Today, I hit “Zero Email Bounce”.  There is absolutely nothing in my inbox.

I have been working at Microsoft for 11 years, 1 month, and 29 days.  And, I have never had zero items in my inbox ever during that time.  I haven’t even come close.  While I have hit 1000 a couple times in my life, I usually am somewhere between 200 and 400.

After reading Omar’s blog, I decided to buy that little book he keeps talking about and try it out.  I’m not even done the thing and it’s already helping.

I actually tried to get to “ZEB” about two weeks ago.  The only reason I couldn’t do it is because of my lack of discipline in just using my inbox for untriaged stuff.  I found myself spinning on a few things, and wimping out and keeping stuff in my inbox “because I’ll get to it in a little bit”.  But, I tried a bit harder, and it worked.

The #1 benefit is that, when I turn off my computer and go and do something else, like hang out with my son, read a book, or go for a walk with my dog, I simply am not thinking about work.  Because, all my work is nice and organized, waiting for me when I return. 

Anyone that has wasted more than 30 minutes of their life worrying about work when they should be having fun doing something else, please go out and buy this book.  Heck, if you ask nicely, I’ll buy it for you.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0142000280/qid=1128055795/sr=2-1/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_1/002-5876265-8060848?v=glance&s=books

The real test will be in about a month to see if I'm keeping it up.  It's a bit of a struggle to get Outlook to do things the way I want.  For instance, if you create a custom view for Tasks, you can only have one sort key.  So, you can sort by priority, or by due date, but you can't sort by both.  If someone from Outlook-land is listening, please let me know if there is a workaround for this.

On Friday, I headed down to the waterfront here in Seattle to attend Gnomedex 5.0. 

The intersection of communication and technology is creating an explosion of cool new things for people to play with, and most of the conversations at Gnomedex are covering the things that we’re the most excited about: using technology to speak to the people you want to speak to, and to listen to the people you want to listen to.

There was once a time when the only people who blogged were high-end power-geeks and teenage mallrats.  The world is tipping now.  When Dean from the IE team got up to talk, he announced for us that there are now over 15 million Spaces out there, and growing.

But with the rapid movement of people getting on the web to share a little about themselves, the “listening” side continues to be fairly rudimentary.  Some people have a hard time finding interesting sites that would be relevant to them, while others are connected to too much content, and it’s difficult to bubble up the interesting stuff, above all the noise.

At Gnomedex, it was great to see so many people understanding these basic problems.  Over the next year, we will be seeing a lot of progress in this area.  Exciting stuff.

My favorite moments of the conference:

• Seeing Chris Pirillo’s dad help out with the microphone.  I’m not sure if it was planned out this way or not, but Chris sure did put his dad to work.  Dave Winer complained that there weren’t enough microphones out in the crowd, so he could have an open discussion with the audience.  Within 30 seconds, Chris’s dad was walking up and down the aisles with a microphone.  He ended up keeping that job for the rest of the conference.
• Dean’s quips to some of the less enthusiastic attendees, during the Longhorn RSS announcement.  We work for Microsoft, and there are a certain set of people in our industry that will never trust anything we do.  It’s disappointing, but it’s something you learn to deal with.  Dean did a fairly good job of being humble for most of his talk, so his important message wasn’t lost to the people who wanted to actively engage in the conversation.  But, Dean lost it a couple times when he got pinged by a few hostile people.  At one point, Dean said something along the lines of “How about we follow up later, and you can tell me where I can get a haircut like that”.   I’m sure people could debate whether that was appropriate or not, but few would disagree that it was hilarious.
• Dare getting put on the spot and being asked to go on stage and defend some of the features he has chosen to support.  When he got beckoned on stage, he had a “Oh No.  Don’t make me do this” look on his face.  He defended himself well!
• Philip Torrone’s (http://www.flashenabled.com/) demonstrations of all the things you can do to an iPod that voids your warranty.
• Getting the OPML list of all the blogs of the attendees, and discovering a ton of new feeds to read.  My new favorite blog: The Year of the Coffee Blog.
  

Adam Curry’s podcast had a great segment the other day, submitted by one of his listeners: a conspiracy theory with Microsoft!  This is a good one.

Roz Ho is the General Manager for MacBU, a team I helped found back in 1997 here at Microsoft, and where I worked for six years.  The theory is that Roz is actually Bill Gates in disguise.

http://mp3.dailysourcecode.podshow.com/DSC-2005-06-09.mp3

Hop to 18 minutes and 12 seconds into the podcast.

Although I worked with Roz for a long time, I have to admit, I never have seen Roz and Bill in the same room at the same time.  So, although I would like to dispel this rumor, I can only say that she *probably* is not Bill. 

Roz, we’re going to need to see a picture of you and Bill together to put this one to rest.

Our friends over on the Xbox team announced Xbox 360 last week.  I’ve definitely been looking forward to this one.

I had never been much of a gamer, but all that changed when James talked me into getting in line to get one of the first Xbox’s the night they shipped, back in 2001.  James and I worked together at the time in MacBU, but the gamer in him got the best of him, and he later went to work with the Xbox team.  But at the time, he was making cool Mac software during the day, and turning into an Xbox nut at night.  And he wasn’t about to let me miss the boat with the Xbox launch.

I didn’t know which games to buy, so I just told James to pick some out for me.  But I knew one game I had to get: Halo.  Man, did I spend a lot of time in my basement with that game!  I was in the basement, of course, since MB wasn’t about to let a big gaming console box hang out in the living room.

Then, last year, Halo2 came out.  I had been using Xbox Live since it went live two years ago with a couple games some friends had recommended, but Halo2 took everything up a notch.  Just last week, they started introducing new maps, and it took me all of 2 seconds to think through whether it was worth six bucks to download them.

One of the best unintended benefits of Xbox Live was that I got to catch up a lot more with my brothers in San Francisco.  They both have Xbox’s, so we can meet up online, catch up with each other through the Xbox Live headsets, and then team up and kill some bad guys.  Being able to have high-quality audio conversations with family a thousand miles away while running around with a shotgun is something that shouldn’t be missed.

The second most favorite game at our house is Sims (or whatever variant of Sims came out the most recently, like the Urbz).  MB isn’t into shooting games, but it’s pretty fun to veg out every now and then and play Sims together.  It’s a great two-player game, which I never would have guessed until I played it for the first time.

So, what am I looking forward to with Xbox 360?

As you can probably tell, I’m not really a hard-core gamer.  I play a handful of games every now and then, but mostly use it as a social tool to hang out with my family.  So, I’m not as interested in the new hardware capabilities.  What I’m excited about:

• it looks like all the controllers can be wireless.  This is insanely cool.  When you have a one-year-old in the room, he finds it really fun to unplug all the cords.
• The box isn’t ugly.  It’s in the basement for a reason!  Maybe I can sneak it back in the living room in the future.
• The controllers are smaller.  The big fat controllers from the original release always seemed over-blown.
• There is some sort of mysterious Media Center PC integration.  This is the coolest of them all!  I want my Xbox to be able to connect to the rest of my geeky infrastructure at my house and do cool things.

One thing that they need to work on: some sort of plastic shield over the power button and the CD opener.  Max loves pushing those buttons!

I also hope they make a left-handed controller.  C’mon guys, we’re like 15% of the population of the world! 

Here is an interesting article in the Seattle Times about the Xbox launch.

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2002276090_xboxdesign16.html

And, the Team Xbox site has some great articles about the new box:

http://www.teamxbox.com/

A bunch of us folks from Redmond spent more than a week visiting our colleagues in Asia earlier this month; specifically, Seoul, Korea, and Tokyo, Japan. 

We ship Spaces now in 15 different languages, which covers 30 markets (that means, for example, that we ship a French version, one language, in France, Canada, Belgium, and Switzerland, which is four markets).  For those who haven’t traveled around the world much, you’d be surprised how differently people communicate in different parts of the world.

For instance, in Japan, most people’s primary way of sending notes back and forth to friends is through phone-based email.  I think most Americans would go insane trying to use their phone as their primary way to send email (although I think 15 year old’s in the US are getting pretty good at it).  There are two main reasons, I think, for why this took off in Japan, that would be hard to replicate broadly in the US.  First off, because of the unique way you enter Asian characters into a phone, it’s actually quicker to type in Japanese than it is in English.  So, a PC keyboard is far easier for me, although it’s only slightly better for someone in Japan.  Secondarily, most people in Tokyo spend up to an hour each way commuting back and forth on a train.  It is not permitted to talk on the phone when on a train, so people tend to use their phone for browsing the web and sending email.  These two forces collide to make the mobile experience to be the most popular form of communication to ones friends and family.  I think the only place where this might get replicated here is in the New York City metro area, so maybe what is happening in Tokyo will be happening there in a couple years.

In Korea, almost everyone has high-speed internet access in their home.  This is pretty unique among all the markets we ship in.  Once you and everyone you care to communicate with has an incredibly fast internet connection, the sort of things that can be done on the PC start to change significantly.  We just shipped our first version of Spaces in Korea last week, so we’re excited about the opportunities to do some really cool things here in the future.

Based on the photos I took, you’d think that all we did was eat.  Let’s just say that a bunch of photos of people arguing in conference rooms wouldn’t have been as interesting as seeing us wolf done local cuisine .

Irving also took some great pictures, check them out here.

One of the things that vexes power users of Messenger is our 150 buddy limit.  A very small percentage of our users actually hit this problem, but a small percentage of a big number (at last count, more than 155 million people per month) ends up being a lot of people.

You can actually receive IM's from more than 150 people; we have something called the "allow list", which controls who can send you an IM.  And, that limit is a lot higher than 150.  The 150 limit refers to how many people can be on your buddy list that you see in the main window.  And, for you to *start* an IM conversation, that person has to be on your buddy list. 

So, our weird 150 limit has created a really interesting social phenomenon.  Once you meet a new person that you want to be able to chat with, if you are at our limit, you have to pick someone else and break ties with them.  Most of the time, this is a grueling experience.  Once you become an IM junkie, it becomes your main form of communication, and not being able to chat with someone means they are gone from your life.  Because it's not just the ability to IM them; you no longer can see their "presence", i.e., whether they are online or not, what their name is for the day, what their usertile is, etc.  I.e., the person is now dead to you.

Except, for the weird nuance that they can still IM you.  So, the social awkwardness is that you have to drop someone from your buddy list, but not tell them you did it, since that would be insulting.  But, if you ever want to have a conversation with them, they have to start the IM session.

The Messenger team took a big step in the right direction to mitigate this social disaster: they made an update to their service that now ups the limit from 150 to 300 last night.  So, for people like me, I now need to go back and find the 50 people I have dropped over the past year, and add them back to my life.  For those of you out there that wondered what happened to me, I will soon be returning.

Takao is one of our international experts here in MSN, focusing on Spaces, Hotmail, and parts of MSN Search.  He posted a pretty cool widget that lets you take a world tour of Spaces.

A lot of people like to surf through Spaces by clicking on the random set of people who show up in the Updated Spaces list.  Back when we were designing that list, we decided to only show the people in your local market in that list.  So, if you were French, you were guaranteed that only other French Spaces would show up on the list.  We did this for obvious reasons: if the list included everyone in the world, chances are, you wouldn't be able to read the language of 80% of the Spaces in the list.

But, with that said, it turns out it's pretty fun to take a tour of Spaces from around the world.  And that is where Takao's tool comes in.  If you click on one of the links in his "Multilingual UI Switcher" (hey Takao, let's work on the naming of this thing ), you can fake Spaces into thinking you are from a different market.

His tool is along the right hand side of his Space, which can be found here:

http://spaces.msn.com/members/ts

As an example of what you can see, here is a link to Takao's site as if you were sitting in Sweden, so all the Spaces in the Updated Spaces list are in Swedish.

http://spaces.msn.com/members/ts/?mkt=sv-se

Another cool integration feature was shipped today, this time, over at MSNBC.  They have a new "Blog This" link, so you can easily chime in with your two cents on what's going on out there in the world. 

By clicking the "Blog This" link, we start the process of creating a new blog entry on your Space, with an embedded link back to the original article.  I actually used "Blog This" for this entry. 

Check out the press release, and start blogging today!

Quote

MSNBC - Press Release

One of the great things about launching products at Microsoft is the random stuff that occurs on the day of the launch.  For instance, coming into work today, I was greeted by a pack of Alpaca's in a nearby parking lot, celebrating the Search launch.  I wished I had grabbed a picture of this, but I was driving, and probably would have caused an accident.

Jay, Mike, and I were grabbing some lunch in the cafeteria later in the day, when we noticed two models in butterfly outfits just hanging out, walking around aimlessly.  Clearly, I wasn't going to miss this one.  Here is me and Mike hamming it out with two cute butterflies.

I think they were actually glad that someone finally walked up and started talking to them.  It was clear that they had no idea how cool the new MSN Search release is, but we'll forgive them.

Great to hear that our pals over on the MSN Search team formally launched today!  And with a nice opening letter from Bill Gates, no less.

We're all pretty excited about this new release.  There once was a time when Microsoft's search offering, well, sucked.  Now, with this new release, coupled with the MSN Deskbar that's in beta, makes this whole space competitive again. 

For those who gave up on MSN Search years ago, it's time to take another test drive.

Quote

Microsoft Formally Launches Search Engine

For those interested, our friend Scott Counts from the Microsoft Research team is conducting an online study on social networking.  As you probably guessed, he works in the Social Computing Group.  If you are interested in participating, feel free to sign up.  You need to be over 18.

He says it takes about 15-20 minutes to complete, and through some magical algorithm that only Microsoft Research understands, some lucky participants will win some free Microsoft software.

To sign up:

• Go to the Online Lab website.
• Register for the Online Lab.
• Select the "Social Networking" study link.

Have fun!

Two great pieces of news today!

First off, some exciting news for us folks on the MSN Spaces team about how many people are out there using Spaces.  We’ve been live now for less than six weeks, but the rate at which people have signed up and started their own Space has been phenomenal.  We just found out that we hit the 1.5 million Spaces mark earlier today.  You can imagine how excited we are that we’ve had that many people sign up in that short of a time, with people still signing on at an explosive rate. 

One of the benefits of having that many vocal, passionate people involved in our beta is that we get a ton of great feedback.  One of the feature areas that we get the most comments on is our Messenger integration, since it lets people catch up with all their friends’ Spaces every time they log in.  I don’t know about you, but I’m addicted to gleams .

That leads me to my second piece of news: the MyMSN team is about to deploy a new version of MyMSN that supports arbitrary RSS feeds.  That opens up a whole new way to catch up with all the Spaces you read.  Since all public Spaces have RSS feeds associated with them, you can add a Space’s RSS feed link to your MyMSN page, and read what is going on at Jay’s Krib right next to the New York Times!

We’re working on a more elegant link that we can include on a Space, so it’s brain dead simple to add the Space you are viewing to your MyMSN page.  But for now, you can click here to check it out.  The URL looks something like this:

http://my.msn.com/addtomymsn.armx?id=rss&ut=http://spaces.msn.com/members/emcee/feed.rss&ru=http://spaces.msn.com/members/emcee

It’s cool to see yet another opportunity to integrate our products together.  2005 is shaping up to be another cool year in MSN, and we’re just getting started.

By the way, If you are wondering when we hit one million users, it was December 26th.  Ryan was very upset that this didn’t happen on December 25th, because it was the only thing he had asked Santa for .

We’ve gotten a lot of suggestions for new modules that people would like to see added to MSN Spaces.  At the top of the list is a guest book, so visitors can leave a general greeting.  This one is definitely on our radar for a future release.

In the mean time, a few people have hacked around the problem and added a guest book on their own.  If you check out freefreshfish’s site, you can see he added a new custom list to his space (called “GuestBook”), and then added a permalink to a new blog entry as the only list item on the custom list.  Visitors can click that link, where they are sent to the permalink page for that blog entry, which supports adding comments.  Ba-da-bing!

We've had a pretty busy December here on the MSN Spaces team.  But with our latest update released on Thursday, I now have some time to start paying attention to some of the reviews on Spaces rolling out from the traditional media (as opposed to the blogging community, who have been giving us detailed feedback since about an hour after we shipped ).

I was pretty excited to see that we got a 4 out of 5 star review from PC Magazine.  A very positive article, with extra special kudos to our photo album feature.  Greg and Divya rock the house!

Their one negative remark was about our quota on photos.  This is a legitimate gripe, but we *are* a free service, and we're still in beta.  We're paying attention to this issue, as well as all the other great feedback we're getting, to make sure we get this stuff right over time.

Our friends on the MSN Toolbar team shipped a great new release today, the beta for the MSN Toolbar Suite.  You can find the download at http://beta.toolbar.msn.com.

The desktop search implementation is life-altering.  Once you start using it, you can't live without it.  Download it now and start playing with it.  If you have any ideas on how to make it better, let the team know!

The Spaces team is also jazzed about the great Spaces integration in this release.  While you are browsing around the web, you have one click access to "Blog It" right on the toolbar.  You no longer have to be left out of the conversation; make sure your opinion is heard!

Channel9 conducted a few interviews with the teams involved in shipping the MSN Toolbar Suite, which can be found here.

An interesting discussion has cropped up around the ownership of content you post to your Space.  Specifically, a few people have dissected the legal language in our Terms of Use, and interpreted it as saying that we somehow own your creative work.

That is not the case at all.  You own the content you post.  Period.

I’m not a lawyer, but we have one of those guys down the hall.  He says that the wording in the TOU is all about granting us the right to post your content and share it out on MSN.  Since you own it, we need that right to actually draw it on the screen. 

Hope that clears this up.  We’re looking at make changes to the wording of our TOU so it’s less confusing.

There have been a lot of observations since we launched on how we moderate content on Spaces.   Just so there aren’t any misconceptions floating around, here is exactly what we do, and why.

One of our main goals for Spaces was to create a platform for people to share their thoughts and feelings with their friends and the outside world.  However, we wanted to make Spaces usable by not only the people who are blogging today, but also be approachable by the general internet user, who might not have heard of blogging previously, or been given an opportunity to try it out.

Unfortunately, whenever you create an open platform for people to say whatever they want, and open it up to the wide world (14 languages, in 26 different markets), there is always a handful of people who spoil the party, and post a bunch of inappropriate (and in some cases illegal) stuff. And to make matters worse, what exactly is deemed “appropriate” or not is very subjective, not only from person to person, but from country to country.

So, we need to do what we can to make our platform available for people to use in the way they like, but we want to keep wildly inappropriate stuff outside of public forums.

How do we do this?

Well, mainly, we ask for your help. If you think something is indecent or inappropriate, there is a “Report Abuse” link at the bottom of every Space. When you submit a problem, we have real live humans looking at your report, and they make an analysis of whether someone has crossed the line. And that line is fairly high. Mostly, we don’t want pornography on our site. But, there are other cases, like hate speech, that we take action on.

So, 99% of our “policing” has to do with users reporting something offensive, and us making an evaluation of whether an abuse took place, and if so, we do something about it.

However, there is 1% left over.  Not everyone on the internet subscribes to the same “netiquette” that some of us who have been around for awhile know and understand. So, we do one proactive thing, to make the world a little less bumpy. We block a set of specific words from being used in 3 areas: the url you select, the title of your Space, and the title of your blog entry. These three fields are reused and displayed in a variety of areas, like search results, so we thought it would be a little thing we could do to cut down on the obvious cases that would most easily offend.

The simplistic way we search for profane words could easily be laughed at. We laugh about it, too. There are 100 different phrases that I can use that are obviously bad, but they short circuit our filter. But that’s OK. Our goal wasn’t to make it perfect, but to cut down on the obvious stuff.

Note that we do not do any filtering whatsoever in blog entries. However, we did ship with a bug, where the profanity filter was turned on for comments. Not only was this a bug that it was turned on, but our simplistic algorithm does not work well with large bodies of text. This has caused some problems with entering comments, and it hasn’t been clear to people what exactly the problem was. We discovered the issue shortly after we shipped, thanks to feedback from users within the first 24 hours, and we posted a fix Saturday afternoon. So this particular problem should be gone.

So, that is what we do. We believe what we’re doing is pretty minimalistic, and a good thing for the overall Spaces community. But, I’m sure not everyone agrees with that . Would love to hear more on this topic, so we get this right over time.  We’re in beta, so we’re here to learn.
 

Scoble is aggregating a lot of great feedback from our launch last nite. 

http://radio.weblogs.com/0001011/2004/12/02.html

It's fantastic to see the depth of feedback we're getting, be it positive or negative.  This is our v1 release, and we're paying attention to what we should be focusing on for our next release, be it a big feature or a fix to a usability problem we missed.  So, keep the feedback coming.

I think Mike's (http://spaces.msn.com/members/mike) day was made today, since his hard work on Spaces got recognized on Scoble's blog.