Tim Bray on Microsoft LifeCams and Window Live

Thu, 15 Jun 2006 16:35:25 GMT

Tim Bray has a blog post entitled Blogging Cam: Almost Right where he writes

Via Niall Kennedy (who’s been very good lately): Microsoft cameras that have one-button publishing to MSN Spaces. This is so wrong. I don’t want to see a future in which your camera is LiveJournal-enabled or Facebook-ready. When I get a computer or a mobile device, it’s either Web-ready or not, it doesn’t have to be MSN-enabled or Yahoo-blessed.

I agree 100%. I worked on the APIs for MSN Spaces and this was one of my goals. The APIs we expose should be industry standards (de facto or de jure) and we shouldn't think of APIs as being the purvey of exlusionary deals. We are waiting for some things to pull together such as the the Windows Live ID client SDK before announcing more APIs. In the meantime, you can assume that any public APIs we provide will be available to all at not exlusionary.

-- Dare Obasanjo

Build Mashups using MSN Spaces feeds

Fri, 09 Jun 2006 14:12:04 GMT

One of the coolest trends on the Web has been the rise of RSS feeds for syndicating content on the Web. Why this trend is so interesting is that RSS feeds can be used both as a way to read content in your application of choice people and as an engine to remix content in mashups of your choice.

Every public MSN Space can provide an RSS feed that contains the most recent blog entries, lists, and photo albums posted to the space. To distinguish between the various item types in the RSS feed, an extension element named msn:type from the "http://schemas.microsoft.com/msn/spaces/2005/rss" namespace is used. The valid values for the msn:type element are photoalbum, blogentry, list, musiclist, booklist, and bloglist. For this application I targeted items within the RSS feed for which the value of the msn:type element was "photoalbum".

One mashup I've created powered by the RSS feeds from MSN Spaces has been the MSN Spaces Photo Album Browser which allows you to browse photos in photo albums on MSN Spaces. I've also wrote an article entitled Fun with IXMLHttpRequest and RSS about writing mashups with RSS feeds provided by MSN services such as MSN Search and MSN Spaces. Check it out, it may give you some ideas for interesting mashups of your own.

-- Dare Obasanjo

Spaces Developer Platform: Dare's Posts

Tim Bray on Microsoft LifeCams and Window Live

Build Mashups using MSN Spaces feeds