Customize ‘til you drop

 

If you’re interested in how to add new gadgets to your space as they become available in Windows Live Gallery. head over to the Space Craft to see my latest post with the same subject. 

Jack Bauer: hero or control freak?

If you watch 24 like the rest of the free world does, it’s probably because Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland’s character) is a much cooler and more violent McGyver!   Every week you’re left shaking your head at Jack’s escapades.  I’m pretty sure my wife fantasizes about him, too.

 

I have no idea how Jack used to be in charge of the entire Los Angeles Counter Terrorist Unit (CTU).  He is pretty much the anti-manager.   Yeah, he barks an order at Chloe every once in a while and she does what he asks.   But, he does what no manager is supposed to do — makes himself indispensable. 

 

Anyone who runs around saying "I am the ONLY one who can interrogate him" or "Bill, you know I’m the ONLY one who can get the answer we need right now, so put me back into play!" has control issues.  He needs to delegate.  If he tried doing that, I bet he would find he has more time to keep key witnesses from dying every damn episode…

Dallas puts me in weird position

There are great players in sports, and there are superstars.  Terrell Owens is a superstar – he’s silky smooth running with the ball after a catch.  It’s killed me to watch him wreck his two teams (49ers and Eagles) and screw with another (Ravens), and I wrote him off completely after he bashed Donovan McNabb and the Eagles last season.  Neither integrity nor being a good teammate are high on T.O.’s list.  T.O. is all about T.O.

However, the news just broke that my Cowboys went off and signed him to a 3-year deal worth $25 million, which is more money than he made with the Eagles:   

 

ESPN.com – NFL – A star is born: Owens signs with the Cowboys

 

Part of me hoped that the NFL owners would conspire to lock him completely out of the league this year to send a message to him and other primadonnas/would-be-team-wreckers that it ain’t about them, it’s about the game itself. 

 

While I can’t look past what he’s done or not worry about him doing it again in Dallas, I’m gonna be excited this season when Drew Bledsoe comes to the line with Julius Jones in the backfield, speedy Terry Glenn on one side, and T.O. on the other.  Michael, a friend at work,  just likened it to his Bulls signing crazy Dennis Rodman and then going 72-10.  Bittersweet….

 

93 million users can’t be wrong…

and the hits just keep on coming!  We’ve seen incredible growth of the service and today we’re releasing a bunch of cool features.  We’ve received a ton of great feedback from YOU that we’ve tried to incorporate.  I won’t try to list all the changes here since you can read more on the Spaces team blog — http://spaces.msn.com/thespacecraft — but here’s a taste:

 

Don’t like "/members/blah"?  Perfect – you can now drop "/members" from your URL.  http://spaces.msn.com/jay definitely looks better on a business card or in an e-mail signature.  Your old URL will still work so don’t worry if you gave it out.

 

Wish the Custom HTML powertoy could support more characters?  No sweat – we doubled the character limit. 

 

Want to write your blog entries offline with spell-check instead of using our Add Blog Entry page?  Use a 3rd party app like BlogJet to create/edit MSN Spaces blog entries thanks to our support for the MetaWeblog API.

 

Wish you could make some money with your space?  Choose our new Sponsored Links module or create a book list with Amazon affiliate integration so you can get paid when visitors follow your links/recommendations!

 

Love your Xbox 360 and want the world to know it?  Add the Xbox Live GamerCard and Recent Games modules to show off your gamerscore, achievements, and link to your full Xbox Live profile. 

 

and you’ll have to check out the Spaces team blog for more…

 

The buzz in the hallway right now is intense.  In between powwow-ing with Operations on the actual rollout, folks are hanging out in my office playing an Xbox 360 trying to get their gamerscore up (you know who you are!).  Hope you enjoy all the new features and keep the feedback coming! 

Transparent or opaque?

One of my biggest pet peaves working in the tech industry is that we get conditioned to do one or more of the following:

• Use technology jargon outside the office (my wife hates it when I tell her she’s randomizing me or that I don’t have any more bandwidth)
• Hear a word in a meeting and unconsciously incorporate it in your everyday speech only to find out it’s not even a real word or you’ve copied a butchered pronunication (e.g. pronouncing template "temp-LAY-te" for an entire career)
• Consistently use a real word in its exact opposite context (see title of this post and below)

Don’t get me wrong.  I’m no linguist.  But, Mike and I just attended a great presentation from someone in the industry whom we admire, and that person hit a very sensitive nerve – the use of the word transparent.  Webster and I both think it refers to something being completely see-through, meaning everything "behind" it can be seen.  Yet, at least once a week, someone says about a process or application – "Users shouldn’t have to deal with this.  It needs to be transparent" while making the case to hide all complexity from that user!  To me, that’s the perfect (and intended) job for the word opaque.  If the goal is to prevent the user from seeing dirty laundry or what’s under the hood, why make it transparent so they can see through the hamper or the hood? 

 

Please tell me if I’m completely wrong here.  It’s time to remove any doubt in my head so I can move on with life.

 

— Jay

This one’s for the geeks

You know how a song gets stuck in your head for days and you find yourself humming or singing the chorus at the most random times?  I watched the premiere of the new reality show, Rock Star, the other night mainly because of the MSN and Spaces connection.  One of the women sang Bob Dylan’s (but in my young mind, Axl Rose’s) Knocking on Heaven’s Door.  She butchered it in my non-musical opinion, but the chorus stuck with me. 

 

Today, I was doing what a Program Manager at Microsoft does a lot of – using the graphic design application, Adobe Photoshop, to "mock up" how some features in our next release of Spaces should look and feel.  After the 10th time through the chorus in my head, a little bit of wordplay started to happen unintentionally.  Let me know if the following means I have a future in music:

 

Original chorus:  Knock, Knock, Knocking on Heaven’s Door

New chorus:       Mock, Mock, Mocking in Photoshop

 

I know, LAME as all hell, but I had to share.  If you like it, there’s more where that came from!  I haven’t even dug into the rest of the lyrics yet. 

Where’s Jay been? Dead, apparently…

I take a lot of heat (and deservedly so) for not blogging frequently.  It hasn’t been because I’ve lacked ideas, don’t want to mix personal and work thoughts on the same Space, or don’t use the product I helped some great folks design over the last year and a half.  Quite the contrary. 

 

In the last couple of days, I’ve decided that I actually have a lot to say about sports, technology, and my life — how much of it will be interesting to anyone but me remains to be seen, though!  I’ve also felt from day 1 of Spaces that Jay’s Krib will be my only Space, rather than having a separate one for each aspect of me.  Some of my co-workers have gone down the multi-Space route and that’s been effective for them, but it’s obvious I have trouble keeping the content of one Space fresh.  Plus, I like the idea that my friends and co-workers can add only one Passport account to MSN Messenger to see when I have something new to say or share.  Finally, I use the product every day, multiple times a day, but it’s generally a version running on our test servers looking for bugs or trying out yet-to-be-released features that I’m working on. 

 

In an upcoming post, I’ll talk about my main pursuit and time eater outside of Spaces – getting an MBA nights and weekends over the last year and a half.  It was a great experience, although my wife Megan, who also got an MBA at the same time, and I are extremely happy that we’re done and can spend time together again. 

 

But, today I discovered the real reason why I’ve been derelict in my blogging duties – I’ve been dead.   Yup.  While filling out a credit application today for Megan’s upcoming Mini Cooper, we were told that the application could not be processed because my social security number was associated with a recent death claim. 

 

Um, yeah, like, I’m alive and stuff.  For a 10-second period, "identity theft" kept repeating in my head and I thought the worst.  It turns out that Megan, who repeatedly gives me crap for not having HER social security number memorized, completely butchered my SSN # on the application.  As my embarassed wife stood by, I provided my real number and was instantly resurrected. 

So, here’s to coming back from the dead, both literally and figuratively.

Another MSN Spaces release!

The team’s been here late, and we pulled off another good one.  We fixed some top annoying issues, added 30+ new themes, Add to My MSN integration, ping Technorati/Feedster/PubSub/MyMSN now, and more.

And, the Messenger team made it easier than ever to get to your own Space (My Space button) and contact card (click on your display picture) in the new version of MSN Messenger. 

Oh, and by the way, we’ve exceeded 4.5 million Spaces since the December 1st launch!

Help MSR’s Social Computing Group & win prizes!

Scott Counts, a friend of the Spaces team, let us know that the Social Computing Group at Microsoft Research is conducting a study on social networking. It takes 15-20 minutes to complete, and 5 participants win free Microsoft software.

 
If you want to participate:

1) Go to the Social Computing Group’s Online Lab website
2) Register for the Online Lab
3) Select the ‘Social Networking’ study link

 

Your feedback would be greatly appreciated!

 

1.5 million Spaces & RSS in MyMSN

It’s been a while since I’ve posted – I don’t intend to go that long again.  After a much needed break following the MSN Spaces launch, I’m back in business.  While I personally may have slowed down a little over the holidays, the growth of the service certainly didn’t – we just hit 1.5 million Spaces in 6 weeks!!!  Needless to say, the team is jazzed by the success so far and the variety of ways that users have embraced Spaces in their lives. 

 

This is why we jump out of bed in the morning – to work on communication services that affect millions of users from family like my wife (a very tough sell who fell in love with Spaces at launch) to Susi Johnston (and her journal of the tsunami relief efforts).  The excitement from the community has been infectious, and please, please, please continue to give us your feedback on what you like and what we could be doing better.

 

Now for the hot tip.  VERY VERY soon, MyMSN will release yet another way to stay on top of what the people & organizations you care about the most are sharing with you.  Word on campus is that a beta of RSS headline support for tracking Spaces and other RSS feeds on your MyMSN page(s) is less than a day away.  I’ve played with it internally and am thrilled to see it go live.  As MC says, we will be doing more to integrate Spaces with this new feature, but in the meantime, he describes a simple way to allow your viewers to track your Space on MyMSN.  Read more about what you need to do here.

 

Congrats to the team, and I bet there’s even more to come from them soon.  Stay tuned…