Angus Logan's Blog

Web Application Toolkit to make your website social

alogan — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 06:40:47 GMT

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

Messenger Web Toolkit updates – UX polish, faster dev time, richer experience for non-Messenger users

alogan — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 21:47:01 GMT

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:

User experience: smoothed out the user experience, added a first run experience, expanded the browser support, increased the performance
Developer experience: reduced the amount of code for you to implement “Share via Windows Live” and the Messenger Web Toolkit is now built on the Microsoft Ajax library.
New scenarios: Allow people who don’t use Messenger to see display pictures and names of Messenger users.

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.

User Experience: Sexier, faster, supported in more browsers

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:

Speed: In March 2009 we extended Windows Live Hotmail to use the Messenger Web Toolkit (see the post ). By having our bits running at Hotmail scale we were able to gather a ton of information around performance and we’ve acted on it: the MWT will now load faster (full/first time loads and cross page navigation).
Availability/Reach: added browser support for Firefox 3.5, Safari 4, and Google Chrome 2 - now more people can connect & share with their Windows Live friends on your site.
Education: One of the most tangible UX changes we’ve made is the first run experience for the Web Bar (a single control you can use if you don’t want to build your own experience). When you first use the Web Bar on a site, a small popup will inform the user they can sign in and tell them the key things they need to know to start connecting and sharing with their friends.

Looks: we have also updated the web controls and web bar user experience to cleaner

Developers: Easier to add sharing controls and aligned with more tech

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.

Something for people who don’t use or aren’t signed into Messenger

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:

Party on

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

All about the rich application experience on any device – using secret foursquare for windows mobile

alogan — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 09:31:18 GMT

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.

Awesome Live Writer Plugin for bit.ly

alogan — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 09:16:25 GMT

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:

tracking visitors who who aren’t aware they are being tracked and selling their behavioral data
getting a nice set of IDs and then adding a landing page (or even better, driving people to search instead of taking them to the content).

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.

What do you want to see @ SXSW? Future of Web Mail? Streams becoming Tidal waves? Vote it up

alogan — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 02:28:37 GMT

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

Lessons learned from Windows Live ID's foray into Open ID

alogan — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 00:36:24 GMT

Jorgen Thelin just posted Windows Live ID OpenID Community Technology Preview Status Update (August 2009).

Community Technology Previews must be expected to come and go. They are used to get feedback from developers, validate ideas, disappear and come back. Sometimes they are even used to prove the feature/service is economically viable and is what developers/users want & need. Jorgen provided an update on the future:

Currently, we do not have a schedule that I can publicly share for when we will release full Production support of OpenID for Windows Live ID users, but rest assured that we are working actively to provide OpenID functionality to all of our 500+ million Windows Live ID users!

In addition to multiple entry-points, and being able to explain unique vs. static identifiers to end users – the main challenge was aliasing:

In the CTP, Windows Live ID users were required to create an OpenID alias (such as “http://openid.live.com/john”) attached to their account, and then to use that alias not just at the OpenID relying party site, but also as the way to identify themselves to the Windows Live ID OP. When arriving at the OP sign-in screen, users were required to enter their OpenID alias (instead of their normal Windows Live ID user name) plus the password (or one of their other associated credentials, such as an Information Card) from their main Windows Live ID account.

We had envisaged that using an alias for OpenID sign-in could provide some separation of the two identity networks. However, the usability model for this approach has turned out to be unfeasible and/or just plain confusing to users!

Read more about it along with the other lessons

Technorati Tags: openid,open id,windows live id,live id,windows live,usability,identity

Report Abuse on the “consent” / delegation screen

alogan — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 00:22:01 GMT

Earlier today when I saw a ton of twitter/facebook spam from an app called 140blood I thought it was some type of hack again. It looks like the app is accessing the service legitimately but is just malicious/spammy. Wouldn’t it be cool to report abuse on the consent screen?

Suggestion: on Consent screens, aside from links to Privacy statements, there should be a link to “report this app as abusive”. Therefore People who land on delegation screens because they have followed their friend’s guidance, can realize “this isn’t what I was expecting” and start to tarnish that app’s reputation to the point of it being pulled/any damage reversed.

Technorati Tags: delegation,consent,oauth,delegated auth,delegated authorization,Twitter,abuse,user experience,UX

Interview

alogan — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 02:25:43 GMT

I just did a quick interview with mynetx as part of a Windows Live and You series This blog is awesome: it has the Messenger Web Toolkit running on it so you can see if he is online or even sign in using the Web Bar.

The interview covered some of my background, mostly stuff about Windows Live today, and a few attempts to get my to talk about what is coming in the future :)

Check it out or check out the others

Try out being a control freak without needing to code (Interactive SDK)

alogan — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 08:40:13 GMT

Ever wanted to see what’s possible (and even write code) with web controls just by clicking a few times in the browser? That is exactly what you can do with the Windows Live Messenger Web Toolkit Interactive SDK (WLT iSDK).

You can:

Sign into the Messenger Web Toolkit
Review the list of controls
Change the attributes and instantly see the affect
Interact with the controls
Copy the code into your application

http://messenger.mslivelabs.com

Sign in

Links to MSDN / Additional documentation

Display picture control with presence

Personal Message (status) display and editing inline

Contact list view

Technorati Tags: Windows Live,Windows Live Messenger,Messenger Web Toolkit,MWT,HTML Controls,JavaScript,Facebook Connect,Interactive SDK

Would you pay to have your identity in a fashionable namespace?

alogan — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 06:31:59 GMT

Chris Messina thinks there is a revenue opportunity in branded namespaces –

For a mere $50 minimum donation ($25 for students), you can own a limited edition URL and profile from Creative Commons that identifies you to the world and provides a compelling revenue opportunity for the non-profit foundation.

Do people really care that much about their namespace from a I'm hip, I'm in this namespace – IMO this won’t convert to a big enough revenue opportunity to care about.

There is only a revenue opportunity if your namespace is soooo attractive and people will use it as their primary identity (being one of many secondary identities means it soon will become irrelevant) but I’m just not sure how many there are and how sustainable it is.

I don’t want multiple identities/addresses to show my affinity with multiple organizations, and I certainly wouldn't pay for it. e.g. (simplified to email addresses) angus@goseahawks.com and then in the basketball season I become angus@stormvip.com.

With all that said, if the namespace is attractive enough and the identity is unique/easy, sure – I’d probably pay (e.g. angus@aussie.com) – but I would only pay for one.

last thought - How well did Skype selling fashionable area code numbers e.g. 212 (Manhattan) numbers to people in not so hip places?

Making email viral – forward to the public / your followers

alogan — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 04:06:30 GMT

I just got an email from Virgin America and one of the interesting things was “Tweet this” button

They let me share their email campaign easily with the masses.

If you think about how email usually gets shared, people forward it – to a limited number of friends.

Allow people to take an action straight from their inbox to tweet it out for the email marketer thats a fairly big return. A return which could be passed back onto the sharer. If each “share” had a unique link, the marketer then knew I was a “sharer” and I drove X amount of conversions, so then they kept on sending me great deals (or even better, throwing me in some rewards program).

Whatcha think?

Live Services plugin for Moodle

alogan — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 22:31:34 GMT

Moodle is an online learning environment. The team at Microsoft Education Labs released a cool plugin for Moodle (in PHP) which allows you to sign in using Live ID, to access your Exchange inbox/calendar, IM other people doing the same course and easily launch search.

Pretty neat solution.

Watch the video here or find out more

Windows 7 has RTM’d

alogan — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 00:11:37 GMT

I’ve been using Win7 for months. When combined with Office 2010 technical preview its an amazing experience.

Read the official post here and press release

REDMOND, Wash. — July 22, 2009 — Microsoft Corp. today announced the release to manufacturing (RTM) of Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2, the next versions of its flagship desktop and server operating systems. With the completion of this development phase, industry partners are readying products in time for the Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 worldwide general launches. Windows 7 will be generally available to customers around the world on October 22, and Windows Server 2008 R2 will be generally available on or before that date. As always, current customers of the Windows Volume Licensing program, Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) subscribers and TechNet subscribers will be among the first to get customer access to Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 in the coming weeks.

Windows Live Messenger loves scripters too: how to get it in your PHP web app

alogan — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 00:05:42 GMT

James Senior just posted about a new PHP tutorial for the Messenger Web Toolkit:

A common misconception is that the cool functionality in the Windows Live Messenger Web Toolkit is only available to developers who are using the Microsoft web platform i.e. ASP.NET. This couldn’t be further from the truth.

The Windows Live Messenger Web Toolkit is entirely client-side based using JavaScript and HTTP endpoints, it will happily run on any platform, any web server and with any scripting language. The Web Toolkit JavaScript was created using Script# which allows you to code in C# and then compile down to JS – neat.

For PHP developers we’ve just released a couple of cool things to allow you to put Windows Live Messenger in your web apps:

PHP Windows Live Messenger Web Tutorial

PHP sample code

Check out the Interactive SDK – cool for checking out samples and code snippets

This means if you code your web apps in PHP, Ruby, Perl etc. you can go ahead and use the Windows Live Messenger Web Toolkit to light up your apps and create cool new social scenarios for people that visit your website.

Enjoy, and let me know how you get on!

Technorati Tags: PHP,Instant Messaging,IM,Windows Live,JavaScript,Chat,Development,Samples,Messenger Web Toolkit

Nice UX on AT&T around privacy policy changes

alogan — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 21:23:33 GMT

This is a pretty slick way of highlighting policy changes without requiring an additional click (if the lawyers let you do that).