venkatna's (Venkat Narayanan's) WebLog : MSN

Building a gadget for Live.com

venkatna — Thu, 12 Jan 2006 00:35:00 GMT

I have been meaning to write about building gadgets for Live.com. The instructions are out there, but they are scattered across multiple sites. We are also working on getting all of the documentation in one place. However, Mike Ormond did it before any of us on the team could. He has a couple of posts about building gadgets. Good reading.

- Venkat

New release for live.com

venkatna — Fri, 16 Dec 2005 07:52:00 GMT

We had a small release today (small on the UI changes, pretty significant in new support). We now support Opera (Opera 9 preview release only). We also did some fixes that should make it easier for developers to write gadgets. You can find more details in our team blog.

http://spaces.msn.com/members/livecom/Blog/cns!1ptlXnVCnj6D3FxjoH7NnLlg!251.entry

http://spaces.msn.com/members/livecom/Blog/cns!1ptlXnVCnj6D3FxjoH7NnLlg!254.entry

http://spaces.msn.com/members/livecom/Blog/cns!1ptlXnVCnj6D3FxjoH7NnLlg!252.entry

http://spaces.msn.com/members/livecom/Blog/cns!1ptlXnVCnj6D3FxjoH7NnLlg!256.entry

- Venkat

Google has gadgets now

venkatna — Thu, 15 Dec 2005 00:53:00 GMT

Well, they are calling it modules. I have been spending some time looking at their documentation and the features they have. They do some things better and we do some things better. Is the personal homepage space heating up or what? :) I am excited to be working on www.live.com. We have some stuff coming out that should take us up a notch. Should be a lot of fun competing with Google, Yahoo and the rest of the industry.

- Venkat

MSN Homepage and Validation

venkatna — Thu, 15 Dec 2005 00:47:00 GMT

I just got an email from Dan about the MSN Homepage passing validation. I worked on this page for about 4 years before moving on to www.live.com. We released a version sometime this April that got very close to passing validation. We had some problems with ads not being valid HTML. It looks like all those problems are now fixed and we are actually valid. Dan's subject for the email said it best - A Christmas miracle :).

http://validator.w3.org/check?verbose=1&uri=http%3A//www.msn.com/

- Venkat

Live.com Gadgets information

venkatna — Sat, 26 Nov 2005 23:46:00 GMT

We had a release a couple days ago to sandbox gadgets and some other small bug fixes. An unintended side effect is the ability to host a third party gadget on other web sites. Donavon, gadget developer has a post explaining how he got it to work. This is interesting and is worth exploring for us. Maybe we can figure out some details and make it a better experience, and of course, brand it [;)].

- Venkat

Changes that may break gadgets on live.com

venkatna — Thu, 24 Nov 2005 05:39:00 GMT

We released a number of changes today that could potentially break some gadgets on live.com. We had to make these changes to address concerns on running third party JavaScript code on the same domain as live.com. Steve has more information in microsoftgadgets. I will not bore you with the same details here. If you write gadgets you will want to look through the changes.

- Venkat

RSS Extensions, SSE and Microsoft

venkatna — Tue, 22 Nov 2005 06:04:00 GMT

Ray Ozzie wrote about the SSE extensions to RSS that Microsoft is advocating. I am excited to see this from us. I wonder what we can do with this in live.com. I bet someone comes up with a gadget that uses this specification. I also like it that we have released it under creative commons. Unfortunately though, i cannot really make my mind completely. I don't see any examples or applications. I am going to wait and see how this is developed further and wait for some applications. Alex Barnett is following the conversation around this and it is on top at Memeorandum as well.

- Venkat

Xbox 360

venkatna — Tue, 22 Nov 2005 05:40:00 GMT

I stood in line for the last Xbox launch, but I am not doing that this time. I will still get one before christmas, assuming I can find one. I am excited about the 360. I think it is going to be huge, not just for console gaming but also for Media Center PCs. I have played around with a 360 and the thing that stuck me was its size. The thing is small. This has the Wife Approval Factor.

My office has a very nice landscape with a stream flowing through it. To celebrate the Xbox 360 release, the entire stream is dyed a fluroscent green. It looks awesome. Here are some pictures.

It also looks like BillG is going to be at the Bellevue Best Buy to hand out the first Xbox 360 there. He is also going to play with people. If you have pre-ordered there, it might be fun playing him.

Do you search on Live.com?

venkatna — Tue, 22 Nov 2005 05:35:00 GMT

I was wondering about this. We have what i think is a cool feature on www.live.com, where we don't steal focus but we still let users type in the search box without clicking on the box first. If you start typing in the address bar, we don't steal focus to the search box as a lot of sites do. How many of you use that feature? Do you like it?

- Venkat

Gadgets for Live.com

venkatna — Wed, 09 Nov 2005 01:02:00 GMT

Sean Alexander has a posting today about all the gadgets available for Live.com. I am amazed by what the community has been able to do in a week. My favorite gadget is the Windows Live Favorites one. We are already upto 50 gadgets. This is just awesome.

- Venkat

Live.com Oops bug

venkatna — Fri, 04 Nov 2005 23:32:00 GMT

We released live.com and immediately got dinged for a lot of errors when reading feeds, among others. I am glad to say that at least that one issue has been fixed. We were tracking the feeds that were being added, anonymously of course, so we could do recommendation for top feeds. Unfortunately, under heavy load, this feature decided to be a pain. We have decided to remove the real time updates to this feature for a while. We should be able to figure out what went wrong and fix it soon. Users will still see the top feeds, but they are not real time anymore. At least this way, you will not have problems reading your feeds. For a web site that has feed reading as one of the primary tasks, i guess that is important [;)].

We have two more major bugs that we need to solve. One is obviously Firefox support. I have read lots of reports that suggest we intentionally do not support Firefox. I would like to say that is pure fallacy. I like that word, fallacy, seems more classy than a lot of other things i could say. :). We want to target the web, not just people using Windows and IE. We have been saying our mission is to provide a page that you can completely make yours. I know Yahoo has My Yahoo and even MSN has My MSN, but this page i think is different from all of those. I can say that because i used to work on My MSN as well. I do not know of any other website that allows you to write your own gadget. We also want to have absolutely no content bias. Before we shipped, there was even talk about alphabetizing everything in the categories list. But we did not do it, because it made sense that NFL Football was higher than Horse racing, instead of the other way around.

Anyway, coming back from that tangent, we are working on Firefox support. I dont like the fact that we had to ship without Firefox support, but when you are under extreme time constraints (our ship date was not moving, to say the least), you have to cut some stuff. Firefox was one of those unfortunate cuts. I guess this might give the impression that we do not care about Firefox users. I just hope we can change that perception by shipping software. On the Start.com page we get a lot of traffic from people using Firefox. It makes sense for us to work in Firefox and we will do it.

The other major bug is our search experience. When you search for something, click on a link and navigate away from our page and come back to our page, your search is lost. We are working on fixing this as well. We have had some discussion within the team about how to solve this particular issue. Our current idea is to ship what we think is reasonable behavior and then listen to you guys to fix it even further.

I hope you enjoy using www.live.com.

- Venkat

Catching Up

venkatna — Tue, 01 Nov 2005 12:09:00 GMT

Whoo. What a month! It has been a pretty hectic time for me lately. Good news is it is all coming to fruition soon.

My daughter was born on the 8th of October. Unfortunately, i have not spent a lot of time with her yet. Hopefully i will be able to spend some quality time with her soon.

What else happened? The White Sox won a championship. I am very happy about that, but unfortunately that leaves my team (Da Cubs) very alone at the heights of futility. Who knows, maybe it IS our time next year. I sure hope so. The Bears are in first place. The defence is coming along nicely and offence is showing signs of life. We will see what they can do this year. It is a weak division, so they should make the playoffs.

We have been very busy at work for the last couple of weeks. It is all coming together rather nicely now. I should soon be able to talk about. I am really excited with the direction we are taking. Cant wait to share it with you all.

- Venkat

Virtual Earth Features

venkatna — Mon, 03 Oct 2005 05:13:00 GMT

I like Virtual Earth. The interface is slick, but i really like the ability to do a local search. I have used it to map out some trips in the past. I wanted to go to a bunch of electronics stores today and i tried to create my trip. I found though you can only have three searches going at a time. That was ok. I could work around that by adding the stores i wanted to go to to the scratch pad. Unfortunately though, i could only add 5 entries to the scratch pad. That totally sucks. The first thing, I understand. They are just trying to keep the number of searches they do to a minimum to make sure the page performs well. The second thing, I dont understand.

Another feature I want is an implementation of a shortest route algorithm for all the stores I want to go to. I mean, with gas prices the way they are, this has to be a killer feature. Of course, I also want the ability to specify dependencies.

- Venkat

Another Ajaxian Portal

venkatna — Mon, 19 Sep 2005 06:30:00 GMT

I just found about another ajaxian portal - http://www.netvibes.com/. Looks quite good to me. It will be interesting to see how the page evolves. There are now at least four portals that i know of:
www.start.com
www.google.com/ig
www.netvibes.com
www.protopage.com

I still think Start is the best of breed, but i am biased. I work on it. :) Of course, we welcome as much competition as we can get. It will only help us get better. It is going to be an exciting time.

- Venkat

Start.com support for other browsers

venkatna — Sat, 10 Sep 2005 00:14:00 GMT

I have been asked a number of times why we do not work properly in Opera and Safari. I have also seen a lot of blog entries knocking us for the same reason. I have been meaning to write about that but Scott has a blog entry describing exactly what the problems are and he does a whole lot better than i ever could have.

- Venkat