March 2007 - LiveSide - News blog

LiveSide in Chinese! – Announcing LiveSino.net

We have been working with our “LiveSide representative to China”, Picturepan2, and he and his team are pleased to announce our collaboration project, LiveSino.net.

Our friends in China will translate LiveSide stories into Chinese, as well as commenting on Microsoft and Windows Live in China, and bringing us news about Windows Live coming out of China as Microsoft continues to expand its presence there.

While this is not a business relationship – LiveSino.net is an independent project of Picturepan2 and his team - we are pleased to help them out as we can, increase our presence in China (we already receive a good portion of our traffic from China, according to Google Analytics), and to expand our horizons a bit.

Welcome, LiveSino.net!

LiveSide中文版!LiveSino.net正式上线！
        我们已经和" LiveSide中国代表" Picturepan2携手努力。Picturepan2和他的团队很高兴宣布我们的合作项目LiveSino.net正式上线。
        我们来自中国的朋友将会把LiveSide的资讯翻译成中文，同样也评论中国微软和Windows Live，并带给我们关于将在中国发布的Windows Live服务和微软在中国继续扩大影响的资讯。
        因此这不是一个商业合作。LiveSino是一个独立的由Picturepan2 和他团队负责的项目。我们也很乐意尽我们所能帮助LiveSino团队，提升我们在中国的形象（ 我们已经在中国获得了相当可观的流量，根据Google Analytics统计 ），同时也能够拓宽我们的眼界。
        欢迎，LiveSino.net！

Here's the list of new stuff on Live Maps - from the Live Maps / Virtual Earth blog.  In addition, the first of European cities in 3D are available - Plymouth, Cardiff, Bristol, Gloucester, and Wolverhampton - here's the collection

New cities with Birds Eye Coverage around the world

United Kingdom
Bedford, Chesterfield, Hull, Ipswich, Lowestoft, Morecambe, Carlisle, Tamworth, Aylesbury, Exeter, Kettinger, Newport, Pontypool, Stafford, Rugby, Taunton, Torbay

Germany
Bremerhaven, Celle, Delmenhorst, Esslingen, Ibbenbuerren, Oldenburg, Osnabrueck, Rheine, Wilhelmshaven, Aachen, Bremen, Flensburg, Fulda, Hamln, Herford, Minden, Muenster, Wetzlar, Ahlen, Arnsberg, Emden, Lippstadt, Wesel, Kassel, Neustadt

Italy
Naples, BOLZANO, CAGLIARI, Trieste, MESSINA

United States
Chicago, Ventura County California, Broomfield Colorodo, Pinellas Florida, Charleston South Carolina

Spain
Pamplona, Seville

Switzerland
Bern, Geneva

The Netherlands
The Hague, Rotterdam, Utrecht

Norway
Oslo, Trondheim

Belgium
Antwerp

France
GRENOBLE, LIMOGES, TOURS

New Ultracam Hi resolution Ortho Imagery
Austin, Cheektowaga, Calgary, Glendale, Toronto, Manhattan, Hamilton, Portland, Buffalo, Ottawa

GlobeXplorer Orthos
Ventura, St. Louis, Santa Barbara, San Diego, San Bernardino County, Riverside County

A quick note posted today on the Live Maps / Virtual Earth blog announcing a major imagery release, including Birds Eye imagery for Chicago, along with "dozens of other cities, including tons of European imagery". 

The Live Maps guys posted a Collection of landmarks to get us started

Here's the Goodman Theatre, where my brother works ;). 

http://local.live.com/?v=2&sp=yp.YN272x5435972

The blog promises more information soon, and we'll have that for you as news filters out about the release.

Microsoft yesterday announced the public preview of a technology that the Microsoft Live Labs has been toying with for a new mobile browser that will bring a more desktop-like experience to the user on their mobile phone. The technology, know as Deepfish, aims to preserve "the rich layout and full form of documents on mobile devices while providing novel ways of effectively navigating that content on small screens."

Deepfish was available as a download for Windows Mobile 5+, but only to limited numbers (which has now sadly been reached). If you want to see what it's all about though, there is a quick demo on the Deepfish home page.

Gary Flake notes in his interview on the PressPass page that "at this time, Deepfish is currently a prototype technology, and we are not announcing any specific plans for making the product more widely available." So do remember that this might not even come to anything in the long term.

Update: See a video showing the working of Deepfish over at on10.net.

SL

Eytan Seidman, a lead program manager for Live Search, confirmed on the MSNSearch blog that some of the advanced query syntax in the Live Search engine, such as link:, linkdomain:, and inurl: has been turned off, due to "what appears to be mass automated usage for data mining".  According to the blog post:

We are doing our best to get this back online as soon as possible in a manner that allows folks that use this functionality for real queries. We have a few good ideas up our sleeve on how to enable this, but want to make sure we are making the right changes that will give you the functionality you want and all of our customers the experience they deserve.

The advanced query syntax allowed a query to narrow down information, for example link: would find pages that have links to a given site or domain, so link:live.com would return pages that have links to live.com, linkdomain: would find pages that link to any site in the referenced domain, and inurl: would find pages with a given term in the page's address, so inurl:forums would return pages with forums in its url. 

"This start-up effort will define the vision and create the implementation for cloud-based platform services that will allow the creation of compelling applications that make deep use of network-based information."

ZDNet News is reporting that MSN Soapbox is being closed to new users for up to 2 months as Microsoft sorts out piracy issues.  ZDNet quotes Adam Sohn, a director in Microsoft's online-services group, as saying that no new subscribers will be accepted, but anyone who has already signed up for Soapbox can continue to access the site. According to the story:

Sohn said the changes were not forced on Microsoft by its new partners, although he acknowledged that some of the content providers were very interested in how his company planned to clean up Soapbox.

"This software company is aligned very closely with the notion of intellectual-property rights," Sohn said. "We feel this is the right time to make these changes and stand up to do the right thing."

The news comes on the heels of an announcement between NBC Universal, News Corp., and AOL, Microsoft, and Yahoo! to create "the largest Internet video distribution network ever assembled with the most sought-after content from television and film. ...The video-rich site will debut this summer with thousands of hours of full-length programming, movies and clips, representing premium content from at least a dozen networks and two major film studios."

Lots of interesting positioning going on as the battle for video distribution rights begins to play out.  Should be quite an interesting space to watch in the coming months.

Thanks to Brandon for pointing to the Windows Live Hotmail team's Spaces blog, announcing the upcoming rollout of M10 (milestone 10) of the Windows Live Hotmail (formerly Windows Live Mail, formerly Kahuna) beta. According to the blog entry:

You can expect to see the following updates/fixes/changes in M10:

Microsoft today announced the creation of a new group spun out of Windows Live, the Live Search and Ad Platform.  Live Search (formerly Windows Live Search, formerly MSN Search) will join adCenter in a new group that will not report to Steven Sinofsky and Windows Live, but will be headed by Satya Nadella, and report directly to Kevin Johnson, the Platform and Systems division head.

The move further separates what has been a confusing and ill defined set of Windows Live services into three groups: MSN - for content; Windows Live - for services; and Live Search and Ads - for, well, search and ads.  Whether or not this latest restructuring will help to define Windows Live or just add to the confusion remains to be seen.

Fresh out of Nielson Netratings is their Februay search share analysis - Live Search increasing from 8.9% in January to 9.6% in February. While it may be too early to start celebrating, it's the 2nd consecutive month of growth in 2007 (0.5% increase between December and January), this is a marked change from the consistent drop in share experienced throughout 2006. Yahoo seems to be the main loser again, with Google continuing to grow.

Windows Vista and IE7 have no doubt helped boost search share, so the key indicator of success will be whether Live Search can retain the new users and continue to grow at the same rate throughout 2007. For this to happen Microsoft needs to continue improving the relevancy of search results and advertisements, while addressing the other issues that continue to trouble Live Search (see below).  Interestingly enough, Emre Sokullu & Richard MacManus analysed the Vista launch last month and concluded that it was Google that was suffering, not Yahoo.

Nielson Netrating stats: February Report | January Report | December Report

As we're seeing almost a new Live Search discussion each day, here's a roundup of some previously unposted Live Search stories (newest at the top): 

• Scoble (as if he needs any more inbound links this week) compares the indexing speed of Live Search to Google search. Needless to say you don't need to read his post to know the outcome, then again the comments are pretty interesting - Live Image Search seems to be gaining some votes which is nice to see.
• One of the Security MVPs, Donna Buenaventura, describes how common Live Search terms produce results that link to malware sites. As it is impossible to directly compare Live Search with Google/Yahoo for all search queries I'm inclined to believe its yet another Windows Live doomsday story. Regardless more bad press is not what is needed. 
• John Battelle discusses Microsoft moving into the corporate market through its Microsoft Service Credits for Web Search program. In essence the program persuades companies to use IE7 and Live Search in exchange for free Microsoft software. Even though the biggest disadvantage of Live Search is its anonymity, buying users is definitely a risky strategy. It's an even riskier strategy when you don't yet have a search engine that is equal to your competitors'.

According to an article appearing today in the Wall Street Journal (subscription required, free preview here), Comcast Corp. is unhappy with their relationship with Google Inc., and is in negotiations with Microsoft to perhaps switch services:

Comcast Corp. is negotiating to use Microsoft Corp.'s Internet search services on its broadband portal, a sign the cable titan isn't happy about its current search deal with Google Inc., according to people familiar with the matter.

Comcast, the country's largest cable operator, also has been talking to Google about extending their relationship. Currently, Google provides search results when users of the Comcast.net portal enter queries into the search box on the site. But Comcast thinks it should get a larger share of the revenue generated by the arrangement.

While by no means a done deal, this kind of aggressive strategy by Microsoft in undercutting Google's price (John Battelle reports the Comcast asking price is $100 million), is an indication that Microsoft is serious about search.

There's been lots of talk about Windows Live OneCare in the last two weeks, particularly around its poor detection rate in some recent malware tests. On Thursday the OneCare team respond on their team blog, though while it's good for Microsoft to come out and address these issues, the response time has just been too slow for there to be a meaningful impact.

As was explained to us when we talked to the OneCare MVPs this week, the tests which questioned OneCare's detection rate were primarily looking for variants of older malware, which for most users will not pose any major threat. In contrast the OneCare team has been concentrating on detecting the newer and more active malware for its v1 and 1.5 products. While the reasoning behind this is logical, this is definitely an issue that now needs to be addressed by the team. (The recent performance of the OneCare anti-malware engine has been discussed in more details on the Microsoft anti-malware blog.)

What doesn't help the OneCare team are comments made to ZDnet by Arno Edelmann, Microsoft's European business security product manager. Edelmann is quoted as saying that that "usually Microsoft doesn't develop products, we buy products. It's not a bad product, but bits and pieces are missing...OneCare is a new product — they shouldn't have rolled it out when they did, but they're fixing the problems now." While I'd disagree that Microsoft's best products are all purchased (Messenger and Spaces come to mind for Windows Live), this is definitely not the way to reassure consumers already running OneCare. Microsoft doesn't have the greatest record when it comes to security and in this case Arno should have followed the Sinofsky lead and kept quiet instead of compounding the issue.

Looking ahead to the OneCare 2.0 beta expected to begin in April, the most interesting feature rumored so far is undoubtedly the ability to backup to the cloud, something we suggested early last year. It'll be interesting to see if and how this ties in with the skydrive, the cloud storage service Ray Ozzie has mentioned previously. With Windows Live moving into wave 2, replication should be one area with some exciting developments.

We can't disclose a lot of what we saw [or even if we saw anything at all] at the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional Global Summit [isn't that a typical Microsoft name?].  However, consistently we heard that Microsoft at all levels are committed to win.  Both Steven [not Steve] Sinofsky and Chris Jones were very aggressive about driving that in, regardless of what's happened in the past.  Although Microsoft might be more private about what they're planning or what's going to happen in the future, I think that's because of the criticism they've encountered in the past.  The Internet industry is such a fast, always changing field that Microsoft's management is attempting to morph with it.  They've realized that the first wave of Windows Live was a little rocky, but they're learning from it for wave 2.  Just like Google is now becoming so large that they're being criticized as well, Microsoft is going back to basics.  Ideas are going to be well developed inside the company before pushing them out to the public, where confusion can become rampant as we've seen.  There's going to be a clear distinction between what's a Windows Live product and what's an MSN product, as well as what's a beta product, or a technical preview product.  For example, Gary Flake emphasized that Live Labs products like PhotoSynth are Technical Previews and may or may not be developed into a beta or product.  We've seen this with alpha products like PC Satisfaction Trial, which later developed into Windows OneCare Live beta, and now Windows Live OneCare.

Overall I was pleased with what I've heard and can say that no, Windows Live isn't dead, or will be for anytime soon [even MSN is still alive and kicking, and that started in 1995].  I think we're all going to hear a clear explanation of what Windows Live is, and what it will be for the future.  It's an exciting time for the industry, and Microsoft is going to win!  Go get them Steven!

@Matthew

Update: Please read the follow up post that can be found here.

It looks like Microsoft is now starting to implement its adCenter Labs Video HyperLink Technology with real world clients. The first signs of this come this week as MSN Entertainment shows of Kohl’s department store using the Video HyperLink Technology, which is an interactive video tool which provides more information about objects in a video when you click or even hover on them.

For example, you might want details about a product you see in the video. So as the video plays, you can move the mouse over the product to see where more information is available. Then, you can click the summary information to go to a merchandize website for details.

Check out Kohls department store Video HyperLink at:

http://entertainment.msn.com/videohyperlink/kohls 

And for more information about the Microsoft adCenter Labs Video HyperLink Technology check out the following site:

http://adlab.microsoft.com/default.aspx