The redesign of my blog and my personal rebranding has been six months in the making. Since I moved to the US and into the world of the social web to become the Live Services Evangelist at Microsoft, I’ve helped to launch some new APIs – the Messenger Web Toolkit, run some events (Live Services Hackathon – tickets still available), been in far too many meetings and more broadly I’ve been assessing the shape and feel of the technology and business landscape in this area.
I’ve been to a lot of conferences, meetings, virtual events etc. and sat down with a lot of interesting people who in some shape or form are involved in this thing we call the social web. These people include valley hipsters, angels, venture capitalists, standards guys, open source advocates, competitors, partners, politicians, customers, agencies amongst others.
One thing they all have in common is that they are pathfinders. When it comes to the social web, we are only five minutes into the first quarter of the game. People are trying new things. We’re plotting uncharted courses into technology and business models where the future is uncertain.
We are seeing what sticks and what doesn’t, and actually that’s ok. That’s the nature of the web, and the wonderful thing is that users are vocal and use the tools we’ve created for them to us know if they don’t like something. It’s a delicious irony. As an example take a look at the changes that Twitter made last week to the way replies work. Users were up in arms and let the Twitter founders Ev and Biz know via (you guessed it) replies on Twitter.
When it comes to the social web we are very much active whether shaping the future by working in the Open Web Foundation on standards like OpenID, OAuth, Portable Contacts etc or with APIs for Messenger, Contacts, Alerts etc. It’s just the start though, and as I mentioned it’s very early days, there’s some exciting stuff to come, especially from Microsoft.
On this blog you can expect to see content about the the social web as well as Microsoft’s web platform overall including things like our Web Platform Installer. For now, this is just a first introduction, a handshake and a nice to meet you. I’m the Microsoft Social Web Guy and it’s really great to meet you.