Archive for October 2009
Bing-Twitter, is something missing?
Big news today about Bing surfacing Twitter and Facebook status updates in http://bing.com search results. Its pretty impressive too. Earlier today I tweeted something about SQL Server:
and sure enough I got the back the following information in the Bing-Twitter search results:
There’s some things to note about this. Firstly, the short URL from my Tweet (http://bit.ly/45bv3t) has been expanded to the full URL to which you would be redirected to (https://connect.microsoft.com/SQLServer/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=499134). Second, it has recognised following retweets so not only is it finding tweets containing the phrase “sqlserver” but its correctly grouping them together as well which I’m very impressed with. Third, there is a link to more tweets related to the same subject.
All very impressive but I have one question, what about Messenger status updates as well?
If the 40million Facebook daily status updates and god-knows-how-many Twitter status updates are considered valuable then surely the same can be said of the many millions of Messenger status updates that appear every day too, right? We as Windows Live users can already opt to make our Messenger status updates public so there’s nothing stopping this public stuff from appearing in Bing.
Now I must admit this isn’t exactly an apples-to-apples comparison. Tweets from Twitter have MUCH more valuable information in them than Messenger statuses do because Twitter tracks retweets and hash tags and that makes them many many more times more valuable than Messenger statuses (although as I have said before I expect Messenger statuses to move in the direction of Tweets in the upcoming Windows Live Wave 4). Nonetheless, if there is gold in those tweets then there at least has to be some silver linings at the very least in messenger status updates.
Alas I fear us Windows Live users are again going to be frozen out of Microsoft’s own search engine, just as we are from Bing’s forthcoming Bing and Ping feature. Sad really isn’t it?
Office 2010 gets “Save to SkyDrive”
Since SkyDrive launched a couple of years ago probably the most oft requested feature is the ability to save a document directly to SkyDrive from your computer. Finally, in Office 2010, that feature is coming. Someone called Manan has posted a blog entry entitled Office 2010 Beta New Features & Changes and it contains the following ditty:
a new option under Share in Backstage – Save to Skydrive! This is to help you save your documents and use them with Office Web Apps. Screenshot:
Oh and the feature is fully functional.
Save to SkyDrive … FINALLY!!! Let’s hope that a SkyDrive API is forthcoming so other teams both in and outside of Microsoft can offer the same feature!
You’ll see this feature in the next interim drop of Office 2010 which is apparently already doing the rounds on the file sharing networks.
Does Windows Live know about your company?
I found something out about Windows Live today that I never knew and I’m wondering if anyone else knew about it either. If you head to http://profile.live.com/details/EditWork.aspx you can edit the work details part of your profile and one of the items you can edit is the name of your employer. I was surprised to find that Windows Live gives you a list of employees to choose from; as you start typing the list narrows to your potential choice:
Unsurprisingly, given that I’m self-employed, my employer wasn’t listed 🙂
Someone has obviously gone to quite a bit of trouble to provide this feature so I’m wondering if they plan to do anything with this information in the future. Intriguing!
my.live.com
Anyone remember http://my.live.com? This was a service that came out of http://start.com which was the first web property put out by the team that later evolved into Windows Live. Sadly it seems http://my.live.com has been put out to pasture as it hasn’t been changed in over a year and the team’s blog hasn’t been updated for a similar length of time.
I was looking back over that blog today and came across the following intriguing clue as to their future activities in a blog post entitled Important update to My.live.com:
What’s Next?
We’ll start planning for our next update to My.Live.com, aiming for a minor update in the Fall. Right now, most of our time is being devoted to another project that we’ll have more information about in the coming months. Until then, we hope you like the changes, and look forward to reading your feedback in our new forum.
That was on 7th August 2008 and there hasn’t been a sniff of news since. If anyone knows what this “other project” that we were promised some news on “in the coming months” actually is please get in touch because I would love to know!
Jamie Thomson 