Imagine a great consumer experience that provides visual
search and the ability to share photos with your friends via IM – that is what Photobucket landed this week by using Silverlight to create a rich visual search
and combining it with Windows Live
Messenger to make it social. Photobucket
visual search is a great example of how the activity of searching for
images can be turned into a rich and compelling social experience, taking full
advantage of one of the most widespread social sharing behaviors with Windows
Live Messenger. Photobucket made use
of the Windows Live
Messenger Web Toolkit UI Controls which provides a skinable and flexible
way to interact with the 320+ million people who use Windows Live Messenger
monthly. The UI controls can be easily integrated (see Interactive SDK) in web sites
and makes a lot of the heavy lifting (coding JavaScript) only required if you
want a fully custom experience. To get more in-depth
details of how the implementation was done see Angus
Logan's blogpost.
Join the Windows Live Messenger team to learn how to integrate Messenger capabilities into your Web site. The Windows Live Messenger Hackathon takes place on May 27, 2009 at Microsoft's offices on 835 Market St in San Francisco - very cool digs just around the corner from the Moscone Conference Center.
What's in it for me?
- Get the State of the Nation from our social media guru (TBA)
- Build a web app that uses Messenger APIs with the Messenger Devs
- Prizes for best implementations - Xbox 360, Zunes, Microsoft Hardware up for grabs!
- Oh yeah, and we have beer and Pizza ;-)
When is it? (27th May 2009)
5:30 - 6:00pm: Arrival, Beers, Pizza
6:00 - 6:20pm: Social Media: State of the Nation from social media guru (TBA)
6:20 - 6:40pm: Messenger Library High Level
6:40 - 7:00pm: Chill, Network, Beer, Pizza (Biz Guys can slink off)
7:00 - 7:30pm: Messenger Library Deeper Dive
7:30 - 10:00pm: Hackathon - let's code!
Who should attend?
- CxO - for the state of the nation and networking
- Developers - for the hackathon
- Everyone - for the beer and pizza!
What do I need to bring?
Bring your codebase for a web app (if you have one) on your laptop so you can work together with the Messenger experts from Windows Live to hack instant messaging into your site!
No web app? Don't worry we can load a sample site with code onto your laptop instead.
Some Inspiration
Here's James Senior Esq. to tell you more about the event and provide some examples of things you can build with the Messenger Web Toolkit.
Video: Live Services Hackathon
And here is a video by Angus Logan, demo'ing even more functionality from the Messenger Web Toolkit:
A bit of background on Live Messenger:
We won't bore you with too much marketing fluff, but you should know that Windows Live Messenger is the world's most popular IM network with over 320m users and we've opened up our APIs so that web applications can integrate with our service to provide cool experiences for their users. To find out more about the Messenger APIs, check out http://dev.live.com/messenger
Dare Obasanjo here, from the Live Services Program Management team. I'd like to talk a bit about the work we are doing to increase interoperability across the "Social Web."
The term The Social Web has been increasingly used to describe the rise of the Web as a way for people to interact, communicate and share with each other using the World Wide Web. Experiences that were once solitary such as reading news or browsing one's photo albums have now been made more social by sites such as Digg and Flickr. With so many Web sites offering social functionality, it has become increasingly important for people to be able to not only be able to connect and share with their friends on a single Web site but also to take these relationships and activities with them wherever they go on the Web.
With the recent update to Windows Live, we are continuing with the vision of enabling our 500 million customers to share and connect with the people they care about regardless of what services they use. Our customers can now invite their contacts from MySpace (the largest U.S. social networking site) and Hi5 to join them on Windows Live in a safe manner without having to resort to using the the password anti-pattern. These sites join Facebook and LinkedIn as social networks from which people can import their social graph or friend list into Windows Live.
In addition to interoperating with social networks to bridge relationships across the Web, we are also always working on enabling customers to share the content they are find interesting or activities they are participating in from all over the Web with their friends who use Windows Live services like Hotmail and Messenger. Customers of Windows Live can now add activities from over thirty different online services to their Windows Live profile including social networking sites like Facebook, photo sharing sites like Smugmug & Photobucket, social music sites like last.fm & Pandora, social bookmarking sites like Digg & Stumbleupon and much more.
We are also happy to announce today that in the coming months, MySpace customers will be able to share activities and updates from MySpace with their Windows Live network.
Below is a screenshot of some of the updates you might find on my profile on Windows Live
These recent announcements bring us one step closer to a Social Web where interoperability is the norm instead of the exception. One of the most exciting things about our recent release is how much of the behind-the-scene integration is done using community driven technologies such as the Atom syndication format, Atom Activity Extensions, OAuth, and Portable Contacts. These community driven technologies are moving to ensure that the Social Web is a web of interconnected and interoperable web sites, not a set of competing walled gardens desperately clutching to customer data in an attempt to invent Lock-In 2.0
As we look towards the future, I believe that the aforementioned standards around contact exchange, social activity streams and authorization are just the first steps. When we look at all the capabilities across the Web landscape it is clear that there are scenarios that are still completely broken due to lack of interoperability across various social websites. You can expect more from Windows Live when it comes to interoperability and the Social Web.
Just watch this space.
Hey, Angus Logan here, I'm at Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco - there is a great vibe and lots of action. I've been spending time with and learning a ton from some of the open stack crew, Joseph Smarr, David Recordon, and Chris Messina. We've been talking about the technology, adoption, and when Microsoft (we) will roll our preview Open ID and Portable Contacts endpoints into production (nothing to announce right now).
Microsoft is a proponent of open standards through our work in the Open ID foundation and the Open Web Foundation. As these open specifications continue to mature, services such as RPX are great because they provide a stepping stone for developers.
I’m excited to see the announcement that RPX now consumes Windows Live IDs.
RPX delivers both user experience for identity provider selection and a translation layer between many proprietary and standardized protocols used by identity/resource providers.
End-users can spend their time in so many places on the web. The battle for attention is harder than ever. The downside of having limitless choice is the tax of signing in and telling websites about yourself. RPX makes it possible to sign in using one of the many identities a person already has - this includes authentication and profile information (first name, last name, etc.)
Web site owners just need to go to www.rpxnow.com and create an account. As end user data is being shared you need to create a Windows Live App ID and you tell RPX the details of your app ID and specify a privacy statement. You can also use the authentication page co-branding to make the experience somewhat smoother for your end-users. After this you implement some UI on your website, and you should see higher end-user satisfaction and conversion for signing in and profile information.
The Live Services APIs used are Windows Live ID Web Authentication and the Windows Live Contact API. Web Authentication is one of the options third parties have for becoming a relying party of the Windows Live ID identity provider/Microsoft federation gateway. It is built using standard web technologies and techniques such as browser based redirects/form posts. The Windows Live Contact API in this case is being used as a profile API as it exposes the "owner record" of the Windows Live user. To gain permission to the profile & address book Windows Live ID Delegated Authentication (DelAuth) was used. DelAuth provides a few unique controls for users to select certain objects to be shared, and the duration of the access.
Below are some screenshots from www.ladygaga.com which uses RPX:
(Windows Live ID, sign in and delegation stuff you've all seen before)
Hey - Angus Logan here, back from MIX09 in Las Vegas. We had a whopping 8 sessions about identity/safety, messaging and the Live Framework at MIX - below are links to all of the sessions about Live Services, which you can view online.
Overview of Sessions
Messaging / Presence : On Wednesday we announced the Windows Live Messenger Web Toolkit, which is a set of controls and libraries that enable you to connect Windows Live Messenger users and their friends with users of your Web site.
-
Keiji Kanazawa gave an overview of the Windows Live Messenger Web Toolkit
-
Chris Parker showed 5 of the top scenarios we identified for a site to become more social & sticky by being enabled with the Windows Live Messenger Web Toolkit.
-
Angus’s pick! Jordan Snyder from Effective UI shared her experiences in integrating the Windows Live Messenger Web Toolkit into a slick Silverlight application for a major photo sharing web site (more news coming soon.)
Identity & Safety : Microsoft is in a unique position to be running one of the largest services in the world, with over 500 million people signing in every month.
-
Jorgen Thelin gave an overview of the different aspects of the Live Identity Service and how we are making it available for web developers, companies that sell solutions and also organizations that want to adopt cloud services.
-
Angus’s favorite :: John Scarrow talks about the things you need to think about when running a massive high scale service in terms of people abusing your service. “the terrorists are no longer in their camps in the desert, they are moving into apartment buildings (i.e. your web site)”
Live Framework – we unveiled the Live Framework at PDC and have been working away taking feedback, hardening and evolving it.
-
Ori Amiga gave an overview of the Live Framework all up
-
Arash Ghanaie-Sichanie went deep on what meshifying a web app really means
-
Angus’s pick! Gregory Renard from Wygwam had the most fun session and showed a great new tool the Live Framework Explorer for Visual Studio.
Full list of sessions with links
Identity & Safety |
 |
Learn how Microsoft provides a range of identity solutions for helping developers more easily build seamless user experiences that include Federation, Authentication, UX Customization, Open Standards, Open ID and more. |
 |
Come hear how Microsoft protects content and identities as servers and users become more distributed worldwide. |
Messaging & Presence |
 |
See how to add IM to a site with the Windows Live Messenger Library and UI Controls, and how to build new relationships around content with Messenger social capabilities. Also hear how top sites and marketers are using the social connections of Windows Live users to grow and … |
 |
Come learn how to make your site more engaging with the Windows Live Messenger Web Toolkit. |
 |
Learn how to add instant stickiness and drive new users to a Web site while uncovering the hidden social network within. Hear how Effective UI quickly and easily added these capabilities to its customers' existing Microsoft Silverlight projects using the Windows Live Messenger … |
Live Framework |
 |
Learn about the Live Framework including new and future services (such as Mesh Services), protocols, APIs, and tools which enable your Web, service, or client applications to access, store, and synchronize user data with Live Services, obtain audience analytics data, and more. |
 |
Come learn how to extend your existing Web applications and get them to live and breathe within Live Mesh. See how Mesh-enabled Web applications can be accessed from anywhere through a Web browser as well as run locally (and offline) on a user's desktop. Also see how Web … |
 |
Learn how to use Live Services to light up rich client applications or to extend Web applications to the desktop. See how to easily access Live Framework to produce and consume data that automatically syncs with the cloud and the devices in a user's digital life. |
For users of the Web, being able to connect to friends and build social networks is becoming more important every day. Today, we are releasing the Windows Live Messenger Web Toolkit--a set of controls and libraries that enable you to connect Windows Live Messenger users and their friends with users of your Web site.
See a video demonstration.
Windows Live Messenger is the most used instant messaging services world wide, with more than 320 million monthly active accounts in over 50 countries and in 36 languages.
For Web site owners
The Windows Live Messenger Web Toolkit provides Web sites with three core benefits:
- User acquisition: Your Web site visitors can help you build your audience on the fly by inviting their friends to your site through instant messaging.
- Deeper engagement: The toolkit allows people on your Web site to easily chat with their Messenger friends or others on your site, keeping them their longer.
- Return traffic: Bringing people back to your Web site is difficult when the only weapon in your arsenal is email. Using Messenger functionality you can break through the inbox chatter and remind people why your service is so great.
For the people
The Windows Live Messenger Web toolkit provides these key benefits to your users:
- See your friends in more places: Sometimes using a new web site is a lonely experience. You want to go where everybody knows your name, or at least you want to be able to find your friends. The toolkit allows your users to easily find their friends who already use the site, or connect with existing friends and bring them to the party.
Meet new people and choose if you want to stay connected to them: Want to connect with others who share a common interest? Discover and connect with someone who is watching the same videos or commenting on the same content. Be discovered and contacted by someone who lives in the same town or likes the same music. Earn yourself a new friend. - Express yourself across the web: Windows Live Messenger users invest a lot of time changing their status messages, display pictures and display name to reflect their mood. Now, this personal expression can be shared with others on your Web site.
Show me the bits
Web developers can choose the level of customization by using the pre-built and skinnable Web Bar control, using the 16 modular UI Controls, or building the entire experience from the ground up using the Windows Live Messenger Library.
We have many cool samples in multiple languages (C#, VB.NET, PHP, Ruby, Java, Python and Perl) that show you how simple it is to integrate the Windows Live Messenger Web Toolkit. So, no matter what your style, you've got the help you need to kick start your development and get these new capabilities on your Web site in a snap.
Getting started
The easiest way to begin is to use this tool, which provides a step-by-step guide and sample code to get you started.
See a video demonstration.
For people familiar with the Windows Live Messenger Library
We've heard from developers that they "want to control the entire experience, just give us APIs and we'll build it". To provide the best experience for everyone using Windows Live Messenger there is a certain baseline of functionality that needs to exist. Building this functionality was a lot of effort and while some great implementations were built, most developers felt the effort required was a lot so they asked for tools to make it easier for them to develop faster.
We decided to deliver a set of 16 JavaScript/HTML controls that can be skinned using CSS and extended using the Windows Live Messenger Library. These controls make it very fast for Web developers to let their users connect and share with their friends no matter where they are.
From v1 to v2.5 we also got some great feature requests and we have delivered a bunch of these, included:
- Automatic Sign In: Once a user opts into using Messenger on the site by using the "softer" opt-in screen, they can be automatically signed in by the Web site even if they use a different PC.
- Cross page state - you can now use this on content portals where users click between pages without losing their signed in status.
- Performance - the web based performance has been increased and should be similar to the Windows Live Messenger client when connected via HTTP.
- Connecting people who aren't Windows Live Messenger friends, yet - People have connections/relationships all across the web, we have now made it possible to for users to take these relationships and get to know the people more via IM (both web and client) and then if the user so chooses add that person to their WLM contact list. Anyone who opts into using Messenger on their website makes it possible for the website to play "match maker" for contacts and show the presence of people on any IM client (Web/phone/Xbox/desktop).
Try it out
You can go to dev.live.com/messenger today to add this to your web site.
The Live Framework team has released the April 2009 CTP update for the Live Framework. This update includes performance improvements, bug fixes, and improved functionality. For the details on what's new, see the release announcement on the Live Framework team blog.
To learn more about the Live Framework, see dev.live.com/liveframework.
Next month, at the MIX09 conference, we’ll be releasing some cool new bits. As such, we’ll be deprecating a bit of our current functionality later this month (details below). Thanks to everyone who has tried our current technologies and given feedback; please know that it has helped us in developing the richer functionality we’ll be providing at MIX and beyond. While we can’t say much more about what we’ll be releasing right now, we think you’ll love this new stuff and we can’t wait to get it in your hands. So watch this space as we get closer to the middle of March for more info.
So, what’s being deprecated?
The Windows Live Photos Control and the presence/messenger capabilities of the Windows Live Contacts Control (JavaScript and Visual Studio versions) will no longer be available come Feb 27th.
What alternatives do you have?
- For presence or Windows Live Messenger capabilities, you have a great set of alternatives. You can use one of the various Window Live Messenger APIs that are already available.
- You can continue to use the Contacts control to display contacts, but the ability to launch the Windows Live Messenger client or to show presence information will no longer be available. To continue to use the Contacts control to display contacts, all you need to do is to remove the devlive:view= "tile" or devlive:view= "tilelist" parameter from the <contactscontrol> element on your Web page.
Again, thanks to all who have used these controls and who have offered valuable feedback. We look forward to hearing how you like our next releases.
--Live Services Team
Hey - this is Angus Logan from the Live Services team! Yesterday was Safer Internet Day and I was at the Open ID UX summit. There are two things close to my heart, internet safety and user experience, and I wanted to take a moment to post some things we've done recently at Microsoft to help make the internet a safer place:
- An update on enabling data portability by working with the largest library developers to make address book portability safer for people using many web sites (see previous posts on screen-scraping).
- A new Live ID feature we are releasing to make the user experience on websites which use Windows Live ID for authentication better and more seamless (see previous posts on phishing resistance)
Safer Address book portability - legitimizing leading libraries
Over the past year we have been working with the largest websites (and of course with those that are not so big) in the world to provide a two-way street for address book portability. Throughout this effort we found most developers like the efficiencies gained by using libraries such as Octazen's Contact Importer. The downside of efficiency is a safety tradeoff, and asking end-users to share their Windows Live ID credentials with other websites is less than ideal (see password anti-pattern).
To this end we worked with the Octazen development team to use the Windows Live Contact API which puts the user at the center of their online experience by using Live ID Delegated Authentication. The user does not need to share their credentials and can select what information and how long it can be accessed by the requesting web site. The Octazen library for websites running PHP is available now and additional platforms (.NET / Java) will be available in the future (demo).
Other advancements in this space such as Portable Contacts and the innovation Plaxo discussed yesterday at the Open ID UX Summit which drove a 92% signup & address book conversion are very exciting but by working at the existing library vendor level many websites will implicitly get safer without any additional effort.
Safety isn't just threat vectors - it's also the experience
One of the consistent pieces of feedback we got from web sites which let users sign in using Windows Live ID Web Authentication was end users were being jarred by the user-experience shift once they clicked "sign in" and were taken to the Live ID authentication page.
For a security expert it makes perfect sense, only type in your credentials where you sourced them from (and you need to see the address bar). But for an end user you end up wondering "Where did the pretty site go and what am I doing here, was it a mistake?" and never return to the site.
Whilst balancing the need for instant recognition and desire for a consistent experience throughout the entire sign in flow we've developed a sign-in and sign-up experience for Windows Live ID which can be co-branded/themed and portions can be customized by web developers.
In the next few weeks a web site owner will be able to self service register their relying party, upload their configuration file and any requests to login.live.com for that Application ID (which redirect to a specific site) will have this co-branding/customization made available.
We have also made advancements in "vanilla" authentication screens designed to be used as a popup.
Below you can see regions which can be "themed" are blue and the areas which can be changed are yellow.
Sign In (login.live.com)
Sign Up
NOTE: This customization is not available for the Open ID authentication flow as that is designed to be consumed by any website not provisioned.
The Live Framework Tools team is pleased to announce the release of an update to the Community Technical Preview (CTP). The
January CTP update addresses top customer issues and includes a new update notification feature to notify you whenever the tools are updated.
For details about the fixes, check out the
Live Framework blog and
forum.
If you are a Drupal user and want to be able to show your Windows Live Messenger online presence, Coworks has a module for you. Coworks attended the Microsoft Web Hosting & Developer Roadshow in Belgium in December 2008, and decided to build a module for Drupal that takes advantage of Live Services. Coworks, who actually specialize in PHP custom development and modules for Drupal, learned that Live Services can be accessed using standard REST and SOAP calls and decided that it was a great reason to give it a go and take advantage of Windows Live Messenger’s capabilities to enhance Drupal CMS.
This integration of the Windows Live Messenger IM Control for Drupal CMS can be downloaded from the Drupal site at http://drupal.org/project/windowslivemessenger. Drupal CMS users can easily integrate the Messenger IM Control by downloading the module and following the activation steps detailed on the download page.
Hi everyone, Angus Logan (senior tech product manager for Live Services) here. I’m in San Francisco at the 2008 Crunchie Awards and after ~ 350k votes were cast Ray Ozzie and David Treadwell accepted the award for Best Technology Innovation/Achievement on behalf of the Live Mesh team.
The Crunchies are an annual competition co-hosted by GigaOm, VentureBeat, Silicon Alley Insider, and TechCrunch which culminates in an award for the most compelling startup, internet and technology innovations.
If you are a Live Mesh user, thanks for all of your feedback which helped us shape the experience and the underlying platform.
If you aren’t a Live Mesh user – what are you waiting for? Try it out for Windows, Windows Mobile & Mac.
DeepEarth is a new, open-source project that integrates Microsoft Virtual Earth with the Microsoft Silverlight 2.0 platform, making it easy to add an interactive, Silverlight 2.0 map to your application. Get all of the code and a full description of the features from the DeepEarth site on CodePlex:
DeepEarth is a mapping control powered by the combination of Microsoft's Silverlight 2.0 platform and the DeepZoom (MuliScaleImage) control. At its core, it builds on these innovative technologies to provide an architecture for bringing together layers for services, data providers, and your own custom mapping elements together into an impressive user experience. Also featured are in depth examples of how you can leverage Virtual Earth Web Services to take advantage of advanced GIS service functionality. This is what you need to get an interactive, native Silverlight 2.0, map into your application today.
You can view a working demo on the DeepEarth Soul Solutions website.
To try it out, download the code from Codeplex. As noted on the Virtual Earth blog, you will need at least a developer's account to get going, so make sure to sign up for a Virtual Earth Developers Account. And, to get rid of the "Staging" watermark, you'll need a license, which you can request by sending an email to the Virtual Earth Licensing Team. Enjoy!
Just a quick note that we will be winding down our Community Technology Preview of the Windows Live Spaces Photo API and the Windows Live Application Based Storage API in the next couple of days and we will be turning off those API endpoints.
The Photos API CTP especially has been extremely useful for us, as we learned a ton about the functionality developers want and previewed our first AtomPub endpoint – this AtomPub endpoint drove some of the thinking around the Live Framework. But the time has come for these CTPs to end. In the future, we will be back with another Photo API, but we don’t have the exact schedule yet.
Community Technology Previews are designed to shape the technology by giving developers early access to a technology to allow them to “kick the tires” and provide us valuable feedback. CTP releases explicitly do not allow for use in production-style environments (see terms). This allows us to get our offering right before we have customers bet their businesses on us. With the development of the Live Framework and the revamped release of Windows Live services, the APIs need an overhaul to provide a consistent developer and user experience for accessing private data and related metadata.
One last thing, I want to explicitly call out the work we did with eye.fi. Allowing their customers to upload photos to Spaces in a preview state really drove a lot of the key learnings around the Photo API – eye.fi have been a great partner.
There has been a lot of excitement and questions about the Live Framework since it was announced at the Professional Developers Conference. To help understand it and share tips, knowledge and code, the Live Framework team has started a new team blog. Subscribe to the feed and make sure to check out their first post "Hello from the Live Framework Team" to learn what their plans are and to take part in the growing community.
The Live Framework team has also made some new downloads available:
A whitepaper on the Live Framework Resource Scripts: A ResourceScript is a "declarative program definition which allows the programmer to model the AtomPub/FeedSync interactions against the Live Operating Environment. The ResourceScript program grammar includes constructs for declaratively modeling control flow, data flow, AtomPub and FeedSync interactions among other things."
Live Services & Mesh Backgrounds: Ori Amiga, the Principal Group Program Manager for the Live Framework, has put together some nice looking Live Services and Mesh backgrounds you can download.
Ori has also started a personal blog where you can find info about the Live Framework. Want to use IronPython with LiveFX? Ori tells you how to get started. And if you've seen the Channel 9 video on Ori's futuristic MeshMobile, now you can get a detailed description of the cool hardware that went into it.