Saturday, October 13, 2007
Windows Live Adds Events to Its Roster
Over the next few days, Microsoft will be rolling out a new service called Windows Live Events, which will be a customized version of Windows Live Spaces for organizing events and sharing memories among participants. (The link above may redirect to Windows Live Spaces for some people, as the roll-out of the service will be gradual across different geographies). Windows Live Spaces is, of course, Microsoft’s family-friendly answer to MySpace—and it’s not doing badly, drawing 100 million unique visitors and 2.5 billion page views a month, according to Microsoft.
Windows Live Events is an attempt to carve out a specific niche for for Windows Live Spaces around events. It’s like Evite with a little social-networking fairy dust sprinkled on top. You can manage invitations and RSVPs for a party, wedding, or any other event by setting up an invite list and sending out a mass e-mail with a link back to your Windows Live Event site. All the event details are also available as an RSS feed, making it easy to export the information. On the site itself you can post information about the event, but it is also a place where attendees are encouraged to come back to share their photos, videos, or blog posts after the fact.
Thus, every event big or small can have its own social Website. “We want it to be a place where people can share their memories and stories after an event,” says Windows Live group product manager Jay Fluegel. Your guests always take better pictures than you at your kid’s birthday party. Now they have an easy way to share those pictures with everyone who was there.
As with Windows Live Spaces, Windows Live Events is very customizable. You can change the color, fonts, background, and play with the design and different features on the site, including adding discussion boards, blog posts, and photo- and video-sharing modules. You can also take your pick from the assorted gadgets (aka widgets) available in the Windows Live gallery. For instance, you could add a countdown-to-the-birth gadget for a baby shower or an Amazon wish list for a birthday party.
Here is Microsoft’s official blog post about the service. Microsoft keeps dribbling out these Live services. Some are unremarkable, and some are solid improvements over Microsoft’s current offerings. People who live on Facebook or MySpace probably won’t flock to this service. They will manage their events where their friends already hang out online. But for everyone else, especially families, I can see this gaining some traction. Expect Microsoft to launch more Live services before the year is out.
picture-226.png
Windows Live Events is an attempt to carve out a specific niche for for Windows Live Spaces around events. It’s like Evite with a little social-networking fairy dust sprinkled on top. You can manage invitations and RSVPs for a party, wedding, or any other event by setting up an invite list and sending out a mass e-mail with a link back to your Windows Live Event site. All the event details are also available as an RSS feed, making it easy to export the information. On the site itself you can post information about the event, but it is also a place where attendees are encouraged to come back to share their photos, videos, or blog posts after the fact.
Thus, every event big or small can have its own social Website. “We want it to be a place where people can share their memories and stories after an event,” says Windows Live group product manager Jay Fluegel. Your guests always take better pictures than you at your kid’s birthday party. Now they have an easy way to share those pictures with everyone who was there.
As with Windows Live Spaces, Windows Live Events is very customizable. You can change the color, fonts, background, and play with the design and different features on the site, including adding discussion boards, blog posts, and photo- and video-sharing modules. You can also take your pick from the assorted gadgets (aka widgets) available in the Windows Live gallery. For instance, you could add a countdown-to-the-birth gadget for a baby shower or an Amazon wish list for a birthday party.
Here is Microsoft’s official blog post about the service. Microsoft keeps dribbling out these Live services. Some are unremarkable, and some are solid improvements over Microsoft’s current offerings. People who live on Facebook or MySpace probably won’t flock to this service. They will manage their events where their friends already hang out online. But for everyone else, especially families, I can see this gaining some traction. Expect Microsoft to launch more Live services before the year is out.
picture-226.png
Labels: Adds, Events, Google, Its, Live, Roster, To, Windows, Yahoo
DivShare Upgrades its One-stop shop Free File Hosting Service
When it comes to decide where and how to host your files on the web you ask yourself two main questions: Are you ready to pay for it? What is the best service for a the type of file you need. File hosting/sharing is a totally crowded space with both vertical solutions (think Flickr or PhotoBucket for pictures, Scribd or SlideShare for documents, YouTube for videos) and horizontal solutions (RapidShare, MediaFire, YouSendit, Megaupload,…). Most of those services stop being free when you need extra space or extra bandwith. Honestly it is really hard to find out your way in the jungle. But if you are a heavy user or are only interested in hosting and controling sharing options you might want to consider a one-Stop shop like DivShare that has been here a for few months. They are starting to release today a series of innovations that will make the service more unique and attractive.
The whole service is now providing a one-stop solution that will save users the download process, whatever the format of the file is. They offer free unlimited hosting and convert to flash nearly every file type (audio, video, office documents,..) instantly upon uploading with embedding capabilities. This is different from a company like Wixi which is built around a social network and where files are indexed and shared. They have built a universal flash player that makes the access and viewing easy and save you the download process (here is an example).
They are also rolling out a new iPhone and Facebook application as well as an API as of next week. With the iPhone app you’ll be able to view and email easily all your documents. The Facebook application “Projects by DivShare” enables students to create a special wall to add and view documents within Facebook.
They will rollout on Tuesday an API that enables any site including social networks to outsource for their hosting capabilities for any kind of file. Divshare has a premium option that enables you to rebrand totally your player (see below an example). I am not sure what is the level of SLA guaranteed by DivShare but this is a ground explored already by Amazon with S3 and EC2. The difference being that DivShare will be free and will provide viewing capabilities. If you want to rebrand the appearance then you will have to pay and become a DivShare Direct customer.
You can argue that some of those features can be found here and there. And their new player looks a lot like the one Docstoc is offering (for office documents only). But the blend of features and the free unlimited hosting makes it a good option. Will they be able to keep that promise as the service grows specially with a model based on advertising only? Time will tell and the challenge will not be simple.
DivShare has been my personal favourite for a long time and those improvements will help me stick to my judgement. If you guys are blogger they have a great plug-in for file uploading and hosting too. They officially launched in December 06 have over three million monthly visitors worldwide, and 150,000 registered users. The company based in Cupertino, California, has only four employees and is self-funded but is planning to take outside funding.
CenterNetworks has an interview of the co-founder David Altschul back in February
The whole service is now providing a one-stop solution that will save users the download process, whatever the format of the file is. They offer free unlimited hosting and convert to flash nearly every file type (audio, video, office documents,..) instantly upon uploading with embedding capabilities. This is different from a company like Wixi which is built around a social network and where files are indexed and shared. They have built a universal flash player that makes the access and viewing easy and save you the download process (here is an example).
They are also rolling out a new iPhone and Facebook application as well as an API as of next week. With the iPhone app you’ll be able to view and email easily all your documents. The Facebook application “Projects by DivShare” enables students to create a special wall to add and view documents within Facebook.
They will rollout on Tuesday an API that enables any site including social networks to outsource for their hosting capabilities for any kind of file. Divshare has a premium option that enables you to rebrand totally your player (see below an example). I am not sure what is the level of SLA guaranteed by DivShare but this is a ground explored already by Amazon with S3 and EC2. The difference being that DivShare will be free and will provide viewing capabilities. If you want to rebrand the appearance then you will have to pay and become a DivShare Direct customer.
You can argue that some of those features can be found here and there. And their new player looks a lot like the one Docstoc is offering (for office documents only). But the blend of features and the free unlimited hosting makes it a good option. Will they be able to keep that promise as the service grows specially with a model based on advertising only? Time will tell and the challenge will not be simple.
DivShare has been my personal favourite for a long time and those improvements will help me stick to my judgement. If you guys are blogger they have a great plug-in for file uploading and hosting too. They officially launched in December 06 have over three million monthly visitors worldwide, and 150,000 registered users. The company based in Cupertino, California, has only four employees and is self-funded but is planning to take outside funding.
CenterNetworks has an interview of the co-founder David Altschul back in February
Labels: DivShare Upgrades, File, Free, Google, Hosting, Its, One-stop, Service, Shop, Yahoo
Saturday, September 8, 2007
Facebook: Opening Up, But on Its Own Terms
Last week we began talking with a independent programmer who ran into a bit of trouble with Facebook over a snippet of code he developed and published that allowed users to update their Facebook status without visiting the site.
Christian Flickinger, who runs the blog Technologist for Hire, posted some PHP code here last April that took advantage of Facebook’s mobile service to perform this simple task. While Facebook offers an RSS feed to export status updates, unlike Twitter it fails to provide a way to import status updates. Christian’s code was meant to fix this shortcoming and consequently help others innovate with the way Facebook status updates are handled. He did not use the code to create a website for updating Facebook statuses; he simply made it available for others to modify or run as is on their own servers.
One such way to use Christian’s code was to incorporate it into a program that takes status updates and pushes them out to multiple status handlers such as Facebook, Twitter, Skype, Adium, and Quicksilver. Another use could be to take information from a music player, instant messaging program, or blogging platform and automatically make Facebook status updates from any activity (such as newly played songs, away messages, or post headlines). After publishing the code, Christian indeed found that several other developers used his code to create programs around the idea of “federated status”.
This past Thursday, however, Christian received an email from a Facebook engineer that requested he take down the code from his blog. While recognizing that Christian was simply trying to provide something useful, the engineer insisted that the code was, and had always been, against Facebook’s terms of service (see “User Conduct” section, bullet #3). As a way of explanation, he suggested that allowing people to automate against Facebook from outside of the site would create a “slippery slope”. The engineer backed up his request by insinuating that he would disable Christian’s Facebook account and/or take legal action if he refused to remove the code.
After Christian stood by his post, Facebook demonstrated on September 4th that it wasn’t bluffing and shut down his account. Christian soon realized that Facebook meant more to him than fighting this out and took down the code; Facebook has since reactivated his account. Several others who had used his code also caved and took down their enhancements.
While Facebook certainly has the right to contact users about violations of their terms of service, I must ask myself “what is Facebook so worried about?”. The company has made great strides in opening up the network with the developer platform, data feeds, and people search. These developments suggest that Facebook wants to make the components of the Social Graph available for wider consumption and utilization.
And yet, it has quite aggressively quelled certain developers that have built Facebook-integrated services. Last fall, the same Facebook engineer involved in this case sent the creator of UnFaced, a compatibility calculator, a similar cease and desist request. Facebook declined to provide a substantive reason for their actions in either of these cases.
Changes to Facebook’s terms of service over the last half year may also suggest that the company has become increasingly cautious about how and when they open things up. Their terms currently prohibit the “use [of] automated scripts to collect information from or otherwise interact with the Service or the Site.” However, archives show that this line was added sometime after February 10, 2007. So, instead of slackening their policies for independent developers, they seem to be tightening them.
What do you think? Was Facebook overbearing or reasonable in the way it handled Christian’s code? Generally speaking, is Facebook “developer-friendly”? If you have developed for Facebook, please share your experiences below.
Christian Flickinger, who runs the blog Technologist for Hire, posted some PHP code here last April that took advantage of Facebook’s mobile service to perform this simple task. While Facebook offers an RSS feed to export status updates, unlike Twitter it fails to provide a way to import status updates. Christian’s code was meant to fix this shortcoming and consequently help others innovate with the way Facebook status updates are handled. He did not use the code to create a website for updating Facebook statuses; he simply made it available for others to modify or run as is on their own servers.
One such way to use Christian’s code was to incorporate it into a program that takes status updates and pushes them out to multiple status handlers such as Facebook, Twitter, Skype, Adium, and Quicksilver. Another use could be to take information from a music player, instant messaging program, or blogging platform and automatically make Facebook status updates from any activity (such as newly played songs, away messages, or post headlines). After publishing the code, Christian indeed found that several other developers used his code to create programs around the idea of “federated status”.
This past Thursday, however, Christian received an email from a Facebook engineer that requested he take down the code from his blog. While recognizing that Christian was simply trying to provide something useful, the engineer insisted that the code was, and had always been, against Facebook’s terms of service (see “User Conduct” section, bullet #3). As a way of explanation, he suggested that allowing people to automate against Facebook from outside of the site would create a “slippery slope”. The engineer backed up his request by insinuating that he would disable Christian’s Facebook account and/or take legal action if he refused to remove the code.
After Christian stood by his post, Facebook demonstrated on September 4th that it wasn’t bluffing and shut down his account. Christian soon realized that Facebook meant more to him than fighting this out and took down the code; Facebook has since reactivated his account. Several others who had used his code also caved and took down their enhancements.
While Facebook certainly has the right to contact users about violations of their terms of service, I must ask myself “what is Facebook so worried about?”. The company has made great strides in opening up the network with the developer platform, data feeds, and people search. These developments suggest that Facebook wants to make the components of the Social Graph available for wider consumption and utilization.
And yet, it has quite aggressively quelled certain developers that have built Facebook-integrated services. Last fall, the same Facebook engineer involved in this case sent the creator of UnFaced, a compatibility calculator, a similar cease and desist request. Facebook declined to provide a substantive reason for their actions in either of these cases.
Changes to Facebook’s terms of service over the last half year may also suggest that the company has become increasingly cautious about how and when they open things up. Their terms currently prohibit the “use [of] automated scripts to collect information from or otherwise interact with the Service or the Site.” However, archives show that this line was added sometime after February 10, 2007. So, instead of slackening their policies for independent developers, they seem to be tightening them.
What do you think? Was Facebook overbearing or reasonable in the way it handled Christian’s code? Generally speaking, is Facebook “developer-friendly”? If you have developed for Facebook, please share your experiences below.
Labels: $, But, Facebook:, Gaming, Google, GPRS, Its, on, Opening, Own, Terms, Up
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