“All the geek that’s fit to news.” –J.D. Lewin
Tuesday next, you may suddenly find yourself with more friends than you ever knew you had. The coming Xbox dashboard update will give you the ability to browse the friends list of everyone you know on Xbox Live (similar to Facebook), allowing you to pillage their social networks in order to stockpile your own massive squadron of fellow gamers. It would be wise to keep logged in to Xbox.com in order to manage the influx of friend requests.
The XNA team will make their Game Studio 2.0 beta available for download soon, and according to the team’s blog post last week, feature complete. One of the more exciting features coming is support for network games between Xbox 360 consoles and Windows machines. Live Anywhere, as this ability was originally dubbed at E3 last year, is an architecture to allow games to interact across any platform available (desktops, consoles, and mobile devices).
The first game to ship that supported Live Anywhere was Shadowrun, which PC Gamer felt wasn’t all it could be. It seems clear that development of the game was focused primarily on proving the cross-platform concept, and hopefully future implementations of Live Anywhere won’t sacrifice sheer entertainment.
Enter the soon-to-be released XNA 2.0 beta. By providing game developers of every stripe the ability to provide network gaming between my friend Dan at his desk, and myself on the couch, we each will be able to have our preferred experience. A brief word to developers: might I recommend starting small? Build a port of Drug Wars that I can play with a couple mates, then worry about the flashy graphics.
photo credit: Ken McGrail
Getting under the skin of this week’s Zune launch, Saul Hansell has posted a three-part interview with Microsoft’s J Allard at the NY Times Bits blog. There’s a great amount of candid conversation around all aspects of Microsoft’s growing entertainment movement.
On the perpetual rumor of a Zune phone:
The phone will be one part entertainment…. What you will see from us is more of these signature experiences. When you see the Zune, you’ll say say, I want my music experience on the phone to be like that. Hey, I want my telecommunication experience on the phone to be more like that.
On the evolution of Zune devices:
I’m a big believer in failing fast… If we skipped last year, we would have never come out with the product we did this year… We learned that because of the shortfalls in the PC client [software], the device was less useful… People hated that there was no podcasts, that they couldn’t fill their cultural cache [the Zune] with the stuff that was meaningful to them.
On the evolution of a new Microsoft entertainment platform:
Today we have Xbox live for $50 a year. We have Zune Pass at $15 a month. We don’t have a rationalized premium version yet. Fast forward a little bit, and you can image a menu like DirecTV. There is basic, there is enhanced, there is movie pack and NFL Sunday ticket.
It’s exciting to see another solid base hit for Mr. Allard. His laser focus on consumer experiences and the interaction between Microsoft and individual human beings is right up my street. There’s a gravity around personalities like J and Ray Ozzie that fill me with a lot of hope. They both seem to understand the importance of user experience, and seem to place more importance on them than traditional Microsoft thinking.
This week the WIndows Live team announced the availability of an API for Windows Live Spaces Photos (don’t get me started on the name). Those of you who write software can now exert some control over the photos kept in a Live account. More interesting though to the rest of us who can’t code is the Live Data Interactive SDK, which shows off the functionality of this new API. Giving the human beings a view into what developers work with is very educational, and more than a little bit entertaining.
A long-standing source of intrigue around Microsoft headquarters in Redmond is, ‘The Golden Helmet.’ Apparently his real name is Stephan, and he has the horror story to justify his glittered headgear. From Ariel Stallings’ interview:
So, you never feel dorky wearing a gold helmet?
Come on: I’m riding a Segway — I’m already dorky.
Once you’ve got yourself a properly cool Zune card, the next thing you’ll want to do is show it off, right? Turns out there’s one chunk of html that simply needs to be pasted wherever you choose. Take this code, replace the all-caps section with your own handle, and click publish.
Keep in mind if your handle has any spaces in it, you’ll want to use the html-friendly “%20″ instead.
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Zune enters its sophomore year starting this morning. As previously mentioned, the new Zune devices and marketing are simply divine. Short of running out and dropping a chunk of change on a device, the new client app will provide plenty of geeky entertainment.
Perhaps most important update to the Zune client software is the support for MP3 files. No longer will moving your library require a massive format conversion. The next bit that I personally appreciate most is the evolution of track rating. As opposed to an overly granular five-star system, Zune simply allows you to mark a song as loved or unloved. Oh and the user interface is stunning. Typography is a given special treatment, and your local library, the online marketplace, and device management all maintain the same visual style and continuity.
Last but certainly not least, the social functionality looks to be extremely interesting. Because your Zune identity is the same as that on Xbox Live, we all start off with a pile of friends. You can customize the graphics to your heart’s content (they even provide pixel measurements), or choose from an already beautiful collection. I can’t wait to watch my Zune profile grow with friends.
If you happened to find yourself near the Sheraton Boston Hotel tomorrow, drop in and say hi to Surface. Robert Warnick and a handful of the Surface team will be in the lobby at 39 Dalton Street from ten till three with three, “big-ass tables.” Grab a drink and take a ride on the coffee table of your dreams.
(Surface in Boston This Week - Tales from the Microsoft Surface team)
When it came time to ask someone to refine the idea behind the Defrag conference, Jeremy Zawodny (Yahoo) was tapped to provide an explanation. The first ideas Jeremy felt were the reasons for Defrag to exist were Open Source, Social Everywhere, Web Services, and Web platforms. Open Source got left out of the discussion a bit, but the remaining three were very interesting.
The point was made the MySpace and Facebook typify sites that are built as destination sites without much real function. In contrast, MyBlogLog attempts to incorporate social software around online activities people already participate in.
This argument makes plenty of sense up front. Providing rich socialization ability in the online locales where users already spend a lot of time is both obvious and logical. Personally I get all dizzy at the thought of a Facebook-esque news feed built into my Flickr homepage. However the question of a tipping point is worth exploring; If enough users all show up, does a site need a real purpose? There are plenty of popular bars that have lines out the door and tonnes of people inside, while the only function of the place is to buy overpriced drinks.
Yahoo’s investment in Hadoop, in conjunction with the in-house growth of Yahoo Research’s Pig, represent a shift in development priorities towards something Jeremy calls, “infrastructure software.” The social networks, even in their first-generation ‘outpost’ modes, are showing us that software needs to leverage grid/infrastructure computing, as distribution is handled by the users.
The movement towards developing software to run in the cloud is clearly a mandate for anyone who wants to have an audience moving forward. When you combine the idea of relocating social software and building the tools for developing infrastructure software, the end result is an extremely democratized method of software deployment. The human experience of finding software through your social grid is more capable than traditional marketing and distribution. This is incredibly similar to the painful evolution of the music industry, and I think what application developers need is something like a Radiohead vanguard to follow.
This morning’s Defrag keynote opened with a panel discussion on where the business of search and discovery has come from, and where it needs to go.
Marti Hearst (UC Berkeley) made a strong opening analogy by explaining that search is currently an, “experience in orienteering;” the journey to your information begins with a few words, followed by a long period of sniffing out clues. This process repeats until hopefully you find what you were looking for.
Obviously this creates a demand for a major upgrade to the human experience of search. One of the natural solutions is natural language processing, where Microsoft is doing a lot of great work (TellMe, Windows Speech Recognition, and Ford Sync).
Another of the interesting factors in the evolution of search is a pitch for building more topic-specific indexes. Steve Larsen (Krugle) argued a compelling case for vertical search indexes, “In a code-writing search index, Python is never a reptile and always a language.”
This feels like a workaround for the lack of NLP implementation/effectiveness, but as opposed to most instances, that sort of design sounds extremely valuable. I think I might rather have a half-dozen different search engines that I use across a day, assuming they are each much more targeted toward the information I’m looking for. I think this type of strategy could allow for a lot of smaller-scale growth in the search market.
Bradley Horowitz (Yahoo) gave an explanation of Flickr’s Interestingness system which brought up the powerful difference between explicit and implicit discovery systems. Explicit systems (voting, rating) are ripe for gaming and rigging, which obviously prevents an honest view of the landscape from emerging. The Interestingness recipe watches views, comments, and favourites across all the system’s photos. In addition though, it weights the value of those actions based on the relationship the author has with the viewer (your brother marking your photo as a favourite is different than a stranger doing the same). Intricacies like that help develop a more honest result set.
The beauty I see in these implicit designs is their invisibility to a user’s actions. Rather than putting the request on the user to think consciously about the value they place on something, the software simply listens and reacts. As Bradley put it so eloquently, “The system changes in the user’s wake.”
When the discussion got to addressing the uncrawlable information trapped behind paywalls and corporate firewalls. Jeremie Miller (Search Wikia) made the comment that as people define knowledge by what is discovered through search, knowledge that doesn’t make it into the index may cease to exist (so far as many people are concerned).
Honestly I’m terrified by the social implications of such a reality; the rift between those with access to the indexes and those without can have dire effects, not to mention the concerns around who controls those indexes.
