MSN Hack Day v1.0

I’ve never been to a "Hack Day" before. This first inaugural Hack Day dealt with MSN Spaces. Basically they get some people in a lab, teach you a bit about how the code works, and then let you run free to implement your own features. "Hack" is a bit of a misnomer:

Wendy:	So how are you guys hacking this? Doing something with the HTTP headers?
Me:	What?
	… pause …
Me:	Oh. We’re not actually "hacking."

Initially I had just wanted to poke around the Spaces code base a little; I’ve never seen what’s required to run a webservice/ASP.NET app; and a v1 app at that. But the more I thought about it, the more I thought I could hack in a way to deal with one of my pet peeves: the fact that you can’t order lists the way you want (although there is a simple–but tedious–workaround for this). How hard could it be? All you’re doing is re-ordering a linked list of some sort.

All I have to say is that it is incredibly hard to get up to speed on a completely new and different code base in 3 hours. Not to mention I know nothing about ASP.NET and web services. It was interesting to see javascript being generated on the fly. I also noticed that parts of the code aren’t particularly well laid out, which made it quite difficult to extend it.

Anyhow, I’m looking forward to the next Hack Day.  (Did I mention free pizza and nachos and drinks?  Oh, and of course, no event would be complete without a complimentary t-shirt.) Hopefully next time though, I’ll actually get something done (and working). (A handful of people did get some mini-demos half working. Doh.)

Google Talk Blows

Google Talk Blows.

 

That’s really all I can say.  It was working ok at work.  But I come home to install it and everything just slows down to a crawl.  It doesn’t look like it’s using too much memory or CPU or anything.  But everything just stops functioning.  And then everything catches up for an instant… and then stops functioning again.  BLOWS.  (Yes I have a pretty crappy comp at home–Pentium II 333 MHz 256 MB RAM.. but still.. for a 900 KB app??)

 

My friend Krish summarized it pretty well:

Krish says:
    Google has finally managed to make something really shitty.
Krish says:
    It’s an accomplishment.

I did notice it supports some kind of MPOP (Multiple Points of Presence), but really not very well (although I’m not very familiar with Jabber and if Jabber supports MPOP itself.)  Its GMail integration doesn’t go any farther than Messenger with Hotmail.  Apparently its VOIP is pretty good, but I don’t have a good mic to try it out with.  And I don’t like the feel of it (with that weird minimize thing every time you switch conversations).  Yes, I’m biased.  But still…

 

 

The only thing to watch is how their platform is "completely open" and how they are encouraging other developers to build applications on top of it.  It’ll be interesting to see where that goes.  (I’m more interested in what kind of scenarios their servers support that we don’t.)

Hot off the press.. (unofficially)

Wild speculation today, and then this article: Google Talk Review

Basic IM capabilities, high-quality and easy to use VoIP, complete integration with Gmail, and a simple, ads-free interface.

It will be interesting to see the quality of their voice sessions.  We have ok integration with Hotmail, especially with the MSN Today window.  Yes it could be better.  Ads-free?  We’ll see how long that lasts.

The download is tiny (about 900k) and the install is so quick and easy you don’t even realize it’s finished yet.

MSN Messenger is huge.  Somebody go complain to the client folks..

Google tells us that SIP support is coming soon and are in talks with Skype, AOL, and Yahoo! concerning interoperability. 

OUCH!!  Once interop happens it becomes a game of who’s client appeals to which users.  Sounds like Google is banking on simplicity.  Danny said this today, "The thing about interop is, you don’t want to be first, and you don’t want to be third."  And definitely not fourth.

Another big feature they’re working on is "joint search," which would allow two or more Google Talk buddies using Google and surfing the web together.

I think Messenger already has this. 

Google also tells us that they don’t yet have solid plans on making money with the service, but plan on using it to drive users to Gmail.

Hmm.. so I take some stuff back I said in the last post.  This is by no means revolutionary.  Somehow I expected more.  I’m not sure if I’m disappointed or relieved.

Hey gIM, you there?

From The New York Times: Where Does Google Plan to Spend $4 Billion?

Google executives say they plan to unveil on Wednesday a "communications tool" that is potentially a clear step beyond the company’s search-related business focus.

While executives would not disclose what the new software tool might be, Google has long been expected to introduce an instant messaging service to compete with services offered by America Online, Yahoo and MSN from Microsoft."

From Mess.be: Hold on tight, because MSN Messenger might get some competition…

---

So let’s be the Devil’s advocate here and say that Google comes out with something revolutionary. In fact, I’d be willing to bet that it’s going to generate some pretty big hype. Google’s not dumb enough just to release another plain old IM service. Everyone and their mother is speculating about what Google has up their sleeve. I won’t do that here. Instead, I’ll look at what this means for Messenger.. ? (This list was meant to be mutually exclusive.)

• Microsoft execs get nervous. They don’t want a repeat of Search (when they jumped on the bandwagon way late), so they immediately bring in the big guns. All current development on existing Messenger servers goes into maintenance mode to support the current Service. In the meantime, the big guys architect a whole new design (but it won’t really be new because the first idea came from Google anyway). They design, build, and ship. It maybe takes a year. In the end the existing team (including me) all gets fired, or at least transferred to some dead-end group on the moon (without life support).
• Around a month and a half after Google’s announcement, we decide to rewrite Messenger. Sound familiar?
• People (from low-level developers, all the way up the food chain) hit themselves over the head: Why didn’t we think of that? Duh. (Actually this can happen in conjunction with any of the other points.)
• People think it’s an interesting idea, but we continue on with our daily routine. (God, I hope this doesn’t happen. We need some serious competition to start some serious innovation.)

Pretty bleak. So then I have a question. Everyone knew Google was developing some sort of IM solution. Why didn’t we (MSN) put our heads together and pre-emptively innovate? Why didn’t we come up with something so earth-shattering that people would look and say, "Wow, MSN did that? This makes everything else obsolete." (Steve and I had one such idea about a month ago–and if Google comes out with something similar I’ll be sincerely pissed.) Why do we constantly have to wait for competition to take the first step? Competition provides motivation, but it would be so much better if we were just so fast and innovative and cool that there was no competition because they wouldn’t be able to keep up.

Wow this blog is getting just more and more cynical. Think happy thoughts.. happy thoughts. Can’t wait until Wednesday.

Kahuna

I finally am part of the Mail Beta (codenamed Kahuna)!! I might even start to use my Hotmail account again instead of GMail.. *Gasp* The User Interface is cleaner and faster. I love the 3-pane Outlook style. But there still is a long ways to go. I can’t use my arrow keys to browse through e-mail. I can’t choose the number of e-mails to display per page. You still can’t search your mail. And I couldn’t get it to auto-refresh with new incoming mail. It feels like there are a ton of features not yet implemented (that are in the existing Hotmail). I hope the Kahuna team has a ton of features up their sleeve that they’re just not releasing to the public yet. Yes, the mail beta is a huge step in the right direction, but it’s not really that impressive.  (Now if they released it earlier and made it as feature rich as Outlook Web Access, that would be so awesome.) Normally I would say "too little; too late", but in this case it’s more like "a little; pretty late (but-fortunately-not-too-late)".

Rant: It frustrates me how slow products can move sometimes. Obviously rewriting Hotmail is a massive undertaking with I-don’t-know-how-many hundreds of millions of users to support. Google came out with GMail on April 1st 2004. At the time, Hotmail was this big, clunky, cluttered system. (Today it is still a big, clunky, cluttered e-mail client.) Only over a month and a half later did the Hotmail team decide to rewrite Hotmail from scratch. And only over a year and half after GMail came out, will Hotmail release their version (which, of course, will be seen as "a copy/imitation".) Now working in a large company, I can completely understand how things tend to move slowly (although I don’t really understand why it moves slowly). Unfortunately moving slowly in this industry means that you are heading towards extinction–someone else will out innovate you.  There is a certain amount of pristige that comes with doing things first.  I just don’t think SteveB’s motto works anymore: "We like to be first, but when we’re not first we want to be the first to make it cool, and if we’re not the first to make it cool we want to be the first to make money off of it." (or something to that effect).

Random: MSN is finally starting to understand the power of the Beta Invite model and viral marketing. Google, obviously, has been a master of this for quite a while. Microsoft tends to do better under competition.

Disclaimer (again): I hope I haven’t sounded overly bitter. Obviously anything I write here is just my personal opinion and definitely does not represent the views of my employer or anyone else, for that matter.  I don’t work on anything that has anything to do with Hotmail so I have no insight/insider information on that team. Me being frustrated at the slow pace of some things is probably applicable to all large companies (I wouldn’t know because I haven’t worked in any other large company). I don’t know.

I do know that my views are distorted as someone working in the tech industry. A regular Joe Schmo off the street thinks as highly of Microsoft (probably more so) than Google. In fact there are many many people that don’t use GMail. So take my rant for what it’s worth (not much).

Darn. How did a post about Kahuna become a long-winded rant?? I apologize.  Go Kahuna!

A Day with MSN Operations

I work on Messenger Server. I don’t work on the Messenger Client, the application that everyone around the world downloads from messenger.msn.com. The Server is what the Client connects to, what keeps track of which of your friends are online, and what routes IMs from one user to another. The Server is what connects you to everybody else. But it’s often easy for people to forget that the server is there. People think about the client and how cool and awesome it is (or how much it’s bloated). People only think about the servers when they can’t connect to them (and then they get frustrated). The client is nothing without the servers. But if we do our jobs properly, people don’t ever have to think about the service.

I write (some of) the code that runs on our servers. But how are our servers managed? Who watches over the set of machines, feeling the heartbeat of our servers to make sure everything is healthy? MSN Operations. These guys work behind the scenes supporting our cloud. If you thought coding on the Server was behind the scenes, these guys are even further hidden from view. Even from my perspective as a developer on Messenger Server, it’s often easy to forget that we have a team of people dedicated to running the Messenger Service. And we rarely get insight into a typical day in the life of Ops.

Today a small group of us got to spend a day with Messenger Ops. It was enlightening to say the least. We learnt a lot about the day-to-day issues that Ops has to deal with (and we, the Product Group, don’t). We learnt about Ops pain points, infrastructure, tools, etc. I got to see how some of the stuff I do is directly used by Ops (obviously we write some of the tools for them so I know they use them–we’re not that out of sync) and how other tools would/could alleviate the manual labour involved. (Also saw a really cool Matrix-like tool developed by one of the Ops guys.)

Then we got to see the MSN Service Operations Center. This massive room seriously looks like mission control at NASA. WOW. It was so cool. It had huge screens at the front, three clocks on the wall (Redmond, Japan, London). (Here’s a job posting if you’re interested in what it takes to work in SOC.) SOC is basically our Tier1 support, on call 24/7/365. Ops is our Tier2, and I’m part of Tier3. The building also has some serious earthquake engineering and natural disaster response plans.

It was a great way to spend a day. Plus I got free catered food (always a bonus).

Fahrenheit 451

In other news, Start.com‘s weather startlet now supports °C!!! HELL YEAH

 

Stupid Yanks.. After living in the States for 5 years I still don’t get Fahrenheit.

Spaces Sneak Preview

Our team got a sneak preview of the next major release of MSN Spaces today from Mike and Jay. Wow. I don’t know what stuff is in the public knowledge so I won’t say anything specific here (although most of it probably is public anyway or else they wouldn’t show us). It feels like the Spaces team just gets it. (Although I still think it would be really great if we/they could ship faster/smaller releases.)

Rockers and their Mohawks

We had our monthly Development Team meeting today. Our dev manager, Danny, asks the new hires every meeting some random question while they introduce themselves. Last month it was, "What’s your favourite RSS feed?", to which a ton of people were like, "What’s an RSS feed?" (To be fair, I didn’t start using RSS feeds until the introduction of Start.com.) Anyhow, today the question was, "What’s your favourite year of the twentieth century?" Not particularly interesting. I would have answered that it was the year I was born. But today he also directed a question at the interns that are leaving in the next month or so:

Danny:	"Who’s your favourite rocker in Rock Star:INXS?"
Intern:	"uhh I read the Rockstars’ Spaces once, and I guess I’ll say JD because he has a mohawk."
Me:	"No, that’s Ty."
Danny:	"BUSTED!!"

Naturally, Danny is quite a fan. I just watch it because it’s the only thing on and is semi-entertaining. (Although I do have a Rockstar Meego and I did vote this week.)

PowerToys!

More old news (I’ve been away for a bit as I had [and still have] family in town visiting me): Spaces launched PowerToys!  They have three detailed on their TheSpaceCraft blog.  I haven’t played around with it much (at all actually), but some initial reactions:

• Why are these so hard to find?  I have to go and paste something into the address bar?? I know these things are geared towards "advanced users", but the amount of stuff it lets you do doesn’t seem particularly "advanced".  Can’t they just add all these things into an "advanced" section that lets "non-advanced" people try it out as well?  (I guess this ties into the "unsupported" comment below.)
• The TweakUI Power Toy does just that.  Only tweaks.  I guess it’s not false advertising.
• I saw the WMP one.. nice.
• Steve had trouble with the Custom HTML one stripping out his custom HTML.  haha
• Why are these things "UNSUPPORTED"?  I completely understand the need to come out with new features that are "unsupported" as a way of testing/getting feedback on new features; but having "UNSUPPORTED" just makes it sound like: "oh we did something in our spare time.. here it is, but if it doesn’t work, too bad."  Maybe that’s what they were going for.
• What’s up with "The Space Craft"?  ohhhh.. I get it.. Space Craft.  Didn’t get it until I wrote it out.  Ok, props for being subtle.  Still, someone needs to get a UI designer to fix that picture on the Space.  (No offense to Joe)

I have a tendency to sound pessimistic/critical/disgruntled in some of my writings.  I’m really not.. I think these PowerToys are definitely a step in the right direction.  I would say, "Good job Spaces team!" but there’s more than enough of that going around already.