Windows Live Expo: Blog

More info about the Communities Feature

Thu, 20 Sep 2007 00:19:54 GMT

We've received great feedback regarding the communities feature and thought a little further information on it's wondrous possibilities might be nice. A community by definition is "a social, religious, occupational, or other group sharing common characteristics or interests and perceived or perceiving itself as distinct in some respect from the larger society within which it exists."(dictionary.com) So, by it's nature, community access is restricted to those outside of it. However, Expo gives community members the choice to restrict their listings or not... and many choose not to.

Safety in numbers
Also by its nature, a community exists for people to communicate with usually trusted members where there is a similar association of some kind. Some people have expressed frustration that a community is limited to a work place or academic realms. However, just because people may share a domain, hotmail.com for example, doesn't mean they are part of a community that shares similarities, localities or close associations. It is important for community members to feel as though the potential for safe and trusted transactions exists amongst each other. Many of these generic domains have been restricted and cannot be joined because they do not comply with the purpose of the community feature.
On the other hand, some people have expressed concern based on the belief that the communities feature is not supportive to consultants, religious organizations or private businesses. This is partially true... technically, Expo does not restrict those with personal domains to create their own community. However, if a personal domain has very few members, it defies the purpose of a community. A good way to change this type of isolation is to add more people to your business, or domain.... in other words, grow the community you are a member of!

To limit, or NOT to limit your listings.... that is the question

Let's say for example, you are a Microsoft employee and you want to only search listings submitted by other Microsoft employees. Or, maybe you need to rent out a condo and feel more comfortable renting to employees at the same company you work at, so limiting who sees your listing is ideal. It is possible! You CAN limit who views your posted listings and your search results to just your community.
Searches
To search for listings posted only by your community:

Click the Community Link seen as (Change) under the distance slider near the top of the web page. It typically defaults to Everyone unless you previously customized it.

In the popup box, slide the Listing community slider to either Contacts and Communities or Communities Only.

Click Save Changes. You should now only see listing results in your searches that are from other users in the same community.

Once upon a time, Microsoft employees were fortunate enough to have an internal classified site referred to as Micronews. Today, many employees have expressed nostalgia for the days when they could limit their listing communications with just other employees, as a community would. However, with Expo they still can!
Posting Listings
Make your listing visible to only members of your community:

In the options panel on the left, click Post a Listing (or edit a listing already posted, by going straight to Listings).

Under the option Make listing visible to, choose Only Microsoft.com users or Only my Communities.

Save any changes.

Hope this answers some questions, feel free to ask more. Your feedback is great! Send questions to expo@microsoft.com or leave a comment.

Team Expo

Check out this new feature

Wed, 18 Jul 2007 00:30:43 GMT

You requested the ability to send messages to other users without using a Live ID... and now Expo delivers with the new Anonymous Messaging feature...

Next time you post a listing, you may notice the new option under the Communications section. Leaving it checked will allow anonymous users to contact you via email about your listing, without having to sign in first. Benefits of selecting this option include widening your potential buyers market to many new people, including those who have not yet signed up for a Windows Live ID.

The Expo Developers have also been hard at work optimizing search features and making it possible for your search results to quickly key in on what you're looking for. Improved search functionality returns results quicker and more precisely. With recent backend optimizations, you can expect your search results to be returned 2-3 times faster than before.

Feedback is great! You can post a comment to this blog, visit the feedback forum or leave us a message using the new Anonymous Messaging feature.

Team Expo

Expo releases new enhancements

Wed, 16 May 2007 23:24:44 GMT

The Expo team has been busy.

First, a few things about Team Expo:

- we are a small development team within Microsoft that focuses on what we think is cool technology and cool consumer experiences. We don't have a marketing budget. We believe in providing a positive consumer experience that we hope will earn word-of-mouth and some notion of viral.

- we are very focused on innovation and trying to nail core consumer needs.

- many of our recent changes and updates have been on the backend - focusing on robustness, scalability, and up-time. we believe these investments will pay off over the long-term.

Next, a quick summary of some consumer-facing changes from our latest release. We're pretty damn excited about a few of these:

- Buddy Alerts - we have launched a new feature that allows a user to post a listing and automatically opt-in their Messenger buddies to be notified with a 'toast' indicating that their buddy has posted something for sale on Expo. In the first few days, the numbers have blown us away and exceeded our projections for number of alerts sent and click-thrus to our users' listings. This new feature helps us to capitalize on the original idea borne out of Expo over 2 years ago: providing a classifieds service within your trusted circle of friends, classmates, and coworkers. A year ago, the Wall Street Journal coined the concept as 'Social Classifeds' as more and more companies looked at this idea and extended them into their own services.

- Local Focus - we have optimized the site to show local listings on your home page. We have also started suggesting local locations for your searches with IP lookup. You can change this local focus at anytime.

- Anti-Fraud - we have enhanced some of our backend services to help fight potential fraud issues

- Performance - our customers told us that search queries and overall website performance was slow. We listened. We improved performance significantly. And, we're pretty happy with the new performance - but recognize that this is an ongoing effort.

Thanks for using Expo - feel free to drop us a line at expo@microsoft.com

- Kurt of Team Expo

UK Expo gets PayPal!

Wed, 21 Mar 2007 20:53:20 GMT

Great news for our users across the pond; Expo's PayPal integration just expanded to the UK! Now our UK Expo users can post listings with the added ability to pay with PayPal.

Having PayPal on your listing allows for a quicker, easier, and more secure transfer of funds. With PayPal, you can receive payment in almost any form, including credit cards! So go ahead and sell some of your stuff and add the PayPal payment option to your listings. And who knows, it might just be the extra bit that helps you sell your collection of disco balls (because decorating your bedroom like the set of Saturday Night Fever just isn’t as “cool” as it was when you were 13).

Thanks for using Expo!

Team Expo

http://expo.live.com

Expo Newsletter

Wed, 13 Dec 2006 19:15:37 GMT

We recently sent out the Expo newsletter, which contained a little trivia question. If you're here from the letter, the answer is right below. If you're not signed up for the letter, go ahead and visit Expo - http://expo.org - and create an account!

For those of you who didn't get to read the trivia bit - we're fans of the TV show The Office, so in the letter we asked people: "How did Jim make Dwight hit himself in the head with his own phone?"

Maybe you remember the scene, but even an avid watcher on the team had a tough time coming up with the answer. The answer is that "Jim put coins in Dwight's phone handset, and then took them out so he hit himself in the head." We know the text doesn't do the scene justice so hopefully you saw it happen.

Stay tuned for more trivia or random bits as we'll be sure to include more in the coming newsletters.

Best,

Latham

Team Expo

P.S. Any funny stories or quotes from your office? Post them below, or better yet, on Expo!

New Release of Expo!

Thu, 30 Nov 2006 03:04:02 GMT

We're happy to announce a pretty cool update to the site that went out this afternoon.

This release includes:

Public availability in the UK and China! Welcome to social classifieds, guys!
Upgrades to the "Communities" feature (formerly known as Email groups) - read details here
Streamlined account sign-up
Upgrade to the newest Virtual Earth map viewer - check out the new 3D maps feature by clicking on the "View map" button!
Image enhanced preview, so you can start scoping people's profile photos
Sharing on Facebook, so you can share your listings with your Facebook buddies
A much needed refresh of the homepage including the slick 'Vapor' theme
Tonnes of bugfixes and backend improvements

Oh, and there were a few nuggets that didn't make it in time for this release, but they're just around the corner. Stay tuned.

--Samir, Team Expo

Communities...

Hock it on Facebook...

Image preview lets you see all the details...

API Update

Mon, 30 Oct 2006 06:38:28 GMT

Expo API enthusiasts:

We recently released a cool little update to our API that makes it MUCH easier to search for listings and filter by location. You can now search for listings by any combination of City, State or Zip code using a new method, ListingsByCategoryKeywordLocation_V2. We'll do the work of converting to lat/longs for you!

Check out the changes on our MSDN article here: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb246473.aspx

As usual, please post a comment here if you've got a cool new mashup using our stuff.

Cheers,

Samir

Team Expo

Presidents of the USA show Expo how to Rock

Thu, 19 Oct 2006 17:22:10 GMT

We open with the band in a crowded garage. The band is getting ready to rehearse “Zero Friction”. There’s too much stuff in there, it’s hard for them to move and play. They need to get rid of that stuff, that friction, so they can play. As they play, one piece at a time, they start zapping things out of the room. They zap these items around the garage with lasers from their guitars and drumsticks. The items they are zapping then appear on the bottom of the screen where they scroll with a price tag and continue across the bottom on black or a simple color bar...

Team Expo is proud to announce the World Premier Video from the Presidents of the United States of America!

The Project

Team Expo partnered with the Presidents of the USA and the MercyCorps to raise money for global communities recovering from war or social upheaval. The Presidents have created a new world-premiere video based on their new song, “Zero Friction” with the help of Windows Live Expo. Every item featured in the video will be available on Live Expo for sale. All proceeds from the sales will benefit MercyCorps.

Every item sold on Windows Live Expo will directly benefit MercyCorps. Since 1979, Mercy Corps has provided $1 billion in assistance to people in 82 nations. Likewise, since 1983, Microsoft and its employees have donated more than $2.5 billion to charities.

Find Project Zero Friction
The video and listings will be hosted on MSN.com, MSN Video, Windows Live Spaces, and Windows Live Expo starting the afternoon of October 19th. Consumers watch the video for free, view the band’s blog, find photos of the making of the video, and purchase items found in the video at www.projectzerofriction.com.

MercyCorps
Mercy Corps works amid disasters, conflicts, chronic poverty and instability to unleash the potential of people who can win against nearly impossible odds. Supported by headquarters offices in North America, Europe, and Asia, the agency's unified global programs employ 3,200 staff worldwide and reach nearly 10 million people in more than 40 countries.

Presidents of the USA
The Presidents of the United States of America have release 9 albums since 1995. The Presidents of the United States of America went double platinum, rocketed all the way to #6 on Billboard’s Top 200 Album Chart, produced three Top 40 hits (“Lump,” “Kitty” and “Peaches”) and a #1 single on Billboard’s Modern Rock Chart, and garnered two Grammy nominations and a gaggle of critical praise for its sense of pop savvy and quirkiness. View their Space at http://presusa.spaces.live.com

Other thanks go to Gogi Design, Phil Holden Photography, and the crazy but talented folks at Wexley School for Girls.

Final comments: Team Expo had a blast working with the Presidents on the video. Great bunch of guys that are down to earth, sincere in their intentions, and fantastic musicians. Keep on rocking, guys! - Kurt from Team Expo

New updates to Expo!

Thu, 21 Sep 2006 00:02:52 GMT

We are delighted to announce a new update to the Windows Live Expo service which launched today!

The team has spent the past 2 months working on features that were either gathered from end user feedback or were part of our long-term roadmap, so we are excited to share our work with you. As part of this update we wanted to highlight the following new features:

Integrated payment service: Paypal’s 150 million registered users can now easily reference their account in order to complete secure person-to-person transactions on Windows Live Expo. Buyers can purchase items from sellers on Expo with a credit card thru Paypal or using their Paypal debit accounts. Additionally, sellers can specify their preferred method of shipping and declare the cost for doing so.

New high quality job listings: Expo now allows users to search and browse thousands of local and national job listings which are supplied by our partner CareerBuilder.

Featured ads: The new featured ads area (provided by AdMission) allows you to generate a lot more interest in your listing by offering a fun, rich media experience that highlights your classified listing. The featured ads module will initially appear in the real estate and autos sections (example).

Smarter search results. Didn’t find what you were looking for locally? We’ll now automatically preview a selection of national results in a special module below the search results.

Tighter Live Messenger integration. A new Messenger tab will show you all the things your friends and family are listing - right within the Messenger client!

Apart from the features above, we also focused on performance improvements and increasing our ranking in search engines so that your listings have a better chance of being found on the popular search engines. Anyway, we hope you’ll enjoy the new features and please don’t hesitate to leave us feedback.

Best regards,

Team Expo – http://expo.org

Toolbar Launches

Thu, 27 Jul 2006 17:42:39 GMT

Windows Live Toolbar recently tore the beta tag off and officially launched. Here's the info: http://blogs.msdn.com/livesearch/

Very cool integration of a variety of Windows Live products.

To celebrate, Expo now has a button available in the gallery! It allows you to track your listings, messages, and quick searches. Here's how to get it:

1. Download the toolbar at http://toolbar.live.com
2. After installation, click the green '+' button on the toolbar. This takes you to the gallery.
3. Select the Featured Item, "Windows Live Expo".
4. Click Download on the right side.

Enjoy!

-Kurt of Team Expo

Expo.org

Tue, 18 Jul 2006 22:28:14 GMT

Team Expo recognizes that sometimes it's easier to say 'Picky People Pick Peter Pan Peanut Butter' than to say 'http://expo.live.com'. We listened.

We recently launched a redirect url, http://expo.org. Hopefully, this will make it easier to remember, to pass along to friends.

Here's how I typically respond at cocktail parties and family events, "Oh, I prefer to sell my stuff at expo.org". You're now allowed to do the same ;)

- Kurt of Team Expo

Official U.S. Launch of Windows Live Expo

Wed, 12 Jul 2006 07:54:51 GMT

Our free classified listing site has ‘graduated’ from the beta stage and is now a fully fledged Windows Live service. As part of this evening’s release you will notice that the site has received a significant make-over and we’ve added several new cool features. The other key piece of news is that we have created a UK beta version of Expo which will be available for internal consumption as of July 12th.

http://expo.live.com

Some of the new features for our latest release include:

New Look - A brand new look & feel for the site which includes the official Windows Live look and integration, accessibility, scaling, and easier to use.

· Comments on a listing – Similar to comments on a blog; this feature will allow users to discuss issues in the soapbox area or ask the seller for more details about an item.

· APIs – Developers can now access all of our listings using a variety of parameters in order to create cool mash-ups (such as http://www.blockrocker.com). Full details about the API are available at http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb246473.aspx

· Driving directions – Users can now easily get driving directions to whatever listing they are viewing (courtesy of our friends at Live Local) by simply clicking a button.

Let us know what you think!

- Kurt of Team Expo

The CBS Evening News

Tue, 27 Jun 2006 22:58:55 GMT

Expo made the CBS Evening News last night in a segment called "Winning The Battle for Classifieds"

Check out a summary and clip here: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/06/26/eveningnews/main1753602.shtml

Another Expo mashup

Thu, 15 Jun 2006 01:11:06 GMT

Our friends at Blockrocker.com just integrated with Expo listings to provide a cool mashup. Check it out.

www.blockrocker.com

- Kurt of Team Expo

Attention Developers: Expo API RTW

Mon, 05 Jun 2006 06:22:57 GMT

The first version of the Expo API went live this week. The API gives developers read access to the Expo classifieds listings database. All our listings are geo-tagged, so there are some cool posibilities for mashups with some of those mapping APIs.

The API docs are published on MSDN and you can find them here. You can get started by signing up for an Application key at http://expo.live.com/myapikeys.aspx.

If you've got a slick working demo using our APIs, please let us know at expoapi@microsoft.com so we can link to it. The nuttier and more creative, the better! Also, make sure you post a link from this blog post.

Remember, this release is our first crack and exposes basic functionality - we're looking to impove it over the next few months. Below are some of features that are on our to-do list. Let us know what you think at expoapi@microsoft.com!

Easier location lookup (by Zip or city)
Power search (including attributes)
User's Messenger buddies' listings
Account information (unread messages, listing counts, saved searches)
Random listings

--Samir (Program Manager, Windows Live Expo)

We're listening...

Sat, 08 Apr 2006 01:08:41 GMT

Since launching, we've received lots of great feedback on ways to improve our service from users, critics and co-workers (who are often our toughest critics).

Here are a few of our top requests, and what we're doing to address them:

1. Changing your Expo nickname

User quote: "Why can't I change my bloody nickname?"

Many of our users aren't aware (until its too late) that you can't change your Expo nickname once you set it.

While this may seem like a bug, it's actually a feature! We want our users to start building up reputations on Expo, as they buy and sell with each other. I need to be sure that you're the Kurt23 that sold me that cool shirt last week when I go to buy a jacket from you this week. If we let people change their nicknames, there are just more opportunities to impersonate others and more ways for the bad people to hide.

Related request: "User reviews tied to rating system for users and their postings."

We're looking at adding ways for you to start rating your buyers and sellers soon, so we'd love to hear your thoughts/requests on features like that. What do you like/dislike about rating systems on other community/classifieds sites?

2. Uploads

"Do you expose bulk uploads for merchants?"
"Please consider adding a bulk upload feature for your real estate section. This is available in competing sites and will help those of us with many listing utilize your service and provide content."

"Web Services Interface! I'd love to do an Expo Mashup with Microsoft CRM."

We may add upload features eventually, but right now, our priority is to create a community (and people) driven website instead of a database of listings added by a robot.

3. US Only

"It is a shame Expo is US only. Do you plan to extend it worldwide?"
"Updating personal information. My profile will not allow me to change it to Canada. It lists me in Seattle. I am in Canada."
"make it avaliable to canada!"
"Expo should be available in Canada as well"

We’re going to bring Expo goodness to the rest of the world soon. Also, Samir, a pesky Canadian/PM on the team, loves his home and native land and wants his mom to start using Expo soon.

4. Bad listings

"The open beta just launched today, and already the listings are filling up with blank ads for personals sites and blanks ads with links to real-estate agencies. If such spam or false/ad listings become common *and they will*, it will instantly kill the usefulness of this site."
"It is absolutely critical that users are given an super-simple, highly visible means to report listings as spam or commercial advertisements."

We've got a few ways to report abuse, including a link at the bottom of every listing that says:

"Help us keep the site suitable for everyone and report abuse by clicking here."

Click it and choose the type of abuse. It fires an email to support, and agent will take a look and close the listing if it violates our code of conduct.

Report spam! Help defend Expo!

5. Browser support

"Mac Safari support is a little sketchy"

For launch we decided to focus our efforts on more common browsers: Firefox and IE. You can bet we'll add support for others browsers/platforms soon.

Please continue to send us your feedback by going here: http://feedback.live.com/eform.aspx?productkey=wlexpo&page=feedback_home_form

Happy Listing!

Team Expo

Expo at South by Southwest

Mon, 03 Apr 2006 05:32:31 GMT

2006 was the South by Southwest Music & Media Conference and Festival 20^th Anniversary and Expo was there for the celebrations. We teamed up with MSN Spaces to show the musicians and music lovers about our integration that allows musicians to showcase their wares (CDs, tickets, t-shirts, used musical equipment) directly on their blog. We had a booth in the Austin Convention Center at the Trade Show where we had talk to hundreds of folks from record labels around the world and musicians from every genre of music. In addition, we hit the streets where we handed out koozies that helped everyone to keep their drinks cool. We got fantastic feedback from record label folks, musicians and attendees and look forward to continuing to attend these great events in the future.

Drilling Down on Local

Thu, 30 Mar 2006 01:01:15 GMT

Yesterday, 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

Expo Meets Spaces

Fri, 10 Mar 2006 21:25:07 GMT

Today, 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:

If you are creating a Space for the first time while adding a listing on Expo, you’ll need to go back and edit your listing to have it show up on your Space
Some small UI tweaks are still underway
Deep integration between Expo and your blog is currently only available with MSN Spaces
If you post a private listing to your public space, we’ll warn you – but it will be public. Change your permissions on your Space or don’t opt-in to post automatically on your space if you don’t want the public to view your private listings.

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.

Technically speaking..

Mon, 06 Mar 2006 22:22:17 GMT

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?

http://expo.live.com/ViewListing.aspx?lId=3385

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

Let us dance..

Thu, 02 Mar 2006 03:17:54 GMT

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!)

Hello world..

Tue, 28 Feb 2006 22:22:14 GMT

The Expo team is very proud to unveil the Windows Live Expo service today. Our public beta will cater to all users in the every location across the US.

To get started on the service, we've produced a nice Flash product tour (thanks Becky!) that outlines all of our cool features. Head over to the homepage here and you'll find a link for the tour near the bottom of the page.

I wanted to call out a few known issues with the Beta that we've acknowledges and are working on:

Spaces integration: The new Spaces module will be activated very soon - hold tight..
Firefox niggles: Yes, we know you can't drag and drop the windows and that the rich-text editing has problems. We already have fixes in the pipeline for this so expect to see it patched shortly.

Anyway, it's been an amazing ride during the last 9 months.. I'll save the "startup in a corporate" story for another blog entry, but all I can say is that I couldn't have wished for a better team to work with. I've included a snapshot of the product development team just after our 9:30AM scrum meeting that we have each morning.

From left to right: Aidyn, John, Doug, Kurt, Garry, Samir, Rob, Paul, Becky and Sonali..

Well, it's time for us to have a beer or two and celebrate this milestone now. However, our work doesn't stop here - expect to see regular updates to the site each month as we keep getting fired up about building cool stuff for people to enjoy.

This is only the beginning...

- Garry and the Expo gang..

UW and Microsoft

Sat, 11 Feb 2006 01:37:24 GMT

The Expo team decided to trim our initial beta preview to focus on UW and Microsoft (and alumni). Today, we’ve started to see the trickle of users and listings picking up. We’ve also had mentions in TechCrunch, BetaNews, and others. It was a great week and big milestone for the team.

Q: Why was access for Boeing, WaMu and Safeco removed?

A: It is still very early in the beta testing process for Windows Live Expo. In the next few weeks, the roster of those who have access to Expo may continue to change as we prepare for our broad beta roll out later this spring.

- Kurt

Expanding the marketplace..

Fri, 10 Feb 2006 02:46:51 GMT

We're very pleased to announce that today we are expanding our beta to include certain email groups from the Seattle area. In particular, we have opened up the service to the following organizations (besides Microsoft employees):

University of Washington (u.washington.edu)
University of Washington Alumni (alumni.washington.edu)
Microsoft alumni (msanet.org & msalumni.com)

What does this mean? This simply means that if you have a valid email address at any of the email domains above then you are able to access the Windows Live Expo service by signing in with Passport and entering your email into the text boxes on our current welcome page. You will be sent a validation email that confirms you have a valid email address at the account you've entered.

It's important to note that all items on the site are *real* listings by people who have been using the service during the last few months, so have fun bargain hunting!

Although we are now opening the service further to include members of the public, we are still seeking feedback from those who use the beta. We've tried hard to make sure the site works in all modern, widely-used browsers, however I suspect that there are configurations that we may have missed. If you do find any issues with the service then please use the feedback form in the help section to report any bugs you may have encountered. Additionally, we're also very open to general feedback such as improvements you think we should make to the site.

Congratulations to all of you who now have access! For the rest of you - please sit tight, sign up to be notified of our launch here and we'll be with you soon

- Team Expo

"So when is it launching then?"

Sun, 08 Jan 2006 01:42:30 GMT

A very common (and good) question that we have been asked quite a few times during our stay here in Las Vegas. The plain answer is that we're not setting an exact date, but we're waiting a little longer to make sure we're satisfied with the progress of the internal beta.

As some of you may be aware, we opened up the service to Microsofties just before Christmas as part of a trial to gain feedback and test system stability. It was shortly after this that all hell broke lose when one of our employees in Microsoft China was a bit overzealous (read: naughty) and pasted a copy of our internal e-mail into their Spaces blog. Oops! The cat was now out of the bag and we had to address the flood of press inquiries that arrived at our office. This was all a little sooner than we'd hoped as we now had to be reactive to stories rather than pro-active and explaining exactly what the service was.

Anyway, one of the primary reasons I didn't want us to set a date in stone for launching is because I felt that we should have the flexibility to decide when the product was of decent enough quality to launch (which could be earlier or later than any date we'd plucked out of the air). As this is an V1 incubation effort we have had the luxury of setting our dates in such a way, however moving forward we'll continue to use the scrum methodology to update our service on a month-by-month basis and continue to add in features and updates.

The good news is that you can sign up to be notified the moment we open the service up to more people. Head over to http://imagine-msn.com/minisites/expo/default.aspx and just enter you e-mail address, name and ZIP code and you'll be the first to know that we're ready for your listings!

On another topic, I believe Kurt (our group program manager) has some photos of us at CES, so look out for those to appear shortly. There may even be a few of us in the infamous party bus as we cruised around the Vegas strip whilst listening to deafening tunes and holding on to our drinks as the bus swung around corners!!

- Garry

CES is calling..

Thu, 05 Jan 2006 00:24:06 GMT

We're just setting off to head over to CES where we'll be manning a small booth at which we will be showing off the product formerly known as Fremont.. Although there's been speculation about our final choice of name (such as Windows Live Classifieds), we've decided upon a product name which we feel reflects openess, community-spirit and wide variety of choice: Windows Live Expo.

Anyway, I just wanted to take this opportunity to kick off our official blog site. You'll be able to find updates here from the team about our product as well as some random posts about things we're interested in.

If you're at CES this week then please do pop by the booth, we'd love to give you a demo and get some feedback!

- Garry