Young Turk's Ramble

Yesterday, I ran into an interesting blog entry from Glen on LifeDev. In it, he described a creator for "an application that will republish your blog’s articles to your readers’ Facebook profile, giving them a way to easily track and share your blog’s articles among their friends..."

What a neat idea, bringing "my blog to my profile" from RSS-to-notes into a new level. I tested it out this morning. The creator worked as advertised, helping me create an application for my blog (or up to 10 blogs) without doing any coding. So, what does this do?

First, it adds your blogs as an application into your profile. This is not a big deal as the notes already do this.

But next, it provides an application on profiles where your friends can share your articles...

..and spread the application, further adding to the viral effect.

Very simple, but very nice for content publishers and all the "pro bloggers" out there.

You can click the link below to add my application and test the idea out. You will likely see this post as the first one inside the application (nice awkward loop).

This reminded me of some efforts Chris Keating was undertaking on our platform, but we have some ways to go on this front.

As a holiday gift for myself, I recently purchased an AT&T Tilt, which is an operator version of HTC TyTN II also known as HTC Kaiser.

I am overall happy with the device, but I had several moments of --as Mike Torres puts it- "how do non techies do any of this?"

The setup for the device took a long time:

First, I had to call AT&T and activate the SIM card. I was renewing my plan with AT&T and keeping my number. After going through a smooth online purchasing and registration process, I was hoping that I would not spend too much time on activating my SIM card. AT&T somehow managed to "lose" the details of my purchase, so when I called to activate, they were not even aware of what plan I had purchased. I had to locate the name of the plans, as well as the amount of any business discounts, in order to go through purchasing all over again. Half an hour lost just to activate the SIM card to get started, and I do not even know if my first bill next month will double charge me. Nice.

Next, I had to go through a few installs of the Windows Mobile Device Center to get the latest 6.1 version on my Windows Vista and to have it recognize the device. After another hour, I finally had a sync setup with my corporate server to get my email, calendar, contacts, and task list. It took a few power cycles to get IRM working. So far so good. A little over an hour into the setup.

Now that I had a working phone, it took me a few minutes to discover all the annoying bugs. Microsoft requires the device to be password protected. Unfortunately, if the device goes into fast sleep during a call while password protected (and it does this by default to preserve battery and prevent accidental button mashing), it freezes its menus. I spent some time online to understand this issue and look into possible solutions. Finally, at Greg's recommendation, I installed Kaiser Tweak in order to hack the registry and modify the phone just the way I wanted it. Almost two hours into the setup.

This was my first Windows Mobile Professional (formerly known as PocketPC) device with a touch screen, as opposed to a SmartPhone. I soon discovered that dialing was much more difficult than it needed to be, especially one-handed. I discovered that, if I could increase the sensitivity of the TouchFlo in the registry, and install a cocktail of CABs, I could do the following TouchCube-like interface:

With some help from XDA-Developers and some from colleagues at Microsoft. I got this to work. This made the phone "usable," but I decided to add some voice dialing on top. The default voice dialing button was very hard to hit one-handed (or bare handed, as I often dial without a stylus). However, I was getting annoying prompts from the PTT button, which was very easy to hit. I had not signed up for PTT service, so it was constantly giving me prompts to sign up when I was accidentally touching it. I decided to remap this to voice dial. Of course, there was no easy way to do this. How do not techies do this again?

I spent some time on AT&T wireless forums and discovered one could hack the registry to take over PTT button from operator settings. This was great news. I used PHM Registry Editor to remap PTT (hold) to voice dial, and PTT to record audio reminders and notes for myself. Now the phone was getting easy to use one-handed. About three hours into the setup.

The default home screen on the phone was sub-optimal. After some research, I opted for HTC Home Customizer to customize it. Some more research led to good dark backgrounds and themes for the device. About four hours into the setup.

Setting up my Hotmail and Messenger accounts were a breeze, thanks to some express tools from AT&T. They were up and running in a few minutes. Since I did not want to pay for AT&T's GPS service, I opted for a great solution from Live Search, which also solved my voice-enabled mapping and yellow pages needs. For added measure, I included TellMe and Google411 into my dialer. About four and a half hours into the setup.

With all this hard work behind me, I then took my time with basic settings. I disabled sounds when dialing (as everyone should), tweaked notification sounds to my liking, customized the order and icons for various launchers, set my top 20 speed dial numbers. Pairing the Tilt to my Jawbone bluetooth was also pretty painless. Over five hours into the setup.

Testing and tweaking everything took me a little more time, so we can safely say that the setup for a clean AT&T Tilt took six hours! And I have not done anything fancy like ROM flashing. How do non techies do any of this?

My first impressions after using the device for a while are positive.

AT&T Tilt is larger and heavier than I would like my phone to be. That said, the keyboard and the nice screen make up for the size for the moment. I used my SmartPhone a lot for email and calendar management, and the Tilt excels at that. It is great to be able to open IRM mail, look at attached PPT, and type detailed comments back. It is great to be able to manage appointments and see conflicting meetings. It is nice to search my mailbox on the go, or to change my out-of-office message during the holidays.

The battery life is decent so far. I have had a few dropped calls over the last week (and even a single one is too many) but I am suspecting that this is an issue with AT&T rather than my phone, as several friends are observing the same. Hey, AT&T, a 3G network is not worth much if you cannot do voice-calls. Take note.

The final verdict is that AT&T Tilt is not a great phone, but it is a good PDA. For my use, which is very email heavy, it is a keeper based on my few days of experience. My biggest gripe was how counter-intuitive the UI is for certain easy items like, um, dialing a phone number. I am disappointed as a MSFT shareholder. Fortunately, like any Windows product (ahem), one can customize to great extent and tweak registry to force the phone to one's liking. But how do we expect non techies to do any of this?

To quote Mike once again, "as an industry, we need to do better than this."

The past few months have been busy for me and for my team. I took a long vacation back to Istanbul, giving me an opportunity to disconnect from my work and my blog for a while, and then came back to a new organization, a launch, and a very active Seattle.

As Moz recently summarized in an entry, we went through some reorganizations and the changes they brought. We seem to have settled into a new structure for now: product management and marketing roles have been more clearly delineated, while lines around our products have blurred. As most of you know, I have been working on the Spaces and Writer products for the past two years. In an effort to bring more seamless experiences to our customers in our next waves of planning, I will now be heading a new team focused on Sharing and Social Networking. Product management for a lot of the services you are familiar with, such as Spaces, Events, Writer, Photo Gallery, will now be run from my team, giving us a better view of your end-to-end sharing scenarios. Chris and Charlotte will be the managers on my team, as well as JP, a new product manager joining us to bring you better Memories experiences. My marketing leads like Marty, Marianna, and Pooja will continue to work on marketing, moving to the organizations running US and international execution.

In addition to the organizational changes, we have been busy building software. You probably saw the launch of Windows Live Events and a set of new features last week, especially the improved "What's New" section. Windows Live Photo Gallery also raised the bar with Flickr integration. I am excited with the stuff coming out but am painfully aware of how much we still have to do, in order to bring great experiences together.

I have been receiving a lot of questions lately about "Spaces' social networking" plans. Speculation around our partnerships have also led to the questions "isn't Spaces Microsoft's competitor to Facebook? What social scenarios are you thinking about?" While I cannot divulge any long term plans here, let me clarify one thing: "social networking" for us refers to the set of online experiences that allow users to feel connected with the people they care about. You did not see "Spaces" anywhere in there, did you? That is because I do not equate it with Microsoft's "social network." A lot of players have done a good job building profile networks --MySpace and Facebook most notably. I am a Facebook user (and Twitter, and MySpace, and a bunch of other things) and have a lot of respect for what they are doing. However, I do think that social scenarios will extend well beyond a "profile network," and defining social networking as a "website where I have a profile, friends, FoF, and some communities I share with" may be short sighted. Windows Live Messenger and Hotmail should become amazing social experiences. Our memories experience should tie in. Events and others

should become great social experiences, not to forget MSN. And all these things will be part of our "social networking" plans. Do not equate "what is Spaces doing" to "what is Microsoft doing" so quickly --and I do not think Facebook is thinking so narrowly either. We will continue to develop and improve Spaces of course, but we are trying to think broader to address your needs.

I will save writing about Istanbul to another day. I am excited to be back in Seattle, but I already miss home. Perhaps a good skiing season will lessen that feeling!

My boss is my friend on Windows Live Spaces and knows where my profile is on the social networking sites. Does yours?

In response to Karen, who wrote: 

This morning I was driving into work and caught an interesting story on NPR's Morning Edition. The story was an interview with Lucy Kellaway, a Financial Times columnist, who was advising people to not social network with your boss because of the implications on your career as ultimately your boss does hold your employment fate in their hands... [...]

It makes me wonder then, how do other people really feel about it? Is your boss your friend on WL Spaces, Facebook, Myspace, etc? Does your boss know where your profile is on any of these sites? 

1. Web 2.0: Webrazzi gibi bloglar ve gazetelerimizin teknoloji siteleri teknolojideki gelişmeleri Türkçe okuyanlara iletse de, endüstrinin içinde olmanın verdiği bazı izlenimlere sahip değiller. Gerek bu izlenimleri gerek Silicon Valley'de artık "eski haber" kabul edilen bazı iş analizlerini aylar sonra Türkçe görmek beni şaşırtıyor. Son haberleri sık sık çevirmeye ve yorumlamaya vaktim el vermeyecek olsa da, özellikle kendimi içimde bulduğum gelişmeleri ve iş için izlediğim trendleri aktarmak ilginç olabilir.    
2. Amerika'da Profesyönel Yaşam ve Yöneticilik: Hakkındaki mütevazi tecrübelerim sıkça sorulan bir konu --genel cevap amaçlı bir kaç yazı ilginç olabilir.
3. Windows Live: Gerek ürün müdürlüğünü yaptığım servisler (ki Spaces bunlardan biri) gerek Windows Live genel stratejisi hakkında özel mesajlar ve yorum alıyorum. Bu yorumlara cevap veren bir sentez yazılabilir.

Yoğun iş temposu elverirse bu konulara değinmeye de çalışacağım. Her zaman olduğu gibi yorumlarınızı ve özel mesajlarınızı bekliyorum (lütfen email değil "private messaging" kullanarak bana ulaşmaya çalışın, bu blogu posta amaçlı kullanmıyorum).

My blog has been quiet for the last month, because a lot was happening in the offline world. Moz has decided to move on to a new role within Microsoft, which has given me the opportunity to be the "acting lead" for the time being. Moz was a great manager, who has taught me a lot over the last years and who has shared so much with so little ego. I am very glad that he will not be far as a friend and mentor, but it was a busy month getting up to speed on different items to fill his big shoes.

There is a lot going on in the social networking world at Microsoft and with "Web 2.0" overall, but I will punt my thoughts to some other time. This is a short personal ramble to get me back to blogging, outside the Twitter gadget.

Some beautiful weather and some good friends have kept me away from a keyboard at all times and broke my entries. I did not have much "downtime" for the last few weeks. Early mornings or late evenings, when I usually can sneak in a blog entry, were taken by biking. I decided to bicycle to work a few days this past month, and had a great time commuting. It is about a 31 mile commute (48 km), giving me a modest workout. Seattle is a very bike-friendly city and the other bicyclists are also very helpful (as I found out when I had a big blowout), so I plan on commuting more this summer. It is fun to listen to the traffic report on the radio when you know your commute will be completely unaffected.

Free days the last few weeks were filled with the Seattle summer: concerts ranging from the usual festivals to the unusual Grupo Fundo de Quintal visit, salsa, some hikes on the nearby trails. The samba concert was also an excellent opportunity to catch up with some VamoLa alumni. It looks like a lot of the experienced musicians have left the band, and a lot of new faces that I have never played with came in. Some of the old timers are now playing Cuban music (I have to go check that out) or biding their time to return. Right after Grupo Fundo de Quintal, the Lions of Batucada, our sister band of sorts from Portland took stage. Kathleen who used to play in VamoLa and who is completely ripping surdo since she came back from Brazil put on quite a show.

Fourth of July, always a good break to catch up on email and blogging (!), was not very fruitful this year. Ziya and Ilknur were gracious hosts in inviting me to their apartment to watch the show. They were also great cooks. By the time I was done eating and playing chess with Ziya, it was clear that no blogging was going to happen that evening.

This weekend, I finally thought I had some free time to blog. I had no plans except a sailing certification that I was planning on completing and a small party to attend. Alas, the certification took forever and again my keyboard was left untouched. Having done quite a few certifications over the years (e.g., 7 PADI levels for scuba diving), I was a little impatient with the process for the keelboat certifications in the US. The exams were easy but the lack of wind in Seattle that day and our first teacher being a little less than structured made me miss even the small party. All is well that ends well, I guess, and I am now certified in the US (ASA) system, and plan on advancing a bit.

Well, enough of a personal ramble for now, I hope to get back to some technology entries over the next few days.

[Updated to fix a typo and add into categories]

I got a new Lenovo T60p a few weeks ago and decided to switch to ClearContext as my GTD implementation. Mike asked me to give him a heads-up "if I am still using it in two weeks" and, taking advantage of a boring session at Web 2.0 Expo, below are my initial thoughts, mostly comparing it to NetCentrics Outlook add-in, my previous implementation.

What I like:

• The functionality to create a task, a meeting, or a delegated item in one click work well. It is not dissimilar to NetCentrics, but ClearContext has simply fewer bugs.
• The snooze button is great, and is far superior to NetCentrics' in that it allows you to specify times, snooze multiple times, and more.
• Unsubscribing from threads is a welcome addition to the basics from NetCentrics. This allows you to remove yourself from a thread: basically, ClearContext files all future replies with the same subject to a folder akin to junk mail. In an email heavy culture like Microsoft, this button alone pays for the software some days.
• Filing is fast. You can assign topics (projects) to threads with one shortcut, plus typing a few letters of the topic. You can then file to that topic folder with another shortcut. This allows me to use ClearContext like a speed filer. For example, if I would like to file a message to "Balance Budget," I can assign a topic with Alt+P and "B" (or as many letters it takes to recognize) and file the message once I am done with Alt+M. This sounds lenghtier than a speed filer but is rocket fast when you get used to it, and gets quicker as ClearContext learn to assign topic automatically.If you still want to use Ctrl+Shift+V, the topics automatically adjust, too.
• You can use topic assignment for anything including tasks and calendar items. This allows me to use the Outlook task list for GTD. I can assign both contexts and projects to messages. Then you can pivot on the views to see everything by project or by context (e.g., @Phone). From the previous filing bullet, ClearContext shows all the messages associated with the project automatically, so you can see a history. Very nice, but I still would have liked a nested view.
• Changing your topic hierarchy is as easy as editing folders.

What I am still not using:

• I am still not using the prioritization features of ClearContext. Having analyzed my folders from the previous months, the software is making a valiant attempt at guessing importance, but it is still wrong frequently. I need to tweak the formula which it uses to calculate importance, but I just did not have time to dig into this. This is the main thing ClearContext builds and sells for, so it is kind of ironic that I am now using the software for its toolbards, basically, but hey, to each his own.

More to come as I play with it and tweak. I especially need to program and customize the task views some more.

January, the month of new year resolutions and of "past year in perspective" posts, seems an appropriate and opportune time to get back at my blog. Unimaginatively, I will post about 2006.

Last year at work was an exciting one. I started the year in a new position in the Windows Live (then MSN) Spaces team. The first quarter of the year was a great learning experience, as I worked closely with Moz and with a few other excellent folks from the product team. From visiting our data centers in Tukwila to conducting customer research across the United States, I got to learn a lot about our business. I got to talk to Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, Keving Johnson, and Ray Ozzie over a few meetings. I made several trips to Shanghai and Tokyo, where I did not only get to spend time with our program managers but also to take in the beauty and intensity of these cities. Then several conferences, from Gnomedex right here in Seatte to a few all the way across the country in New York or Philadelphia, filled the rest of the calendar. Some of our advertisers were gracious enough to have me at their headquarters, which took me all the way to Detroit. Most of time, however, was spent in Redmond, where I worked on planning and marketing for Spaces. A lot of documents, meetings, presentations, and emails packed my days. There were plently of long nights and frustrations along the way --and I should also apologize to all the people I frustrated as I am developing- but it was, again, an exciting year at work.

All this "excitement" --did I mention long hours- took its toll on my involvement with VamoLa. With the musical director Tom Armstrong's departure to New York, several senior musicians stepped up to steer the ensemble and maintain its great performance quality. I simply was not ready to commit more hours to the band however and reduced myself to watching their performances despite identity crises from the audience's point of view. I still managed to practice tamborim and a little guitar at home, although it was not as dedicated as it should have been. I was eager to draw more at the beginning of 2006; alas, this did not get dedication either. So, my involvement in arts was reduced to watching and occassional humble contribution. Not that I did not see some unique performances and things: a trip to Vancouver was worth it, for example, both for the music scene and for a stop by the Museum of Anthropology at UBC. I also took time to dance salsa at Century Ballroom; I should do more of that this year (a resolution?!) and even try some Casino Rueda.  

As I mentioned in June, the summer festivals are a great part of Seattle. Outdoor activities in general make this place so nice to live. I did not hike this year as much as I normally do; the former members of the "bus trail crew" were not active in poking me to put my gear on. Nonetheless, I spent quite a few days skiing. Sure, Whistler is the best, but Stevens Pass made me quite content. I tried to slowly get back into cycling. I used to go everywhere on a bike when I used to live in Philadelphia. A friend of mine leaving Seattle left me a great road bike, which I really would like to use to commute. Both the city of Seattle and Microsoft encourage this (with decent bike lanes and showers at work, respectively). Maybe I could put more days in riding this year. I played in a friendly squash league for some of the year, until a shoulder injury put a stop to it. The bike might be a good way to keep my upper legs in shape for the courts.

I was not all "outdoorsy" of course: my new Xbox360 and the usual voracious reading habit kept me home for quite a few days, especially when I could not deal with the gray sky. Check out the book lists in my Windows Live Space, in their sui generis categorization. Bar the previous paragraphs, the only things that pulled me out when the sky was full were dating and non-profit activities. With dating, let us just say that I do not have any weddings to announce this year. With non-profit activities, I did some work in Freemont and some separate work with the Youth Symphony. I might have spent more time with both if a decent number of friends had not passed through Seattle this year, ranging from a former classmate accepting a great job at Starbucks to a few consultants working around Microsoft. For someone like me who has spent most time in big cosmopolitan cities, Seattle can be annoying at times. "It is not a New York or London," you will often hear. It surely is not Istanbul. Catching up with friends and the occasional fly out with Microsoft made dealing with it possible. I also got to spend several weeks with my parents this year, through a trip to Turkey and a quick trip by them to the East Coast; it is a shame I do not get to spend more time with my parents I love so much, so I appreciated the flexibility to escape from work this year.

This should about wrap it up for this blog entry. As for the year, I wrapped it up with two things I truly enjoyed: good friends and clear Seattle skies. So this week's photos capture the spirit pretty nicely.

 Have a great new year.

• Meeting Greg from Findory, who has been on my OPML for a while.
• Talking to the WetPaint guys in person, finally, weeks after MC pointed them out
• Lots of food and bottled water (the beer was less interesting to me)
• A few interesting demos
• Good feedback from several folks on adCenter

• Nametags. Very few people had written their companies on their nametags. I am very interested in talking to Kevin from WetPaint. I am not interested in talking to Bob, just Bob. If you are recognizable by your first and last name alone, or are wearing your company shirt, you are ok, in this context. The rest of you should be color coded into "have money," "need money," "covering event," "supporting relationships."
• The actual speech or presentation of the event. Huh?

• The steam-room effect inside (maybe I was sweating because I had biked to the event, but it felt way too hot)
• Using a wiki to sign-up (not ugly until people start deleting your replies).

I also ran into Natala at the event, who blogged about the event and linked to some pictures. Here is the attendee list.

Looking forward to more of these in my neighborhood!