Young Turk's Ramble: Personal Ramble

Exciting Times for "Sharing and Social Networking"

Fri, 19 Oct 2007 20:40:59 GMT

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!

Why so quiet?

Mon, 09 Jul 2007 23:42:29 GMT

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]

The best Whistler Blackcomb trip yet

Tue, 23 Jan 2007 19:44:21 GMT

My Whistler skies picture in my look at the past year was apparently too lame for some --my fault for not taking my camera with me and then losing some of the pictures friends sent. I was able to quickly remedy the situation by taking yet another trip to Whistler Blackcomb this weekend. The snow was excellent this time around (almost 10 meters of powder so far this season!) and so was the company. A few friends and I rented a combo near Blackcomb, and had a good time; check out the pictures Jen uploaded here.

A Look at Last Year

Fri, 05 Jan 2007 01:24:44 GMT

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.

Congrats Moz

Mon, 03 Apr 2006 03:20:22 GMT

Moz is now a proud father. Armaan Manik Hussain is finally here, after a long wait. Check out the pictures.

is that you?

Sat, 14 Jan 2006 02:57:39 GMT

A friend of mine was looking for my blog today and got a bunch of search results for my name. He sent a few over asking "is that you?"

This is me talking about Web services and service oriented architecture (SOA). This is Becky talking about our conversation on Livestrong. None of these or this are about me. I hope that helps!

looking at software, not the sky

Fri, 13 Jan 2006 18:48:51 GMT

Yesterday, someone commented how he could never do a job sitting in an office all day. "Don't you get sick of computers?" he asked. He said that he liked his job in sales, because he could be outside and move around all day. I can understand that he is not as passionate about software as your average Microsoftie, but how can he boast about this or this. I think that we have had rain every day since I got back from Turkey. Let us postpone this discussion until the beautiful Seattle summer.

"geezer" gamers

Tue, 27 Dec 2005 19:14:13 GMT

I finally took my long overdue and (I hope) well deserved vacation. Istanbul, that coolest city in Europe, was the destination. It was so nice to catch up with friends and family. This was also an eye opening visit to catch up with Istanbul. But more on all of that later (maybe with pictures, on my personal space)...

What is a vacation without some precious time wasted for mindless entertainment? I also spent a couple of hours playing MMORPGs --yes, beyond my business interest, they are also fun. Multi-player games are getting harder for me. First, players who do not behave, ahem, in a respectful manner make the games less enjoyable. Next, it is getting more difficult to join and enjoy games against veteran gamers, unless one is willing to spend days mastering keystrokes (I am not).

I found GeezerGamers a great community to overcome both issues. Nice to play with nice people. JameyT and KerbTick are good friends; I expect to stick with the community when I finally move to Xbox360. Check it out and let me know what you think.

talking turkey on my blog

Tue, 13 Dec 2005 03:51:46 GMT

Around this time of year, it becomes cumbersome to access news about my native land. The cause is not journalists taking vacation or my RSS reader going on strike. It is the plethora of Turkey recipes that choke the search results. I have not found a good way to have my engine differentiate turkey, the animal, from Turkey, the country. If you know of a good prefix to do this on a query, please let me know by commenting to this entry, so that I do not have to sift through "frozen Turkey hits woman" headlines before reaching one on a Turkish earthquake.

About a year ago, I had posted this message which was forwarded to me, on an internal blog. A friend brought it up the other day, so I'll replicate it here. Skip to the pen-ultimate paragraph if pressed for time.

“How did the turkey get its name? This seemingly harmless question popped into my head one morning as I realized that the holidays were once again upon us. After all, I thought, there's nothing more American than a turkey. Their meat saved the pilgrims from starvation during their first winter in New England. Out of gratitude, if you can call it that, we eat them for Thanksgiving dinner, and again at Christmas, and gobble them up in sandwiches all year long. Every fourth grader can tell you that Benjamin Franklin was particularly fond of the wild turkey, and even campaigned to make it, and not the bald eagle, the national symbol.
So how did such a creature end up taking its name from a medium sized country in the Middle East? Was it just a coincidence? I wondered. The next day I mentioned my musings to my landlord, whose wife is from Brazil. "That's funny," he said, "In Portuguese the word for turkey is "Peru". Same bird, different country. Hmm, with my curiosity piqued, I decided to go straight to the source. That very afternoon I found myself a Turk and asked him how to say turkey in Turkish. "Turkey?" he said. "Well, we call turkeys 'hindi', which means, you know, from India." India? This was getting weird. I spent the next few days finding out the word for turkey in as many languages as I could think of, and the more I found out, the weirder things got. In Arabic, for instance, the word for turkey is "Ethiopian bird," while in Greek it is "gallapoula" or "French girl."The Persians, meanwhile, call them "buchalamun" which means, appropriately enough, "chameleon." In Italian, on the other hand, the word for turkey is "tacchino" which, my Italian relatives assured me means nothing but the bird. But, they added, it reminds us of something else. In Italy we call corn, which as everybody knows comes from America, 'grano turco,' or 'Turkish grain.'" So here we were back to Turkey again!
And as if things weren't already confusing enough, a further consultation with my Turkish informant revealed that the Turks call corn "misir" which is also their word for Egypt! By this point, things were clearly getting out of hand. But I persevered nonetheless, and just as I was about to give up hope,a pattern finally seemed to emerge from this bewildering labyrinth. In French, it turns out, the word for turkey is "dinde," meaning "from India,"just like in Turkish. The words in both German and Russian had similar meanings, so I was clearly on to something. The key, I reasoned, was to find out what turkeys are called in India, so I called up my high school friend's wife, who is from an old Bengali family, and popped her the question. "Oh," she said, "We don't have turkeys in India. They come from America. Everybody knows that." "Yes," I insisted, "but what do you call them?" "Well, we don't have them!" she said. She wasn't being very helpful. Still, I persisted: "Look, you must have a word for them. Say you were watching an American movie translated from English and the actors were all talking about turkeys. What would they say? Well...I suppose in that case they would just say the American word, 'turkey'. Like I said, we don't have them." So there I was, at a dead end.
I began to realize only too late that I had unwittingly stumbled upon a problem whose solution lay far beyond the capacity of my own limited resources. Obviously I needed serious professional assistance. So the next morning I scheduled an appointment with Prof. Sinasi Tekin of Harvard University, a world-renowned philologist and expert on Turkic languages. If anyone could help me, I figured it would be Professor Tekin.
As I walked into his office on the following Tuesday, I knew I would not be disappointed. Prof. Tekin had a wizened, grandfatherly face, a white, bushy, knowledgeable beard, and was surrounded by stack upon stack of just the sort of hefty, authoritative books which were sure to contain a solution to my vexing Turkish mystery. I introduced myself, sat down, and eagerly awaited a dose of Prof. Tekin's erudition. "You see," he said, "In the Turkish countryside there is a kind of bird, which is called a çulluk. It looks like a turkey but it is much smaller, and its meat is very delicious. Long before the discovery of America, English merchants had already discovered the delicious çulluk, and began exporting it back to England, where it became very popular, and was known as a 'Turkey bird' or simply a 'turkey'. Then, when the English came to America, they mistook the birds here for çulluks, and so they began calling them 'turkey" also. But other peoples weren't so easily fooled. They knew that these new birds came from America, and so they called them things like 'India birds,' 'Peruvian birds,' or 'Ethiopian birds.' You see, 'India,' 'Peru' and 'Ethiopia' were all common names for the New World in the early centuries, both because people had a hazier understanding of geography, and because it took a while for the name 'America' to catch on. "Anyway, since that time Americans have begun exporting their birds everywhere, and even in Turkey people have started eating them, and have forgotten all about their delicious çulluk. This is a shame, because çulluk meat is really much, much tastier."
Prof. Tekin seemed genuinely sad as he explained all this to me. I did my best to comfort him, and tried to express my regret at hearing of the unfairly cruel fate of the delicious çulluk. Deep down, however, I was ecstatic. I finally had a solution to this holiday problem, and knew I would be able once again to enjoy the main course of my traditional Thanksgiving dinner without reservation. Now if I could just figure out why they call those little teeny dogs Chihuahuas....”

stulti timent fortunam, sapientes ferunt

Fri, 09 Dec 2005 01:35:24 GMT

Welcome to my blog “at work.” I will ramble, true to the title, but I do not know what about. I expect to talk about my cool job as the Product Planner for Spaces, bounce a few ideas off for feedback, and post snippets on what I find interesting. I will keep this separate from my personal space (blocked link unless you are authorized) which I still find a great place to keep in touch with friends and family --hence "aliatwork" here.

Here is a little bit on my background: I am from Istanbul, Turkey, where I lived until my move to the US for college. I graduated from Yale University with a degree in economics, a passion for languages, and a few martial arts injuries. After a brief stint with the Walt Disney Company, where I worked on licensing, I decided to take on bigger cartoon characters and became a management consultant. I worked for McKinsey & Company in NYC, focusing on banking, telecommunications, and media industries. I then returned to school at the University of Pennsylvania, where I completed an MBA at the Wharton School and an MA in International Studies at the J. H. Lauder Institute --before joining Microsoft. I am an avid snowboarder, scuba diver, reader, juggler, as well as an enthusiastic but horrible musician scaring audiences with a local samba band in Seattle.