Into the Maelstrom

Greetings!  My name is Danny Thorpe and I am happy to announce that I have recently joined Microsoft's Windows Live Platform team. 

What's the Windows Live Platform team?  They're the folks bent on organizing, unifying, fleshing out and defining new APIs and SDKs to enable software developers from all camps to leverage Windows Live services in their own applications and interoperate with the world at scale.

Some of you who know me from my years at Borland working on Delphi stuff may have wondered where I disappeared to.  I've just completed a stint at Google to help create some cool stuff in the "web as an application platform" space.  That's well on its way now, so hopefully we'll see some manifestation of it show up on Google Labs in the next year or so.

Now I'm setting about figuring out some cool stuff for Windows Live!  One part of the challenge is to chip away at the mountain of Microsoft service API todos that the guys here have already identified as "must haves" and "minimum requirements". 

A more interesting - and more difficult - part of this team's job is to look out beyond the dust cloud kicked up by current industry activity to consider where things are going and what things should look like down the road - not just for Microsoft, but for the Internet as a whole - and set minds in motion to enrich everyone's Internet experience.  Seeing the forest and the trees, and planting trees where needed to make a better forest.  We're talking distant future stuff here, like 6 months from now.  (Hey, we're on Internet time!)  Heaven forbid we resort to overused marketing labels, but can you say "Web 2.0"?

To that end, we need your eyes and brains and whatever else they're attached to to have a look at the content over at the Windows Live Developer Center and tell us what's missing.  What API content needs improvement?   What existing APIs in the Windows Live family of services are missing functionality?  What APIs are missing completely?

What scenarios would you like to use the Windows Live services to accomplish?  Scenarios are solid gold, but often get boxed in by preconceptions.  Describe what you want to be able to do rather than waste too much time on describing how you would do it using today's primitive stone hammers.

Above all else, dream.