Another one of those ‘it’s coming soon’ good news posts.

Joe Wilcox weighs today’s news that Microsoft plans to open up the Office file format and offer the technical specs to the ECMA early next month:

Just as OASIS polishes off OpenDocument v1 and some governments beat their desks for OpenOffice, open source and open standards, along comes Microsoft saying that it wants to establish its formats as legitimate standards. Kaboom.

Microsoft says this may take up to a year or more to get done which puts this on track with the Vista launch. Loren wonders if this will allow access to Word ink comments?

Don Dodge: “This is a major step for Microsoft. Opening Office documents to PDF and Open XML creates an open environment for competitors, partners, and users. This is a good thing. Moves like this usually stimulate innovation in new and existing products”

Is it just me or does Microsoft really, really want to appear more open and flexible today? Whatever the motives are, I’m happy to read both Microsoft announcements today.

Ray Ozzie announces the new Simple Sharing Extensions (SSE specs) for RSS and OPML:

There are many great item synchronization mechanisms out there (and at Microsoft), but we decided we’d never get short term network effects among products if we selected something complicated – even if it were powerful. What we really longed for was “the RSS of synchronization” … something simple that would catch on very quickly.

Ozzie refers to this project as being before it is “fully baked” but it won’t be baked on a completely commercial path. The spec is being released with a Creative Commons Atribution-ShareAlike license.

Dave Winer who Ozzie credits as an innovator is beaming and shows some love back:

I’ve always had enormous respect for Ray as a technologist and because he’s a gentle and thoughtful person. There was an outliner in Notes, but I remember very well sitting in an audience hearing Ray tell people about it, and then calling me out as one of the people who blazed the trail for his work. It’s so important to recognize each others’ accomplishments, because that’s how you build trusting relationships.

Now that all the backslapping, handshakes and high fives are done, what does this really mean for real world applications? Perhaps the SSE FAQ will help:

SSE defines the minimum extensions necessary to enable loosely cooperating applications to use RSS as the basis for item sharing—that is, the bidirectional, asynchronous replication of new and changed items among two or more cross-subscribed feeds. For example, SSE could be used to share your work calendar with your spouse. If your calendar were published to an SSE feed, changes to your work calendar could be replicated to your spouse’s calendar, and vice versa. As a result, your spouse could see your work schedule and add new appointments, such as a parent-teacher meeting at the school, or a doctor’s appointment.

I need to dig into this much more but so far I like what I’m reading and seeing — at least in theory. Whether it works or not in actual real world application as described above is another thing.

Danny Ayers isn’t impressed. I imagine most of the folks embracing Atom are going to have mixed emotions about this, but at the end of the day a single format would be best for the end users and developers instead of what, nine or ten versions that are currently available out there?

In another promising trend which this developer (moi) hopes continues: eBay is dropping their developer API and transaction charges. via cbronline:

Consequently, eBay has taken the hint, and is throwing off charges to spur adoption. Over the past year, the eBay developer network has more than doubled to roughly 20,000, accounting for 22% of listings on the site. In another announcement, eBay announced a developers challenge contest that will award prizes for best individual application and best collaborative open source applications. Winners could get $5000, Xbox 360s, or iPod Nanos, plus an all-expenses paid trip to demonstrate their app at the 2006 O’Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference.

Incenting developers is a good thing. Techdirt’s Mike wonders what took so long?

Developers should beware of eBay’s legacy schema which will be migrated to their new unified schema on June 1, 2006. For those who already have written apps, check out the migration developer center for more information.

Reference links
eBay developer program official press release
HOMEPAGE - developer program
eBay SOAP API
XML developer center

During Steve Ballmer’s keynote this morning [archive here], he announced that Visual Studio and SQL Server Express 2005 will be available for free for the first year. How are these express versions different from the professional version?

Express Edition products are designed for hobbyists, students, and novice developers. As such, they lack the full breadth of features found in higher-end Visual Studio and SQL Server Editions. They are designed specifically for scenarios common to the hobbyist, student, and novice developer. Each Express Edition includes targeted documentation that will help the beginning programmer quickly learn the concepts required to build more advanced applications.

Download Express versions here.

Sometimes the best artificial intelligence isn’t artificial.

That’s the premise behind the Mechanical Turk whose name derives from a Hungarian nobleman named Wolfgang von Kempelen who travelled the world with this supposed mechanical chess program that secreted a master chess player inside.

Have an Amazon account? Sure you do. Check out the Amazon Mechanical Turk Service which will allow you to submit Human Intelligence Tasks (HITs) to Amazon to tap a well of human beings willing to answer questions for pennies.

From the Mechanical Turk API:

Mechanical Turk posts your application’s questions to the Mechanical Turk web site, where they are found and answered by Mechanical Turk users. Your application then retrieves the answers using the web service. From your application’s perspective, Mechanical Turk behaves like any other asynchronous web service: Your application submits the request using a programmatic interface, then retrieves the result of that request from the service at a later time.

An example of a HIT that pays the worker $0.03: “You are presented with the name and address of a business as well as a set of photos taken along the street where the business is supposed to be located. Your task is to identify the best photo of the business that is listed.”

From the developer side I see how this could be useful for having an inexpensive Q & A guy/gal (from what I saw, the requester sets the price), but I’m not convinced the human worker is getting a very good deal in this piecemeal arrangement. Amazon? Not bad for them. They get 10% for being the facilliatator of the transaction. Hmm.

Google Blogoscoped points out who can currently use the system: “As far as I understand it, the service at the moment – at least for Requesters – is only available in the US (you can sign-in from anywhere, but you are asked to transfer money from a US bank to your Requester account).”

What do you think about this program?

Good news for developers, which eventually translates into more coolness for netizens, if the following turns out to be true. According to Zvents CEO, Ethan Stock:

More on this tomorrow, but I just got off the phone with the Yahoo Maps team, and they said that tomorrow they will be removing the “non-commerical only” clause from their TOS [Terms Of Service].

Note to self: keep an eye on their TOS. As mentioned yesterday, developers don’t want to use APIs with lots of ifs ands and buts which means keep the fine print to a minimum if you want your API to actually be widely used. Also noticed that Yahoo has added some spiffy web badges for display on programs that use Yahoo Web Services.

Hat tip to Scoble.

The big news today from the Microsoft camp is Bill Gates and Ray Ozzie announcing in San Francisco Windows Live and Office Live via live.com.

Michael Arrington blogged the event live today writing via his new techcrunch blog about Bill Gates comments:

Windows Live: Primarily ad supported. Does not kill off MSN.

Office Live: “internet based services for growing and managing your business online.” extensible, thousands of partners. ad supported level with tier above requiring subscription.

There is already a call out to developers on Channel 9 to get some gadgets working with live.com and maybe win an Xbox 360 for their efforts.

Dan Farber from ZDnet adds:

Everything we have done on MSN fits the live software model,” Gates said. Live software also extends to managed services for enterprises, with Microsoft running SharePoint or Exchange for customers. Small business software connecting to ADP payroll service, for example.

First thoughts
I chuckled when Paul Kedrosky demoed live.com and wonders where the pulse is at: “BillG, this is 2005. Why isn’t Windows Live “Live”?”

I tried Paul’s test in Internet Explorer after seeing that the page wouldn’t load correctly in Opera (just the Windows Live logo and the search box show, nothing else). Live wasn’t smart enough to locate the RSS feed from this blog despite the fact the RSS aware code is used in the head. I then put in the feed name and the windows alert shown above appeared.

Even though I was already signed into .NET passport, it still told me I needed to sign in, so I did the .NET passport signin process and then tried adding the RSS feed again — worked adding the feed the second time. However, when I tried to click on the link in the “My Web” area (interesting Y! coincidence there?) I saw the message: “Oops, we seem to be having a problem with this feed.”

Wait, was my RSS feed down? I went there directly. Nope. Ran it through the Feed Validator. No problem — except for Windows Live. How good is My Web if it can’t even handle My Feed?

When I first attempted to navigate to the prominent link that says: “Discover more about Windows Live” and received the error message below:

Oops is right.

I tried it again and successfully arrived at ideas.live.com. Mail screenshots look cool. Sign up. Wait, it’s only available to Hotmail users. I haven’t used that for years. Tried to go there and ended up in a brief whirlwind of redirects as it attempted to log me out so I could login again and choose a new hotmail email address.

Trepidation. I don’t need another spam drop off. I choose a Hotmail account nobody could have used yet. It worked. Created a strong password. This signup form felt like it was swimming in quicksand. Navigate the crooked eight character CAPTCHA. Slowwww. Submit. No, I don’t want to install MSN Messenger or change my f!#%ng home page to MSN, but you checked the boxes anyway, thanks. Uncheck, twice and continue.

The account will only remain active if I: “Sign-in at least once within the next (10) days.
Sign-in at least once every 90 days after the initial (10) day period.” Accept.

Accept another Microsoft legal agreement. Man, the lawyers were feasting on this process, weren’t they? Ok, I’m in and activated now back to live to try the mail beta:

“Thanks a lot for signing up. There’s nothing else you have to do at this point-you can expect to hear from us soon with an invitation to join the beta.”

Well, at least the beta signup page is … live.

Meanwhile, others continue to make observations on the event like Steve Hamm who is reminded of a fateful day in 1995 before Microsoft dethroned Netscape as the de facto browser.

Now what about Office Live? Can’t look at that one yet, but I filled out the beta request form which says Office Live is “coming in early 2006.”

Like Google Reader, think I’ll come back to this when this is closer to being cooked. Still blood rare right now.

Update 5:08pm PST: Check out Niall Kennedy’s 52 photos of the event which offer a peek into what Office Live has coming. Check out Windows Live call, should eBay/Skype really be worried now?

According to CNET, Oracle is planning on releasing Oracle 10g Express Edition for small organizations, students and software organizations.

The latest edition is the same as other databases in Oracle’s lineup but is limited in usage. It can only run servers with one processor, with 4GB of disk memory and 1GB of memory.

Beta next week will be available in the Oracle developer area (the link is showing up 500 now, so watch here or the new to Oracle DBA here), so fellow devs, keep your eyes peeled. I’ll so be there to give it a run. Oracle is a sweet database engine.

Read (mostly tech-oriented) print books in your browser and also download chapters from Safari Bookshelf ($14.95 - $19.95 / mo, with 14 day FREE trial)

URL shortening services like tinyurl and makeashorterlink offer a redirection service based upon indexing longer URLs entered in with a character code system.

Once the number of characters have been assigned, a new digit is added with a new range of mathematical storage slots. Mathematically speaking, thought it was never one of my best subjects, these generated URLs can still stay relatively small, even if a significant number of URLs are entered into it

Using most elligible URLs from http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1738.txt

a - z  (26)
0 - 9  (9)

We can then calculate with the following example (not all elligible characters used, so the actual numbers are even larger):

1 digit: 35
2 digit: 1,225
3 digit: 42,875
*4 digit: 1,500,625
5 digit: 52,521,875
6 digit: 1,838,265,625
7 digit: 64,339,296,875
8 digit: 2,251,875,390,625
9 digit: 78,815,638,671,875
10 digit: 2,758,547,353,515,625
11 digit: 96,549,157,373,046,880
12 digit: 3,379,220,508,056,640,512
13 digit: 118,272,717,781,982,429,184
14 digit: 4,139,545,122,369,384,742,912

As of this writing the tinyurl service is at 4 digits, so we can assume that approximately this number of URLs have not been exceeded at the time of this writing. The other service is at 9 digits, indicating that it has been used more often, or perhaps more likely that the programmers randomized the digit outcome (78+ trillion is a lot of URLs to have generated).