Microsoft creating a new Flickr

Was tipped off by Thomas Hawk regarding a job posting appearing on Microsoft's web site.

Come make Windows Live the best place to share your digital memories! Heard of Flickr? YouTube? How about. Mac? This role will work across the new Windows Live division with teams like Spaces, SkyDrive, Messenger and Hotmail to construct a winning strategy for Microsoft in photo and video sharing. This role involves leading the team to design the strategy then build and implement a winning solution that will be loved by millions of customers. This feature team is building a next-generation photo and video sharing service that will compete with flickr, smugmug and other photo web solutions today. This is a “v1” opportunity.This role requires a strong PM with several product cycles of consumer experience. Successful candidates will have strong strategic thinking, outstanding cross team leadership and a proven track record of shipping. The right candidate for this position has an entrepreneurial streak - and functions well as part of a team. The ideal candidate has experience shipping consumer web solutions.The Digital Memories Experience team (DMX) is helping people make deeper connections with those they care about. We want to give you the ability to effortlessly share your memories, be that a simple slideshow of photos and videos (e.g. evolution of the Vista Slideshow or of Photo Story), a carefully authored experienced (evolution of Movie Maker), or a fully interactive cinematic multimedia experience (a narrated 3D path through a Photosynth that you can control). And we want to make it easy and fun to enjoy your photos and videos, whether that is on the PC in your office, the Media Center in your living room, the XBox in your entertainment center, or on your mobile device when you are out and about. DMX is a part of the Windows Live Experience division (WLX/LEX), which also includes Mail, Hotmail, Messenger, SkyDrive, Spaces, Writer, Calendar, and Family Safety. To achieve our vision for digital memories we work with many other teams including: Core User Experience, Find & Organize, Graphics (Windows Imaging Codecs - WIC - and DirectX) in WEX, MCE, Expression, SmartFlow, and Xbox.

"Come make Windows Live the best place to share your digital memories! Heard of Flickr? YouTube? How about. Mac? This role will work across the new Windows Live division with teams like Spaces, SkyDrive, Messenger and Hotmail to construct a winning strategy for Microsoft in photo and video sharing. This role involves leading the team to design the strategy then build and implement a winning solution that will be loved by millions of customers. This feature team is building a next-generation photo and video sharing service that will compete with flickr, smugmug and other photo web solutions today. This is a “v1” opportunity.This role requires a strong PM with several product cycles of consumer experience. Successful candidates will have strong strategic thinking, outstanding cross team leadership and a proven track record of shipping. The right candidate for this position has an entrepreneurial streak - and functions well as part of a team. The ideal candidate has experience shipping consumer web solutions.The Digital Memories Experience team (DMX) is helping people make deeper connections with those they care about. We want to give you the ability to effortlessly share your memories, be that a simple slideshow of photos and videos (e.g. evolution of the Vista Slideshow or of Photo Story), a carefully authored experienced (evolution of Movie Maker), or a fully interactive cinematic multimedia experience (a narrated 3D path through a Photosynth that you can control). And we want to make it easy and fun to enjoy your photos and videos, whether that is on the PC in your office, the Media Center in your living room, the XBox in your entertainment center, or on your mobile device when you are out and about. DMX is a part of the Windows Live Experience division (WLX/LEX), which also includes Mail, Hotmail, Messenger, SkyDrive, Spaces, Writer, Calendar, and Family Safety. To achieve our vision for digital memories we work with many other teams including: Core User Experience, Find & Organize, Graphics (Windows Imaging Codecs - WIC - and DirectX) in WEX, MCE, Expression, SmartFlow, and Xbox."

This position mentions some really interesting things that might result in being able to simply post a Vista slideshow to the web, using Windows Photo Gallery and Movie Maker as upload tools to share your photos/movies. Can't wait to see what they come up with. While Flickr has some issues, it's a pretty feature rich application/site that'll take some beating especially for Microsoft to build something from the ground up (although they certainly have the resources). Interesting that they haven't opted to purchase one of Flickr's competitors (pbase, smugmug, zoomr etc).

Flock - Browse Web 2.0

Flock 1.0 Beta was released to the public mid-October. This browser was created by Yahoo! and designed to provide an integrated Web 2.0 experience including seamless integration with Flickr, YouTube, PhotoBucket and Truveo.

The browser has the now standard tabs across the screen enabling you to browse more than one site at a time, but above this is what is called a Media Bar which has an integrated search box. The user can select whether to search Flickr, YouTube, PhotoBucket or Truveo media streams. Search results matching your query (in the form of photos/thumbnails are displayed in the media bar area.

Flock also has a built in photo uploader which allows users to upload their photos to Flickr directly from the Browser. It also has a built in Blog Editor function which bascially launches a window that looks like a word processor that allows you to post directly to your Blogger, Blogsome, LiveJournal, Typepad, WordPress, Xanga and self-hosted blog without ever leaving the browser.

After using Flock for two weeks I have to say that I found this integration quite useful (not so much the photo uploader as I left the browser to locate my photos). I definitely enjoyed the ability to search Flickr and YouTube archives from inside the browser without having to navigate to the web sites first. Same for posting to Blogger.

The down side was the amount of screen real estate dedicated to the new media bar. Even though you can resize or close the media bar, I found that I tended to leave it open which resulted in about 20% less screen space dedicated to web site display. On a wide screen (where many web sites don't fully utilize the width in trying to support lower resolutions) I would have preferred the media bar to be located vertically rather than horizontally. This is the solution that photo host company Zooomr.com have utilized for their new ZipFox application which allows Zooomr users to see their Ziplines directly in FireFox.

Anyway, you can try Flock for yourself here. You can try Zipfox for yourself here.

Blogged with Flock

Poor Yahoo!/Flickr user experience

One thing that I don't like about large internet based companies is the lack of user support and phone numbers to contact anyone.

This first came to my attention when I had problems with Picasa and Blogger integration with the new Blogger accounts. Basically there was (and still is) an issue posting more than two photos from Picasa to a new blogger account. Only 2 photos will ever be uploaded even if you select more. After trying to contact someone through Google Groups (which is the only option for Blogger and Picasa support) this problem is still unresolved after 6 months.

This last month I ran into another problem, this time with Yahoo and Flickr. On August 28 I tried to open a new Flickr account. I used to have one a year or so ago but I had let the Yahoo id I had expire due to the amount of spam mail I was receiving on that account. I have since signed up for a new Yahoo account and tried to login to Flickr using that account.

I received an error telling me that an account already existed with that email address. This suprised me as when I logged into Yahoo I didn't receive that error, so basically Flickr was still aware of the old account even though it had been dropped from the Yahoo login database.

I sent an email to the tech support department through the web site explaining the problem and asking for the old Flickr account to be either deleted or the associated email address removed. Simple right?

Well appparently not. Even though I had provided the two user ids together with the email address that was associated with both accounts one week later I received an email asking me what the two user ids were that were causing the problem. Duh? It was in the original email. So I repeat myself spelling out the two ids old=ABC and new=XYZ.

The next email tells me that the new account XYZ doesn't have a Flickr account associated with it (yes, that was the point of my asking for support - I'm trying to open a Flickr account using my new Yahoo id). And then asks me for the old account id again. So I reply and provide the old account id for a 3rd time.

Now I hear nothing for 3 weeks. No response to my email. I send a follow up email asking for help, forwarding all the previous correspondence and a jpg screen shot of the error message. Guess what? The reply now asks me for my new and old user ids so I send them (yes, this is now the 4th time I've provided them).

So I wait a few days and receive an email telling me to contact SBC Global via a web page. Who the hell are they? Well on further investigation they appear to be the Yahoo ISP via AT&T. But I don't use them. I only have a Yahoo.ca account so I can use Yahoo Groups. I don't use them as an ISP. So I have now sent an email explaining this and that if I got to the site they suggested I am supposed to put in an @sbcglobal.net email address which of course I don't have.

So what is the lesson that can be learned from this experience. Well for me the lesson is that these companies which traditionally have not needed to provide technical support (you don't really need support using a search engine) need to figure out that if they are going to purchase application services (photo organization, blogging etc) that are less straightforward to use, they are going to need to step up to the plate and provide better technical support and a better user experience if they want to stop users switching to the competition.

The future of photo search

My developer friend Doug, sent me a link today to an interesting article/video on "how photos should be viewed". This technology has now been acquired by Microsoft and looks really promising.

Basically the first technology is that you can have as many pictures on your screen as you want and be able to seamlessly zoom in and out with no time delay. The technology is built on the idea that only the number of pixels you have on the screen are rendered (which is static obviously), and images are rendered as and when you zoom in and out, contributing to it's amazing performance.

Beyond that they have an even more amazing technology that maps images to each other looking for similarities. The demo video shows hundreds of pictures of Paris' Notre Dame Cathedral making up a whole entity. Really cool stuff!

The scalable pictures remind me of how revolutionary microfiche was when it first came out, enabling tons of information to be stored in such a small format. This would be a fantastic application for a digital archive. As well as the more obvious map applications, I think this technology could be applied to information discovery such as an interactive encylopedia as people tag their images with information about what is contained in them. Viewers would be able to browse the images, jumping in and out of images as things caught their attention.

Certainly it will revolutionize how we view photos and other images and may just provide an alternative to search for information retrieval. It demonstrates that any information can be presentated visually in image format (and actually they demo'd a text file too) and will be browse-able in a way that is not currently available (most computers choke when given a large number of digital images).

It also poses some interesting scenarios for research, many of which may be highly subjective, such as image placement patterns (what is the focus of attention, are all parts of the screen viewed equally), repetitions (do you view something because there are more repetitions of it (and does it make a difference if they are in blocks or not), attractiveness of photos (colors, contrast etc).

Kudos for Microsoft for acquiring this (and supporting these start up developers) and I'm sure we'll be seeing more of this in the future.

The growth of computer hijacking

In an article over at MSNBC (http://redtape.msnbc.com/2007/03/bots_story.html), it is suggested that there may be up to 150 million computers worldwide that have been hijacked by criminals by installing "bot" technology via a virus. While this number is considered to be too high by most estimates, Symantec Corp. has counted 6.7 million active bots during one internet scan and as bots are not all active at the same time, the number is likely to be much higher.

These bots commit acts on behalf of these criminals such as sending out spam emails, buying stock as part of a scheme or attacking key sites on the internet to bring them down. In fact, almost all spam email is sent from a hijacked computer.

Scarily this article goes on to state that the companies providing security software already realize that they are fighting a losing battle with these criminals who develop viruses at a pace that nobody can keep up with.

For example, in 2006 there were 2.5 times more new viruses than in 2005, and the growth rate is continuing to rise. On Mar 22, 9408 virus laden files were submitted to totalvirus.com (a site that uses 30 antivirus products to look for viruses) with only 28 being detected by all 30 products.

While this is a sobering thought, this is not to say that we should stop trying to defend our computers, it just suggests that maybe one product is no longer enough. It is recommended that you scan your computer using multiple antivirus products, most of which have a free online scan service. You should also consider shutting down your computer when not in use (that way it is unable to operate as a "bot" while you sleep or go to work).

Here are some free antivirus and other security software resources:

Online scans
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17805225/

Avira Antivirus Free Personal Edition
http://www.free-av.com/

VirusTotal Free File Scanning (uses all 30 antivirus products)
http://www.Virustotal.com

Microsoft Windows Defender Free Spyware Protection
http://www.microsoft.com/athome/security/spyware/software/default.mspx

Spamfighter Free Spam Protection
http://www.spamfighter.com/

Ask your questions on Live QnA

A while ago I reported on a human guided search engine ChaCha.com. Well it seems that this idea of interacting with humans is starting to take off with one of the mainstream search engines, MSN.com.

Just recently MSN has added a footer at the bottom of their search engine results pages that says "Didn't find an answer? Ask a real person on Live QnA. And while you don't get any help with your search query, Live QnA is a threaded message area that lets you post the question to other Live QnA users (basically helping each other find out the answers to your questions).

It is an interesting concept but the main flaw seems to be that there is no real incentive for anyone to spend hours scouring the questions and answering them for others. Like similar functions in LinkedIn, which basically help define you as an expert in front of your network, Live QnA gives you a rating such as "superstar" as you answer more and more questions. The difference though is that nobody really knows you so do they really care? The advantage LinkedIn has is that you can become an expert in your field which helps your networking.

Anyway, if you are interested, do a search on MSN and when you see the link (below) click on it and submit your question.

5 reasons for corporate blogging

I've been asked about the benefits of blogging for businesses. While it is pretty easy to explain why a business should have a corporate website, selling the idea of a blog is a bit more difficult, especially when a company is small and may not have the resources to participate in a blog.

I've summarized my thoughts into 5 points below and would suggest that companies who don't have enough resources to blog think about encouraging "off-the-clock" blogging or blogging during employee "down-time", especially as blog entries can be posted using email from virtually anywhere using a cell phone or blackberry.

5 reasons for corporate blogging:

1. If you don't blog your competitors will - Why give them a competitive advantage? Companies that blog are seen as more friendly, open and just more 'hip' than companies that don't. Why give that advantage away?
2. What better way to address (and learn about) customer experiences and opinions - You can answer customer questions and help fix bad customer experiences. If you don't let customers vent on your site they'll find somewhere else to do it. At least this way you can try to resolve an issue.
3. Increase your Google PageRank and overall ranking as your incoming links increase. One of the benefits of creating blog entries is that people will link back to them as you write about interesting topics. All those incoming links will add to your authority and popularity on the search engines.
4. Create good Corporate/Product PR - Your chance to talk about your product and company, explain what you do and why you make a difference - build your brand.
5. Find out what people are saying about your product/company/competitor - participate in their conversations. Use Technorati, Digg etc. to find out who's talking about you.