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March 29 Drilling Down on LocalYesterday, a few folks from Team Expo attended a conference hosted by The Kelsey Group called 'Drilling Down on Local'. Great presentations from folks like Greg Sterling, Eric Chandler from Verizon, Gerry Campbell from AOL. Garry, the PUM of Team Expo, joined a panel to talk about Classifieds, Local Listings, and 'Social Search'.
The panel included the San Jose Mercury News, LiveDeal.com, AdMission, WPNI (Washington Post), and Edgeio. Good fun discussing trends in the market. Check the photo slideshow for pics (warning for the faint of heart: Garry appears in a photo on a 20 foot screen).
- Team Expo March 10 Expo Meets SpacesToday, we’re thrilled to launch our integration with MSN Spaces. This integration allows you to post a free listing on Expo and have an abstract and thumbnail image displayed automatically on the front page of your MSN Space. Visitors to your Space can view abstracts from your different Expo listings and click directly to view more information and communicate with you via IM or anonymous messaging.
Here’s why we’re particularly excited: one of the reasons we built Expo was to provide an easy experience to share and view listings with those you trust: your friends. MSN Spaces captures this vision as a great communication experience among both friends and the broader web community. By posting a listing on Expo, your Space is updated, your MSN Messenger contact card is updated, and you gleam to your Messenger buddies. We hope that this automatic ‘promotion’ of your listing among those who share your interests provides the right kind of directed traffic to your listing.
Some early known issues:
Express yourself with blogging, photos, and now, tell your network of friends that you’ve got an extra ticket to the concert next weekend, you’re looking for a used laptop, you’re looking to sublet your apartment, you’re looking for a date. Do this by pulling your friends to your listings rather than pushing them!
 Tell us what you think.
- Team Expo
Special thanks goes out to DeEtte, Charlie, Karen, Mike, Jay, MC, Kevin, Azure, Dare, Steve, and many others. Great people and fun to work with. March 06 Technically speaking..Today's blog entry is going to appeal to the inner geek in all of us. We've prepared a few questions for one of the star developers on our team: Doug. To understand how dedicated Doug was to getting our product launched, in December he volunteered not to shave until we launched. We thought (or rather hoped) he was joking.. unfortunately he wasn't and we have the before and after pictures to prove it (see below)..
 Anyway, on with the questions:
Doug, tell us about your favourite feature in the service today.
I love the social networking aspect of our site, specifically the “Buddy Listings” module on the home page. It’s always nice to check in and find out what my friends and co workers are selling. I think this feature may take a while to catch on because your buddies need to post things on Expo before they you see it, but once it does, I think users will tell their friends about it and the we’ll see the use of our service explode.
OK, what was the most difficult feature to create and why?
Believe it or not, I think the most difficult front end feature were the “sliders” used to set the search radius and social networking level constraints for searching. For those who haven’t discovered them yet, click “change” next to the large orange words in the upper left of Expo. The client side javascript to make those work correctly was very difficult. They’re a beautiful piece of work.
What was the best technical thing you learnt during the development process?
Wow, this is a hard one. While trying to frame an answer I’ve considered and rejected several ideas because I can’t isolate just one. Among the contenders were: Unit testing in Visual Studio 2005, new features in SQL Server 2005 and AJAX techniques. Web development is one of those disciplines where you never truly master it all. There’s always room to learn. I assume that anyone who’s read this far is into development so let me end with this: the new Microsoft .NET 2.0 platform is so rich and compelling that you’re doing yourself a disservice by not upgrading. I’m sorry this answer ends on a shameless plug for our company, but it’s the honest truth.
Finally, what is your favorite listing on Windows Live Expo at the moment?
Thanks Doug, it's always a pleasure.. Also, you can catch some more tech-talk about our product on MSDN's channel 9 where we recorded a video back in November (when Expo was still codenamed 'Fremont').
Hey, isn't it time you headed back to our site to find that thing you've been looking for?
- Team Expo
March 01 Let us dance..This morning our fellow softies were greeted with dance as they entered the Redwest campus. It's traditional for a product team to let the rest of the campus know when they've launched their product by unusual means. The Xbox 360 launch resulted in all of the water streams on campus turning bright green, the MSN Search launch saw execs being dunked into the pond and in our case.. well.. we were so happy to launch that it made us want to dance.
Fortunately, we hired people who were far more experienced in the field of dancing. Check out the pictures.. (yes, we really blew the marketing budget)..
- Team Expo
P.S. Check out http://expo.live.com/ViewListing.aspx?lId=3979 if you want to see some cool improv (from the same folks who danced their hearts out today!) |
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