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As a web application development team I’m really excited about how AJAX and related technologies are allowing us to make the web experience simpler. As I’ve blogged about before we recently launched the blogmailr.com service. One of our goals was to make sure that we didn’t assume anything, i.e. what blog you used or how technical you were (or were not).

With AJAX we setup our form to ask for the pieces of information that every blogger knows: the URL and login information for their blog. No questions for the “metablog API” URL or other technical details. The cool part is that we do a client-side callback and figure all this stuff out automagically (I love that word).

Surprisingly it took us about 4 or 5 iterations of this screen to get to this point. The feedback, “it’s so simple to use” has been great.

In many ways BlogMailr is a big experiment to test some new ideas, development principles, and SaaS opportunities. We’re hard at work on our next product right now. It’s our first opportunity to take a lot of the ideas we’ve preached and put them into practice. We’ve already built version 1 which we’ve been using internally since June and will officially roll out in early 2007: Universe. It’s a new simpler way for businesses to manage customer relationships. More details to come…

I just chuckled when I saw this today after getting my laptop updated with IE7. Just a rule of thumb: I *never* add new software to my laptop before a conference, so I’m getting caught up now.

It’s funny since I noticed that my Google toolbar had recently auto-updated with some cool new auto-complete features. Guess they slipped in a few other features too.

Colonel Sanders from space? For those of you not familiar with KFC it’s a fast-food fried chicken restaurant here in the U.S. Apparently they are claiming the first “ad” to be seen from outer-space.

 …I wonder how many chickens died to make this possible. Sorry couldn’t resist, I’m sure I ate plenty of them too.

Craig Shoemaker was kind enough to invite me for an interview on his podcast.

You can listen to the interview here. While his podcast is usually about architecture and best practices we really just had an informal chat on the business of software. Thanks Craig!

We’re going to start a Telligent podcast in the coming weeks — something REALLY informal. More details to come!

BlogMailr got written up by Michael Calore on Wired. That’s freaking cool!

It’s fun to watch Google results too. When we came up with the term ‘blogmailr’ and searched for it on Google there were zero results. Today we’re at nearly 400K and climbing (by about 50,000 per-day)!

What’s fun for us at Telligent is that it’s an opportunity to talk to a completely new set of people. We’re hearing from people that have never ever heard of Community Server or Telligent while at the same time providing a really awesome service that validates a new product (Mail Gateway) that we’ll roll out later this year for email enabling any software application.

Microsoft is releasing Zune any day now. Personally I have no plan to give up my Apple iPod just yet – although the bigger screen looks pretty nice.

I’m on my 3^rd iPod now – a black video 60GB iPod. I’ve got iPod adapters for my home, my cars, and listen to 85+ GB of music through iTunes everyday at work.

Zune, from what I’ve read, is getting slammed. So far I’ve heard: it supports WiFi (neat, but so what), does not support WMA DRM9, can’t import from iTunes, and that there are no hardware adapters (these will come). As a consumer I’m sorry Microsoft, you’re going to have to make it unbelievably easy for me to change devices.

As someone on the outside that knows how Microsoft works I’m extremely jealous of what the Zune team gets to do.  For example:

No market share – starting at zero means that doubling and tripling your market share is easy to do. Selling one is 100% more than zero.

No Expectations – everyone is pretty much writing off Zune; there are no high and mighty standards or expectation Zune has to meet. So in many ways they have more freedom to innovate. Anything innovative they do will be seen as just that: innovative and they’ll get credit for it. In some ways this may also mean their competitors ignore them (that’s a good thing).

Smart people – a lot of the same people that pulled off the Xbox are now working on Zune. We know what happened with Xbox…
Lots of reach – ok, lots of money to throw at marketing and different ways to talk to people.

Free Press – Sure much of the press is negative, but as has been said before: any publicity is good publicity.

In other words Zune has a huge opportunity here. As someone who is increasingly becoming more interested in the business of technology I can’t help but feel a pang of jealously. Zune is a fantastic opportunity for Microsoft and I’m personally excited to watch the story develop – not to mention that Microsoft has a pretty good track record of coming from behind in existing markets.

Awesome, looks like we got some coverage by InfoQ for the CodeSmith 4.0 announcement.

An interesting perspective on web developers…

We’ve released an update to the Community Server 2.1 MetaBlog API. Download it here.

Installation is simple.  Just drop the updated MetaBlog.ashx file into the /blogs/ directory of your site, and you are done!  All the code is inline.  You can also set some AppSettings parameters in your web.config as far as maximum attachment size, allows extensions, and a few other settings. By default we only allow images, but other file types are supported – they are simply added as links.

This update adds support for the newMediaObject MetaBlog API which will allow you to use services like LiveWriter or BlogMailr to easily add images to your posts. In the case of BlogMailr you simply write an email and add the images inline (drag-and-drop them between text) or as attachments.

For those of you blogging on weblogs.asp.net we’ve updated that Community Server blog server to support this already (test post)!

First Read (http://firstread.msnbc.com) – a Community Server powered blog – got slammed with traffic on election day with over 1,500 comments and over 1mm page views.

P.S., this is also a test to see if inline images are working for weblogs.asp.net too J