A blown transformer in the Fisher Plaza building (home to local ABC affiliate television station KOMO-TV and KOMO Radio) in downtown Seattle has affected a data center there, and Bing Travel among numerous other sites have been affected.  An explanation is up at www.bing.com/travel:

Sorry, travel isn't available just now

A fire occurred at Fisher Plaza in downtown Seattle just after midnight on Friday morning. The blown transformer knocked out power to the entire building, which is home to the Bing Travel servers. This is isolated to Bing Travel only, and there is no impact to any other aspect of Bing. We're hard at work to restore service following this unexpected event.

Our current estimate for re-establishing Bing Travel functionality is 5pm PST, July 3rd. In the meantime, you may use Microsoft travel partner Orbitz for your travel needs.

The fire reportedly lasted only about 10 minutes.  Todd Bishop from TechFlash is on the scene, and has updated reports.

Any guesses as to why Bing Travel is hosted at Fisher Plaza and not at one of Microsoft’s data centers?

MSN UK has a whole page dedicated to the recently departed Michael Jackson. Who doesn’t know what he ment for music and dance? You can find just about anything about Michael Jackson on this tribute page. Most prominent is a Silverlight application featuring hundreds of photos of Michael Jackson, his life, his work, his fans and tributes to his career as King of Pop.

 
You can zoom in (using the scroll wheel of your mouse, by clicking or by using the navigation buttons) and drag around (hold mouse button and move) to look at all the separate photos, varying from Michael’s childhood to more recent ones. Just make sure you have installed the latest version of Silverlight. All photos in this Silverlight gallery © Press Association.

This sure is a nice way to remember Michael Jackson, may he Rest In Peace.

Source: Deep Zoom into MJ’s Life in Pictures | Sarah In Tampa | Channel 10

The Bing team is bringing a bit of Twitter to Bing search results. Not indexing all of Twitter at this time… just a small set of prominent and prolific Twitterers (a few thousand) to start. This includes Tweets from folks from Microsoft’s own search technology and business sphere like Danny Sullivan or Kara Swisher as well as those from spheres of more general consumer appeal like Al Gore or Ryan Seacrest. The choice who to add was based primarily on follower count and volume of tweets. Did your blog (or you personally) get in? Only way to find out is to try!

How? Of course we want to find out if LiveSide got added so we type in “@liveside” as search query and lookie here, our last two tweets appear in the search results:

So we got added, yay! Also notice the See more tweets link there. Another way to get these results is by typing “liveside twitter” or “liveside tweets” (don’t worry about using caps) as search query.

According to the post on Bing search blog this feature will roll out gradually, so you may not see it right away. That might explain the lil’ glitches I experienced whilst doing a search on our own, on first try only “@liveside” gave the results but after trying the other two search queries for several times those started to work too, they didn’t initially. Currently this only works if you have Bing set to United States, hopefully this will roll out to other markets as well.

Speaking about Twitter, you can follow the Bing team here and of course you were already following us, right?

As reported by Mary Jo Foley, the Windows Live Butterfly program, a group of beta testers who signed on to test whatever was thrown their way, is sputtering to a close.  From a statement issued by Microsoft on the subject:

“The Butterfly group has been involved in beta testing MSN and Windows Live products for a number of years.  Rather than continue the program as something only focused on beta testing, we’re offering the group a variety of options to engage in the broader Windows Live community, including the opportunity to join the MVP (Most Valuable Professional) program and continued and future access to beta testing opportunities.”

(how one goes about “joining” the MVP program is beyond us, but hey)

In case you didn’t know, LiveSide came about largely as a result of the (then MSN Butterfly) program.  We all met as beta testers, and were all original members of the MSN Butterfly program, which later changed its name (along with dang near everything else in Red West not nailed down) to Windows Live.

In 2003, during a beta test for MSN Premium 9, Wendy Stidmon, who was a contract employee managing the beta program (Wendy is full time at Microsoft now, and currently running the Windows 7 technical beta), initiated a “cafe” newsgroup as part of the tests.  Modeled after the MVP “Coffeehouse”, the cafe gave beta testers a place to get to know each other and post on interests outside of the beta.  At the time, Microsoft beta tests were serious affairs, populated by curmudgeonly IT professionals who sounded alarms if anyone went anywhere near “off topic”.

However the beta for MSN Premium required a different set of beta testing skills.  This was a consumer product, not a technical one, and it required more than a technical beta.  The cafe took off, engagement in the beta was unprecedented, and after the MSN Premium beta ended, with more products in the pipeline, Wendy and her boss Jon Beck (also still at Microsoft but long gone from the beta testing program) set up what became known as the MSN Butterfly program.

The idea was to keep a group of testers available and engaged, and when betas needed testers, well there we were all ready to go.  And it worked, for a time.  We tested new versions of MSN Messenger, came together in Redmond for “Butterfly Tours”, and in 2005 some 30 of us became MSN MVPs.  It was at the 2005 MVP Summit, held in September in Redmond, where the three LiveSide founders (Chris Overd, Harrison Hoffman, and Matthew Weyer -  I officially joined LiveSide 3 days after it was launched) first discussed joining together to start an MSN focused blog.  Little did we know at the time that we were being shown most of the elements of the first wave of Windows Live, and when the Windows Live initiative was announced in November of 2005, LiveSide found a name and a purpose.

So what happened to the Butterfly program?  Well of course there were some systemic problems with having non-IT pros as beta testers.  While the feedback we provided (and some of it was loud and long) ultimately made the products we tested better, turns out we couldn’t really write a bug report to save our lives.  In June of 2006, what became known as “the big purge” dumped testers who weren’t filing bug reports (including, ahem, me), and pared down the program by (guessing) 75% or so.  Attempts were made to make the Butterfly program relevant again, but actual betas were few and far between, and it’s really no surprise that the program has finally been put out of its misery.

Beta testing in general at Microsoft has moved away from the newsgroup/bug report model, you need only to look at the large public betas of Internet Explorer 8, Windows Live, or Windows 7 to see the writing on the wall.  Get the product in a large number of hands, collect crash reports and public feedback, and refine.  We can’t really argue with that.

Still, we’re going to miss the Butterflys.  We met not only each other, but many of our Microsoft friends through the program.  Together, we built a community, which is what we thought social networking was supposed to be about in the first place.  And we tried to help make better software, and better experiences, for the users of Windows Live.

We know that many of our readers have been involved in the Butterfly program in some capacity over the years, and we’d love to hear your remembrances, or feel free to correct our memories or add to the timeline.  What do you remember about the Butterfly program?

One of the favorite features of Bing for many users is the daily image that appears on the homepage each day. Whilst not yet available in every country, this will change! According to this blogpost, international markets will also get a rich image version of the homepage. Starting next month, a number of those markets (including Australia, Canada, China, Japan, and the UK) will begin customizing the images to suit their unique audience, as well as adding their own hotspots!

Hotspots? Yes those little squares you see when you hover over the homepage image, they tell you more about the picture.

And did you know that you can mouse over the copyright symbol in the bottom right corner to see a quick caption about the image, as well as the photographer’s name and agency?

And on top of that, that you can click the arrows to scroll through the past 7 days of homepage images? All that is required for that is that you have Silverlight installed. And what if you see a nice one you want to share it with your friends? Head on over to Bing Photo sharing App on Facebook. But that’s just for the last 7 days, what about if you want to see all images that ever appeared on Bing? Long Zheng to the rescue! He started the Bing Image Archive. Here, you can find all background images from Bing presented in a simple calendar format, appropriate to the day which the image was originally displayed on.
 

Photo Contest, get your photo on Bing.com

Speaking of the images, the Bing Team launched their first ever photo submission contest on Facebook. The theme is “summer travel,” and the winner will have his or her photo displayed on the Bing homepage on Monday, August 3rd.
 
Want to find out more about/participate in this contest? Head on over to the Bing photo contest on Facebook, read the guidelines and rules, upload your photo and who knows…

Source: Bing Community Search Blog - Get your photo on bing.com
istartedsomething - Bing Image Archive, for your viewing pleasure

One of our readers, nikhil_jain, pointed out Windows Live Planet. Curious me just had to investigate.
 
Windows live Planet is a social network from Microsoft India. It will help you find people with similar interests as you. You can also “Populate Your Planet” as they call it by importing contacts from the social networks that are connected to Windows Live (Facebook, Myspace, LinkedIn, Hi5 and Tagged), just as you can on your Windows Live Profile.

The site also makes use of the Messenger Web Bar, so you can chat to your windows Live contacts without leaving the site. This social network apparently hasn’t gotten much publicity (outside of India) yet as most of the people registered there live in India. And yes, you can register there too if you are in another part of the World, just choose your country from the dropdown as you sign up.

What I wasn’t able to find out is how long this social network exists. I tried to find out yesterday, but the email I’ve sent to the Feedback address returned User Unknown. Another victim of the lay-off rounds?

Windows Live Planet - Disclaimer

In order to offer you a friend locator service and build your online profile, we will be requesting you to share demographic information, such as location, age, gender and other areas of preferences, interests and favourites. This demographic information in addition to the other profile details that we are collecting would be available for viewing by other signed in members of the friend locator service, and will be publicly available until the you delete your online profile from the friend locator. Based on your online profile, you might receive invitations from other signed in members to become friends.We urge you to be cautious about any personal contact information that you share to prevent misuse.