InsideMicrosoft

Windows Live Writer: Early Review

So, here I am, sitting at a friend’s wedding, blogging over EDGE, exactly what I didn’t plan on doing. Eh, this is what happens wheb you rely on people to hold by embargoes.

Anyway, my first impressions of Windows Live Writer are very good. While the product is filled with usability mistakes (all of which I’ll detail tonight), the bottom line is that it does the job well. The WYSIWYG editor goes beyond having formatted text to actually formatting the whole page, letting you edit your blog in the most natural of environments. Once they iron the bugs out in it, it should prove to be the most natural method of blog editing available, making a blog feel more like a Word document and less like a web form.

Meanwhile, Writer is designed with the future in mind. It comes with a plugin architecture designed to extend its use in the future. Already, they’ve created a nigh universal “Blog This”, since the Windows Live Toolbar has that very button, which wisks you straight into Writer. From communication with some of the Live folks, it seems like they want you building plugins to get your Flickr photos, del.icio.us bookmarks, and all sorts of other services built in. Not only am I excited about competitive services being built in, so are they!

Two good things about Writer: The Live services tend to get good development support, so this won’t likely be forgotten like the latest Google of the week. Also, Writer will likely be presented as a great tool for users of Windows Live Spaces, far and away the largest blog platform. That means plenty of incentive for mod developers to showcase their abilities. Why wouldn’t you design your Digg/del.icio.us/Slahsdot/Netscape/Technorati/BoingBoing/Scoble/TechCrunch autosubmitter/spammer to the world’s largest blogging community?

There are plenty of rough edges, but that is to be expected. Listen to LiveSide’s audio interview for the lowdown on how an Onfolio tool became Writer.

Also, to give credit where credit is due: Gary at Menori appears to have had the story first, posting about Windows Live Writer as far back as July 15! Nice scoop, and he didn’t screw over any embargoes to do it. I only wish he had spammed the rest of us to get the word out (and oodles of links).

So to sum it up: Live Writer works for everybody, but is tied to a hugely popular service, guaranteeing it gets wide use and hopefully lots of cool plugins. I wouldn’t be surprised if, due to a large number of downloads, the developers are forced to make the program a lot bigger than they intended. Good. Spaces is a nice success story for Microsoft, and there’s no reason to believe products related to it won’t turn to gold.

August 13th, 2006 Posted by Nathan Weinberg | Live, Writer, Spaces, Windows, Blogs, General | one comment