Microsoft and the Future

It’s interesting to note that Microsoft has finally shut down MSN Shopping (a site I thought was just horrendous for shopping) and MSN Travel (a site that really didn’t have much going for it either).

Here is Bing Shopping:

Here is Bing Travel:

I predicted this would happen eventually at some point, and I was right.

Personally though, I’m still not liking the design of Bing. It just seems rather bland and too white for me. And the ways it looks and is laid out just bores me. There’s very little graphic appeal, no nice colors, nothing. Just a bunch of text to look at with a few graphics.

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Then there’s MSN Soapbox news. Apparently, Microsoft is pretty much killing Soapbox as a place for users to upload and share videos. Rather than making it user oriented, they want to make it a specialized video-sharing site for just bloggers and citizen journalists. You know,kinda like Brightcove? Here’s a direct quote from CNET, the source of the news:

“Microsoft hopes to transform Soapbox, originally code-named Warhol, from an also-ran in the user-generated content space into a forum where bloggers and citizen journalists can post videos relevant to areas in which MSN focuses, categories like entertainment, lifestyle, and finance.”

I’m rather disappointed. I was hoping Microsoft would eventually update Soapbox with Silverlight effects, video thumbnail previews (like Bing), more Bing and Windows Live integration (like the What’s New feed updates and integrating Bing Maps for geotagging), and a bunch of other stuff Microsoft could/should do.

Instead, it’s been an awful video-sharing service. MSN Video is at the forefront, with Soapbox as a small pet project underneath it and hidden away with no advertising whatsoever. Many people who have posted comments to this news were surprised MSN Soapbox ever existed. This goes to show that Microsoft didn’t really even try with Soapbox. This was just another half-hearted attempt it seems to compete with someone. Examples of how Microsoft has not really tried:

1. No ad campaign for MSN Video or Soapbox (that I remember)
2. On the MSN homepage, in the list of content offered on MSN, there’s no direct link to MSN Video (however, there is a MSN video player with other video highlights, but it’s not direct to the MSN Video homepage)
3. No major features added (well except a nasty filter crawler that detects copyrighted material) since launch around 2 years ago
4. MSN Soapbox team blog long decommissioned. It used to be here: http://soapboxteam.spaces.live.com

MSN Soapbox was awesome in its beta days. There were no ads, my video showed up in amazingly high-res compared to YouTube, and the whole site seemed to have a lot of potential.

Nowadays, MSN Video reigns over Soapbox with it’s many MSN content videos, and partner channels. Soapbox is a small link away. Ads practically play before every video (often 30 seconds long, wasting lots of time), an MSN content video autoplays after 9 seconds a video finishes (mega annoying since I didn’t request this), very little content in comparison to Youtube, etc. I could go on and on.

The only really thing MSN Soapbox has going for it is its slick interface (where you can always video the video player while the page changes, and it’s convenient video queue. That’s about it. The fact that it’s going to become some stupid thing for writers, makes me think that Soapbox will soon be dying with the other services that have died because MS no longer really cared about it. Quite sad frankly.

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I’ve also noticed something tacky and utterly disgraceful about MSN: ads that pop onto the page (don’t confuse with pop-ups). Say you’re on the MSN Greetings site, and you’re browsing for eCards. Up shows a little ad, just like the one in the picture above. Not as a pop-up, but as an ad that appears on screen where you have to click “Skip Ad” to get it off the page. That’s something I’d expect from trashy website, not something affiliated with MSN. It could have something to do with the fact it’s really the American Greetings site, but Microsoft should be more responsible than that. Those ads are nasty and annoying and don’t make me want to use this site at all. Also, these eCards are rather weak for a high price and membership requirement.

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I’ve been looking around international MSN sites, and I noticed something called MSN Wallpapers on the British and South African version:

Gathering from the information on the site, you can find and discover interesting wallpapers MSN has collected, and you have the ability to fix the images up in a special type of software designed for MSN Wallpapers and you can even add speech balloons. You can also sign a wallpaper to specific times a day, or a wallpaper slideshow. Kinda interesting if you ask me. I might try it later and write about it.

So that’s about it for MSN news. There may be even more, but that’s all that’s too interesting at the moment.

The red band leads to an MSNBC article that I saw was posted at least 4 minutes ago, and updates 5 minutes ago:

Now that’s fast!

The other day, I just posted my Bing entry, and now Bing has already been released to the public as a preview in the American market, and a beta in others. It’s interesting how rapidly it’s been spreading in the news and on other sites. There’s already been a somewhat positive feedback on Bing, where bloggers and readers have commended Bing for bringing a more different and useful style of search where Bing brings back results or information in a layout that is quite useful.

Bing has also invaded several website. On MSN, there’s already a Bing moniker next to the search box. If you take away the Bing logo, the search box actually looks kinda nice.

Bing is also present on Windows Live, in the (useless) search box. The only use the search box has in my opinion is to search the web, though it’s not the default. I still can’t find most of my real life friends using Windows Live.

Ask.com already recognizes Bing as a competing search engine, and tells users they should use Ask instead. (Personally, I think Ask.com has gotten worse since they removed universal search, and the many text ads are extremely annoying).

Bing also appears to have a mobile version. Bing Mobile can modify web pages to fit on a mobile phone screen by breaking the page down into sections. You can also call 1-800-BING-411 (1-800-246-4411) and orally tell Bing what local information you want to know.

Bing seems to be pretty promising. Keep up the good work Bing team.

News has come out that Bing will be replacing Live Search, and the Kumo branding has been scrapped.

Bing has several promotional sites you can visit including:

1. Decision Engine – Just one video that shows how Bing can help you decide stuff, a letter from the Bing Team, and links to follow Bing and share to your friends.

2. Discover Bing – This will showcase additional information about what Bing is, how it was developed, and the people behind some of the projects. There’s videos, and several Bing applications you can download.

The actual site is up, but it’s not available to users until June 3rd at http://bing.com/

Microsoft is marketing Bing as a ‘decision engine’, meaning that Bing isn’t just a typical search engine that will display the just pages and pages of results, but it will try to make it easier to display information that might help you reach your goal.

In my opinion however, Bing is pretty much the SAME as Live Search. Same results, just a new look and different layout. Personally, I don’t like that new look or the new layout. It didn’t add anything new, it just looks different and I don’t like it.

I do like the scorecard feature that they offer to compare prices and reviews. Microsoft has this neat algorithm that can scan through reviews and pick up keywords that will indicate how well a product/place does in a certain category. This already exists on MSN City Guides.

I also strongly dislike the logo the chose:

The font type isn’t really attractive, the ‘g’ looks too similar to another search engine we all know well of, and I don’t under stand why toe dot in the ‘i’ is yellow. Really, it’s just ugly.

I also don’t like the background fade that appears at the top right of the page. It’s distracting in my opinion, and doesn’t really do much.

I am also not a fan of the whole orange-blue-gray color scheme they have going. Looks kinda tacky.

Of course, things can change (the transition to MSN Search to Bing has shown this), so maybe they might change their logo to something better, and may you can turn off some of the glitzy effects. I really do hope Bing brings great results, and will add extra features over time. I think Bing may have the potential of finally being more on a competitive level with at least Yahoo! and maybe Google.

Official Press Release: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2009/may09/05-28NewSearchPR.mspx

Here are some of the latest MSN developments.

MSN City Guides has finally gotten a facelift! I wrote a nasty blog entry more than a year ago on how cruddy MSN City Guides was, and they finally listened to some of my feedback.

Well the have changed the look that’s fore sure. Here’s what I like about the revamped City Guides:

1. Complete switch to Live Search Maps and Live Search – Finally. Not just static Live Search Maps, but maps you can zoom and pan around in to look at the local area. When you hover over a point, it shows general info as well as an option to write a review or upload a photo about the point. The search results are also generally better and you can filter by neighborhood, type, or relevancy.

2. Social aspect – Users can now earn a reputation for their knowledge about a local area (though if you’re an expert in Houston, you  may still be a newbie in Chicago). Reputations such as:

• City Newbie
• City Amateur
• City Pro
• City Champ

What qualifies you to level up?

• 1. Write reviews for any business within that city
• 2. Upload photos for that city. This may or may not be associated to any business.
• 3. Add businesses from that city to your collections
• 4. Add any business/location from that city to your “Plan to go” or “Been there” lists.

This is definitely an interesting aspect, and it might encourage some people to actually participate. You can also have specialties, public/private collections, reviews you’ve done, and (maybe) photos you uploaded. For more info: http://cityguides.msn.com/help.aspx

3. Ability so share a collection of places you’ve been – I can share a bunch of places I like to be publicly viewed, and I can also tag places where I’ve “been there” or “plan to go” and my Windows Live friends can see this.

4. Ability to make reviews – When MSN and Citysearch (a more true expert local site) broke up, you couldn’t make reviews anymore. Yes, that officially made MSN City Guides a site to avoid. Now you can add reviews with a rating, title and review.

5. Ability to upload photos – It’s not quite obvious, but if you hover over a point on the Live Search Map, there’s an option to upload a photo of the place. Now the process isn’t too hard, but I never saw the images that I upload of my high school in public display. Maybe it’s a quirk, but I upload 2 on specific points of the high school, and couldn’t spot them again. If my photos weren’t approved for some reason, I didn’t get any message saying why it wasn’t approved. This is a really awesome feature though, because often times, a lot of the listing have outdated photos or no photos, and allowing users to upload relevant photos is a great thing.

6. Ability to add events, venues and performers – It’s another very unobvious thing, but if you click on this: , right under the weather widget, you can add events, performers, and venues in your city and information about them.

7. Scorecards (for some restaurants) – The scorecard can be really useful if you want to a variety of categories that a restaurant has been judged on, such as it’s value, atmosphere, dessert, food quality, etc.

However, I couldn’t find any way to write a review where I can grade a restaurant based on this criteria. I’m wondering how MSN works this out. Actually, I’ve noticed these reviews are from CitySearch, so why doesn’t MSN offer such criteria to base our reviews on, if they’re going to welcome CitySearch reviews with such criteria?

How it could be better:

1. Can’t add events directly to Windows Live Calendar – I got this pop-up when I wanted to add an event to my calendar:

I’m surprised that there’s no direct access to Windows Live Calendar, but you do get other options…

2. Still kinda ugly – It’s hard to not notice how tacky looking the site is. The font type, colors scheme (black, navy blue, orange and yellow?), bad rendering in Safari (see below), among other details that suggest that the MSN team needs to hire better designers on the team. I know looks aren’t as important as the features and content, but the design is still crucial because it determines the site’s usability, discoverability, and may have aesthetics that make the user feel more positive.

3. Listings could use extra information to differentiate – Microsoft needs to differentiate MSN City Guides from the competition. One way would be to make listing include extra information, such as health rating, whether the restaurant is currently opened or closed (including a countdown of when it will close/open), tags, categories, excerpts of expert reviews from more professional sites, etc. Make the listings on MSN City Guides stand out against what the competition currently has.

4. Basic City Profiles – There should be a page dedicated to an overview of what the particular city is all about. Some up the characteristics, geography, and local hotspots a person may notice if visiting this city. Have a nice slideshow of great photos of that city, as well as a cool video showing the city in action. At least this would help bring some more truth in the whole “city guide” name.

5. Throw in classified listings – It would be neat if Windows Live Expo could live on through MSN City Guides. It will encourage more users to participate on the site, and make the site more alive. Users could also sign up to pay for premium listings, listings with extra feature like uploading a video,

6. Allow users to do ‘Scorecard’ reviews based on criteria – I think the ScoreCard is a great idea, but instead of just limiting this to people on CitySearch, how about giving users the same option? It provides far more accurate results, and it’s a key differentiator from just any review site. It honestly doesn’t make sense, because the Scorecard can be really handy. It seems really backwards that users on CitySearch get to have ScoreCard reviews, while we just have the same old-fashioned style reviews.

It’s fine and all that Microsoft has finally pushed a good update for MSN City Guides, but is there really a need for MSN City Guides? In my opinion, Microsoft really shouldn’t have MSN City Guides. There’s already well-established sites out there that do this, like Yelp, CitySearch, Yahoo! Local, etc. that take on a much better job.

Instead, Microsoft should just scrap MSN City Guides, and implement these features on Live Search Maps. Honestly, the stuff you can do on MSN City Guides already exists on Live Search Maps (such as finding places, info. and reviews about places, discovering users’ public collections, etc.). The only thing missing is a way to add data layers (such as events) on top of the map and a way to have user participation (which can be an external link to view someone’s profile). That’s about it. Otherwise, Microsoft would be golden if they keep improving Live Search Maps.

For more info: http://news.ebrandz.com/microsoft/2009/2606-microsoft-overhauls-msn-city-guides-with-live-search-and-maps.html

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MSN Autos is finally upgrading to Live Search Maps, even though Live Search Maps has been here since like three years ago at least. It’s being called the “Gas Center” where it will allow you to zoom to street level, see gas listings and the map side-by-side, lets you navigate along your route to find the best gas prices, and share with friends.

I guess it is much better. Here’s the old version:

Here’s the new version:

You can see how the new one is MUCH better. However, I wish they would have gone on and beyond, and just combine the Gas Center and Local Traffic maps together instead of being on separate pages. It would be much more useful. Also, there should be data layer directly on Live Search Maps that show gas prices. It’s such a great feature, I don’t get why it’s available on MSN Autos and not Live Search Maps.

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After hearing news of MSN Direct being phased out, I’m surprised that they’re even offering a new watch.

If you go to http://direct.msn.com on Safari 4.0, this is what it shows. However, after testing the site in IE8, I didn’t get the same result. It wasn’t shown. On the Safari browser, I tried clicking on the Flash banner, but nothing happened. It says there’s a new watch, but nowhere on the site does it show hardware devices. It only shows the Channels and Coverage available. Really stupid to say there’s a new watch, and not have any web link to it.

I have noticed a new MSN Direct site at http://msndirect.com/

It’s obviously a lot more up-to-date, so I’m still confused as to why they created a whole new URL, instead of just scrapping the old site it was on. The only bad part of the site I could find, was that when I checked out under the ‘Devices’ section, under ‘Smart Watches’, it just gave me a link the referred me back to the old site. Which in case if you I hadn’t mentioned, doesn’t show any watches or devices!

Instead, it should redirect you to this link (which I found by clicking MSN Direct Service Plans on the old Direct site).

Now that’s just even more stupid. The old MSN Direct site claims there’s a new Smart Watch. It doesn’t show this so-called watch anywhere on that site. I go to the new MSN Direct site, and references to Smart Watches brings me back to the old MSN Direct site (that didn’t even have a section for devices!). I find this link that leads me to a Smart Watches page on the new site (why didn’t it redirect me there the 1st time?) and now I realize: There’s no new Smart Watch! This is plain idiocracy. It’s not a wonder why MSN is having a hard time if you such bumbling things like this going on.

Well anyway, I’m hoping that MSN Direct can continue to stay, and I wish Microsoft could do some more advertising to keep it afloat. MSN Direct is extremely handy, and I’ve heard a lot of great compliments about it. Please don’t sell the service or destroy it.