Husain Shambhoora

I installed the beta of IE 8 (here) a few weeks back. It's been working great so far!!!

Out of all the improvements/features, I really liked the "Accelerators" (previously called Activities). Check out the Gallery for some accelerators (http://ieaddons.com/en/accelerators).

Before accelerators, I would frequently copy and paste text between websites

• Copy an address and paste it into Live Maps and then find directions to that place from my home/office.
• Copy a line of text and translate it.
• Copy a word and lookup it's meaning on an online dictionary (or search through a search engine or at wikipedia).

With accelerators, most of the above are available at a single click (via the accelerator menu). Read this link for a detailed overview of the feature. Also, check this link on MSDN, to see how simple it is to create an accelerator. It's simply an XML file!

Coming soon! A bookmarking accelerator!!!

I attended two workshops on the first day (09/16) of the Web 2.0 Expo.

• 9 AM - 12 PM: Building Successful Next Generation Web 2.0 Applications - Dion Hinchcliffe
• 1:30 PM - 4:30 PM: Designing for Community - Joshua Porter

Will publish detailed blog posts about the workshops in a few days.

My schedule for tomorrow (09/17):

• Designing for Gestural Interfaces
• Designing for Sign-up
• Web Analytics 2.0

I would love to attend two more sessions, but have conflicts.

• A brief history on Platform Wars 
• Electricity as the New Internet

Are you attending these? Let me know. Would love to get some notes!

I am in NYC this week, attending the Web 2.0 Expo. Read through the overviews of the sessions and looking forward to attend several of them!! Just one thing left to figure out. "How to be in two sessions at the same time?" :-)

I will be blogging about the sessions and will also try to publish some tweets during/after the sessions.

If you are going to be at the expo, ping me and let's sync up.

It's been quite a while since I have blogged. Well, I am back!

Since launching the preview of social bookmarks in May, a lot has happened. Recently, we launched v1.0 of the bookmarking experience. In this v1.0 experience, we have closely integrated our bookmarking and profile experiences and have also strengthened our syndication feed features. Now, you can not only read and explore bookmarks at our websites, but can also subscribe to an RSS feed of bookmarks. Taylor Parsons has written up a really great blog post focused on the feeds.

Apart from the UX changes and syndication, we have also added a few tools related to bookmarking (like an import bookmark feature and a bookmarking widget) and a "Browse Users" feature that facilitates you to explore and reach a person's bookmark. Wait, there is more! We have also made the application available in a total of 12 languages (Check out the list of languages here.)

Chris has produced two introductory videos covering some of the new features. You can check those out here.

I'll be blogging more about the v1.0 apps capabilities and also about what's coming up in our next release! So long!!

We launched the preview of the Social Bookmarks application yesterday (late in the day on Tuesday, May 27, 2008). I had published the URLs to the app in an earlier blog post (my first one on the Microsoft blog platform)!!

 Over the next few blog posts, I will be providing links to videos, tips on how to make the most of the application, and more details on our plans for future releases. Stay tuned...

Hi. Welcome to my new blog.

I am Husain Shambhoora, Program Manager at Microsoft. I am working on a new social bookmarking web site being launched by Microsoft targeted towards the users of MSDN, TechNet, Expression and other Microsoft products.

We are launching a preview of Social Bookmarks in the coming week. The preview would be available at:

• http://microsoftbookmarks.com
• http://msdnbookmarks.com
• http://technetbookmarks.com
• http://expressionbookmarks.com

Going forward, I would be using this blog to share more details on the direction of Social Bookmarks and to hear from you about the app. You can also provide feedback or have discussions with other users of the app at the Social Bookmarking forum here. Looking forward to hearing from you.

UPDATE: Made changes to the links
FINAL UPDATE (I promise!!!) :-)... Reverted back the links as the new short URLs are now active.