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!

Some of you may have heard that Christchurch is about to have it's first CodeCamp ever and it's going to be a great event. Peter, Chris & Darryl have already blogged about it and now it's my turn. I was waiting on us confirming the venue and dates and now they have been confirmed, the event details are below.

Myself and Peter will be sending out speaker invitations this weekend so some of you should expect to hear from us soon So whether you want to present a session or just attend one then don't wait! Hurry up and head over to here for registration. We look forward to seeing you there.

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've been using Sauce Reader for reading all my feeds till now and I want to move on but can't decide on what to use. What is everyone using out there.

The only 2 annoying things with Sauce Reader were it's a desktop thing so cant read all my feeds from anywhere without my computer, and a few crashes every now and then, other than that, I really liked using it.

I know of several other replacements to Sauce Reader such as FeedDemon that I can try, but I was thinking of an online reader, and so far, I am not impressed with any.

Here are the ones I tried and my thoughts about them.

Live.com : Can import my opml file and read feeds there but there are 3 problems.

1) Only partial content is shown

2) Can't read comments on posts

3) to read more you have to popup a new window 

BlogLines : Better than live .com but I don?t like the fact that

1) I don't like the frame set, the frame divider is far too thick

2) Again can't read comments on posts

NewsGator Online : Only tried the beta AJAX version of it. Better than the above two but

1) Seems a little bit slow

2) Again even though it does seem to have a comments section at the bottom it doesn't seem to grab any feed comments!

Google Reader : Not impressive at all, well not to me anyway, but it seems a lot of people like it out there. Problems:

1) I don't like the UI, colours are just bad, consistent with GMail colours but used the wrong way around I think.

2) Comments, comments, comments, where are they, why are ALL online readers I've tried missing comments.

Are online readers a bad idea? Is there anything better that I haven't tried out?
It looks like I might give up the whole online RSS reader thing and just stick with something like FeedDemon.
If I have to choose from the above I would go for the NewsGator one, but still it feels like the best of the worst to me.