Windows Experience Blog : Facebook

The Windows Platform, Silverlight 4, and Facebook

Brandon LeBlanc — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 21:02:33 GMT

Last week, we announced the availability of the Facebook SDK for .NET developers. The SDK supports coding for both Silverlight and the Windows Platform (WPF, etc.). Yesterday, Scott Guthrie, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft's .NET Developer Platform, took the stage for his part of the Day 2 Keynote at PDC09 where he announced Silverlight 4.

During the keynote, an out-of-browser Silverlight 4 application called SilverFace was demonstrated. SilverFace was developed using the Facebook SDK we announced last week.

SilverFace lets you do all kinds of things on Facebook directly from your Windows desktop such as update your status, upload photos, view friend’s photos and videos, and much more. This application is meant to serve as a proof point for the capabilities of Silverlight 4 in combination with the Facebook SDK and is not an actual product. You can think of this as more of a “technology showcase” and a demo of what the technology can do.

For those of you wanting to try out physical code (and is pretty cool), I’ve got something just for you.

Today, we’re making available an application for Windows 7 called Fishbowl for Facebook. This application is a sample application created by UXLabs@Microsoft that showcases the Windows Platform (when I say Windows Platform = .NET Platform) and takes advantage of key Windows 7 features.

Download: Fishbowl for Facebook Preview

Fishbowl for Facebook lets you quickly post a Status Update to Facebook, watch your Facebook News Feed, post comments, browse your friends and their photos and upload photos directly from their Windows 7 desktop. Let me take you through a few key areas of the app. I’ll start with the Windows 7 integration.

When running, Fishbowl for Facebook takes advantage of new Windows 7 features such Taskbar Previews and Jump Lists.

For example, when moving your mouse over the Fishbowl for Facebook icon on your Windows Taskbar, you get a Taskbar Preview. This allows you to quickly navigate quickly between Home (you’re News Feed), your friends list, your profile, and photos. You can also quickly go to Facebook’s homepage too.

If you right-click on the Fishbowl for Facebook, you get a Jump List that lets you see your most recent notifications. It also lets you switch to “mini-mode”.

You can upload photos to Facebook using Fishbowl for Facebook – simply by drag-and-drop!

Just put a title in, choose the album you want to add the photo to (or create a new album), and hit upload! Here I am dragging a panoramic photo I created in Windows Live Photo Gallery from my visit in September to the U.S.S. Hornet in Oakland, CA.

See the red lines under the “U.S.S.” and “SFO” text? Yeah, that’s spell check. Fishbowl for Facebook comes with spell check to help ensure you don’t accidently spell important words wrong that your friends can make fun of you for the rest of your life with. Trust me, it happens ;-)

While browsing a photo album, you can view the album in a slideshow, save photos, print photos, and zoom in and out.

And Fishbowl for Facebook supports Windows Touch too.

Ok, one last thing – when browsing your friends in Fishbowl for Facebook, you are given several ways of sorting through your friends. You can sort by name (display name or family), last Status Update, Upcoming Birthdays, or Interest Level. And you can also adjust Interest Level of individual friends by simply clicking on a friend and viewing their profile. Interest Levels let you control how much of that friend’s stuff hits your News Feed. If you have an annoying friend, just turn the Interest Level way down.

There are a lot of neat experiences you can have with Fishbowl for Facebook so give the app a spin yourself! Remember, you can download it here.

Fishbowl for Facebook will run on Windows XP and Windows Vista but requires .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 to be installed (this is not needed if you’re on Windows 7 as it’s built in). For the best experience with Fishbowl for Facebook, it is recommended you use Windows 7 to take advantage of all its features. Fishbowl for Facebook with automatically update when updates are available as well so when we make updated available, you’ll get them! But please note that Fishbowl for Facebook is meant as a sample application showing what developers can do with the Windows Platform and the Facebook SDK. This is NOT an officially supported product.

Stay tuned, Yochay from the Windows 7 for Developers Blog will be posting some behind-the-scenes geeky developer stuff shortly. For you developers out there, this will be a must-read. I can’t wait to see more applications like this for the Windows Platform.

Seesmic Moving to Windows Platform, Announces Seesmic for Windows

Brandon LeBlanc — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 18:05:41 GMT

During this morning’s keynote at PDC09 – Seesmic Founder Loic Le Meur joined Ray Ozzie on stage to make a very important announcement regarding the future of Seesmic. Seesmic focuses on bringing many of your favorite social networking services like Twitter and Facebook together into a single application so you don’t have to bounce between those services. They are best known for their Abobe AIR Twitter and Facebook app called Seesmic Desktop today.

While on stage with Ray, Loic announced the launch of Seesmic for Windows.

With the vast majority of Seesmic users coming from PCs running Windows, the move to the Windows Platform made sense. By moving development to focus primarily on the Windows Platform, it will allow Seesmic to focus on providing the best user experience to the majority of its users. This includes addressing issues with performance. Loic also announced that Seesmic for Windows will allow developer to write plug-ins that can run securely within the application.

As part of today’s announcement, Seesmic is releasing a Preview release of Seesmic for Windows. Seesmic for Windows is Seesmic’s brand new desktop client developed on the Windows Platform. They have been working aggressively to have this Preview release ready for you today.

Seesmic for Windows provides an excellent way to manage tweeting on Twitter. It helps you stay on top of what your friends are tweeting and what the latest trends on Twitter are.

Seesmic for Windows provides a “tabbed” UI (left-side of the app) that lets you filter your Twitter “stream” of tweets. You can filter by account as Seesmic for Windows supports having multiple Twitter accounts signed in, searches and Twitter’s latest new feature called lists. Everything can be filtered into specific columns. You can drag the columns into whatever position you like and scroll right to left to view your columns. And the new posting bar in Seesmic for Windows makes it easy to switch from one account to multiple accounts.

I’ve had the pleasure of using Seesmic for Windows for the last few weeks now and it works great! I’m currently managing 2 Twitter accounts, a few lists and use the Twitter Search capabilities track tweets on Windows 7, Windows Live, and more. I am very excited about what’s to come for Seesmic for Windows. You can expect to see Seesmic for Windows take advantage of the Windows Taskbar enhancements in Windows 7 and when Twitter adds support for dynamic location, it will use Windows 7’s Location and Sensor Platform!

Seesmic for Windows was released to all Team Seesmic members during the keynote this morning. If you are a Team Seesmic member, you should have an email from Loic in your inbox with a link to download Seesmic for Windows. If you’re not a Team Seesmic member, don’t worry. Join Team Seesmic to download the Seesmic for Windows Preview and receive the latest and greatest builds. You can also head on over to Seesmic.com right now and sign-up to receive Seesmic for Windows when it becomes available as well. Give Seesmic for Windows a spin and be sure to follow @windowsblog and @mswindows!

Loic also demonstrated Seesmic ported over into Silverlight and running as a Silverlight-based app. Seesmic is also excited about the possibilities Silverlight will provide in regards to eventually creating a cross platform application.

For more on today’s announcements from Day 1 of PDC09, click here.

UPDATE: For more information on Seesmic’s announcements today including Seesmic for Windows, check out Loic Le Meur’s blog post!

Find The Windows Blog on Facebook!

Brandon LeBlanc — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 04:02:01 GMT

You can now find The Windows Blog on Facebook and become a fan! Just click on the button below to go to our Facebook Page.

Remember, you can also follow The Windows Blog on Twitter as well.

An Overview of Recent Updates to Windows Live

Brandon LeBlanc — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 18:33:44 GMT

Over the past few weeks, we’ve introduced quite a few improvements to Windows Live. I thought it would be nice to list all those improvements in a single blog post for everyone to read.

New web activities: 20 new third-party feed partners were added to Windows Live including Facebook, Digg, and SmugMug. MySpace will also be added in the coming months, so that MySpace customers can share activities and updates from MySpace to people in their Windows Live network.

By adding new feed partners to Windows Live, it’s easier for you to connect your activities various blogging sites, social networks and photo sharing sites and share them with your friends in your Windows Live network. This update will make it easier for the 500 Million users who are active on Windows live today to connect their activities on these partner sites and share them with their friends on Windows Live.

For instance, when you add the Facebook web activity – any photo, video, note or status update you make on Facebook will now appear on Windows Live via your What’s New feed. When you add Digg, any article you “digg” or submit to Digg, will now appear on Windows Live via your What’s New feed. Since Windows Live is global, it’s interesting to note that fourteen of the 20 new feed partners are headquartered in countries outside of the United States. According to Comscore, Hyves is the top social network in the Netherlands, and Metroflog is a top social network in Argentina.

There are quite a few partner web activities you can add today! Check them out by going to your Windows Live Profile and choosing “Web activities” in the lower left-hand corner of your profile

Add new contacts to Windows Live: MySpace, hi5, and Tagged join Facebook and LinkedIn as contact partners on Windows Live. Now you can exchange contacts between Windows Live and these five social networks and vice versa.

Messenger has come to Hotmail: Now you can IM through the web via Windows Live Hotmail. You can sign-in to Windows Live Messenger directly from within Hotmail and exchange IMs with your Messenger contacts.

If you are ever on a PC that doesn’t have Windows Live Messenger installed, just go to your Hotmail inbox and sign in to Messenger there to chat with your contacts. Once you sign-in, you can browse your contacts via your People page. If you are signed in to Messenger while checking your Hotmail and a contact sends you an IM, a toast will pop up in the lower right-hand corner of the page just as it does on a PC. For more details on Web IM in Windows Live Hotmail – see this blog post from Antonia on the Windows Live Team Blog.

Arrange your Photos in Windows Live SkyDrive: I blogged about this last week. Windows Live SkyDrive now allows you to arrange your photos in any order you want (thanks to Silverlight).

In one of your Photos folders on SkyDrive just click “Sort” and choose “Arrange photos”.

Photos of you: A new entry point has been added to Windows Live Profile pages called “Photos of you”. Essentially, this new link will take you to a page of photos tagged with a specific person (or yourself). It’s a great way to see all the photos your friends appear in or photos you appear in.

SkyDrive takes your Favorites: All your Favorites from favorites.live.com are now automatically moved to SkyDrive where you can use Windows Live Toolbar to sync your Favorites with Internet Explorer on your PCs.

And the Windows Live Sync website has now been integrated with the new Windows Live UI we launched with this last fall.

The new Windows Live Sync website makes a huge difference in managing your personal and shared folders and managing the PCs you are syncing them with.

Enjoy the improvements to Windows Live!

New Web Activities and Contact Importing Coming Soon to Windows Live

Brandon LeBlanc — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 18:56:15 GMT

Rob Dolin, Program Manager for Windows Live, just announced over on the Windows Live Team Blog new Web Activities such as Facebook, Digg, and SmugMug will be hitting Windows Live next week. He also announced that MySpace, Hi5, and Tagged will join Facebook and LinkedIn as contact partners. These contact partners allow you to invite your friends to Windows Live and vice versa. And in the next few months, MySpace customers will be able to share updates and activities from MySpace on Windows Live. For more information – read Rob’s blog post and take a look at the Q&A with Brian Hall, General Manager for the Windows Live Business Group, over on PressPass.

Upload Photos to Facebook with New Windows Live Photo Gallery Plug-in

Brandon LeBlanc — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 09:18:24 GMT

Michael Palermiti, Program Manager on the Windows Live Digital Memories Experience Team (the awesome people responsible for Windows Live Photo Gallery and Windows Live Movie Maker), has posted about a new plug-in for Windows Live Photo Gallery Beta that allows you to upload photos directly to Facebook. Using LiveUpload to Facebook, users can configure multiple Facebook accounts to upload photos to in Windows Live Photo Gallery. Upload to Facebook supports the ability to upload photos to existing albums on Facebook or create new ones.

Download: LiveUpload to Facebook

What’s even better about the LiveUpload to Facebook plug-in is that it takes advantage of Windows Live Photo Gallery’s new People Tags feature. That means if you tag a person you are also friends with on Facebook – once you upload the photo to Facebook that tag will automatically appear on the published photo.

You can download the Windows Live Photo Gallery Beta, along with Betas for the rest of the Windows Live Essentials suite, at download.live.com today. The plug-in only works with the Beta.

For a list of other plug-ins for Windows Live Photo Gallery Beta – click here!