InsideMicrosoft

Syndicate Conference: Keynote: Phil Holden On MSN

If you don’t know already, I’m at the Syndicate Conference in Manhatten. The keynote I just attended had some very interesting news about MSN, so here’s my recap:

Day Two Keynote - Blogging and Consumer Online Communication

Phil Holden
Director of MSN Global Business and Product Management, MSN.

Starting off, Phil notes that while blogging may have hit the mainstream, a CNN / USA Today / Gallup poll recently showed that a large percentage of Americans not reading blogs, and blogging not changing overall American media consumption habits. To further develop MSN Spaces, they spent the last six weeks talking to people who blog and read blogs, in different countries all around the world.

He shows how, on any axis, you can’t chart bloggers as falling mostly under any specific category. Some people want to share with their friends about their personal life, some want to talk with the world about world events, and others want one or the other (telling the world about personal stuff, telling friends about the world).

Those who fall in the relationship category (To Friends, Re: Friends) tend to be much younger. The major social networkers (To World, Re: World) tend to be superficial, have many contacts, and tend to have message board-type blogs. The classic content creators (To World, Re: Friends) tend to have close circles, but see themselves as experts in various fields, and only read other blogs to get content. The content consumer (To Friends, Re: World) tend to do only blogging as part of a conversation, not as the center of the content, and tend to read more than write.

He sees growth and market interest in more powerful content creation and distribution tools, social networking elements, and as part of consumer offerings. Of course, these services tend to be separate, with those who want one not necessarily being interested in any of the others.

Next, Phil shows off MSN Spaces, which is very consumer oriented and easy to set up. He says, “The product is clearly not for everyone”. It is very much targeted to the Friends/Friends market. The conducted a survey to see what people thought Spaces did well. Number one was sharing photos, while in last place was staying up to date on hot topics.

He shows how many people use MSN Spaces. In December, it was one million. In January, 2; February, 3.5; and March, 4. However, since Messenger 7 went live and Spaces left beta, Spaces exploded, going up to 10 million Spaces at the end of April. Wow. They are adding 100,000 Spaces a day.

Moving on, Phil gets into notifications. He mentions “gleaming”, where Microsoft leverages Messenger to notify people that their friends have updated their Space. Clicking on a person reveals their contact card, and that can take you to the blog. This is the single-source personal notification system.

Phil shows how a less personal, single-source public contact notification occurs, through MSN Alerts. This is what they acquired MessageCast for last week. It will work to notify people of updated blogs.

The multiple-sourse public notification is through MSN’s “What’s Your Story” page, which highlights the most interesting Spaces.

Then he introduces Kyle Von Haden, program manger of Global Site & Develoment at MSN, who shows off Start.com/1/, which is to be the multiple-source personal notification system, or RSS reader. He explains how they have been silently releasing and updating stuff on Start.com, with no publicity for the time being. Start.com can be a superfast loading home page. The whole thing is built in Ajax, so they can change the page without refreshing. They plan to add sections that suggest feeds that a person’s friends like. The focus is making it easy, simple, fast, and with no learning curve.

Then he shows off something new, what will be next: Start.com/3/, a much richer interface, with folders, logos, custom pages. You can add custom feeds, like weather feeds. It looks very, very impressive.

Phil returns and discusses the problem with having a business model with RSS. The need is to bring customers from the feeds back to the site, without ruining the user experience. Some advice: Teaser feeds, forcing users to come back to the site for the full story. Providing more than just content is a great draw, with a personal experience deeper than RSS, with more exploration and social aspects and interaction. Finally, there is also the option of advertising in RSS feeds, or making the RSS be the ad, acting as public relations for the site.

Kyle comes back up and notes that search engines have problems with non-static content, like breaking news events. He says that people can subscribe to RSS feeds of the search results. He recommends that sites have user-accessible RSS links that explain RSS, show how to use it, and show cleanly the RSS results. Later in the presentation, they note that sponsored links will eventually make their way from the search engine into the RSS feeds.

Phil says one good idea would be to build RSS readers into existing applications, making it easier for users to adopt and use. Challenges exist in making it easier for users to understand what’s going on, so they don’t just get confused by little orange boxes. Industry challenges exist from different formats and authentication for private content.

Kyle gets back up and shows off the next thing from MSN: a (currently alpha) screensaver that uses RSS to show recent news, much like Apple’s Tiger has, but much cleaner looking. Its very easy to add any feed, especially easy for Spaces. You can subscribe to image feeds and have those feeds supply the photos on the screen, as well as showing blog entries and news articles. The product didn’t work perfectly yet, but seeing the photos full-screen with other articles in the corner looked very useful.

Phil wraps thing off with some goals, including serving multiple segments of consumers, new ways of getting content (like the screensaver), and strategies to let the public know how useful syndication can be.

A great presentation. MSN clearly gets RSS better than most, and they’ve got some very interesting stuff coming down the pike.

I had the opportunity to talk to Kyle following the presentation, and he told me that Start.com/3/ should be just weeks away, while the screensaver will hopefully release as part of their next toolbar release, something like a month away. Since it is still an alpha build nothing is set. Both product are very impressive.

From top: the panel, Phile Holden, and Kyle Von Haden:

May 18th, 2005 Posted by Nathan Weinberg | Spaces, Search, MSN, General | 8 comments