James Senior's Blog

Something that I’ve been acutely aware of over the last few years is the Consumerization of IT, where the use of technology – amongst those known as the “Millennials” – creates a benchmark and an expectation that causes businesses to cater and provide technology at a faster pace for an ever more demanding group of individuals.  The battle for the best and brightest school leavers will be increasingly fought using golden gadgets as well as golden handshakes and golden handcuffs.

For me, job interviews are very much a two way conversation where both parties are trying to extract as much knowledge as possible from the other person.  That is to say, the interview is not just about the candidate getting grilled, this is about the candidate finding out if the role is right for them, the pay is acceptable, what the benefits are going to be etc.  These questions are starting to extend to technology, and candidates (I have done this in the past) are increasingly asking about the tools they are going to be provided with to do their job.  Questions like, do I get a phone, what type of phone is it? Does it do email? Do I get a laptop? How many? How many computer monitors do I get? Can I access the internet at work?  Can I use Facebook at work?

The list goes on – you get the picture.

The last question is a key one.  When it comes to social computing, what software do we have inside the workplace that facilitates the kind of social interaction and collaboration that apps like Facebook, Windows Live, Office Live or Twitter allow?  We’re starting to see these kind of experiences leaking into businesses via products like SharePoint with its Social Computing solution and I’m sure that Office 2010 will provide new ways with which to interact with colleagues, vendors and customers too.  Another example is Yammer, a business version of Twitter that allows conversations to only flow between company employees.  The use of Instant Messenger in the workplace through products like Office Communicator after IM was made popular by consumer products like Live Messenger and ICQ adds further weight to the argument.

For employers this means that HR departments and interviewers will need to be increasingly aware of what their company provides not only from a pay, benefit and career perspective, but also from an IT perspective.  Don’t be surprised to find more conversations going on between HR and IT in future, and don’t be surprised that businesses adapt as the fight for the brightest talent is increasingly driven by technology.

This blog post was inspired by a recently recorded podcast on the Consumerization of Enterprise IT.

[Photo courtesy of alexdpx on Flickr]

What is erupting right now as I write is an unconfirmed news story that Michael Jackson has died from a heart attack after being rushed to hospital.  For all the many tweets and Facebook status updates, it wasn’t clear what the truth was behind the story.  Was he actually dead or was he in a serious condition in hospital. 

A small online news website broke the “MJ is dead” news story first and set the whole thing on fire, but nobody in the major news outlets confirmed it.  This left the many people on Facebook and Twitter contributing to the mass hysteria, effectively running around like headless chickens shouting “is he dead” which quickly turned to “he’s dead” even before it was acknowledged or confirmed but someone reputable.

This kind of online mass hysteria is interesting to observe due to the velocity at which it gets out of control.  Twitter users Retweet one another, Facebook users comment and make their minds up based on their social circles.  But what if the sources are wrong?  You get the biggest false news story ever, thanks to the social microphone.

So I’ve been writing this post for the past 10 minutes, in between checking CNN.com, BBC.com, Twitter and Facebook and am still yet to know who is right.  Here is the verdict as of (1522 PST)

Twitter: MJ is dead - (search “Michael Jackson”)
Facebook News Feed: Mixed – death/unconfirmed death
CNN.com – heart attack, unconfirmed death
BBC.con – hear attack, unconfirmed death

Let’s see what happens…

[Update]

RIP Michael Jackson

Want to find out how passengers get the option for in-flight massages when they check in online?

Vittorio recently released a great screencast on using the identity from a third party website to drive the end user experience on your own website *all* without writing a single line of code *and* using open standards (WS-Federation) thanks to the Geneva Framework. 

In the video we see how he uses the delegated authentication and authorization of a third party which provides various claims back to his website.  These claims can drive different behaviors based on the information he receives back, for example in the demo he shows how to manipulate text and images using conditions and mappings based on the values received from the 3rd party.  The beauty of this is that you get it all without writing any code.

The sample code from the screencast, as you would expect, is downloadable.  Get it here.

For more detailed information on this topic, I would recommend you look at Vittorio’s blog post which delves into the guts of what goes on behind the scenes.

Looking for ways to manage your home energy a little more efficiently *and* save money in the process?  Well Microsoft Hohm could be right up your street!  We just launched Microsoft Hohm, a new online application that helps people understand how they can conserve energy and monitor their spending patterns across appliances and electrical devices in their house.

There’s a few nice technical details which are kind of nice like Hohm makes use of the custom Live ID sign in page (details here) and also runs on the Azure Services Platform – another example of a real live app launched on the platform.

Which online application is without an aspect of social these days?  Well Hohm is no different allowing people to share energy saving tips.  It’s like if Mint.com allowed me to recommend or provide feedback on a credit card.

Future plans are to provide a software development kit to utility companies so they can feed in customer bills straight into Hohm reducing the amount of information people need to enter when they start off using Hohm.

I know the marketing team for Hohm had fun creating some funny videos that are currently spreading like wildfire across Facebook and Windows Live.

Sign up for Microsoft hohm here.

Earlier this month the creative geniuses over at Information Architects in Japan recently released a new version of their famous Web Trend Map, a really slick visualization of the players in the web today, how they compare based on success and stability and the themes that connect them throughout the industry.  You can download the full size image from Flickr here, but I found this a little tough to navigate and explore, so I uploaded the image to DeepZoomPix.com where you can zoom and pan until your heart’s content!

Wow it seems that the search innovation trend that Bing kicked off a couple of weeks ago has been picked up by Photobucket who today announced a new Visual Search feature that takes searching for images and sharing them with friends to the next level. They’ve created a slick experience using Silverlight to search, browse and interact with images and then used the Windows Live Messenger Library to add a whole new vector – sharing via IM! Try the app out here!

I’m intrigued by the social side of the app (aka the sharing) and it’s a great conversation starter to the discussion that Angus and I have been bouncing around for the last few weeks; do users want to swim around in the stream looking for interesting information (i.e. a news feed) or do they want to be pushed information by their close friends and get it front of mind (i.e. an IM chat). Perhaps it’s a mixture of both with more value being attributed to the latter rather than the former.

Looking at the same choice, which is valuable for publishers of information? By that I mean the Photobuckets of this world who are interested in getting new users to party on their websites. Perhaps the answer to this question is an amicable, both, or put another way, different strokes for different folks. What’s clear is that it’ll be really interesting to advertisers and publishers to find out which is more effective when it comes to pushing their product or service.

On the tech side what’s behind the scenes here? Well the Windows Live Messenger Library is a very slick set of javascript libraries that provide programmability into the Messenger Service (our big datacenter in the cloud) that powers the client experience across Windows, Mac, Xbox and WinMo for 330m users every month. Incidentally it’s nearly Windows Live Messenger’s 10th Birthday!

The Library allows ANY website on ANY platform using ANY language to integrate IM capabilities and provide instant sharing of content to Messenger users. To get started head over to the Interactive SDK where you can get a feel for what you can do with it, then check out our demo website Pulse that has the full capabilities baked into a sample.

If you are interested in seeing screenshots of the whole flow of user acquisition Angus has a great post on that.

Facebook announced today that they will be rolling out new search functionality in beta that allows people to find content (including status updates) that users have decided to share with “everyone”.  This functionality is similar to the broadcast power of Twitter.  (As a side topic its been interesting to see that Facebook have been positioned as the enemy by Michael and Eldon).

There is opportunity for Facebook here, Twitter currently is adored for the way it spreads news faster than anything on the planet, but there are risks too.  Let’s not forget that they need to provide a user experience to match and cater for the inevitable flood of information that broadcast distribution will bring.  For the main part, Twitter has left it up to the developer ecosystem, with the likes of Tweetdeck and Seesmic addressing this problem, but this might just be its Achilles heel.

*If* this turns out to be a race to real-time, then the winner will eventually be decided by a balance of user experience and developer opportunity.  Twitter became successful because of its developer opportunities but so too have Facebook and they offer a far broader set of services to program against – not just a feed.  This could prove key.  Let’s not forget the 1st party experience of Facebook.com and Twitter.com where Facebook have arguably iterated faster than Twitter trying out new designs (for better of for worse) where Twitter seem to have focused their attention on support their exponential growth and trying to avoid downtime by building out their datacenter.

The balance, and this has been proven by the success of Microsoft (with boxed software), is to build out a platform that provides business opportunities for developers, support them in creating their own software, and in parallel incrementally improve the 1st party experience for people.  The prime examples being Windows and Office. 

It’s not rocket science but I do feel like Twitter has dropped the ball when it comes to their .com experience.  It is hard to execute on though, we’re still getting it right (some would argue we are just starting) when it comes to 1st party experiences on Windows Live vs. the developer ecosystem.  Nobody’s perfect but as in any business, it’s survival of the fittest.

Oh yeah, and Facebook, your A/B Testing is pretty cool.

Windows Live Messenger is the world’s most popular instant messaging service and is going to be 10 years old this summer and we’ve just announced that the service has over 330 million user every month.  In commemoration of the big birthday bash the team are asking you to join in the party and share any fun, emotional, or personal stories so we can tell people how important Windows Live Messenger is to all of you.

We want to learn about those very personal stories and moments and we would ask you to share your story with us. What was your funniest, most unexpected or most emotional moment with Messenger? If you have a great story and you would like to share it with others, please send it to us! Please note that we will publish the best anecdotes in our Windows Live Messenger marketing or public relations communications. Of course we will do that anonymously, only mentioning your first name and home country (and maybe a related picture if you decide to add one).

If you want to share your story and let others participate in your special moment with Messenger, please send your short story in English to [email protected] by June 28th. Please add your first name and home country – you can also add a related photo if you like. We will share the best stories during the month of July, right here on the blog.

Full details are available on the Windows Live Messenger Blog.

Don’t forget that as a web developer you can also use the Windows Live Messenger Library to quickly and easily add Instant Messaging capabilities to your website and connect it to those 330 million users.

After we penned a deal with PayScale.com, Bing has incorporated average salary information into its search results so that you can get a glimpse of the lower and upper bounds of salaries in a chart, and options to drill into salaries by city.  I just searched for the occupations below and got some useful results – nice to see the “decision engine” in action!

CEO Salary

Doctor’s Salary

Customer Services Salary

Story courtesy of Fav.Or.It

Importing an RSS feed (aka a blog) into my Facebook News Feed is really easy to do, you just hit settings on the top right of your News Feed and add your feed URL to the list.  When you do this each new blog entry is placed in my News Feed – you are probably reading this now in Facebook!

What I don’t like is how Facebook takes your whole blog post and sucks it into their site displaying the blog post as a Note in your profile.  You see, the value for the content publisher in this transaction is if I get people to visit my blog – www.jamessenior.com however if people can read each post without leaving Facebook then I lose that value.  What is not clear to the reader, is that this content originates from my blog and Facebook simply importing the content.  The only reference to my blog is down the bottom of the Post where I see a “View Original Post” link – in all honesty if people read all the way to the bottom of the post why on earth would they click to view the original post – they’ve just read it! To add salt in the wound you can also comment on the blog post right within Facebook, what would be really is if those comments were syndicated back to my blog, but that’s not possible right now.

You might think that I’m unhappy because of the loss of ad revenue – I’m not.  The real value I lose it tracking the number of people who have read my content – i.e. the statistics and analytics.  Facebook choose not to surface any of that information to me, so tracking readers/visitors is impossible.  Funnily enough, like other content publishers, this kind of information is kind of important to me.

I much prefer the model that Windows Live currently uses to aggregate Web Activities in my News Feed.  Here, they have chosen to just include a short excerpt of the blog post along with a prominent link back to the original article, thus ensuring that I get traffic to come back to my website. 

My content deal with Facebook is a little one sided right now, whereas with Windows Live it seems a little more even.  One solution would be to only publish excerpts on blog posts in the RSS feed but then my feed reader friends wouldn’t be able to read the full article.  Ideally, I could configure how Facebook displays the blog post and whether you want the whole article published as a Note or a more prominent redirect to the original blog entry.  Either that or give me analytics!