REST API format for adding a new Bookmark

MSDN Social Bookmark FeedFlare

Here is what I have so far for a FeedFlare item for MSDN Social Bookmarks.  As the REST API opens up more, I will try to add more to this.

<!DOCTYPE FeedFlareUnit SYSTEM "FeedFlareUnit-1.0.dtd">
<FeedFlareUnit>
    <Catalog>
        <Title>Bookmark on MSDN Social</Title>
        <Description>Add a link as a bookmark on MSDN Social.</Description>
    </Catalog>
    <FeedFlare>
        <Text>Bookmark on MSDN Social</Text>
        <Link href="http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/action/create/s/E/?url=${link}&amp;ttl=${title}&amp;d=${title}"/>
    </FeedFlare>
</FeedFlareUnit>

Note:

You can adjust the URL in the link node to hit any of the 4 Microsoft bookmark sites:

• http://social.msdn.microsoft.com
• http://social.technet.microsoft.com
• http://social.expression.microsoft.com
• http://social.microsoft.com

How to use the FeedFlare

To use the FeedFlare item, you need to have a FeedBurner account.  This account is free and easy to setup, just register here: https://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/register.  Once you have your account, add your feed to the list.  On the main feed page click the “Optimize” tab and select the “FeedFlare” link to the left:

What it looks like

If you add the FeedFlare to your blog site, this is what the link looks like:

If you add the FeedFlare to your feed, this is what the link looks like in Google Reader:

When the link is clicked the url of the bookmark is set and the title and description are prepopulated with the feed item’s name.  You can modify these values and tag the bookmark before saving it.

Enhancements

I would love to see the following features added once more of the REST API is opened up (or revealed) for MSDN Bookmarks:

• A count of how many people have bookmarked the same link.
• A list of the tags used to bookmark the link. (ordered by most used tag)

The enhancements would have the link look a lot like the Delicious FeedFlare item.  Here is an example of what it would look like on the site:

Larry Clarkin will be in town to present at the next ArcReady event.  Larry is an Architect Evangelist at Microsoft for the Midwest District and is a good friend of mine.  Larry is a wonderful speaker and brings a lot of knowledge and experience to his talks.  You do not want to miss this event.

If you are in the Indianapolis area, or want to make the trip out, you can attend this session and Bill Steele’s session on MSDN Events Unleashed immediately afterwards. From 9am till 4pm EST, you can enjoy hearing from two of the best speakers in the Midwest and learn a lot about Microsoft technology and architecture at the same time!

The Indianapolis ArcReady will be held:
Wednesday, September 17, 2008 9:00 AM-  11:30 AM Eastern Time
Welcome Time: 8:30 AM

At:
Microsoft Offices
500 E. 96th Street – Suite 460
Indianapolis Indiana 46240

This event will be followed by the MSDN Events Unleashed event at the same location.

Click here to register:
http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032385767&Culture=en-US

Check the ArcReady site for other locations:
http://www.arcready.com/

Event Details:

Nearly every application we build today has dependencies to other systems. How do we design them to work together to meet our goals? How do we decide what to build and what to buy? Do we host it ourselves or in the cloud? With a bewildering array of choices, the biggest challenge we face today is how to architect robust applications with the right technologies to meet our user’s needs and integrate nicely into our existing IT ecosystems.

Session 1: Blueprints for Success

In this session, we will survey the modern architecture landscape from the ground up, including infrastructure, application, and client solution choices. We’ll discuss how current industry trends are shaping our architectures and present an innovative architecture mapping technique for analyzing our customer’s needs and aligning them to today’s technologies and solution patterns.

Session 2: Making It Real

In this session, we’ll take a look at several case studies to learn how to apply the mapping technique from Session 1 to architect real world solutions that add true business value. We’ll examine applications we use every day and take a walk through a Microsoft reference architecture that explores many of the decisions we face when building modern distributed applications.

Microsoft’s STO (Server & Tools Online) team released a new online site today called MSDN Social bookmarks.  This is a Social Bookmarking site where users can add bookmarks, tag them in various ways, share them with others, etc.  This new site is part of a greater initiative by the team to create a common social platform:

Some of the finer points of this diagram have yet to be explained, but the revamp of MSDN Forums, Codeplex, and some of the classic MSDN features we have known and loved are all part of the “bigger” picture.

I am excited about the potential impact this site can have on the Developer Community.  It should fit in nicely with the Forums, MSDN Library, and other sites.  User’s will be able to follow tags on their interested topics, sites can link to tag lists, people can follow the bookmarks of subject matter experts etc.

The concept isn’t new to most of us. We have seen Social Bookmarking sites before.  Delicious was founded in 2003 and has all of the same basic functionality.  According to wikipedia, Delicious currently has over 50 million users and sports over 150 million uniquely bookmarked Urls. I have been an avid user myself since sometime in 2005 (the same year it was purchased by Yahoo!).  Delicious underwent a huge redesign on July 31, 2008 and how has a series of add-ins for Firefox and Internet Explorer.

However, the concept of Social Bookmarking may be new to some of you. So before I go any further, I should probably define it and list some of the advantages and weak points of using a Social Bookmarking site over of just using Internet Explorer’s (IE) Favorites or Firefox’s Bookmarks.

What is Social Bookmarking:

Social Bookmarking is a method for Internet users to store, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web pages on the Internet with the help of metadata. In a social bookmarking system, users save links to web pages that they want to remember and/or share. These bookmarks are usually public, and can be saved privately, shared only with specified people or groups, shared only inside certain networks, or another combination of public and private domains. The allowed people can usually view these bookmarks chronologically, by category or tags, or via a search engine.

 (Source: Wikipedia)

Advantages:

1. Bookmarks can have a title and description.  Most application bookmarks don’t allow any addition description of the content.
2. Bookmarks can have multiple tags.  Instead of putting bookmarks in a hierarchical folder, you simply add tags to them.  You can then sort by tag.  The nice thing about this is that if you have a bookmark that spans multiple subjects, you don’t need to decide which folder it should go into and forget where you put it.
3. Bookmarks are accessible online.  If you store them in IE or Firefox, you can’t access them from another computer.
4. Bookmarks can easy be shared by others.  This is where the word “social” starts to come into play.
5. Users can follow Bookmarks based on a tag.
6. Users can follow Bookmarks created by others.

Weak Points:

1. There is no standard on tags.  Because of this things can be improperly tagged or there could be redundant tags.  Examples are PDC, PDC08, PDC2008, MicrosoftPDC, etc which could all represent Microsoft PDC 2008.
2. Spammers have used Social Bookmarking sites as another means of Search Engine Optimization (SEO).  The more times a site is bookmarked, the higher it is returned in some searches.  So some tags can be flooded with spam.
3. Some Social Bookmarking sites may not allow “private” Bookmarks.  However, even if they are private, I think that people keep their “non-work safe” bookmarks more local.

All Social Bookmarking sites share these same Advantages and Weak Points.  So why should you choose to use MSDN Social bookmarks over Delicious?  I am not going to advocate moving off Delicious just yet.  In general it is a simple design, but MSDN Social bookmarks is new, while Delicious has been out a long time.  However, Microsoft has a good track record for scalability and this site should be highly stable and will only get better. I don’t really think that MSDN Social bookmarks it out to compete directly with Delicious though.  MSDN Social bookmarks is marketed to a MUCH smaller audience.  Delicious is used by anyone and everyone to bookmark anything.  MSDN Social bookmarks are targeted primarily at Microsoft Developers for bookmarking development related resources.

Here are some of the advantages I see to using MSDN Social bookmarks on top of the simple Social Bookmarking features:

1. Its developer focused.  Bookmarks are by developers for developers about development primarily with Microsoft products.  You won’t find a lot of fluff when looking at tags for help.
2. RSS feeds for tags and users.  (Most other Social Bookmarking sites have this too).  I can see adding WCF and OSLO tags to my RSS Reader.
3. Tools to import bookmarks from Firefox, IE, and Delicious.  (http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/en-US/Tools/).  There are also tools for saving bookmarks to MSDN.
4. Single sign in via your Windows Live ID.  Say what you will about Passport, but I like having a single identity throughout my MSDN Subscription, Hotmail, Forum access, Bookmarks, etc.
5. Potential for tight integration with other MSDN content and Microsoft products.  The diagram above hints at this, but we can expect bookmarks to play an even bigger role in the MSDN developer community in the coming months.  We should probably expect to see some other announcements from the team either at PDC or by the end of the year.  I wonder if this will play into this “reputation” piece they have on the diagram. I also wonder how this will play into MSDN Stars?
6. Enable social connections by users finding like minded developers.  For instance, if I am following a WCF tag and notice someone bookmarking under that tag a lot, I may seek to get to know that person better.

You have to remember, you can still use Delicious or another site for your primary bookmarking needs if you so choose.  You can even use it for all of your development bookmarks, then use the import tools to bring them into MSDN Social bookmarks .

MSDN Social Bookmarks Overview

Finding Bookmarks

The site itself looks very much like other MSDN content:

The main page shows the most popular tags by default, but gives you the ability to find or filter on more tags. The find screen allows you to look through the tags, or just start typing to find tags that start with your criteria:

Once you have your filtered list of bookmarks youc an scan them to your heart’s content. One thing I do really like is that when you are looking at a bookmark, not only can you see how many others have bookmarked that site, but there is also a nice ajax callback to display the list to you:

It is nice that they added the “Report” flag as well.  There is nothing worse than bad or inappropriate content filling up these sites.  I hope that the moderators for the bookmarks are diligent and proactive.

Finding Users

You can also easily search and find by username.  Hopefully they will add other ways to find users.  Perhaps based on state/region/city or area of expertise:

Creating Bookmarks

The “Add Bookmark” control is very basic right now.  Hopefully they will add in some additional ajax support like what Delicious does.  If i am using a URL that is already been used, it should start to show related tags used for that URL:

I am hoping there will be some good documentation for the REST interface for adding bookmarks.  This will help the community come up with better tools.  They have added a little snippet of html that you can add to your page though to help others bookmark your site on MSDN Social bookmarks:

<script type="text/javascript"
    src="http://Services.social.microsoft.com/widgets/bookmark.jss?type=0&brand=Msdn&locale=1033"></script>

Conclusion

It will be some time before we really see how this site gets used, but I am planning on importing over some of my Delicious Bookmarks and giving this site a chance.  I am excited about some of the developer community possibilities that can be derived from this site. Overall, the site is very good for a first release.  I expect to see improvements over time. Here is what I believe the STO team needs to do to rise above the competition:

1. Build Tools. Build tools for easy integration into IE and Firefox.  These tools could be a lot like the Delicious tools, but could also include things such as IE 8 Accelerators.
2. Integration into Visual Studio.  If I am looking for a help on a topic, I should be able to easily find Bookmarks with related tags.
3. Integration into MSDN Library.  Much like Visual Studio integration, MSDN Library resources should link to bookmarks with relative tags.
4. Embrace the competition.  What would be better than to have a link on each tag page that could take you directly to Delicious to search for more tags on the subject?  This would help the developers find more resources and bridge any gap they have with Delicious.  I am sure they would want to get approval from Yahoo first before doing this though.
5. Open the API or at least provide some good documentation.  This is probably only a matter of time.  Microsoft is pretty good about documentation and they will want developers to make the post of this site.
6. Keep up with Development.  Hopefully we will continue to see great features added to this over time.  The last thing we want is yet another product that is developed, but loses a lot of its’ momentum.  There are a lot of integration and improvements that could be made over time.  I can think of a number of mini-gadgets they could build.
7. Get the site listed on social aggregators like FriendFeed and Plaxo Pulse.
8. Continue to market the site and show its value to the community.
9. Advertise the most popular bookmark feeds for people.  For instance, if someone like Scott Hanselman uses the site and starts creating a lot of bookmarks, showcase his feed for other users to follow.  This will help people find the value in following others.
10. Add Tag Clouds.  I love these things.   They give a great visual view off the data.

I encourage everyone to at least check out this site.  Please post your thoughts or comments on this here or directly to the STO team.  Microsoft has always been pretty responsive to comments and “creative” criticism.

Resources

Interview with John Martin about the changes coming to MSDN and Social Bookmarking:

http://8zucnw.bay.livefilestore.com/y1pFn6K0FOcN62M6-cyRDgSC3eLks36OEvuV75X5UgFo-GZwKy8P0LeYGplzkFhvvPp3Qn-rkNfcag/CdnDevsJohnMartin.mp3?download

Interview with PM/dev:

http://video.msn.com/video.aspx?vid=312b773d-a0a5-4e37-8a5e-af7554c647e4

How-to use MSDN Social bookmarks Video Part 1:

http://video.msn.com/video.aspx?vid=dadc2865-0aec-4f23-8d70-76a4b8f8012e

How-to use MSDN Social bookmarks Video Part 2:

http://video.msn.com/video.aspx?vid=81def583-f4f0-4b7f-8061-fc32e189bc7f

Links

John Martin’s Announcement: https://blogs.technet.com/johmar/archive/2008/09/08/now-live-social-bookmarking-v-1-0-for-microsoft-msdn-technet-and-expression-sites.aspx

Chris Slemp’s Announcement: http://blogs.msdn.com/cslemp/archive/2008/09/09/launched-social-bookmarking-v1-on-msdn-and-technet-video.aspx

Questions or comments about MSDN Social bookmarks?  Visit the Social Bookmarks Discussion Forums.

Today Microsoft announced 54 new PDC 2008 sessions.  This brings the total from 84 to 139.  They are promising over 200 total sessions.  There will be more sessions announced early in October, and a handful more announced at PDC (after they make the big announcements).

You can see the full session list here: https://sessions.microsoftpdc.com/public/sessions.aspx

If you haven’t yet registered for PDC 2008, the registration is still open, but today is the last day to register to get $200 off.  Hurry, before registration ends.  If you have questions, read this post to see why you should attend.

I did a bit of analysis and here is a break down of how many new sessions were added to each of their tags:

2 Ad Platform (2 total)
0 ADO.Net (3 total)
6 ASP.Net (9 total)
10 Cloud Services (27 total)
2 Dynamics CRM (3 total)
0 Entity Framework (3 total)
2 Expression (2 total)
0 HPC (1 total)
0 Hyper-V (2 total)
4 Identity (8 total)
0 IIS (2 total)
0 Internet Explorer (2 total)
3 Languages (5 total)
2 LINQ (4 total)
2 Live Mesh (5 total)
3 Live Platform (11 total)
2 Office (4 total)
-2 Oslo (6 total)
3 Parallelism (7 total)
3 SharePoint (2 total)
5 Silverlight (11 total)
2 SQL Server (14 total)
2 SQL Server Data Services (6 total)
2 Sync Framework (2 total)
2 TFS (3 total)
2 Unified Communications (3 total)
0 Velocity (1 total)
0 Virtual Earth (1 total)
6 Visual Studio (13 total)
2 VSTS (6 total)
4 WCF (6 total)
3 WF (8 total)
1 Windows 7 (5 total)
0 Windows Home Server (2 total)
0 Windows Mobile (2 total)
0 Windows Server (1 total)
0 WMI (1 total)
3 WPF (5 total)
1 XNA (1 total)

Not many surprises around tags that got new sessions.  I am surprised though that the Oslo tag lost 2 sessions.  My guess is that they just cleaned up the tags a bit.  We still se a large number added to Cloud Services, WCF, and WF.  This still reaffirms all of the speculation that a lot of the big announcements will be around services in the cloud.

One of the more interesting finds in the session lists is the introduction of yet another identity technology codenamed “Zermatt”! Maybe we will get identity done right soon?

I am still waiting for someone at Microsoft to call me to ask if I will speak at PDC (operators are standing by), but since this will never happen, here is a summary of some of the more interesting additions to the Cloud Services and WCF tags:

“Oslo”: Building Textual DSLs
The “Oslo” modeling language can define schemas and transformations over arbitrary text formats. This session shows you how to build your own Domain Specific Language using the “Oslo” SDK and how to apply your DSL to create an interactive text editing experience.

“Zermatt”: Deep Dive
In this session we examine the architecture of “Zermatt” next generation identity technology, and how it can be customized and extended for advanced security scenarios. At the center of the discussion is the Security Token Service (STS), a core component providing authentication and identity services. Many applications will benefit from an embedded STS, and many scenarios will call for an STS that is built on a specialized user store.

“Zermatt”: Enabling Next Generation Identity
The security demands of applications continue to evolve in the face of compliance requirements, new online threats, and SOA and cloud re-engineering. See how to use the “Zermatt” next-generation authentication framework and services and the claims-based identity model to enable single sign on, strong authentication, federation, and the ability to flow user authentication between applications. Find out how to use “Zermatt” with ASP.NET, WCF, Active Directory, and Windows CardSpace.

A Lap around Building Block Services
Learn about the building block services that enable developers to easily create or extend their applications and services. From consumer-targeted applications and social networking web sites to enterprise class applications and services, the building block services make it easy for you to give your applications and services the most compelling experiences and features.

A Lap Around Cloud Services
Hear about key problems that cloud computing is solving and how these services fit into Microsoft’s cloud computing initiatives. Learn about the pillars of the platform, its service lifecycle, and see how they fit with both Microsoft and non-Microsoft technologies. Also, hear about the services roadmap over the next few years.

Modeling Data for Efficient Access at Scale
Learn how to model data for cloud services. Topics include: mapping common data idioms to tables, tuning data models for common access patterns, and creating efficient queries.

Windows Communication Foundation: Tips and Tricks for Performance and Scale
Join us for lunch to discuss the different kinds of performance and scale requirements that are a crucial part of any distributed systems development life cycle. Learn great tips from Nicholas Allen on WCF throughput and responsiveness optimization throughout the lifecycle of a distributed system. Hear about WCF scalability improvements in the next version of the Microsoft .NET Framework. (Nicholas Allen is presenting this one.  I might get to meet him!)

Microsoft .NET Framework: Developing RESTful Services
Learn the latest features in Windows Communication Foundation for building Web 2.0-style services that use URIs, HTTP GET, and other data formats beyond XML. See how these features can be applied to AJAX web sites, “REST” applications, and data feeds.

Live Platform: The Future of the Device Mesh
Live Mesh provides the infrastructure for devices to share and listen: communicating status, accepting remote management, and synchronizing and sharing files and applications. See how the combination of software running on devices, services running in the cloud, and open protocols and APIs make it all happen.

Microsoft .NET Framework: Declarative Programming Using XAML
If you’re using Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), or Windows Workflow Foundation (WF), then XAML is your new best friend! Learn how an entire application-from presentation to data to services to workflow–can be authored using simple, declarative XAML notations introduced in the next version of the .NET Framework. Learn about XAML additions like: support for generics, object references, non-default constructors, and more.

Architecting Services for the Cloud
From design to implementation, building a scalable, available web service is different from building other kinds of applications. This session discusses the impact that designing for the cloud has on all stages of the service lifecycle, and how the Microsoft cloud platform works for you to meet the scaling and availability goals of your service. Also learn how the cloud services platform is architected to isolate and protect your service.

Architecture of the Building Block Services
Dive into the architecture that links many of the building block services and lets ISVs and businesses deliver compelling solutions. Learn how to compose these services to create applications in the cloud and connect them with on-premises systems. In this session we cover the next generation of messaging, data, identity, and directory services, and how they help developers.

Architecting Services for the Cloud
From design to implementation, building a scalable, available web service is different from building other kinds of applications. This session discusses the impact that designing for the cloud has on all stages of the service lifecycle, and how the Microsoft cloud platform works for you to meet the scaling and availability goals of your service. Also learn how the cloud services platform is architected to isolate and protect your service.

Architecture of the Building Block Services
Dive into the architecture that links many of the building block services and lets ISVs and businesses deliver compelling solutions. Learn how to compose these services to create applications in the cloud and connect them with on-premises systems. In this session we cover the next generation of messaging, data, identity, and directory services, and how they help developers.

Developing and Deploying Your First Cloud Service
In this session we take a tour of the capabilities of the Microsoft cloud platform by building and running a simple service using the platform SDK. The sample service highlights some of the features of the platform including service management, storage, and an integrated developer experience. This is a demo-heavy session.

Services Symposium: Enterprise Grade Cloud Applications
Today, hosted applications do not offer many of the features that large enterprises expect related to identity, management, and data. See detailed examples of “enterprise grade” hosted application design. Learn how to implement a federated identity scenario, enable remote application management, and provide richer control of data storage.

Services Symposium: Expanding Applications to the Cloud
Take an enthusiastic–yet pragmatic–look at cloud opportunities. First, hear about a model for determining what should be pushed to the cloud and what should be kept in-house. Second, explore examples of cloud-based infrastructure as part of an existing application. Finally, discuss architectural tradeoffs and best practices.

I had the opportunity to speak the Kentucky Day of .Net yesterday. I gave my Agile Project Management with Scrum talk and got to premier my newest presentation on REST entitled RESTing on the Web with Wcf.  Both talks went very well.  The REST presentation was a blast to do.  I got a number of excellent comments afterwards, and I think it may be my new favorite talk to give.  I want to give a “Thank You” to the organizers of such a great event,  and I want to thank all of the people who made it out. If you attended any of my talks, please pass on any feedback about what I could do better or what I did right.  I am always looking for ways to improve and to help convey the material to others. And, if you are interested in REST, know a lot about it, or are giving other presentations on REST, I would appreciate any comments you may have on my slides.

To catch any of my future talks, you can always check out my speaking engagements here: Speaking Engagements. I am currently promoting 4 main talks this season (September – November). If you are interested in hearing any of these, please send me an email, talk to your user group leaders, or comment on this thread.  I enjoy every opportunity to speak, share, and talk with my peers. I do still have materials for a session on Heroes {Community} Launch (Visual Studio 2008 and .Net 3.5), if there is any interest in this still.

Expect new presentations for Winter (December – February).  I am anticipating upcoming talks on the following: JQuery, Live Mesh API, Oslo, and PDC 2008.

As a treat, here is a picture of “RESTifarian Dan the Pig” taken at the closing ceremony of Kentucky Day of .Net.  I didn’t wear both of these items at the same time during my talks, but those who attended would understand each of these props.