- Text cloud of my friends’ Facebook status updates
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I’m desperate to blog something work-related, but have been so busy with things I can’t discuss publicly yet that I haven’t made the time. Well, I had a brainstorm for a quick, fun, social computing-related post, so here it is… a text cloud of my friends’ Facebook status updates. Don’t know that I’ve seen anyone do this yet.
My friends are apparently updating most often about going to and from work, and the snow. Nice to see other common words though: “happy”, “love", and “friends.” Lots of people shortening URLs with tinyurl.com.
How can you get some insight into what your FB friends are saying in their updates? There’s a public RSS feed for your friends’ status updates (info here). I had already subscribed to that feed in Outlook because of an internal tool that imports them through Exchange, then I exported the folder as a .CSV file. In Excel, I stripped off the names, removed all instance of “is”, “http://” and “.com”, then plugged the rest into TagCrowd.com.
- My new Microsoft gig: still as 'social' as ever
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So, in this economy, anyone getting a new job is great news. But more so when it’s me :)
One of the more interesting green fields for social software right now is enterprise social computing. I've been lucky enough to be offered a new role in Microsoft working on their own internal social computing project. Having worked on the first steps of bringing Microsoft's developer and IT communities together on MSDN and TechNet with their new forums and bookmarking apps, I'm ready to bring "the social" inside now.
Pic from Fred Cavazza, Flickr
As I'm sure many of you are aware from other Microsoft bloggers, the Microsoft culture is very e-mail-centric. While e-mail is great for a lot of reasons, it's extremely inefficient for tasks like finding an expert or a project owner amongst 100,000 people. My new team already has fantastic ideas that will create great enterprise business value for social computing. I'll be sharing more details as we get closer to locking down just what we can deliver and when. For now, this blog will focus more on the broader Enterprise 2.0 questions being discussed in the industry today.
My first question in this space: can we come up with a better word than "social?" It's got so much baggage that makes it unpalatable for the enterprise. It used to be "community" - what was wrong with that?
I wish all of my friends and MSDN and TechNet the best - they've built some incredible assets in their new social apps, and I'll be excited to see where it goes.
- MSDN and TechNet Search: now more refined...
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Several months ago, we did a deep-dive on MSDN and TechNet search with a dozen users. They were generally impressed, but had some feedback on a few items. We've addressed several of their concerns and more, so I wanted to outline what's better now...
- Speed. You feel the need. Actual response time (not just what's reported on the page from Live) has been improved by one third due to reduced page size, fewer requests, and improved cache-ability. And that's for your first query. Subsequent searches are *much* faster (about 2x) because practically everything but the results themselves are cached and served from a CDN.
- Refinements for each result. We've added a list of the refinements that match each result, which serves as a "more like this" function. Click a refinement on a result, and the query will be re-run with that refinement added.
- Page titles fixed. The page title for search results used to be "MSDN Search - searchterms". It's now "searchterms - MSDN Search", which is handy for when you have search results in multiple tabs and you're looking for a specific set, or for looking through your feeds in a reader if you've subscribed to several search results.
- Fixed EN-(not US) refinements. If you're in the UK, Australia, or South Africa, give us another try! Previously, the US library was not being searched in all English-language, non-EN-US searches, making non-US English searches essentially unusable for MSDN. This is fixed now...
- Added refinements for SQL 2005, SQL 2008, Exchange 2003, Exchange 2007 on TechNet, and for Sharepoint on MSDN and TechNet.
- Fixed a few more refinements, like Office, which was returning as a match for every result on TechNet because of some Library TOC changes.
Hope you like... Please let us know if there's more refinements that you'd like to see added or improved. See the search blog for more details.
Technorati Tags:
MSDN,
TechNet,
search
- Popfly gadget for your bookmark feed (or any RSS feed)
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Thanks to Chad Brooks, architecture evangelist, for creating a Popfly gadget that displays an RSS feed. He’s using it to expose bookmarks for the upcoming MSDN Developer Conferences. I tweaked it for my blog, as you can see in the right rail. It’s showing my own public MSDN bookmarks.
Here’s the link to my Popfly project. If you click on Tweak This, you’ll get options for changing the RSS feed to whatever you like… though I’d suggest hosting your MSDN or TechNet Bookmarks feed, of course :) You can find your bookmark feed by going to http://www.msdnbookmarks.com or http://www.technetbookmarks.com and going to "”My Profile”. The link to your feed is next to the tabs. Note that if you filter your own bookmarks, like I’ve done below on “Azure”, then your feed gets filtered too! Which is nice in cases where you only want to expose your “Sharepoint” bookmarks on your blog, for example.
- How to make your mark on the System Center site
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The number of feeds on MSDN and TechNet sites that are driven by social bookmarking (community members tagging relevant URLs) just keeps growing. The latest adopter is the System Center TechCenter, which has just put “links from the community” front and center. Dave Morehouse, System Center Product Manager, blogs here about why and has some great questions for the System Center community.
Jump in and contribute to the site:
- Head to TechNet bookmarking and add the bookmarklet to your browser from the “Tools” page.
- Find the best sites anywhere on the web related to System Center.
- Click the bookmarklet and use the “system center” tag (use quotes and a space) -- the popular ones will show up on the site!
You will also be contributing to a database of the best stuff on the web. Use another tag or two to get really specific, and we can create some very interesting feeds of links that you can subscribe to. Here’s the popular “system center” stuff saved this week, or the most popular links ever saved about MOM… the possibilities are endless.
BTW, there’s a bigger version of the feed on the Community tab, next to a feed of recent forum posts:
- MSDN at PDC 2008, or "why bookmarking is like fire insurance"
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After four days of speaking with a total of 269 developers at PDC in Los Angeles about MSDN Bookmarking, I have a pretty good idea what you think of it. Nearly all of the response at the booth was very positive, with a few in-depth conversations yielding some great suggestions and insights.
A few quotes from the convention floor regarding bookmarking:
- "I have something fun to do tonight!" OK, I think this guy needs to get out more, but I love the enthusiasm.
- "I can see I'm going to be filling up my feed reader." This from a dev that had started the demo very skeptical of the value. He was also impressed with our search improvements.
- Regarding the new forums: "This is the best forum software I've ever seen... I wasn't expecting to see anything like this [from MSDN]."
Other comments and suggestions:
- Allow users to wire up their blog to their profile, and their Twitter account too.
- What if the "all bookmarks" view put more popularity weighting on bookmarks from users whose bookmarks you'd saved in the past?
- A user group leader is going to suggest that their user group use a tag (e.g. "SoCalUG") that would generate a feed for the user group members to share links with each other.
- Build an IE/FF add-in for bookmarking. More than just a bookmarklet.
- Add instant messaging capabilities whenever showing other user badges, especially in forums.
- Do more to make content from existing communities like pinvoke.net easily accessible from MSDN.
On that last note, I also heard from several people that thought what we were doing was similar to what Jeff Atwood is doing with Stack Overflow. I actually was able to pull Jeff to the booth and have a chat with him about our two applications. We agreed after discussing each other's goals that we actually have two complimentary sites.
At the moment, Stack Overflow is more similar to Digg, and MSDN Bookmarks is closer to Delicious. Stack Overflow is designed to provide quick micro-blog-like conversations around questions that can rise and fall in popularity. MSDN Bookmarks is designed to create a massive filterable database of links with associated feeds. I'll be reaching out to Jeff after putting more thought into this to see if there's synergies to be found between us.
I did talk to a few people that just weren't very interested in sharing their bookmarks, either because of privacy concerns or because they did most of their reading in an offline reader where bookmarking isn't currently available.
However, most saw that while forums provide answers when they had to put out a fire, bookmarking provides fire insurance: feeds of the latest hidden treasures on topics you care about, found by peers and experts, which help you plan against and prevent those fires from cropping up in the first place.
Bookmarking is also the simplest way to contribute to the community. "Paying it forward" is an attitude frequently seen in healthy communities, and the 5 seconds it takes to use the bookmarklet or IE8 accelerator is a fast and easy way to give back and to drive our site experience.
Oh, one more thing: On the last day of the conference, Joey deVilla, a new evangelist from Canada came by and did an interview. I'll link to it when it's up, but here's the blog. For those of you that were there, you'll know him as the guy that plays a mean AC/DC on the accordion.
UPDATE: here’s the video of the interview with Joey.
- Under the Azure skies of PDC 2008
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I couldn't resist getting Azure into the title of my first post from PDC 2008. The day started with what I'm sure will come to be known as "the keynote that started it all." Ozzie's vision of what cloud-computing will do in the shape of Azure Services is pretty awesome in its scope.
...but my role in the vast landscape of greatness that is PDC is to man the MSDN booth, where we're talking about our own service for the Microsoft developer community: our social bookmarking, forums, and code gallery applications for the site.
Our lonely booth... before the pavilion opened and we were swamped with people wanting a foam cup-holder organizer... thingy.
Between the 3 of us that were at the booth today, we gave demos to 87 people, and nearly everyone was impressed with the story we're telling:
- Find "vetted" and popular resources on any topic and subscribe to feeds of the good stuff.
- Find experts in a topic area and subscribe to a feed of their findings so that you can be proactive instead of reactive.
- Show off your own expertise with your MSDN bookmarks and forum posts.
If you're here, please come see us. Better yet, show us your profile (here's mine) with some bookmarks in it to get the highly coveted MSDN Bookmarking Badge:
The coolest badge on the floor at PDC. Bar-none.
- MSDN Social + fine-tuned SQL 2008 = speed, sweet speed
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Today we released an update with a number of performance enhancements, some of which I referred to in my previous post. I decided that now was a good time to compare our performance with some other leading sites that we might be compared to. I opened Fiddler and ran the following scenarios on MSDN Social, Delicious, and Digg (using IE7):
- Load the default home page, not signed in
- Sign in
- Navigate away, then reload the home page signed in
- Filter the site by a tag
- Remove the filter
- Apply a different filter (Longest time window for MSDN Social, Recent for Delicious, and nothing for Digg, as there really wasn't an equivalent)
I compared 3 key stats that affect perf in different ways: the number of server requests for each user action, the number of bytes sent to the browser, and the total time for the page to load. Here's the results:
Our one weak spot is the time for page load when you change the filter to "Most Popular Ever", but I'm pretty ecstatic about these results. The response time is fantastic, and the low number of bytes sent down the wire means that perf should be great all over the world.
Hey, if I can use it over the shared wi-fi of the commuter bus I'm on while I type this, that's a good sign that you've got a well-optimized site.
Shout out to our engineering team! You guys ROCK.
- Behind the scenes of the Microsoft Social platform
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I’d like to bring a little focus on some of the cool things going on behind the scenes with the Social platform that underpins our search, social bookmarking, and forums apps. We’ve spent the last month optimizing performance for our overall platform, leveraging resources like Akamai’s worldwide content delivery network (CDN), and deploying Microsoft’s most current technologies, like Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008. As a result of our focus on performance, we are actually seeing a 67% reduction in page load time for China, 58% for Europe and over an 25% improvement for the US. These gains apply to both social bookmarking and forums.
Earlier this month, we moved all Social platform web servers to run on Hyper-V virtual machines (VMs). Aside from providing a great showcase for an important Microsoft technology running in a high-scale production environment, virtualization makes it much easier to manage and add web servers, reduces datacenter costs through server consolidation (smaller foot print), with less power consumption and less cooling required. Going forward, we’ll be able to rapidly build out with VMs too. We are now running 24 VMs (with room to grow) that host the primary applications. Each app is running on a dedicated cluster of VMs, so we can add and remove capacity as needed to each app.
In the past few weeks, we’ve identified a few more ways to further improve our performance, and you should be seeing the fruits of those efforts late next week with our next scheduled platform release. For the interesting details on investigating perf issues related to VMs, caching, and query plans, see this post from Vince Rohr, one of our dev leads.
- Podcast: Tony Soper gets it! Why IT Pros should bookmark
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Tony Soper of virtualization user assistance documentation fame (not to mention a top bookmarker), recorded a podcast with myself and Chris Kilbourn, lead site manager for TechNet. His companion blog post is a great summary of reasons that IT Pros should bookmark. For more detail, including how we plan to use your bookmarks on the TechNet site, listen to the podcast.
- Top 10 Bookmarkers on MSDN and TechNet for September 2008
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We’d like to give kudos to our top bookmarkers as of September 30, 2008. These are the people that are on the leading edge of driving new content onto MSDN and TechNet. I removed a few of the people from our own team, as they’re kind of expected to use it :) Rest assured that we’re eating our own dogfood.
Follow the links to these profiles – if they’re bookmarking in areas you’re interested in, these would be good feeds to subscribe to. Bolded names are not Microsoft employees.
On MSDN Social:
- Ricardo Jimenez – with over 4,000 bookmarks, Ricardo’s still the man to beat. Ricardo’s added many of the best Code Project resources.
- YazanR - .Net and CSF guru.
- Oschpele – Webmaster from South Tyrol.
- Lars Wilhelmsen – Consultant in Norway. Java and Python resources!
- Christof – Lots and lots of AJAX and BizTalk stuff.
- DamonWilderCarr – A massive import from Delicious… would be nice to get these categorized, Damon :)
- xin cheng – Hundreds of bookmarks, almost no tags. Xin, help us find the good stuff.
- Dave [WynApse] – MVP for Silverlight.
- Phillip Trelford – UK dev that I highlighted in a previous post. A little of everything in his bookmarks.
- Emily Schroeder – Sharepoint and Office resources.
And on TechNet Social:
- Michael Gannotti – At nearly 1,000 bookmarks (mostly on MOSS / Sharepoint), Michael is way out in front on the TechNet side.
- Vít Sedláček – A little of everything from one of our translation vendors in the Czech Republic.
- Brad Turner – ILM MVP, lots of good Active Directory and security resources.
- tonysoper – Virtualization and Windows Server. Tons of Hyper-V resources.
- Christophe Fiessinger – Senior Technical Product Manager for Project Server.
- KeithCombs – All things tech. One of our most popular bloggers and evangelists.
- RaajExchange – You guessed it: Exchange goodies.
- UMCO JSchmidtke – From Germany, lots of Windows resources.
- Alenat – Config Manager and virtualization.
- KFletcher – Exchange and enterprise admin.
Keep up the good work, guys! I’d love it if those of you that don’t know me already would drop me a line so that we can talk about how to make this app even better.
- More MSDN (and TechNet) Library tips
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John Martin posted today about a few things you should do in the library: bookmark, search with our site search and the new Code Search, try (loband), and contribute to the community content. I’ve got a few more hidden gems for you:
- Show/Hide TOC. Need some more horizontal space for reading? Just press “T” whenever you’re on a library page. Voila! No TOC.
- Code sample languages: I know, I know… they’ve been there forever. But now, if you have cookies enabled, we *remember* your preferences. Fancy that. You’ve been asking for this one for a while. Enjoy.
Technorati Tags:
MSDN,
TechNet,
library
- IE8 Accelerators for MSDN and TechNet Social and Search
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In the last of my series of cool new toys we're adding to extend the new MSDN, TechNet, and Expression social bookmarking sites, we've just posted a set of accelerators for IE8. Thanks to our own Tim Pearson and Husain Shambhoora for creating these! They'll be the first to say these were amazingly simple to create.
If you're not familiar with IE8 Accelerators, this page explains them very simply as quick shortcuts to services (like translation or search) that you use frequently.
We've just put a Social Bookmarking accelerator for each brand in the IE8 Add-ons Gallery:
We also added a TechNet Search accelerator to the existing MSDN Search one created by someone in the community (thanks!). Note that if you add TechNet Search or MSDN Search as a provider in IE8, it's automatically added as an accelerator as well.
To get any of these accelerators, install IE8 and go to the page for the accelerator you'd like to use, click on "install accelerator" and click "Add Provider". That's it! Then, whenever you're on a page you want to bookmark, just right-click on the page and click the accelerator on the menu:
Hint: these accelerators work with the text-selection trick we told you about before... select some text before right-clicking, and that text will be copied into the "description" for your bookmark. Nice time-saver.
One other tip: If you want to move one of the accelerators so that it’s at the top level of the popup menu, click on More Accelerators and then select Manage Accelerators. You can edit the category for any accelerator to make it appear at the top-level menu.
In case you missed them, here’s a list of the whole series of posts on extensions for social bookmarking:
You're now well-equipped to bookmark like crazy! Go, go, go!
- Shiny object #3: Live Writer Plug-in for MSDN and TechNet Social
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Rahul Soni, a Microsoft field engineer in Bangalore, wrote a Live Writer plug in for including “Add to…” links to a number of social services like Digg, Delicious, Technorati, and Facebook. He’s now updated the plug in to work with Microsoft’s new social bookmarking apps for MSDN, TechNet, and Expression. So even if you’re not using FeedBurner (see my FeedFlare post), you can add links to each post that make it easy for your readers to share and spread the word.
There are two catches with this plug-in:
You do have to publish twice: once to get the URL to enter into the dialog box (see above) and a second time to publish with the bookmarking links.
You need to run Live Writer as Administrator.
We’re actually working on something like this within our dev team as well. It’s focused on inserting the bookmarking widgets for our sites, but will support all locales of our app.
Thanks, Rahul! We’re excited to have our services integrated with all sorts of tools in as many different ways as we can.
(BTW, I also used Rahul’s “Insert Bullets” plug in for those bullets…)
Here’s the links inserted by the plug in:
- Shiny objects for MSDN and TechNet Social: #2 Custom feed queries
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Continuing our series of cool new stuff you can do with our new social platform, Taylor Parsons has a post fully outlining all the conditions and parameters that you can use to slice and dice social platform queries.
Here's some examples using Taylor's instructions, broken down so that you can see how to construct them:
Today's forum threads tagged "WPF"
http://services.social.microsoft.com/feeds/feed/query/tag/wpf/eq/
ns/ForumThreads/eq/and/nsrecursion/true/eq/and/timespan/P1D/eq/and
OK, let's break this down:
- http://services.social.microsoft.com/feeds/feed/query/ - this is the root of all feed queries.
- tag/wpf/eq/ - This requests anything with a tag equal (eq) to "wpf"
- ns/ForumThreads/eq/ - This specifies that results should be limited to the "forumthreads" namespace (only items of type "forum thread" will be returned).
- and/ - Now that we have more than one qualifier, we need to start adding our operators (and / or).
- nsrecursion/true/eq/ - Use this whenever you request forum threads because the forum namespace is hierarchical. If you leave this out, you won't get any results because it will only pull from the root namespace, which is empty.
- and/ - Remember an operator after each condition.
- timespan/P1D/eq/ - This specifies a time span of 1 day. This is why you won't see many results in this feed. But it might be a great mini-feed to have on your blog if you're a WPF guru...
- and - the last operator.
Note that our system stacks all the operators (and's) at the end. Either way works, but I personally think it's less confusing this way.
50 most popular German MSDN bookmarks in the past month
http://services.social.microsoft.com/feeds/feed/query/locale/de-de/eq/ns/SocialBookmarking/eq/and/timespan/P30D/eq/
and/brand/msdn/eq/and/?sort=popularity&count=50
The breakdown:
- http://services.social.microsoft.com/feeds/feed/query/ - the root.
- locale/de-de/eq/ - Limits the results to those items saved from the German versions of the applications.
- ns/SocialBookmarking/eq/and/timespan/P30D/eq/and/ - Note we're now refining to the SocialBookmarking namespace instead of forums. Also, the timespan is greater.
- brand/msdn/eq/and - Here's how you limit to one of our four brands (msdn, technet, expression, or microsoft).
- ?sort=popularity - This is a parameter noting the sort order. Default = recency.
- &count=50 - Limits the results to the top 50.
The most popular items ever saved to TechNet on "Virtualization, Hyper-V and deployment"
http://services.social.microsoft.com/feeds/feed/?query=brand/Technet/eq/nsrecursion/True/eq/and/ns/SocialBookmarking/eq/
and/ns/ForumThreads/eq/and/tag/virtualization/eq/and/tag/hyper-v/eq/and/tag/deployment/eq/and&sort=Popularity
The breakdown:
- http://services.social.microsoft.com/feeds/feed/query/ - the root.
- brand/technet/eq/ - scoped to TechNet.
- nsrecursion/True/eq/and/ns/SocialBookmarking/eq/
and/ns/ForumThreads/eq/and/ - This gets us results from both forums and from social bookmarking.
- tag/virtualization/eq/and/tag/hyper-v/eq/and/tag/deployment/eq/and - here's our three tags.
- ?sort=popularity - sorted by popularity.
- Because we don't specify a time frame, we get the "top" results from the entire database, regardless of date.
Note that the order of the conditions and parameters doesn't matter.
Let us know if you come up with some really useful queries or write some applications based on this. Would love your feedback.
