Imran Qureshi

Brand New Spleak

Fri, 02 Nov 2007 16:34:20 GMT

On Sunday 10/28/07, we released a brand spanking new version of Spleak after a few weeks in beta. Add spleak@hotmail.com to your MSN Messenger list or "Spleak" to your AIM buddy list and just say hi to play. Or visit www.spleak.com.

The main thing you'll notice from a user standpoint is that Spleak is now all about you. It is a place where you can find the latest gossip about celebrities and post your own that you find out from your "secret sources".

However it is what is underneath that is most interesting and revolutionary. Over the past four months we've built a platform that I believe will power the next generation of online communities.

Currently there are a lot of sites for "personal expression" e.g., MySpace, Facebook. There are fewer sites dedicated to "community expression". The best known is probably still Yahoo Groups although there are a few new ones like Ning.

In my view, Yahoo Groups, Ning etc are still stuck in the previous century. In today's world there are a few things that are necessary for useful online communities:

1. An online community should be everywhere I am. These days people spend more time on IM and mobile phones than they do on the web.

2. An online community should be accessible everywhere on the web not just on one web site. People spend their time on existing "destination" websites like MySpace, Facebook, Piczo etc. Why force users to go to groups.yahoo.com instead of bringing the community to them?

3. Community posts are too long. I don't want to see a diatribe from one person - i want to see opinions from lots of people.

4. Everything should be ranked. Do the work for me and tell me what is good. Be a Google not a Yahoo web directory(remember the pre-Google Yahoo?).

Four months ago we set out to solve these so people can have better online communties.

Spleak online communities are available through IM and Web today and in the future will be available via SMS on mobile phones.

Spleak online communities are accessible through "widgets" that any user can put on their social networking page (see my Myspace page: http://myspace.com/imranq2) You can access these communities right from your MySpace page or your friends MySpace page.

Spleak online communities force users to write short posts - no diatribes.

Spleak online communities automatically rank every post, every poster and every community. "Good stuff bubbles to the top and bad stuff to the bottom".

Celeb Spleak is our first community focused around gossip about celebrities. This is what is available at spleak@hotmail.com on MSN and Spleak on AIM. Once we've iterated on our platform we'll open it up so you'll be able to create your own communities around whatever topics you're interested in. Your community will be instantly accessible through IM, your MySpace page and mobile.

In a future post, I'll talk more about the platform we built and why it was necessary for enabling this next generation of online communities.

Feel free to try out CelebSpleak and let me know what you think at imran_atsign_spleak.com. Replace "_atsign_" with "@". (i do this to avoid spammers picking up my email address and sending crap). We will be continuing to add features over the next few months based on what you tell us you want in the next generation onlne communities.

Trip to Denmark

Fri, 26 Jan 2007 07:53:02 GMT

ok, i'm posting these entries a couple of months after the fact but it's so busy here at Spleak that I had not had time to take photos off my digital camera. yeah, i know it sounds like it should be so quick but i guess it is more about having the time to think about it.

anyway, back in october i headed to Denmark to visit our team there. i decided to take my wife and two kids with me. Once I got there we discovered that my boy, Zane, adjusted quickly to the new timezone while my daughter, Malaya, did not. As a result we had to stay up with Zane during the day and with Malaya during the night and hence got very little sleep.

However it was fun to see our Danish team. Everything is so expensive there compared to the US (which was very surprising to us). our first night there we ate in KFC for a $25 meal!

We did take the train to Helsignor, the supposed castle of Hamlet in Shakespeare's play. In our photos you'll see the dungeons under this castle.

the best food was smorebrod outside of Copenhagen in a small town where I spent a couple of years when I was really small.

I uploaded my photos from the Denmark trip here.

Now hiring...

Wed, 08 Nov 2006 16:47:54 GMT

I'm looking for a developer right now - we have too many cool things we want to do and not enough people . You can see the job description by clicking the link below. If you know anyone who would be perfect, please tell them.

http://sfbay.craigslist.org/sfc/sof/231883418.html

Note: You can apply for the job at this link.

Feel free to trackback/link to this post also to get the word out. we need a star developer who wants to help define the next communication revolution.

thanks,

-Imran

Parking at Fremont BART

Mon, 16 Oct 2006 23:31:34 GMT

Now that I've become a "bridge and tunnel person" according to a friend (because of commuting to SF every day from Milpitas), I'm completely reliant on BART. The parking situation at Fremont BART station sucks big time. Even when I get there at 8AM all the parking slots are taken. There is no place nearby to park. I parked at a mall next to the bart station and I got a warning. I've finally found a place to park on the street that is a 20 minute walk. This is just crazy. If BART wants people to ride it and cut down on pollution they must fix the parking situation at their stations. They should just build a multi-level parking structure at this and other stations.

First day at new SF Office

Wed, 11 Oct 2006 00:29:50 GMT

On Monday, we moved into our brand new offices in San Francisco at 505 Montgomery Street. Ok, it's actually just two rooms on the 11th floor but still it was fun. In the morning we couldn't get the internet access to work. We found out that you have to pay extra to get internet access and it is almost a hundred dollars per person per month. So we decided just to get Verizon Wireless broadband cards since those are only $60 per month and you can use it anywhere in the bay area.

Finally in the afternoon, I got online and was able to check email. Our office is nice corner office with three windows. I forgot my camera but i'll post pictures soon.

today (Tuesday), the other two people on our team showed up and it was fun to finally have all of us working in one place. We had to make another trip to Staples to get some office supplies like whiteboards, writing pads, pens etc. we all seem to get along so it's fun to work and have fun at the same time.

Buddy script

Wed, 04 Oct 2006 02:07:54 GMT

Aside from talking to the key people in the company, I spent yesterday and today creating a bot using BuddyScript. It has some nice natural language processing but it forces you to learn yet another syntax. As if knowing C++, C# and VB.NET syntax is not enough!

Also the error messaging is almost non-existent. I spent a good part of three hours tring to figure out why the results of my SOAP call were not showing up. Finally after trial and error I identified the problem.

All this makes me realize that we take the excellent documentation and debugging of .NET languages (and Java) for granted. If the documentation and debugging facilities were better I could have written the bot in half the time.

Spleak Spleak

Mon, 02 Oct 2006 20:38:01 GMT

Today is my first day at my new company: IMTLabs. You can find out what the company does from the web site so I won't repeat it....

I'd been wanting to join an exciting startup and this one seems perfect for me. The IM and Mobile space is so full of promise. Technology visionaries like Bill Gates and others have always talked about "agents" that help you but this vision has never really been realized. This company has a great chance at finally delivering on this vision.

The company is based in Denmark with a development office in India. They're building their management team in the US so I'm employee #4 in the US!

On my first day today, I had to get up early for an 8 AM call with a colleague in Denmark. During the day I'm going to work on creating my first bot. Tonight at 9PM I have a call with a colleague in India. I guess I'll have to get used to weird working hours...

Our first "character" is Spleak. You can add spleak@hotmail.com to your MSN Messenger buddy list and interact with it. Spleak is targeted at kids so you might find it a little childish. Still try it out and send me comments at imran_foo_imtlabs.com (replace _foo_ with @).

I'll be talking a lot about this stuff on this blog so keep watching.

Day 2 of TechEd

Tue, 13 Jun 2006 20:49:29 GMT

At 8:30am this morning, we had the strategic briefing on the Windows Live platform. There were not a lot of people there because the audience here is primarily enterprise developers. The best part of the demo here was the Messenger bots platform especially the TechEd bot who you can ask for the schedule of the conferene.

Aside from the whole "IM is cool" thing, the part I really like is that you can get the information much faster without waiting for complex web pages to load with tons of graphics. I wish you could easily get the WAP versions of web pages on computer when you just need to find something and don't want to browse. Browsers are great for, well browsing, but not so great if you just need to find some piece of information.

I then attended a session about Visual C# tips and tricks. It was great to see how easy it is to understand and modify code in Visual Studio 2005. I asked the PM there about the fact that if you have a class library in a web site, it takes a few minutes before every refactoring request. Apparently this is a known issue and expected to be fixed in the next SP for Visual Studio. The "Dim" code snippet got the biggest applause. (For those that don't know what it is, you can type "Dim" in Visual Studio C# and it puts in a code snippet to create an object and call the constructor.)

Over lunch I sat in on a presentation of the Virtual Earth API. As expected, there was a good number of developers here. They've added a "birds eye view" feature that is fun to look at.

After lunch, I went to the "CLR: Managed Apps that Fly: Tuning for Performance and Footprint." This turned out to be an excellent talk and relates well to the issues we deal with at Hotmail. I wish I knew about some of these tools a few years ago when I was banging my head working on trying to get some MSN Calendar queries to run without causing delays.

The next talk about "Effective management of Web Farms" was also very relevant. The Hotmail Operations team already has this stuff down pat but it was good for me to learn how it works. The Windows Network Load Balancer (NLB) looks very cool and could make the hardware load balancers obsolete in some cases.

-imran

Day 1 at TechEd (continued)

Tue, 13 Jun 2006 13:59:52 GMT

After my post yesterday, I went to the Visual Studio for developers session and the Visual C++ session. The coolest thing I saw is actually something that I never knew existed. It's the Code Definition window in Visual Studio. You can bring it up from the View menu. When you click a function call in the main editor window, the Code Definition window shows the actual function itself. So you don't have to use "Go to Definition" and lose sight of your calling code.

Another cool thing is that you can execute commands in the Find box in Visual Studio. Just click on the Find box (or type ctrl-D) and then say something like ">open foo.cs" where foo.cs is a file in your project. Hit enter and that file will be opened. There are a lot of other commands that you can see in the Autocomplete popup.

The ability to automatically generate unit tests for C# projects is great and will encourage more people to use unit testing. You are in your method and right-click and choose "Generate Unit Tests". Visual Studio creates the basic unit test for that method and then you can edit it. It saves a few of the tedious steps in the beginning of creating a unit test.

One thing that seems missing is the ability to run unit tests over the web. The scenario I'm thinking of is when you deploy a web site to production. You'd want to run the unit tests there also to make sure everything still works. Ideally you could go to http://webite/unittests.ashx and it asks for the administrator login for the web site. Once you're logged in, it runs all your unit tests and shows the output as XML. From my understanding, it seems you need to have visual studio on the production machines to run unit testing. This is usually unacceptable for production servers. Hopefully someone know of a way to do this.

It is also nice that Microsoft has added a unit testing framework for C++. Nunit or VSTS is great for managed code but it was quite hard to do unit testing on C++. There are frameworks like CppUnit and others but they are typically much harder to use that their managed code counterparts. Unfortunately, if you want to have Visual Studio automatically create the unit tests for you you will need to compile your C++ code with the "/clr:safe" parameter which checks to see if your code is CLR-compliant. In my view, this is just not acceptable for someone with native code. I hope someone will write an addin that allows you to automatically create unit tests for C++ without having to use the "/clr:safe" option...

Day 1 at TechEd

Mon, 12 Jun 2006 17:17:38 GMT

Here I am in Boston for the Microsoft TechEd conference. A few interesting things I've noted:

First time I've ever seen the line to the Men's restroom longer than the line to the women's restroom. I guess that should be expected at a technical conference but it sill struck me.
Very few people in Boston actually speak with the Boston accent. I was really hoping to listen to the accent. I did find a small restaurant where people spoke with the accent.
The subway does not accomodate handicapped people or people with strollers very well. The elevators are all located in confusing ways. On the Park Street station you MUST get off on the middle island. The side island has no elevators nor a way to get to an elevator! You have to wait for the next train to come and then pass through it to get to the middle island. At the downtown crossing station, the elevator is broken and it says to contact a MTBA person. The only MTBA person I saw were at the ticket counter.
It is very cool how Boston incorporates the historical sites right into a downtown of modern buildings. We saw the Paul Revere house which seems attached to an apartment complex. The Faneuil Hall is now an open air market. I wish we had a place like this in the bay area. They have all kinds of cool ethnic restaurants inside. It is a great place to just hang out on an afternoon.
You can't go anywhere without seeing something about Paul Revere. I watched a documentary recently that casts doubt on Paul Revere's role. You can read more about it here.

Anyway, back to the conference. I took the MTBA subway to the conference center. I had planned to take the shuttle from my hotel but it got full. Unfortunately, the registration area was really far from the entrance next to the subway station and it took me a while to get there.

The first talk I attended was about an interesting topic but the speaker was just not into it at all. (I won't say the name of the talk to protect the person). Now I know he's written a book on the topic but he has a room of about 200 people. He sounded like he was forced to do this talk by his publisher.

The second talk I went was about how Microsoft.com handles massively scalability. It was an excellent talk by three Operations people. The most interesting part was when they showed how much faster it is to transfer data to a Vista client vs. Windows XP/2003. The Windows XP client took 2 minutes to download a file. The same file took 12 seconds to download to a Vista client. Even more amazing was the demo of downloading files from a Longhorn server to a Vista client. The file downloaded in 2 seconds. I was totally blown away. Awesome job by the networking team in Windows Vista!

I'm heading over to a talk about C# in Visual Studio...

Took kids to Sharks hockey game

Wed, 19 Apr 2006 17:27:52 GMT

Last Saturday, we decided to take our 5 month twins to a hockey game between San Jose Sharks and Anaheim Mighty Ducks at HP Pavilion in San Jose. This was supposed to be their first time to a sporting event. We packed up both kids and got there. We paid $15 for parking.

I'd thought we'd just buy the tickets there but when we got there the game was sold out. I was worried we had come all this way for nothing. The scalpers were charging $65 per ticket which was too much. Thankfully my wife found a couple that was selling off two tickets of their friends. They sold them to us at face value.

We had the kids on baby bjorns on our chests. Zane, our boy, was sitting there looking around at all the lights and structures in the arena. Malaya, our girl, was instead focused on all the faces.

They got a little antsy at times but mostly handled it pretty well. Which is great for us 'cause it means we can go out more with them.

The game turned out to be one sided as SJ Sharks beat Anaheim handily. But it was still a fun outing.

We forgot to bring the camera so we didn't take any pictures, unfortunately.

Windows Live Developer Center launched

Thu, 23 Mar 2006 21:07:57 GMT

Recently we launched the Windows Live Developer Center on MSDN. You can go here to see the existing opportunities for building on the Windows Live platform.

If you missed the MIX conference in Las Vegas this week, you can watch the videos here.

-Imran

I'm back and my new role

Wed, 15 Mar 2006 23:44:28 GMT

A couple of weeks ago I came back to work after a bunch of time staying at home with my two new babies. It is strange being back at work... (Not used to the silence anymore)

Before leaving in early December for their birth, I decided to shift roles at work. As most of you know I've been working on the Mail User Experience in Kahuna for about two years. We started with nothing and went through many iterations to come up with the Kahuna UI. It is great to talk to the beta users about how much they love the new Kahuna (oops, Windows Live Mail).

Enough blubbering you say, just tell us what you're doing now!

I'm now working on building the developer platform for Windows Live Mail, Calendar and Contacts. There are a ton of cool ideas you guys have mentioned to me but there is only a finite number of developers we have. So why not make Kahuna extensible so external folks out there can implement their own cool features in Kahuna?

Well, it's my job to help make that happen. You can help me by telling me what you would build if Kahuna was easy to extend.

If you haven't already, check out the MSN Developer Center. There you can find ways to extend other Windows Live products. Also check out Microsoft Gadgets, one of the core technologies behind the Windows Live developer platform.

-imran

Where in the world is Imran?

Tue, 07 Feb 2006 07:37:20 GMT

A number of people sent me email asking why I haven't posted for a long time. Well, I'm taking time these days to help my wife with our twins. I don't have much time to do anything else...

here's the twins at two months old.

Two new additions to our family

Mon, 05 Dec 2005 01:06:01 GMT

Yesterday, we welcomed a baby boy, Zane Amir, and a baby girl, Malaya Luna, to our family. Malaya is in the pink cap in the photos.

Since I am Pakistani and my wife is Filipino, we wanted one name from each culture and we also didn't want very common names.

And the update is now live...

Thu, 01 Dec 2005 05:34:06 GMT

M4 is now live to all beta users...

Quote

And the update is now live...

Posted by Imran Qureshi

This afternoon we released the "M4" (Milestone 4) update to all our Windows Live Mail beta users. You can find out more about the improvements in M4 here.

If you are on the beta, you have the update.

If you are not on the beta program, the ONLY way to get added is to get on the waiting list at http://ideas.live.com. Posting a comment here will NOT get you on the beta any faster.

We have way more people signing up than we expected so it may take a few weeks before you're added to the beta program. It'll be worth the wait though.

-Imran Qureshi

Windows Live Program Manager

Talking about Update to Windows Live Mail Beta

Wed, 30 Nov 2005 06:32:27 GMT

Today I posted an article on the mailcall blog about some of the improvements coming this week in the next update of Windows Live Mail beta...

Quote

Update to Windows Live Mail Beta

Posted by Imran Qureshi

The wait will soon be over. This week we will be releasing the “M4” (Milestone 4) update to the Windows Live Mail beta (codename: Kahuna).

We listened to what you, our beta users, told us. We fixed many of your issues, improved reliability, made Kahuna even faster and added some great features that will improve your mail experience.

One of the really awesome features we’ve added, that no other webmail has, is “Spell check as you Type.” (You can watch a demo of this here). This spell check feature runs in the background and highlights spelling errors while you type unlike the spell check feature in existing webmail services that require you to click a button and then correct spelling errors one by one.

Keep using Kahuna and keep the feedback coming. We're not joking when we say that you're now part of our development team.

P.S: Hold down CTRL key when clicking on hyperlinks below to open them in a new window.

Here are some other improvements in M4:

1. Safety Improvements
We're laser focused in the area of spam and safety with Windows Live Mail and have already made major improvements over other webmail services. Never one to rest on our laurels, we simplified and consolidated the safety experience even more in M4.

We automatically

Sneak Preview: Spell Check As You Type

Wed, 23 Nov 2005 20:33:29 GMT

Today I posted a video of one of our newest and most exciting features: Spell Check As You Type. Check out the video to see the feature in action and meet some of the people including me who worked to bring this feature to you, our customers.

Quote

Sneak Preview: Spell Check As You Type

Posted by Imran Qureshi

Today I'd like to give you a sneak preview of one the most exciting features we have coming in our next beta refresh of Windows Live Mail(codename:Kahuna): Spell Check As You Type.

(It was shown in the Windows Live demo on November 1st but you may not have seen it there.)

This feature was driven by customers who told us they didn't like how hard it was to check spelling on the web and wished they could have something closer to desktop applications like Microsoft Word without having to install any software. Well, we did it!

With this feature, you can just start typing in Compose UI and we’ll check spelling in the background and put red squiggles under words that are misspelled. You can then right-click them and choose from our suggestions, tell us to ignore that word or add the word into the dictionary.

I know what you’re saying. Big deal, Microsoft Outlook already does that. Well, we’re the first webmail service I know that does this on the web without installing any software!

In the video below you'll see the feature in action and meet some of the people who made it happen.

Watch the Video of Spell Check As You Type

If you are on the Kahuna (Windows Live Mail) beta, you should see this feature very soon in the next beta refresh. If you are not on the beta, you must go here to add yourself to the waiting list. (Posting a comment here will NOT get you on the beta).

If you have any questions about this feature or other WLM features, you can send me mail at imranxqureshi@hotmail.com (replace "x" with a "."(period) before sending - this is to avoid spammers getting a hold of this address via web crawling). please do not send me email about getting on the beta - use the web site above.

-Imran Qureshi
Windows Live Program Manager

Talking about Why I love Windows Live

Fri, 04 Nov 2005 01:29:07 GMT

Today I wrote an article for our team blog explaining why Windows Live will greatly improve your life on the web. I was kindly reminded by Reeves that no one has the patience to read such a long post.

Do you guys think this is too long to read on the web? If so, next time I'll break it into multiple postings.

Quote

Why I love Windows Live

By now, you’ve probably heard about Windows Live Mail and the other suite of Windows Live products. (If you haven’t, read the post below).

As a customer your biggest question probably is “Why should I care?” I’ll try to explain why today you should care.

First, let me introduce myself. My name is Imran Qureshi and I’m a Program Manager on the Windows Live Mail product working on the Mail Experience. (Yes, I’m the guy on the Channel 9 video... )

1. Integration
All the products in Windows Live work similarly and connect together well. Once you learn one you know how to use the other and your information is available in all of them.
If you use Microsoft Office, it’s the same idea – once you learn Microsoft Word it is very easy to use Microsoft PowerPoint or Microsoft Outlook or Microsoft Excel. The same tools are available in all of them and you can move data between them very easily.
Windows Live now enables the same for web services.

2. Speed
I hate waiting for pages to load on the web and I’m sure you do too. All of Windows Live products are built for speed. They use a technology codenamed Atlas to provide you a much faster experience so you don’t have to wait. You can do what you have to do in less time.
The Windows Live web services behave very much like desktop clients so they have the same richness and speed.

3. Focused around people
Your life is focused around the people in your life. Why is it so hard to find the email of someone to send mail to? Why does it take so many steps to allow/block someone to send you mail or IM, to view your calendar, to read or comment on your blog, to see your pictures etc.
Windows Live is designed around people and makes this easy.

Windows Live Mail (codename Kahuna), what I work on, is one of the first products in the Windows Live suite of products. It is refreshingly different from any other web mail product because:
1. Kahuna is built from the ground up with the idea that our users can design software better than Product Managers or Developers. Read more.
2. Email must be safer - The days of every email being treated the same are over.
(Continued on mailcall blog)

Kahuna = Windows Live Mail

Wed, 02 Nov 2005 03:13:55 GMT

Finally after months of secret, we announced today that the official name of Kahuna is Windows Live Mail.

Read the press release here.

If you haven't been to my blog before, there are a lot of posts here that explain what Kahuna is (I'm sorry, Windows Live Mail ) and why it is different from any other mail product before it.

-Imran

Photo Album: Denmark

Fri, 26 Jan 2007 07:47:59 GMT

Denmark

More Photos...

Photo Album: Microsoft Party

Fri, 15 Sep 2006 20:39:19 GMT

Microsoft Party

tahoe 032

Photo Album: Finnegan

Wed, 15 Mar 2006 23:02:37 GMT

Finnegan

Untitled Photo

More Photos...

Custom List: My Favorite Site

Thu, 08 Sep 2005 19:20:52 GMT

My Favorite Site

camcordershare.com
Share home movies with friends and family

Custom List: Custom List

Thu, 08 Sep 2005 19:18:06 GMT

CamcorderShare
You can share home movies with friends and family

Blog list: Blog list

Mon, 21 Feb 2005 03:06:03 GMT

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