A long time ago I wrote this post about Creativity & Innovation in products & service offerings in IT. Without repeating my other post; I mentioned that I find it interesting to see that big players in one area in the IT industry, such as Google in search and Microsoft in Windows & Office products start going away from their core competencies and offer additional products and services and move away from enhancing their core product (or so it seems to me anyway - not in all cases but in some) for instance, can anyone tell me what the latest major improvement / upgrade Google did to it's search engine??

I personally don't know if anything has changed to improve/change the search experience... Are we there yet? Is this really the best Google can do? Is this really the best Microsoft can do? Is this really the best Yahoo can do? Surely not, I'm sure there's a long way to go.

Anyway, to get to the point of this post: yesterday I came across Tafiti a beta service from Microsoft that offers a different way to search the web powered by the new Live Search. Despite the fact that it might need a little bit of getting used to, it's a cool way of searching IMHO, allows you to also bookmark your searches ...etc. Worth trying out I think.

Live Search itself has been upgraded to a new version (will post about this in more detail soon) I particularly like how they improved the advanced search options of Live Search.

This is just a quick post to mention that Live Search 2.0 is here. Check it out it's being rolled out world wide but only seemed to arrive to NZ a couple of days ago. See the Live Search blog for more details.

I will be posting my thoughts on it soon.

I've had a play with the idea I suggested in my previous post about this topic and using the Facebook Developer Toolkit it was possible to get a lot of information out of Facebook and display those in a .NET application and you can also get info back in XML format so this should work well with a gadget. So far so good...

BUT the problem with using the toolkit or the Facebook API for that matter is authenticating your Facebook application user so you can get some info. For a web application you have to redirect to the Facebook login page let users login and then capture the authentication token... For having a Windows Live gadget I'm not sure yet how to do an alternative to this, would have been nice if there was an API method that lets you pass in login details for authentication...

Will have to think about a way to work around this so that I can carry on with my gadget development otherwise I'm not entirely sure this idea will work.

I've recently been made aware of a new site www.viawindowslive.com that provides a great place for developers to find resources about the Windows Live family of products. The site is still in the early days but more content is going in all the time, I've even started contributing some stuff myself and will be writing more stuff very soon.

Here's a brief description of the site taken from the about page

"Welcome to the Via Windows Live community space. This space is dedicated to you as a developer to help you build and understand how to utilise Windows Live technologies in your applications.  You'll find different sections on the various Live technologies and APIs that are currently available for software developers."

Information on the people behind Via Windows Live can also be found here

I've recently been wanting a lot to dig deeper into other areas of Windows Live that I don't know much about and get myself to learn more about these. Of course the hard thing in moving forward with that stuff aside from motivation is thinking of an idea of something that can be done.

I think I found an answer to that today! Here's something I'm going to try and see if I can do with or without help and I think it's a cool idea! One that will help me learn more about Windows Live Gadgets and also Facebook!

Here's the plan. I will attempt to get some data from Facebook and show this data on Windows Live and the idea is basically to allow you to see a little bit of your Facebook stuff on your Windows Live homepage.

- A couple of possibilities would be perhaps status updates of friends,notifications, and also showing who's online...

Sounds like an interesting project to work on, will see how it goes!

I've previously blogged about Windows Live Custom Domains and POP3 support in my last two posts but didn't really talk much about setting it up. Thanks to Darryl's post I don't need to!

You can go read his full post but here's a quick summary of what you need to do.

- Register your own domain name if you don't have one
- Head to domains.live.com and sign in using a Windows Live ID/Passport
- Choose the Setup Windows Live Hotmail for my domain option
- Note the settings given by Windows Live Custom Domains for the MX/TXT records
- Head to your DNS provider and add a MX record and optionally the TXT record as given by Windows Live Custom Domains
- Go back to your Live Domains account and refresh
- Done!

Yep that's all you need to do, if you wish to use Outlook with your Windows Live Custom Domains account you will need the Outlook connector, see my previous post for more information on this.

I had a look around and I think I found the answer to the above question. The answer happens to be there is no support for POP3 with Windows Live Custom Domains at the moment. I found the following piece of information here

"Right now these protocols are not supported for free or paying users.  We are evaluating adding these protocols to the product in the future, but likely as part of the above subscriptions.  We currently do support protocols for rich e-mail clients like Outlook and Outlook Express in the above subscriptions."

So as far as I can tell there is no POP3 support for paying or non paying customers at present. However IMHO using Outlook Connector seems to be good enough. You can also sync your calendar with Outlook by applying the workaround from the link above.

Most of the questions and answers about Windows Live Custom Domains can be found in that link above. 

In my previous post I said I will soon be trying Windows Live Custom Domains and this weekend I managed to have a play with it and I like it! Now I have all my emails for this domain on Windows Live and I can access my email via the Hotmail website, Outlook (will get to that in a minute) and can also have my email showing on my Windows Live home page which was one of my wish list items for Windows Live a while back nice!

I recently read on Lukas's blog the following:

"However their service with POP3 support is not free and a lot more expensive than even the Google premium service."  

I can't find any references to POP3 support whether free or not but you can use Windows Live Custom Domains with the Microsoft Office Outlook Connector which can be downloaded from here and can be used with Outlook 2003 & 2007. I've just tried using the outlook connector and it seems to work well with Outlook. Will update this post if I find any info on POP3 support. 

When I first started blogging about the Windows Live family of products I initially was very general and then I developed an interest in Live Search, now I think I've covered Live Search quite a bit and I feel ready to jump onto the next thing. On my list of things to checkout in the Windows Live family next

- Windows Live Gadgets (It's about time I started playing with these)
- Windows Live Domains

So expect some blog posts about these in the next few weeks

It looks like Microsoft is building another search engine? or perhaps revamping Live Search, not sure. But I guess we'll see.

I do have some thoughts about Live Search though and here they go. I don't think the problem with Live Search is it's algorithm or index or anything like that. I think it's the culture around it!

Those of you who read my blog would know that I've covered Live Search a lot and I like to think that I took a close look at it. IMHO, Live Search isn't lacking in features but it's lacking a lot of support! It doesn't seem to me that Live Search has had good coverage in the blog world by MS bloggers which I find a bit interesting! The other thing works at a disadvantage to Live Search is it's name! I can go and talk to some one and say I 'googled' blah blah, or they can say google this and this, but this wont work with Live Search, I cant go say I Live Searched this thing.. not easy to pronounce, same thing with yahoo, I don't feel it's very easy on the mouth!

Here are some naming suggestions (which are not really that great but I think illustrate my idea)

MS Can buy www.find.com (I mean the domain name and not the actual site) and name it's search Windows Live Find, then when someone is trying to search for something they can go Find it and when they do they can say, I found  it ...etc

My other naming suggestion would be, Windows Live Locate, and using www.locate.com (I mean the domain name and not the actual site) then they can use Locate it ...etc like I say in the find example. This could help MS substitute google as a search term... hence compete with the google culture.

Microsoft, I still love your search engine but you can do better, I hope you are listening!!!!

I was going to write about this in the past before all the issues I had with my blog but it looks like it's good I didn't! It just got a loot easier. A couple of months ago I was trying to play with the MSN Search Web service to see if I can add search functionality to my site.

I tried to do so by following this article, and my advice is, don't! Back then I got a bit confused by it and it seemed that some info was missing. Also a lot of the components such as the AntiXSS library were not even included and you had to search for them to get them included.

Now you don't have to do any of this! Thanks to this download. The download includes all the files you need to get the search functionality included in your site.

The only thing you need to do is go and grab a search API ID from here and place that into your source code, you can either do this by adding a key with the obtained value into your Web.Config file or by entering the value in the appropriate place in the SearchProxy.aspx file, and this should be all! Well almost!

The only thing left to do from here is that you specify which site/sites you want the search to operate on this is done by replacing the following code that exists in the Default.html file in the source downloaded from the link mentioned earlier, with the values that you want.

var sc = new searchClient('keyAndCount', 'returnArea', "(site:www.dan.net.nz)");

So in this case I've set that value to search my blog site.

I wish I've seen this stuff a few month ago! Would have made my experimentation a lot easier

Just read this post on Scoble's blog and it got me thinking. I don't really care what Microsoft's intentions are to take Google head to head by offering similar services or what but I personally am very happy with the Windows Live family of services and Live Search specifically.

I think the problem is Google is just good enough for the search needs of most people and it also seems to fit very well when speaking about it  - I mean when saying "I googled this and that", it doesn't sound as easy to say I Yahoo'd blah blah or I Live Searched so and so.

Microsoft need to convince people that Windows Live - (and I'm speaking of Live Search specifically in this post) it's become my favourite area - is worth trying. AND IT IS! But on the surface there is no obvious reason that would let people use Live Search instead of Google. All of its good features have not been talked about enough, if ever, and I don't know why. Like Scoble indicates most of the people in Redmond (read MS employees, USE Google) well that's the problem! If people at Microsoft are not convinced their search engine is the best then how is it ever going to take off.

I think all what Live Search needs is for those that tried it to speak about it - what happened to all of those bloggers out there, if a word can spread through blogs online then MS people are the best to do it! How many MS bloggers do you know of?

The different features that Live Search offers need to come to the surface so people can know about them and try them. It's not just another search engine!

Here are a few things of the top of my head that I love about Live Search, go try them!

- Customizable Search algorithm
- Search Macros ( I was first introduced to this concept on Live Search and then Google came up with the very similar Personalized Search)
- Live Image Search (not having to click a NEXT button is just fantastic), the scratchpad is also a VERY interesting idea

So there goes a few. More on this topic in the future...

And what's the deal with the tag game thing, everyone currently says that everyone they know has been tagged 30 times so they aren't tagging anyone! It's interesting I have not been tagged yet, maybe my readers are not that many after all! My blog must be boring!

I thought I was keeping a good eye on what's happening with Live Search but Chris was faster to post about the ability to have Windows Live Search on your mobile. See his post here

I still have a couple more posts I was meant to write up last year and haven't yet, they should be coming soon. Stay tuned for more on Live Search.

Found this link about Live Search on the Microsoft home page.

I was playing with the MSN Search web service to try and enable Live Search into websites a couple of days ago and I lost the article reference that I was reading through with the examples.

Today while searching for that article I stumbled across this link. Apparently there are easy ways of integrating Live Search into your websites without having them embedded.

The link above allows you to implement the search in two ways, one by having the search box only and redirecting the results to the Live Search results. The second is by having a floating window that displays the results on top of your web site.

Check it out.

I'm currently also playing with the MSN Search web service (why is it called MSN and not Live when it's for Live Search?)  and will be posting more about this soon.

It's about time I started blogging again, it's been a while. A couple of days ago I realized that Google has made a new offering with it's search services. Google Personalized Search. And almost instantly I was thinking, this looks familiar and you know why. I blogged about something very similar before a while back when I posted about Windows Live Search Macros.

It looks like Google are offering a very similar service to WLSM. I have not tried Google's yet but will be checking it out soon.

I guess Google likes some of Microsoft's ideas! They even have an ugly looking service similar to Windows Live, have you ever seen the link that says personalized page on Google?

This just keeps getting better and better all the time! I've now found yet another reason to use Live Search. The Image Search features are really great. Viewing full size images was a very nice idea but here are some even better ones IMO. The scratch pad and the related people panes, VERY NICE. The scratch pad allows you to drag images to the side of the page and build a collection of images from the search results you get and the Related people pane also shows when you search for a person in images, if you seach for bill gates for example, you see Paul Allen, Warren Buffet ...etc in the related people list.

Here's a screenshot showing the scratch pad.

So Windows Live Search is now Live, and also has new features. I just noticed that there is now an "Only from New Zealand" checkbox that lets you localize the search. It's good this has now been made avaialbe and surely enough I had to try it out.

So I decided to seach for myself and it looks like Windows Live Search knows best!

Searching for "Dan" using WLS with only NZ selected returns my blog as the no1 result (yay!) and if I search for "Daniel" on WLS search I also end up on the first page but I show on 5th. Not bad!

On Google searching for "Dan" finds my blog on the top of page three when NZ is selected.

Will try to play with the algorithm customization thing I blogged about earlier and see what that does to the results (not that I want to!) it's good to be on page one.

The only annoying thing that I see after the release is renaming Windows Live TM Search to Live Search. I think it was better when all Windows Live pages had the Windows word in them rather than some having it and some not.

As you can probably tell by now, I've been paying a lot of attention to Windows Live generally lately as well as Windows Live Search specifically. This has actually got me thinking about Google again and back again to my Innovation and Creativity post.

As you would have read in that post, I mentioned that I don't like it when companies go out of what they do best to invest in offerings done by other companies and that I think there should always be new ideas ...etc but acknowledged that new entrants help evolve existing products but here's the question. Do they?

Now as you know I've been having a close look at Windows Live Search recently and I like it a lot, it even looks like it might be out of beta soon. The logo doesn't have the word beta any more, there's no news of that anywhere though.

So I went back to take a close look at Google Search, now we all know that this is their big thing, after all they are the best search engine in the world. Well they might be, but is it going to stay so? I wouldn't be so sure about that, and here's why. Unless there's a secret Google search revamp project going somewhere. I thing Google has a problem, they are investing in areas which IMO are out of their main services - email,spreadsheets,IM's ..etc and are forgetting their core service?

I personally am starting to slowly go away from Google. Windows Live Search is great for me and I use a lot of the other Windows Live offerings anyway, so it's easier for me that way. So unless Google are doing something to renew their search engine, they could lose me!

One of the other cool features that Windows Live Search has that I've been playing with lately is search macros, which allow you to create a sub search engine - the best way to explain this in my words - so basically enabling you to have a context or so for a search. Some of the things you can do is specify a list of sites for the search to work on and even use advanced search queries. Once a macro is defined you can then use this macro as the search engine and use that to search for what you want.

I guess the benefit of this is getting more specific results returned to what you are looking for.

One example I've tried is creating a macro to search auction and e-commerce shops sites such as TradeMe,Zillion and Ferrit ..etc

To create a macro, search for anything and then when the search bar appears above the results go here:

and then follow through.

I'm still not happy that the pageless search has been removed but displaying 50 results on the page kind of minimizes the need for me to click a page number anyway, so not so bad.

While looking through the advanced options of Windows Live Search after my previous post I noticed this

Apparently you can customize how the search works, cool idea. Will have a play with this shortly.

Two of the features that made me like Windows Live Search a lot was the ability to navigate results without having to click on a page number to go to a next page and the ability to customise the depth of the results. It looks like these two features are now gone and I dont see why.

Eventhough I can setup Windows Live Search to show upto 50 search results on one page, I still hate that whole pages idea and LOVED the feature in Windows Live Search that overcame that problem.

Those two features were the reason I decided to use Windows Live Search more than I used Google, but now whats the difference between both?

They are both good enough for my search result purposes and I favoured Windows Live Search for the two features that are now gone.

Feedback posted to Live.com. It would be nice if the page can be customized to use either option I think.

This is just for my own future reference. As I plan to have a play with writing Live.com gadgets some time soon.

See here for details

Here goes my first post from Windows Live Writer, and first impressions are this thing looks VERY cool. I've recently decided to try out as much as I can of the Windows Live family of services and products so expect to see more posts on Windows Live stuff very soon.

So far I've only blogged about Windows Live.Com, Windows Live Messenger, Windows Live Mail, and Windows Live Search, and here goes Windows Live Writer. More stuff soon on the categories I didn't cover closely and ones I havent covered yet

After being very annoyed by the Windows Live problem I reported in my previous post, I decided to go ahead and contact the Windows Live Support. And after exchanging about 6 emails with them my problem is FINALLY solved!

At first they suggested me resetting all my browser settings giving me all details on what to do ...etc and try again. Which I did and didnt fix anything. So I email back saying it didnt work and then they email back suggesting that my account might need resetting which they do, that still didnt work so I email again. They reply saying the have transfered the problem to the product support team and require blah blah of information which I give them and then they reply saying thanks ... and confirm they sent the problem to the product support team and FINALLY I get back an email saying that I should DELETE the 'Add Content' pane from my page and just use the 'Add Stuff' link at the top of the page. So I do this, and it WORKS, FINALLY!

Overall, I'm pleased with their attempts to help but I think it could have been a lot faster. So anyway my page is now rebuilt and Live.com is on my happy side again.

Oh and on a side note: Congrats to JD for winning this years blog of the year competition. Though it seems he can't find any PC's with internet connectivity at TechEd yet, see here for more! He hasn't announced his win on his blog!

I don't know how long this has been the case but it's annoying me alot, I went through a PC rebuild last week and after I was back up and running I logged on to my 'customized' Windows Live page and hmm... It's no longer there. All my custom settings have been lost and it went back to the default look you get when you first set it up. I was very annoyed by this but I thought maybe the settings where stored in cookies or something on my local machine that got deleted from my rebuild. So I go to work the next day and load up my page there again and hmm... I see the old settings but then I think maybe this is a cached page. So I refresh it and :-( I lose everything again. The next thing I think of, it's ok, I can rebuild my settings on live.com but I can't and here's why.

As you can see above, the add content pane never gets populated with the content I can add and remaings "loading" forever. Very annoying...

I just noticed that Windows Live Messenger and a few other Windows Live products have now gone out of beta. Google are you listening! One thing that looks interesting among those is Windows Live Domains. It seems that this will make possible one of my early requested features of being able to access other email accounts than Hotmail though windows Live.

Off first glance it looks like the offering is very similar to google's which Rod has been trying out. But with less storage space. Will be interesting to see how these two evolve in the future. The main difference at present is that Google's offering is beta while Windows Live's isn't.

Ok so it's been over two weeks since I've posted saying that I will give Windows Live Search a try. Well here are some of my thoughts. In my previous post I mentioned two of the annoying things I found with Windows Live and posted an update on how to resolve one of them. Well it looks like the second one (the position of the search box on the page+ the tab order) has been solved! I was soo annoyed by this so I even ended up posting feedback comments to Windows Live about it! And guess what (they seemed to listen - yeah right!)

Well, not long after I posted the feedback I noticed that when you are not signed in to Windows Live, the page has been tidied up a bit with the search box in the middle of the page and the tab order selecting the search box by default and all the other non necessary stuff not shown (NICE) this means that I can go and use Windows Live Search just as a search tool without a distraction by all the other stuff just like I would use google. I really like that change.

Search Performance: 

As for the search performance, well it seems to do a very decent job but there are 2 things that annoyed me. Search results for the stuff I looked for in the past two weeks were almost always relevant. I only went to Google once to find something I couldnt find directly by using WLS. However, there was one thing that spoilt my experiment (my Google addition!) on 3 or 4 occassions even when having WLS as my default page. When I am browsing somewhere else and needing to look for something I immediately find myself searching Google! Otherwise I was very please with Windows Live Search. The annoying thing I found was the way WLS displays the results- but there is a way around it. The way WLS displays results without letting you click to go to a next page is a very great idea but was annoying in the following case. If you use the cursor to move the scroll bar and reach the bottom if it, it automatically jumps back to the top of the middle of the page to continue displaying the results. This makes you lose the position of the cursor above the scroll bar which I found a bit annoying. The way around this is to just use the down arrow key on the keyboard (which of course is more efficient anyway)

So overall WLS is looking good. I've played with News,Images and the general search during those two weeks.

I've decided to give Windows Live Search a good try and see if it will make a good subsitute to Google for me. There are already 2 things I dong like about the Windows Live Search interface, but I will give it a fair chance to just test how well it performs in returning useful results for what I'm looking for. The way I'll judge this is by seeing if I can find everything I am looking for without having to go look in google. This is not a formal experiment but just an attempt for me to convince myself whether or Windows Live Search is worthed.

The things I dont like about the interface are the fact that the search box is at the top of the screen. Why do I have to move the mouse all the way to the top of the screen to type a search query (and yes I know you can tab into fields and not have to move the mouse but to get to the search box thats another 4 tab clicks) Again I think the first tab order should be the box. The other thing is the number of search results that show on the page, in google I can see more results on each page and the WLS page displays sub results of listings from the same site (the indented ones) thats a waste of space IMO it would make a lot more sense to me to see top level listings as this will reduce the ammount of scrolling one has to do.

Anyway, I will ignore all those annoyances and see if I can really rely on the results returned by WLS for the next 2 weeks without having to go to Google.

Update: I just noticed that you can control the depth of the search for an entry using this thing: available at the top right corner

the further left you pointed the more results displayed with less descriptive detail. That kindof solves one of the two things I reported not liking.

Tim posted about Live.com saying why he 'doesn't' like it here.

Here's my take on the topic.

While Tim sees 'no compelling reason' to use it. I think I've found a few...

I do agree with Sean that it live.com makes a great homepage; while this depends on how you customise it
here is why it works great for me.

Live.com allowed me to group a lot of my online usage in one place; which saves space and memory!

Here's how:

Every morning here are some of the things I tend to do online

- Check my email accounts
- Read blogs
- Read news from several news sites
- Check the weather
- View stock information
- Search for stuff online

Using live.com  I managed to group most of the above in one place.

And here's why.I dont have to open Sauce Reader to read blogs;open news sites in several tabs/browser windows to check latest news for each ..etc
I also dont have to open hotmail...

The advantage in the bit above that you get from live that I can see 'parts' of each section before I decide to read news so that if there's nothing new; then I just wont read...

So overall it does reduce work by having things grouped.

The things I dont like about Live.com
-------------------------------------
- It's slow; on broadband it takes more than a 5 or so seconds to load!
- The above become more of a problem with more usage! The more I like live.com the more I'll add stuff to it the slower it becomes :-(
- I also dont like the current UI - The previous one (where you could customise border colours was much better IMO
- I REALLY would like to be able to access ANY email account I have through live and not just Hotmail.

I dont know how long this has been the case, but it looks like Windows Live Mail beta is now available no non US residents. I've signed up for this a while back and received my invite today.

- I can now enjoy a hotmail account with 2Gb space, nice, wont have to worry about downloading my messages every now and then now.
- It integrates very nicely with Windows Live - I really like the grouping of services that Windows Live does. My wish tho is that Windows Live would allow you to plug in other email accounts to it than just hotmail, this will be very handy if it happens I think.

A couple of days ago I got a Windows Live Messenger invitation and been using it since. Over all it looks good and has some nice new features new user interface ...etc, but here's the one that caught my attention. In Windows Live Messenger you can actually send offline messages to people when they are not online so that they'd receive them on their next login, very cool! This used to be one of my favourite features in ICQ and I'm glad to see it in Windows Live Messenger now. I havent tried MSN Messenger 7.5 but I'm sure that this feature was not available in MSN 7 and earlier.

To send an offline message just right click an offline name or just double click the name...

Update: I also just noticed that you can now also talk to people while you are appearing offline, nice!!! I wished for this feature long time ago to be on MSN...

I previously blogged about my first impressions on Windows Live here

Well so far I've been very happy with it - kudos to the Windows Live team. The reason I like it so much is that it puts together several things that I do every day.

But what I would REALLY like to see made available (my Windows Live Christmas wish list) is:

The ability to integrate any email account to the page and not just Hotmail or Windows Live Mail Beta.

I really dont think this is very hard to achieve, and would love to be able to plug-in several email accounts into it.

The next other thing I wish would happen is Image Search, I occasionally find this feature very handy in Google when working on some projects and looking for specific images ..etc

So Sean I know you mentioned that you are trying to convince you're family to have Windows Live as their homepage. Well here's a promise from me, if any of the above features on my wish list become available, I promise to have www.live.com as my homepage

Just  been playing around with the newly launched Windows Live www.live.com and my first impressions is, very nice! Integrating a search engine along with other things such as email and news feeds is just very very handy to me.

Having RSS feeds and a good search engine integrated in one place, plus a simple, easy to navigate interface is just great.

More thoughts to come soon