James Senior just told me about his pet project, the Web Application Toolkit for Making your Website Social.
This Web Application Toolkit shows how, using a few lines of code with the Windows Live Messenger Web Toolkit, it is possible to add social capabilities to a Web site. The Windows Live Messenger Web Toolkit is a JavaScript based set of controls and libraries that allow a developer to quickly and easily add instant messaging to a Web site and harness the power of the Windows Live Messenger network that is used by 330 million users around the world. The Web Application Toolkit will also show how to bring information about users from Windows Live such as their presence, profile information and profile picture.
Check it out
We’ve been working hard on the Windows Live Messenger Web Toolkit (MWT) which allows you to connect your web site to 330M+ people who use Windows Live Messenger every month! Today we’d like to announce the availability of the Messenger Web Toolkit v3.5 which will enhance the user experience, make it easier to enable sharing via Messenger scenarios on your site (new sharing control), and enable new scenarios (e.g. people who don’t use Messenger will be able to see display pics / names). Specifically, the improvements we have made are:
How did we figure out what are the most important things to get in this release? We listened to and incorporated the great feedback from our partners (some award winning), and were able to come up with new and exciting scenarios.
To bring more people to your site and get them to spend more time there, the user experience needs to be superb. We have made the Messenger Web Toolkit user experience better in many ways:
We’ve done two things for developers 1) created a new control for sharing which reduces the amount of code required and 2) changed the underlying JavaScript libraries to the Microsoft Ajax libraries.
Sharing control: aside from in-page chat, the next most common scenario we see is sharing via instant messaging. Sharing content is important and it is often a major driver of user acquisition (or user retention). To understand the differences between sharing via a public feed, newsfeed and instant messaging read my post on user acquisition.
The gist is: a user’s friends are more likely to click through to see the content/service being shared with them if it is done via instant messaging and in a conversational way.
To make sharing via Windows Live Messenger much easier we have created a new control, msgr:share. The sharing control reduces the amount of code required to the following:
// include the JavaScript libraries <msgr:app … insert the code for app tag here… /> <msgr:bar></msgr:bar> <msgr:share message="I am sharing the Messenger Web Toolkit http://dev.live.com/messenger with you" picker-label="Select Contacts"> </msgr:share>
The control contains a user experience which will sign the user in (via the consent flow), show the contact selector control, and send an IM with the predefined content.
Aside from visible features such as the sharing control, we have also done some infrastructure work. The Windows Live Messenger Web Toolkit is now built with the Microsoft AJAX Library. With this integration, a Messenger Web Toolkit application works with the standard browser runtime library for Microsoft web development tools. Prior to version 3.5, the Web Toolkit worked with the Script# runtime library named 'sscorlib'. See Microsoft Ajax to determine whether you need to make any changes with your application.
People using Windows Live Messenger generally chat with people they have ‘friended’ in Messenger. However, sometimes people who use Messenger on a web site may want to chat with other people they know from that web site (who are not their friends on Messenger). We call this feature Application Contacts. The cool thing about this is when I sign into a web site (and grant permission to sign into Windows Live Messenger) which uses Application Contacts, other site visitors can chat with me while I’m on the site, or anytime when I have Windows Live Messenger client open (all the time, like hundreds of millions of other people).
We have made a lot of enhancements to Application Contacts (more information), but the major change is that you don’t need to be signed into the Messenger Web Toolkit for all scenarios. People who are not Windows Live Messenger users (or are not signed into Messenger on the web site) can still see the profile picture and display name of user’s the web site chooses to display. This is particularly interesting for commenting and user profile scenarios. To use this functionality a new Messenger Application Key must be used. This is analogous to a service account. Our documentation on Application Contacts outlines how to get a key.
Previously, if you wanted to show the display pictures/names to a user who wasn’t signed in to Messenger the pics/display name weren’t available. Using the updated Application Contacts functionality you can now show display names and pictures to people who aren’t Windows Live Messenger users (or people who haven’t signed in yet). See the before & after:
Try out the new bits dev.live.com/messenger and if you have ideas or questions, hit us in our forum.
/Angus Logan, Technical Product Manager
I just saw a bunch of noise about FourSquare’s application on Android. Foursquare is a great location based service which lets you “checkin” to restaurants and other venues, and have that automatically shared with your friends.
My buddy Anand Iyer who just went to work for Windows Mobile gave some new bits he has been working on: a FourSquare client on Windows Mobile. The FourSquare mobile web interface is nice, but it just isn’t rich enough – having the data cached, easy to access is important.
The bits are still somewhat secret (not share yet) but what I think people are missing in this whole iphone app and android app building spree is: YOU WANT RICH APPLICATIONS ON YOUR MOBILE. Web based mobile just doesn’t cut it.
Next time you are building a mobile interface, ask your self: should I go for the masses and create something generic which may only drive 5 minutes of use per user. Or should I go for something specialized which will drive 50 minutes use for 25% of your user base.
I’m personally not bought into the overall value of URL shorteners. I think the COGS are high, and you only monetize in nefarious ways:
But… Bit.ly adds something different. they add nice stats and tracking which I find extremely useful (especially when I try to drive people to content via blogs, tweets and emails).
One of the neat things I found was a Bit.ly plugin for Windows Live Writer, check it out here
You simply highlight the URL and it converts it into a bit.ly.
nice and easy to use.
Here are some sessions for y’all to vote up at SXSW. It is easy! Just click the Thumbs Up and if you don’t have an account it will only take you a few seconds to create.
Web Mail - Is There Room Left to Innovate? (Web Mail) Web mail has been around the block, and everybody’s got it. Its role may be narrowing to the place you manage online bills, shopping, travel, and photos with mom, with conversations migrating to social networks and IM, but companies are still pounding the digital pavement for new users. If web mail isn't going anywhere, where does it go from here? Vote Now
The Stream Has Become A Tidal Wave (Social Media) The stream is overflowing. How do you make sure the stream is still useful when there is SO MUCH getting pushed into it? Vote Now
Social Network Interop (Open Standards) Portable contacts, life streaming and various ‘Connect’ offerings have begun to break down the silos and walled gardens that are social networks. Come hear a panel of experts discuss some of the technologies, design issues and future direction of this trend. Vote Now
Securing Web Behemoths – Web Applications That Are Large (Security) As the trend of ‘webifying’ continues, the smallness and simplicity of web applications will become a thing of the past. This raises the challenge of securing these web behemoths. An industry panel of Security engineering managers will discuss the approaches they use to secure their web behemoths. The attendees will gain awareness into the panelists’ security engineering programs & gain access to tools that they could apply at their companies. Vote Now
ActivityStrea.ms: Is It Getting Streamy In Here? (Open Stack) From Facebook's newsfeed to Twitter's relentless real-time updates, the metaphor of the "stream" has taken social networking beyond blog posts and on to rich social activities. Learn about ActivityStrea.ms — the open format adopted by Facebook, MySpace, and Windows Live — and how it's fundamentally changing the social web. Vote Now
OpenID: Identity Is the Platform (Open Stack) Ignore the hype over social networking platforms and web OS's! The platform of the social web is identity. Facebook and Twitter Connect are just the beginning of the era of user-centric identity. I'll go beyond the basics of OpenID and learn how to effectively incorporate internet identity into your apps. Vote Now
Standards - Handling "Zero Day" Exploits (Security) The OAuth exploit last year was a catalyst for developing ways to deal with zero day security issues in open standards. No one vendor is responsible for managing the process, how do you determine responsible disclosure in an open forum? You can't hide from open standards, and you can't stick your head in the sand about security. You'll learn from the pain of others how using open standards just got safer... or did it? Vote Now
User Acquisition Smackdown: Email Raiding, Stream Polluting or Instant Messaging? (Social Media) Getting people to your website is critical (D’uh!). New people. Old people. A constant flow of sharing and content discovery is required to succeed.Some people are sneaky using address books, others publish to the stream - which one is best? Vote Now
Running a Business on Open Standards (Open Standards) This panel will discuss the different standards for social applications and how a developer can utilize those to build and grow a business. It will focus on monetizing the Open Stack, and how developers can build a sustainable business model using industry standards. Vote Now
Protecting Your Service from Internet Terrorism (Security) Historically, the enemy launched their attacks from far away from populated areas – you could detect them and nuke the entire area. They are getting smarter, moving into apartment buildings and no one likes nuking apartment buildings. In this panel, leaders in internet service abuse prevention will invite you into the “situation room”. Vote Now