April 14th, 2008

Microsoft Virtual Earth Gets Vegas in 3D

The release of version 6.1 of the Microsoft Virtual Earth API has been announced on the Virtual Earth / Live Maps blog (with more details from from VE evangelist Chris Pendleton). Although it’s a minor release number there’s a variety of useful new capabilities in the service and its API. Some of the highlights are:

• Better 3D rendering for certain cities, starting with Las Vegas, Dallas, Denver and Phoenix, and extending ultimately to 250 cities. For instance, take a look at Cesars Palace on the Las Vegas Strip displayed in 3D and in Bird’s eye view.

  

• New walking directions, available via the API
• The option for traffic-based routing, which optimizes driving directions optimized based on current traffic conditions. For example: directions between an office in Berkeley and the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, accounting for traffic

To get a sense of how Microsoft’s new features compare to those in Google maps, compare different views of the main building of the New York Public Library:

• Google street view
• Virtual Earth — 3D looking straight down
• Virtual Earth — 3D from an angle
• Virtual Earth — Bird’s eye

Go to http://maps.live.com/ and them out features out.

As noted on Techcrunch, one of the most interesting features is the deeper support for KML in Virtual Earth. Microsoft Live Maps will take the URL for a KML file (such as those from Google My Maps) and display the point. For instance, you can use Yahoo! Pipes to extract the locations and convert a RSS feed to a KML feed. For instance, pass the NY Times International Section RSS feed to a location extracting Yahoo! Pipe to generate a KML feed. For a while now, you’ve been able to display KML feeds using Google Earth or Google Maps, and now, by using the mapurl parameter, you can use Live Maps to also display the KML feed.

As a developer, don’t forget one of the best learning tools around for any mapping API — the The Virtual Earth Interactive SDK as well as the source documentation at Microsoft Virtual Earth. And for more examples of what’s being built on the VE API, see the 140 Virtual Earth mashups listed here.

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Posted by Raymond Yee as Mapping, Microsoft at 2:33 AM | No Comments »

March 27th, 2008

Microsoft Partners with Social Networks on Data Portability

This week Microsoft made data portability news by announcing a partnership with five of largest social networks to allow users to export their contacts from Windows Live directly into those services. Partner networks include Facebook, LinkedIn, Bebo, Hi5 and Tagged (the Facebook export works now, with the others coming soon). Underneath the covers the integration is based on the Windows Live Contacts API and in conjunction with the announcement Microsoft has launched www.invite2messenger.net where users can invite friends from partner social networks to join their Windows Live Messenger contact list.

The stated objective is to create a “secure two-way street” in which users control how and when their data is shared:

We think customers should be able to share their data in the most safe and secure way possible, but historically this openness has been achieved largely through a mechanism called “screen-scraping,” which unduly puts customers at risk for phishing attacks, identity fraud, and spam. Now with the Windows Live Contacts API, we have provided an alternative to “screen-scraping” that is equally open but unequivocally safer and more secure for customers.

Certainly screen scraping is an anti-pattern that’s gotten a lot of attention recently. And it’s become such a common way for sites to access users’ contacts that it’s created a good business for companies who provide address book scraping libraries like Octazen Solutions.

Moves like this from Microsoft and Google’s recently launched Contacts API are solid steps along the path to interoperability of social network data. For more lively discussion on this topic there’s the upcoming Data Sharing Summit and Workshop on April 18-19th in SF and Mountain View on May 15th.

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Posted by John Musser as Facebook, Microsoft, Social, Standards at 12:22 AM | No Comments »

March 13th, 2008

Microsoft’s Data Stack Goes Up to the Cloud

Building on their flurry of announcements around last week’s MIX08 event, Microsoft’s Live Platform Services GM, George Moore has just outlined in the dev.live blog how Microsoft plans to unify their storage solutions from on premise all the way up to cloud storage. As you can see below, the strategy spans a range of products and services. As a driving theme, the post makes reference to Ray Ozzie’s MIX08 keynote and ideas around having a connected “mesh” of synchronized devices and services.

As George describes “For the first time ever we have a unified protocol and developer tooling story across most of our major storage products from Microsoft”. Microsoft provides the following table to help summarize the layers on this stack. The four layers build up from Microsoft-specific products and services, the open standard protocols, developer tools, and at the highest level is a synchronization infrastructure.

Technically, two key pieces of the puzzle are: a) using Atom as the “unified on-the-wire format” with AtomPub as the “unified protocol”, and b) “a set of URI namespace conventions to address scalar values and feed-of-feed hierarchy navigation which also work uniformly across the above storage products and services, regardless of the top level DNS address of the underlying service.” The latter are outlined in this table:

Earlier this month ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley wrote about Microsoft working to stitch together a comprehensive story on unified storage. It’s safe to assume there will be additional Microsoft announcements before long as more pieces of the Live Services puzzle fall into place (23 Live APIs so far).

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Posted by John Musser as Infrastructure, Microsoft at 1:26 AM | No Comments »

February 28th, 2008

Microsoft’s Flurry of API News for MIX08

Microsoft made a flurry of API-related announcements today in advance of next week’s sold-out MIX08 event in Las Vegas. The key details are outlined in this blog post at dev.live from David Treadwell, Corporate Vice President of Windows Live Platform Services. Today’s news covers five of their Live APIs, development tool support for web APIs, and a bit of insight into their overall technology strategy for the Live family of APIs (they currently have over 20 APIs). Over the past couple of years Microsoft has increasingly been using MIX as a launching ground for their online platform technologies (see our MIX07 coverage here).

• AtomPub: Perhaps most notable overall is the official statement that “Microsoft is making a large investment in unifying our developer platform protocols for services on the open, standards-based Atom format (RFC4287) and the Atom Publishing Protocol (RFC 5023).”. They’re starting with the Windows Live Spaces Photo API, their Application-Based Storage service, the Astoria ADO.Net Data Services, with “a few more surprises in this area announced at MIX”. Since Google’s GData is also Atom-based, this means two of the biggest web API providers are both supporting the same underlying REST-based model in their web services. Of course the devils in the details and over time we’ll see how the implementations will inevitably vary across vendors.
• Windows Live Messenger Library (WLML): The next biggest part of the announcement is this new JavaScript API built on top of the Windows Live Messenger platform (and their 300 million+ users) that allows web sites to create their own customized chat experience. You can get details on the API in our new API summary and on the MSDN site.The screenshot below shows a custom app on the right interacting with the standard Messenger on the left. The API supports all of the core Messenger features like text chat, user status, pictures and contact list management. It’s a secure model where sign-on is done through Windows Live ID so the site hosting the application should never have access to the user’s password. The library is compatible with IE and Firefox on Windows and Mac. What about usage limits? It’s free up to 1 million unique users per month. Note that this is a different, more powerful interface into Messenger than their existing Windows Live IM Control.



• Windows Live ID Delegated Authentication: This updated API and new web control give third-party applications a secure way access users Windows Live data while giving users granular permission of what can be accessed and for how long (see API our Live ID profile here). In order to use the service developers must first sign-up for an Application ID. They then supply this at runtime when a user wants to access their Live data (the process of “requesting consent”). At that point users are sent to a Windows Live login page or iframe where they login and grant access based on function and/or time. This gives the app a “Consent Token” which in turn contains a “Delegation Token” which can be used by the app to access specific Live APIs and functions. These tokens expire and need to be refreshed by the application. This will be an important API in the Live platform stack given how many other services will leverage it. The slide below shows the interaction between this services and an app using the Photo API.



• Windows Live Photo API: In a major upgrade to their Windows Live Spaces Photo API. The API lets third-party sites build photo applications on top of Windows Live Spaces. Because of the large size of the Live Spaces user base, the API gives developers programmatic access to 4 billion photos. Underneath the covers the API now supports both a WebDAV and an AtomPub model. The APIs let you upload, download and delete photos and to create, edit, and delete albums. One of the changes to the API and photo hosting model is that third-party developers don’t need to host or proxy the images but instead can manage the photo metadata but leave the storage and serving to Microsoft. And note that it uses Windows Live Delegated Authentication in which users delegate permission to read or read/write photos on a site-by-site basis.
• Application Based Storage API: Details on this will be released at MIX next week but this is “an experimental API which allows application developers to store a small amount of state/configuration data in the Windows Live data centers on behalf of a user. This API has an AtomPub service end point so developers will be able to call this using ADO.NET data services or other AtomPub compatible tools. The real value kicks in here if an application was to have hundreds of thousands of users as the storage is offloaded to Windows Live infrastructure.”
• Last but not least are updates to Silverlight Streaming including WebDAV support as well as new code samples at mslivelabs to help developers get started including an update to their existing Tafiti app (our PW mashup profile) along with source.

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Posted by John Musser as Events, Microsoft at 12:01 PM | 8 Comments »

February 11th, 2008

Microsoft and Yahoo: Comparing the APIs

Now that Microsoft has responded to Yahoo’s initial rejection of their offer it looks like this story isn’t over yet. Whether or not this deal goes through, it’s worth noting that both of these companies take developing open web APIs as a key part of their strategy going forward (even in the midst of the talks last week Yahoo released their Yahoo Live API). Overall Yahoo has 28 open web APIs and Microsoft has 22 open web APIs. This means that between them there are 50 APIs. Of course there’s overlap and given the technical challenges it’s not easy to combine platforms (ex: look at how Flickr and delicious APIs at Yahoo retain their own flavor). To give a sense of comparison the following table gives you an overview of how the APIs currently stack up:

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Posted by John Musser as Microsoft, Popular, Yahoo at 11:58 PM | 7 Comments »

February 10th, 2008

Mashups Break the Microsoft Mold

The New York Times has a piece today by John Markoff on Microsoft’s mashup builder Popfly entitled Mashups Are Breaking the Mold at Microsoft. Like many mashup tools, Popfly is relatively new, it went into alpha testing earlier last year and was opened to a wider audience last fall (for more you can see our Popfly launch coverage here). The Times story looks at how the project and team are not typical Microsoft: Popfly lead John Montgomery and his team of 17 is very small by Microsoft standards, they are building software inherently designed to be delivered over the Web, and it’s an innovative tool for building applications but the audience is non-programmers.

Introduced at the Web 2.0 conference last year by Steven A. Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive, Popfly was picked by PC World magazine as one of the most innovative computing and consumer electronics products of 2007. It has garnered more than 100,000 users — the company says the exact number is confidential — and now has a library of more than 50,000 “mashups”: new components or Web pages that have been created in a visual snap-together fashion, like Lego blocks.

Reference is made to some of the challengers: “Microsoft is certainly not alone in seeing this kind of an opportunity. Yahoo offers a widely used tool call Yahoo Pipes that offers some of the same capabilities as Popfly, and Google has designed a “mashup editor” for more skilled programmers.” And there are other challenges, the largest of which may be Web community skepticism because it relies on Microsoft’s own Silverlight technology as an RIA delivery medium (and indeed Silverlight, outside of Popfly itself, is being used for for some mashups today).

But in the end there’s an interesting question, and opportunity, that many mashup products are pursuing, of how to put more sophisticated tools in the hands of non-IT staff, be they in a corporate environment, at school or at home.

For his part, Mr. Montgomery believes that Popfly does have some very big ideas to offer the Web world. He is following in an important tradition that began in the 1960s with computer languages like Logo and Smalltalk, which were aimed at unlocking the power of computing for nontechnical users. Today he is betting that Popfly will offer a simple way to give the power of programming to the rest of us.

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Posted by John Musser as Microsoft, RIA, Tools at 4:36 PM | 3 Comments »

January 1st, 2008

Wii Earth 3D Mashup

If you want a hacking diversion on your New Year’s holiday, here’s a mashup-related idea: turn your Nintendo Wii into a controller for Microsoft Virtual Earth 3D maps. Our first Mashup of the Day for 2008 comes from this article by Brian Peek that shows you how to do it along with accompanying video and source code in C# and VB. (And for more Wii hacking, see the earlier Wii Enterprise Remote).

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Posted by John Musser as BestMashups, Hardware, Mapping, Microsoft at 4:35 AM | No Comments »

December 28th, 2007

Microsoft’s SSL for Secure Map Mashups

If you’re interested in creating secure maps mashups the Microsoft Virtual Earth team has a new feature for you: SSL support. As .NET developer David Barkol points out: by providing SSL support the Virtual Earth API now offers something not yet available in Google Maps. This means developers can include a version of the VE map control from a https://dev.virtualearth.net address for any SSL-enabled applications they’re building without having to resort to requiring specific browser settings or server-side proxies.

David notes that “if you’ve ever placed a Virtual Earth map or Google map on an HTTPS page then you’re probably familiar with the mixed content message that appears when the page loads” and that this new VE capability directly addresses this problem:

While SSL support is not required for many mashups, this level of security will become more relevant as map mashups evolve into integral elements of enterprise applications, commercial mashups, and other higher-value apps.

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Posted by John Musser as Enterprise, Mapping, Microsoft, Security at 12:53 AM | 2 Comments »

November 6th, 2007

Silverlight Election Mashup

We’ve talked before about Silverlight mashups and since today is an election day here in the States (an “off year” as they say, so no big national contests), this is a good time to point-out a new election-themed mashup: Silverlight Election App. This mashup uses Microsoft’s new Silverlight platform to create a rich UI with biographies, images, links, and feeds for the main presidential candidates. It also uses the Virtual Earth API to integrate campaign maps so you can see where each of the candidates will be visiting on which dates.

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Posted by John Musser as Mapping, Microsoft at 10:50 AM | No Comments »

October 11th, 2007

Silverlight Mashups

Microsoft made headlines earlier this year when they released Silverlight, their RIA compeitor to Adobe Flash. Since it’s so new we haven’t seen a lot of mashups built with it but did recently get this new entry Silverlight Photo Carousel, an interactive photo carousel displaying interesting photos using Silverlight and the Flickr API. You can read more about how the application was built on developer Nikhil Kothari’s blog.

Given that Microsoft’s innovative Popfly mashup builder uses Silverlight extensively we might start seeing some interesting Silverlight mashups once that service moves out of private alpha.

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Posted by John Musser as Microsoft, Tools at 3:09 AM | 2 Comments »