Windows Live WordPress Web Activity

Software, Websites

While playing around with the new functionality in Windows Live last night, I noticed that they had a WordPress Web Activity.

Adding the WordPress Web Activity to my profile, it asked for my WordPress.com URL and provided suggested formatting of that URL on the textbox. While I do have a WordPress.com account, I don’t use it for blogging for obvious reasons – so adding that URL would have been rather boring for anyone viewing my Windows Live profile.

I assumed that Microsoft hadn’t necessarily collaborated with WordPress.com to allow that integration, after all, the information they are attempting to display within Windows Live is publically available through an RSS feed for a given site.

Making some assumptions about how Microsoft were going to perform their magic, I added in this blogs URL – even though the form suggested http://something.wordpress.com. After hitting submit, their service hit my site and found an alternative formatting for the content within the HTML (RSS), which gave them everything they needed for the integration.

Within a minute of me adding the WordPress Web Activity, the six most recent posts from this blog were visible within my Live.com Profile. Within my activity stream (all of my activity, not just WordPress.com), they were displaying the title, date posted and a short snippet as well with the title linked back to my blog to read the full article.

What I really liked about this piece of functionality was that the Windows Live team didn’t hobble their implementation with over zealous validation. They could have taken the hardline and not accepted anything not in the format of http://something.wordpress.com for a URL – however it would have severely limited its usefulness. Simply because of their forward thinking, millions of users who have their own WordPress blog that aren’t hosted on WordPress.com can now automatically have their posts published into their Windows Live profile.

Windows Live Is Getting Smarter

Software, Websites

A couple of years ago Microsoft embarked on a new product and brand named Live. From memory, the Live product was initially a fight back from Microsoft in response to the might of Google after they recognised that MSN Search wasn’t a strong enough product and brand to combat Google Web Search.

In more recent times, Microsoft have been quietly working away and releasing a number of high quality services, such as:

  • Live Messenger (replacement for MSN Messenger)
  • Live Mail (desktop replacement for Outlook Express & web mail)
  • Live Writer (desktop blog publishing utility)
  • Live Photo Gallery

Probably the most visible amongst those is Live Mail, specifically the web mail – which historically went under the banner of Hotmail. The progressive rolling out of Live Mail has been a refreshing breath of air as the existing Hotmail service was falling by the weigh side in speed and functionality compared to other newer services such as GMail from Google.

The next evolution has been plodding along from Microsoft, which is the notion of a user profile – not unlike what you have on most other web sites. You’ve long been able to login any Microsoft service with your Hotmail and subsequently Live account; Microsoft are now finally capitalising on that single sign on to embrace the social web landscape that has seen incredible growth over the last 3 years.

With recent upgrades to Live.com, when signing into your account you can get a snapshot of your online assets – such as the last x emails you’ve received in your Hotmail account and a history of your activity with various Live products like changing the status message in Live Messenger.

Today there is an amazing set of new functionality within the Live.com profiles, which allows users to consume other social network content within their profile. Microsoft are calling these things ‘web activities’ and are marketing it as a method which will allow your friends to keep on top of all things you, without having to visit potentially dozens of different web sites. The new web activities go by the name of widgets in other sites, small blocks of pluggable content from a different source which is displayed on your site. As a simple example, they have web activities to plugin your Facebook stream and literally dozens of others to your Live.com profile.

While Microsoft have come into the user profile space behind Google, who first released them in December 2007 – the evolution of the Live user profile functionality seems to be happening at a much faster pace. Google Profiles allows a user to tell others about themselves, associate their profile with other social network profiles via a simple URL and in some instances, consume content via widgets but not to the extent that the Microsoft Live profiles do.

A feature that is surely high on the Live list of functionality will be vanity URL’s for users. The current user profile URL’s are horrible and completely useless for a consumer, mine being http://cid-067d01ecc9a1cc7b.profile.live.com/. Only in the last month have Google provided vanity URL’s as an option for their profiles, which are either numeric by default or based on your Google Account username. To explore how that might get used, I’ve enabled the vanity URL’s for my Google Profile at http://www.google.com/profiles/alistair.lattimore.

I’ve been a late adopter to all things Live, so I’m really excited by the functionality and features that are flowing into the Live products. I keen to see where Microsoft are going to take this going forward – maybe there are plans for tighter integration with Facebook or their own social network down the road?

Princess Is On A Holiday

Animals, Photos

A close up shot of a white Ragdoll cat's faceAfter months of discussion, procrastination, discussion, deliberation and more procrastination – Claire and I finally decided that we needed to find our beautiful ragdoll Princess a new home.

The decision has been really difficult to make as we love Princess a lot, she is positively gorgeous and has a fantastic nature. However, since Hugo arrived – she is no longer our baby. At the start it wasn’t quite so bad as Hugo was sleeping more, which meant there was more time to give Princess the affection that she craves. Unfortunately as Hugo has grown up, we’re left with less and less time and we’re honestly not giving her the attention that she deserves.

We were very reluctant to simply give her away – as we really wanted to know she was going to an excellent home – not just an okay one. I talked to some friends at work, to see if any wanted their first cat or optionally a second or third but that didn’t pan out. However, when Claire’s younger sister Lucy suggested that they’d love to have her – Claire and I thought it perfect. Perfect because Lucy & Michael already have a fancy pants Layanese and Lucy was in fact the person that gave Princess to Claire as a birthday present back in 2006!

White ragdoll cat sitting inside a paper bag, happily restingLucy & Michael were a little unsure how their Layanese named Boost would react to another cat in the house and we were a little nervous as well. To make sure things were going to work out, we packed up Princess’s gear for a night or two away as a test. As it turns out, neither of us had anything to worry about as Boost & Princess hit it off straight away. Initially there was a lot of sitting close to one another, looking each other dead into the eyes and then the rampant playing started – which is a sure fire way to know Princess is relaxed and happy.

We’re really sad to not have Princess in our lives on a daily basis, Claire and I are constantly expecting to hear her distinctive little ‘burr’ sound around the house. Fortunately, she isn’t far away and we know that she is in a fantastic environment with people that love cats as much as Claire and I do.

Smile Plus, Gold Coast Dentists Without The Fuss

Family, Life

Toward the end of last week, Claire mentioned that she had a toothache but didn’t take too much notice of it. By the time Friday clicked round, the toothache that she wasn’t paying all that much attention to was well and truly making her pay attention.

Being generally uneasy about dentists, Claire called one of her older sisters for a dentist recommendation. While Anita could offer a suggestion, it was more than likely that the soonest Claire could see anyone was going to be early the following week. At this point, the toothache was severe enough that Claire could barely wait for 9AM to come around to get to the chemist to get some serious pain relief for it. After taking the first two Panadeine Ultra tablets, it provided relief for about two hours – instead of the normal four and then the ice packs came out.

At this point, it seemed quite clear to me that there was no way that Claire was going to be able to make it through to next week (if she was lucky) – so I started calling around some local Gold Coast dentists just before lunch time on Saturday morning in a vein hope that one would be open and be able to see Claire.

The local Pacific Pines Dentist was open, however unable to get Claire in until Monday but referred us to Smile + or Smileplus in Southport. Giving them a quick call, the receptionist was helpful and I got to talk to the dentist within about a minute of calling. They were just about to close up but stayed open for us, which was absolutely fantastic. We left straight away to get into Southport Central and they were both very reassuring for Claire and really set her mind at ease about the whole dental experience.

About an hour and a half later, Claire had her initial consultation, x-rays and a the problematic tooth extracted. To Claire’s surprise, she was feeling considerably better before we’d even left the dental surgery, as the pressure being placed on the nerve was gone.

I think I thanked the dentist & his nurse about half a dozen times while we were there. It was such a refreshing experience to be able to call, when you’re really in need of a specialist service and to be able to get in touch with the specialists. Claire was so impressed with their service, that she voluntarily scheduled another appointment for this Saturday for a general check up, which I think speaks volumes about their service.

Fremantle Down Carlton At Gold Coast Stadium

Sport

I had corporate tickets to the Fremantle versus Carlton AFL match this evening at the Gold Coast Carrara Stadium via work.

The evening was fully catered and included waiters in each of the boxes, which was a nice touch. The other great aspect of the corporate tickets was VIP parking, situated right behind the Gold Coast football stadium. Getting into the parking was straight forward but getting away from the stadium was even better, straight into the car, onto the road and completely missed the typical traffic chaos.

The first quarter of the match was quite scrappy, with a lot of stray kicks and handling errors. I thought that was going to set the tune for the entire match, which would have been disappointing but I was pleased to see the quality lift by half way through the first quarter.

My one paragraph breakdown of the match is as follows. Fremantle won the match through great defence within their 50m circle and cleared the ball well. While Carlton were able to get the ball into the Fremantle half quite easily, their approach to getting the ball into the 50m circle was very ordinary. I think their approach strategy tonight (if you can call it that) ultimately lost the match for them – which compounded by poor ball control and ball movement choice made disposal a simple task for Fremantle.

I’m not a massive AFL fan, however I do enjoy watching the matches on the TV – however I couldn’t tell you the names of all the teams or who plays for what team and in what position. After seeing a match in person now, I can completely understand why it is such a massively popular sport in the southern states – the aerial acrobatics and sheer fitness of the players is quite astounding.

I could definitely see myself going along to another game at some point – the crowd are vocal and passionate about their teams, which makes the experience that much more memorable I think.