Microsoft: #notdeadyet

Posted on October 30th, 2010

CNN ran a story last week calling Microsoft a “dying consumer brand”. No way. With products like Windows 7 that have been on the market for the last year and Windows Phone 7 and Kinect hitting the market soon – I of course have to disagree. But my opinion is pretty biased. Frank Shaw, however, has started up a new hashtag on Twitter called #notdeadyet with a series of tweets highlighting some pretty eye-opening numbers regarding Microsoft. Here are some of what’s been highlighted:

And of course in September we also released the new version of Windows Live Essentials which includes new versions of Messenger, Mail, Photo Gallery, Movie Maker, Mesh (previously Sync), and Family Safety. Download Windows Live Essentials 2011 here. Here are some interesting data tidbits about Windows Live my pal Dharmesh published in a blog post last week:

  • 300 million active Messenger users.
  • Mesh is syncing over 500 terabytes of data between PCs (wow!).
  • 360 million active Hotmail users.
  • Hotmail delivers 8 billion email messages daily.

Over the summer, we also released Office Web Apps where you can edit and create Microsoft Office documents, PowerPoint presentations, and spreadsheets online through Windows Live!

And in September we also launched the beta of Internet Explorer 9. As of this week, the IE9 Beta has been downloaded 10 million times making it the fastest adopted browser beta. If you haven’t already, you can download the IE9 Beta here.

I also highly recommend reading Frank Shaw’s blog post on the official Microsoft Blog from June called Microsoft by the numbers for further perspective.

Microsoft is not dead yet.

Why RSS is still important (today)

Posted on August 29th, 2010

I hear a lot about how RSS is no longer important (e.g. subscribing to an RSS feed of a blog) now that everyone gets their information from Twitter or Facebook these days. While I agree that most people get their information from social networks like Twitter today than they do “subscribing” to an RSS feed – I do disagree that RSS isn’t important, at least today. It’s just less important for the average person visiting a blog (or website) but its still very important to the existence of a blog. Let me explain why.

The problem with RSS was that it never quite got to the point where it was something easily understood by the average person visiting a blog. My mom would never understand the concept of “subscribing” to an RSS feed of a blog or “subscribing to a blog”. It was easier for them to just add that blog to their Favorites (or Bookmarks) in their browser so they can revisit in the future. Along comes Twitter and Facebook which makes it extremely easy for people to consume information and easy for bloggers to push their blog posts out for people to read. The average person understands the concept of following someone on Twitter. Following someone could mean following a person or following a website. Most websites today automatically push their blog posts out to at least Twitter. And that’s where most people consume the content people blog.

But with bloggers pushing their content to Twitter – do you really think there is someone manually tweeting when a new post is published?

No.

At least not likely.

This is where RSS comes in.

Social networks today have become quite good at aggregating information from a variety of sources – including RSS. It’s almost a standard option. There are a bunch of services offered in Twitter’s extensive ecosystem that will take your blog’s RSS feed and automatically tweet it. My favorite is Twitterfeed. And both Facebook and Windows Live offer the ability for you to configure an RSS feed to bring in anything you publish to your blog and display it in your news feed. As a blogger and someone who runs a few blogs, I want to be able to push my content out to the major social networks for people to consume and as easily as possible. Today RSS allows me to do that.

RSS today is more important to content publishers like bloggers than it is to anyone else. It is very important for pushing blog content out to important services like Twitter, Facebook, or Windows Live for people to consume their content. It’s just no longer important for bloggers to recommend people “subscribe” to their blogs. Instead, the recommendation is to follow them (the blogger or blog) on Twitter.

Side note: The advantage to Twitter that is really exciting to me as a blogger is that its much more interactive. My Twitter feed is a place I can push my content to people that follow me but also interact with them and discuss my content beyond the comments section of my blog.

Now I say RSS is important today. It may not be very important in the future though. Actually, it probably won’t. If you look at Twitter, Facebook, Windows Live, and other social networks like Foursquare – they are all developing APIs that web developers can use to tap directly (and more integrate more deeply) into their services. Blog platforms are beginning to take advantage of this. Blogs and websites in general are looking at becoming more integrated into these services. In the future, it is likely a simple RSS feed won’t be enough. Actually – it won’t.

It will be interesting to watch this space in the next year or two.

Anybody know of a major website that is no longer publicly offering an RSS feed but instead asks their readers to follow them on Twitter or “like” their Facebook Page?

Testing Seadragon from Microsoft Live Labs

Posted on November 19th, 2009

Thought I would give Seadragon a try. Seadragon is a technology from Microsoft Live Labs that lets you zoom in and pan around images from the Web. Images could have lots of text or just really big photos. This technology could be extremely useful in rendering large images with lots of text. Imagine a single image with the entire text of a book and using Seadragon to read that book.

In testing our Seadragon here, I uploaded a panoramic shot I took while visiting the U.S.S. Hornet in Oakland, CA this summer. This panoramic shot was created from a series of shots using Windows Live Photo Gallery.

Pretty damn cool.

A Trip to Snoqualmie Falls

Posted on April 19th, 2009

I moved to the Seattle area this last December and am continuing to explore the area and “see the sights” so to speak. I’m familiar with what Seattle offers but its the surrounding areas and the non-City stuff that is of interest to me. A few weeks back my girlfriend and I visited Snoqualmie Falls.

I thought I’d share some photos. I took them with my Nikon D40. I think the settings on the camera is possibly a bit off as the images look a little grainy. It was suggested I perhaps turn down the contrast a bit.

By the way – I absolutely love the ability to embed Photo Albums from Windows Live into a blog post via Windows Live Writer.