Yahoo and Windows Live exchange messages

Yahoo! Windows Live interop Yahoo! and Microsoft’s instant messaging networks are now able to exchange messages between users. A Windows Live Messenger user can IM with their Yahoo! buddies within the Windows Live application and without having a Yahoo! account. Same thing in reverse for Yahoo! users. These initial features are just the beginning of planned interoperability between Yahoo! and Microsoft’s networks.

The interoperability should be especially popular in east Asia, where Yahoo! and Windows Live Messenger are extremely popular. Desktop clients based on open-source libraries such as Gaim currently provide a single client for text-messaging access to multiple networks today, and the large networks mainly turn a blind eye to what could be considered rogue clients.

The original version of MSN Messenger, launched in 1999, included interoperability with AOL Instant Messenger that was shut off and turned on again through rapid patches on both sides. Although it is possible to bind to AOL’s OSCAR servers and create custom clients, AOL’s current developer terms of service prohibit clients “that are multi-headed or interoperable with any other IM network.” Apple Computer signed a deal with AOL in 2002 establishing iChat as an officially licensed product.

Any IM network could interoperate with Google Talk over XMPP and TLS. Google and AOL have announced plans for Google Talk and AIM interoperability “provided certain conditions are met” after Google’s investment of $1 billion in AOL last year. Google previously offered the Trillian multi-protocol instant messenger as part of its Google Pack software package but has since removed the software from its bundled offering.

Instant messaging networks are the first step towards defining a broad social network across multiple networks and service providers. The more information a search company can collect about the preferences of you and your friends, the better targeted search results and advertisements they are able to serve back to the user (at a higher advertising fee of course). You can expect more interactions and data exchange between large networks as these companies try to learn more about you, your friends, and your favorite online activities.

Accidental Innovation

Harvard business school professor Robert D. Austin is writing a book on reliable innovation and shared some of his findings in a HBS Working Knowledge interview last week. He takes a look at how some big accidental discoveries such as anesthesia, cellophane, cholesterol lowering drugs, cornflakes, dynamite, the ice cream soda, Ivory soap, NutraSweet (and several other artificial sweeteners), nylon, penicillin, photography, rayon, PVC, smallpox vaccine, stainless steel, Teflon came about and what are key factors allowing accidents to happen and realizing value in what could be considered chaos.

It takes a considerable capability to see the value in an accident, and to build upon it to create even more value.

Discovering completely new ideas is all about getting outside a cone of expectations and intentions to create something new. My favorite example cited was an artist creating a beautiful pot and whacking it with a stick during the drying process to see what interesting shapes might form. He knew what a beautiful pot looked like, but he was also willing to experiment and recognize something new that might happen in a way he didn’t expect.

Technorati comScore stats for May

According to comScore Media Metrix numbers cited by the San Francisco Chronicle Google Blog Search had 94,000 unique visitors in May versus 3.3 million unique visitors for Technorati in the same period. Google Blog Search has less than 3% of the number of users as Technorati under those metrics.

Either that’s a typo or Google is not very competitive in both blog search or shopping comparison verticals.

World Cup Final in Dolores Park

The World Cup Final match between France and Italy will be shown this Sunday in Dolores Park starting at 11 a.m. If you live in San Francisco it should be a pretty fun place to watch the game with a good crowd. Food and drink proceeds will help fund science field trips for Bay Area inner city kids to places such as Slide Ranch.

I recommend a trip to Phil’s Coffee on 18th and Sanchez to wake yourself up before the game.

LiveJournal adds Jabber, XMPP

Frank feels chatty

LiveJournal will soon rollout a Jabber service to connect its over 10 million users and content generated on the service. LiveJournal users can authenticate against the service using their LiveJournal username and password to connect to their online friends and receive real-time alerts on new posts and comments. Users will also be able to post to LiveJournal using a special chat bot. The team plans to federate the service to other networks, allowing interoperability with users on Google Talk and other compatible clients.

The new service should be able to support Atom notifications over XMPP. Developers should be able to authenticate against the server and pull out a LiveJournal friends list, allowing anyone to pre-populate a feed aggregator with feeds from your online friends.

Google workplace design

Google offices

I’ve always wondered why the offices of Google employees are fabric tents. Metropolis Magazine recently published an in-depth look at the design of the Google headquarters and the use of colors, lighting, and shared room locations to encourage focused creativity and interaction. (via 37signals)

Wilkinson’s group designed an ingenious system of tented glass offices that allows daylight to stream through the window-side offices and into the center of the floor while preserving acoustic integrity. The white canopies are made of an acrylic-coated polyester, quilted together with polyester-fiber fill. They help reflect light into the rest of the office and are topped by a neat unobtrusive unit that contains lighting, HVAC, sprinklers, and an air diffuser. At intervals panels of glass are glazed in color combos that identify each office neighborhood.

The design company was brave enough to push back on client demands, choosing neutral colors instead of Google colors and focusing on the design of the space before engineering.

Amanda Congdon off Rocketboom

Unboomed

The latest popular blogger to step out on their own is Amanda Congdon of popular video blog Rocketboom. According to a video post on her personal blog Amanda was kicked out by majority shareholder Andrew Baron.

My guess as to what happened? Rocketboom was looking to expand into a video blog network and restructuring the company and ownership in preparation for the new move. Amanda has one of the most popular faces in video blogging so expect her to have a new job or startup soon.

Andrew Baron is director and producer of Rocketboom.

A statement on Rocketboom says Amanda “has decided to move to L.A. to pursue opportunities that have arisen for her in Hollywood.”

DeWitt on Atom syndication 1.0

DeWitt Clinton:

My recommendation to application developers today is to use Atom 1.0, not RSS, as the basis for your content syndication.

DeWitt is the lead engineer at Amazon’s A9 search engine. He took a pretty detailed look at RSS 2.0 and Atom as part of A9’s syndication efforts (including OpenSearch) and shared some of his thoughts today on his blog. He appreciates the detailed implementation of the Atom Syndication Format allowing more lossless expression of data between content publisher and parser.

Firefox in the next 9 months

Mozilla Firefox logo

I heard a few questions yesterday about the future of Firefox and its product goals, differentiating factors, and its positioning against Microsoft and its Internet Explorer browser. I’ve been following the Firefox process intermittently so I’ll outline some of what I know in an attempt to spark community involvement and feedback on behalf of Mozilla and the Firefox team.

The Firefox planners is divided into a few different functions such as planning, development, user interface, test, internationalization, and quality assurance, just to name a few. The product planners are currently engaging the community to determine what should be the differentiating factors of Firefox over the long-term (version 4, 5, 6, etc.). What is Firefox’s role as a browser? What is its role as an application enabler, powering application features through HTML rendering, XUL, or a general handler of all things HTTP. You can follow that thread on the mozilla.dev.planning mailing list if you’re interested.

Firefox 3 roadmap

Current plans for the Firefox browser include a v2 release by the end of September and a v3 release by March of next year. The next version of Firefox, 2.0 aka “Bon Echo” includes features such as OpenSearch support, better feed handling including a browser-friendly render of a feed and better pass-through to other applications, and UI improvements on Windows Vista, OS X, and Gnome. You can read about some of the new features on the Firefox 2 requirements page and you should be able to download the first beta version next Tuesday.

Firefox 3 is focused on improved memory handling, performance, and stability, improved XUL, and new core components such as application data stored in SQLite. Firefox 3 could break a few existing extensions and applications built on top of Firefox, and it will definitely include new optimizations if you like to build on the popular browser. Firefox 3 should have additional JavaScript and SVG features if you’re into that sort of thing.

Mozilla has also realized it has a sizable chunk of revenue from search engine deals and is starting to look at new ways to spend that money. It could mean more books and documentation, user/developer conferences, or more tutorials and other efforts to build the platform.

That’s my mini-summary of what’s going on at Firefox, from an outsider’s point of view.