunch of these, included:
You can go to dev.live.com/messenger today to add this to your web site.
The team announced the update to the Live Framework CTP
This update includes:
More details
When trying to get developers to move from screen scraping to legitimate APIs there must be additional value to offset the development effort – otherwise it’s just goodwill. A couple of weeks ago I was on a call with a customer talking about the new Live Framework Contact API technical preview and some of the inline expansion capabilities to pull through the profile information of your friends. That’s when it hit me; the industry has been aiming too low! Address book (business card) portability is great but it’s just the beginning. Below I enumerate different ways of perpetuating the success web sites have had with address book portability by extending the metaphor to be not just who I know but what they let me know about them.
This is just the beginning, in the future address book portability will enable lots of killer scenarios such as being able to tag a picture on MySpace of a coworker I know on LinkedIn without those two circles mixing, but today it’s generally thought of as a tool for user acquisition.
The goal of most socially oriented website is to grow both their user base and deepen the relationships between users as fast as possible. This is usually achieved by giving end users the ability to invite their existing friends from other services which have mature relationship stores, and see which of their friends are already on the service. There are many address book APIs which provide the basics of what is on someone’s business card (name, contact details, physical and digital address).
Knowing the people I am connected with and being able to contact them has resulted in lots of user acquisition and engagement, but it is so low tech. The basic value address book portability provides is a prequalified list of people who can be easily referred to a product or service. I think this shotgun approach of “I know these people” is going to evolve to be more “I know people like this”.
The cornerstone of this will be a change in the way people think about delegating permission to their data. No one has any question that the user owns their data, but what about the data people grant them permission to access? This is a complex space and a world of great discussions can happen about privacy settings. In the examples below, I’m talking about sharing this extended data with a service, not other people. If you trust the service and want to let them know everything you know about your friends, it’s all good – this is a massively complex space – what do you think?
A few of the scenarios from simplest to most advanced spring to mind, the shotgun, pistol and laser:-
I like the shotgun approach of inviting my entire address book to a website (and so do the site owners, cheap TAC). By using additional profile fields such as gender, home town, and age we can move beyond “Angus invited you to foo” and added contextual information to the invites such as “here are pictures from your home town”, or “here are the people Angus knows from your home town”. If I then click to join the site, my profile information (first name, last name, and interests) can be pre-completed for me to confirm overall streamlining the process, making user acquisition a breeze.
An example of the data you need is below:
Source
Field
Data
Profile
Email address
Vatsal @ foobar.com
Home town
Seattle
Age
27
Sports
Skiing
User sending invite
Name
Angus
Latest activity
Friends on the site
Whilst the shotgun approach is effective, as we continue to build out our social connections we need to be more disciplined in terms of who we invite to certain sites. I’ve friended people from all around the world, I know some from school, some from work, and different people like different things. It makes no sense for me to interact with someone I know from Australia on Seattle Seahawks website. Whereas, if I was given the ability to share a piece of content with relevant people such as males in Seattle with an interest in football, I’m more likely to invite them, and they are more likely to visit the site (higher conversion). Presenting a filtered list of friends is the key, without a cut down list, the end user will be overwhelmed by the number of contact and some people will be forgotten, or irrelevant invites will be sent.
At some point the balance is going to shift from quantity to quality of invitees. To bring the right people at the right time you need to query beyond just basic profile information, into all of the associated data they let you access.
One example is: I’m browsing a music web site and I see that my favorite band has a concert in Seattle this Friday night. I want to see if one of my friends can go with me (no one likes to go to a concert alone).
The way my brain works to find someone to go with is:
For me to contact all of the people I’m connected with and run those conditions its hard work, and I always end up missing people out.
Imagine if I could do this automatically, all of my friends are on one or more social networks, they all have well populated profiles, and most of them use online calendars.
Running a query across my networks with the following criteria should be straight forward:
If I grant permission for a website to perform these deep contextual queries of the people I am connected with, the game of user acquisition and engagement becomes less brute (with low conversion), and more highly targeted invites (with higher conversion).
Dave Winer said “Advertising will get more and more targeted until it disappears, because perfectly targeted advertising is just information” that is where I see cross network invites heading, less of an annoyance and more of an optimization.
If you are going to SXSW or MIX09 I’d love to chat about it more.
I’m working on some slides for a MIX09 presentation.
builds to
has anyone else tried to make funny shapes out of their tech diagrams (or have I had too much coffee?)