Windows Live Session

I'm back! It was a long, but really good, two days. I've never walked so much in my life! I finally got in around 11pm last night.

The Windows Live Session event definitely beat my expectations. Before the event I met up with a bunch of people who I'd never met before. It was a great idea to meet up and get to know each other before the event as you can then spend the event talking about more interesting things other than who are you and where do you come from.

The presentation was shorter than planned and offered an overview of the Windows Live services as well as a demonstration of Expo (formerly Windows Fremont) which is a service that allows you to buy, sell or offer things for free. It's very similar to the hugely popular Craigslist. Don't expect to see it over here anytime soon though, which is a pity as the UK could do with a service like that.

After the presentation there was a chance to meet members of the MSN team and the organisers of the event. I had a good conversation with Chris McCafferty who is head of PR and Corporate affairs for MSN UK. He was even nice enough to go an get us beers. I didn't think PR guys were supposed to be as nice as that.

I ended up staying until about 10pm and had a good time chatting with one of the organisers, Romain, who seemed to be really enjoying the free wine ;o) We chatted about the problems of labeling emails. At the moment services like Gmail require you to setup labels and filters in advance so that when an email comes through it automatically gets sorted, but this requires a person who's a good organiser. Romain was saying how cool it would be if email systems became intelligent enough to filter and sort everything for you automatically. I think that's a long way off but it would a killer feature.

Another thing that we discussed was being able to pick up your email from multiple email addresses, particularly webmail addresses, on one web site. Webmail services can currently pick up mail from other pop accounts but I'm not sure if they can pick up other webmail accounts.

The reason why this would be cool is that I'm currently a user of Gmail and I'm a big fan of it, but the Outlook-style interface offered by Hotmail is an improvement on the Gmail interface. However, I would be reluctant to switch because it means either telling all my contacts and subscriptions that I'm switching email addresses or running the two addresses. And what if I decide that I like the new Yahoo! Mail interface and want to switch to that service. Do I tell everyone again that I'm moving or do I run the three services?

I think in order to get more people to start using your mail service you will need to be flexible and allow people to access their other accounts. Of course this requires co-operation from other services who are unlikely to do so because of the risk of losing users.

I think the future events (apparently there will be others) should be more Q & A based rather than presentations about the services because I felt that I got more out of the event from the discussions before and after the presentation. As Chris Overt from Liveside rightly pointed out, the majority of people who attended the event either use the services discussed or are at least familiar with them so don't need to be given an overview about them.

Being so open about their products (hearing Phil Holden, Director and evangelist for Windows Live, admitting that Hotmail is crap was surprising) and inviting the general public to view beta products is something that is new to Microsoft so I think future events will be different.

Thanks again Romain for inviting me. If you want to see pictures of the event there is a Flickr feed but I could find it. Let me know if you know where it is.

Related: Liveside post, Darren Straight, i-wisdom, MSBlog

Sorta related: If you are really interested, here are some touristy photos of London.

Comments

[Gromain]

Sorry
I'll do the flickr after having slept during twelve hours
That means on sunday ;)
that was great to meet you - hope we can talk much more next time because you and i share some points of view
batw i enjoyed inviting you there - especially your t shirt - where can i steal it from you please?

[Linda]

Hi Rob
Yes, it was nice to meet you too. we didn't get to talk much in the pub, mostly due to me not being able to hear... you have a lovely soft welsh voice but that made it particularly difficult... next time though, hey?!! It was a good night!
ps. yeah I know its a silly email address!

[Chris]

Glad you had a good time Rob, it was great meeting you beforehand. Hopefully see you at the next event!