BlackTech Blog

In our previous post, Electronic Arts vice president of corporate communications Jeff Brown gave us EA's side of the news and events related to the company's offer to purchase Take-Two. We reached out to Take-Two for comment as well, regarding ZelnickMedia's revised compensation agreement for running Take-Two and to get their reaction to information we'd received suggesting that future Rockstar games could be delayed as a result of the developer committing the bulk of its studio resources to completing Grand Theft Auto IV in time for its April 29th ship date. Here's what we were told by a company spokesperson:...(read more)

Ever since Electronic Arts made public its intent to acquire Take-Two, newspapers, Web sites and blogs have been abuzz with reporting, rumor and speculation. Over the past couple of days, several business reporters have focused on the recently revised employment contract forTake-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick's ZelnickMedia, which is managing Take-Two. Even though Zelnick admitted to the Wall Street Journal that he originally hadn't planned to remain in the job more than six months, and even though there was significant interest in Take-Two by potential acquirers, ZelnickMedia now has an extra year tacked on to its management contract to go along with an increase in its annual mangement fee from $750,000 to $2.5 million. The Wall Street Journal described the agreement as follows:

Between those two offers [from EA to purhcase Take-Two], on Feb. 14, Take-Two's board of directors approved an amendment to an earlier agreement that more than tripled ZelnickMedia's cash compensation for providing financial and management consulting services to the company, boosting to $2.5 million a year from $750,000 the annual management fee it pays the firm. The board also boosted to $2.5 million from $750,000 the maximum annual bonus the firm is eligible to receive, according to a filing with securities regulators.

The board further granted ZelnickMedia 1.5 million Take-Two restricted shares, worth about $40 million at current prices, an award that still needs to be approved by shareholders at the company's annual meeting. Roughly half of that award will vest immediately if Take-Two is acquired in the near-term and various other conditions are met.

Having speculated on the ramifications of this news earlier in the week, we caught up with Electronic Arts vice president of corporate communications Jeff Brown to see if it had any way impacted EA's plans. Here's what he told us over email:

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1. EGO...trip: the Apostrophe Defense Force comes to our rescue
2. RUM...ors of PC Gaming's death greatly exaggerated? Or Cliffyb held hostage?
3. VSM...on EA/Take-Two, cont'd: "I want big companies to innovate"
4. MMO...We can be heroes, for ever and ever...if we plan from the outset
5. OUR...milkshake brings all the boys to the yard, says Take-Two...
6. BUT...Activision's CEO says he's not one of the boys that are waiting
7. SUP...ertoys last all summer long, and other stories of future pets
8. SCi...and fourteen of its games go into a room. Only SCi comes out.
9. APB...Kotaku puts Phil Harrison on milk carton; videogaming247 finds him
10. CDC...may want to investigate the pandemic at this month's GDC
11. RND...Random Gawker post comments section taken over, turned into blog

...(read more)

1. DIE...I want you to shoot me as hard as you can
2. LOL...Nerd rage-fueled flame wars find an interactive home
3. VSM...Corporate games still suck: why Passage is better than Portal
4. VSM...EA and T2: "a very bad deal for us" or a move to "competent, stable management"
5. RND...Our sister company gets hip. Will Newsweek follow suit? We hope so.

UPDATE: A better link for item #3 can be found here at the blog Grand Text Auto.

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David Treadwell has a blog post on the Windows Live Developer blog entitled David Treadwell on New and Updated Windows Live Platform Services where he previews some of the announcements that folks will get to dig into at MIX 08. There are a lot of items of note in his post but there is some stuff that stands out that I felt was worth calling out.

Windows Live Messenger Library (new to beta) – “Develop your own IM experience”

We are also opening up the Windows Live Messenger network for third-party web sites to reach the 300 million+ Windows Live Messenger users. The library is a JavaScript client API , so the user experience is primarily defined by the third party. When a third party integrates the Windows Live Messenger Library into their site they can define the look & feel to create their own IM experience. Unlike the existing third party wrappers for the MSN Protocol (the underlying protocol for Windows Live Messenger) the Windows Live Messenger Library securely authenticates users, therefore their Windows Live ID credentials are safe.

A couple of months ago we announced the Windows Live Messenger IM Control which enables you to embed an AJAX instant messaging window on any webpage so people can start IM conversations with you. I have one placed at http://carnage4life.spaces.live.com and it’s cool to have random readers of my blog start up conversations with me in the middle of my work day or at home via the IM control.

The team who delivered this has been hard at work and now they’ve built a library that enables any developer to build similar experiences on top of the Windows Live Messenger network. Completely customized IM integration is now available for anyone that wants it. Sweet. Kudos to Keiji, Steve Gordon, Siebe and everyone else who had something to do with this for getting it out the door.

An interesting tidbit is that the library was developed in Script#. Three cheers for code generation.

Contacts API (progressed to Beta) – “Bring your friends”

Our goal is to help developers keep users at the center of their experience by letting them control their data and contact portability, while keeping their personal information private. A big step forward in that effort is today’s release to beta of Windows Live Contacts API . Web developers can use this API in production to enable their customers to transfer and share their contacts lists in a secure, trustworthy way (i.e., no more screen scraping)—a great step on the road toward data portability. (For more on Microsoft’s view on data portability, check out Inder Sethi’s video .) By creating an optimized mode for invitations, it allows users to share only the minimum amount of information required to invite friends to a site, this includes firstname / lastname / preferred email address. The Contacts API uses the new Windows Live ID Delegated Authentication framework; you can find out more here .

A lot of the hubbub around “data portability” has really been about exporting contact lists. Those of us working on the Contacts platform at Windows Live realize that there is a great demand for users to be able to access their social graph data securely from non-Microsoft services.

The Windows Live Contacts API provides a way for Windows Live users to give an application permission to access their contact list in Windows Live (i.e. Hotmail address book/Live Messenger buddy list) without giving the application their username and password. It is our plan to kill the password anti-pattern when it comes to Windows Live services. If you are a developer of an application or Web site that screen scrapes Hotmail contacts, I’d suggest taking a look at this API instead of continuing in this unsavory practice.

Atom Publishing Protocol (AtomPub) as the future direction

Microsoft is making a large investment in unifying our developer platform protocols for services on the open, standards-based Atom format ( RFC 4287 ) and the Atom Publishing Protocol ( RFC 5023 ). At MIX we are enabling several new Live services with AtomPub endpoints which enable any HTTP-aware application to easily consume Atom feeds of photos and for unstructured application storage (see below for more details). Or you can use any Atom-aware public tools or libraries, such as .NET WCF Syndication to read or write these cloud service-based feeds.

In addition, these same protocols and the same services are now ADO.NET Data Services (formerly known as “ Project Astoria”) compatible. This means we now support LINQ queries from .NET code directly against our service endpoints, leveraging a large amount of existing knowledge and tooling shared with on-premise SQL deployments.

The first question that probably pops into the mind of regular readers of my blog is, “What happened to Web3S and all that talk about AtomPub not being a general purpose editing format for the Web?”. The fact is when we listened to the community of Web developers the feedback was overwhelmingly clear that people would prefer if we worked together with the community to make AtomPub work for the scenarios we felt it wasn’t suited for than Microsoft creating a competing proprietary protocol.

We listened and now here we are. If you are interested in the technical details of how Microsoft plans to use AtomPub and how we’ve dealt with the various issues we originally had with the protocol. I suggest subscribing to the Astoria team’s blog and check out the various posts on this topic by Pablo Castro. There’s a good post by Pablo discussing how Astoria describes relations between elements in AtomPub and suggests a mechanism for doing inline expansion of links. I’ll be providing my thoughts on each of Pablo’s posts and the responses as I find time during the coming weeks.

Windows Live Photo API (CTP Refresh with AtomPub end point)

The Windows Live Photo API allows users to securely grant permission (via Delegated Authentication) for a third party web site to create/read/update/delete on their photos store in Windows Live. The Photo API refresh has several things which make it easier and faster for third parties to implement.

• Third party web sites can you link/refer to images directly from the web browser so they no longer need to proxy images, and effectively save on image bandwidth bills.
• A new AtomPub end point which makes it even easier to integrate.

At the current time, I can’t find the AtomPub endpoint but that’s probably because the documentation hasn’t been refreshed. Moving the API to AtomPub is one of the consequences of the decision to standardize on AtomPub for Web services provided by Windows Live. Although I was part of the original decision to expose the API using WebDAV, I like the fact that all of our APIs will utilize a standard protocol and can take advantage of the breadth of Atom and AtomPub libraries that exist on various platforms.

I need to track down the AtomPub end point so I can compare and contrast it to the WebDAV version to see what we’ve gained and/or lost in the translation. Stay tuned.

Now playing: Jay-Z - Can't Knock the Hustle

Over the past week, two Windows Live teams have shipped some good news to their users. The Windows Live SkyDrive team addressed the two most often raised issues with their service with the announcements in their post Welcome to the bigger, better, faster SkyDrive! which reads

You've made two things clear since our first release: You want more space; and you want SkyDrive where you are. Today we're giving you both. You now have five times the space you had before — that’s 5GB of free online storage for your favorite documents, pictures, and other files.

 

 

SkyDrive is also available now in 38 countries/regions. In addition to Great Britain, India, and the U.S., we’re live in Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Denmark, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Finland, France, Guatemala, Honduras, Italy, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Norway, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Puerto Rico, Portugal, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, and Turkey.

 

Wow, Windows Live is just drowning our customers with free storage. Thats 5GB in SkyDrive and 5GB for Hotmail.

The Windows Live Spaces team also shipped some sweetness to their customers as well. This feature is a little nearer to my heart since it relies on Contact platform APIs I worked on a little while ago. The feature is described by Michelle in on the their team blog in a post entitled More information on Friends in common which states

In the friends module on another person’s space, there is a new area that highlights friends you have in common. Right away you can see the number of people you both know and the profile pictures of some of those friends.

Want to see the rest of your mutual friends? Click on In common and you’re taken to a full page view that shows all of your friends as well as separate lists of friends in common and friends that you don't have in common. This way you can also discover new people that you might know in real life, but are not connected with on Windows Live.

Finding friends in common is also especially important when planning an event on Windows Live Events . Who wants to go to a party when none of your friends are going? On the Guest list area of every event, you can now quickly see how many of your friends have also been invited to the event. Just click on See who’s going and see whether or not your friends are planning to go.

Showing mutual friends as shown above is one of those small features that makes a big impact on the user experience. Nice work Michelle and Shu on getting this out the door.

Now playing: Iconz - I Represent

I found Charles Hudson’s post FriendFeed and the Facebook News Feed - FriendFeed is For Sharing and Facebook Used to be About my Friends somewhat interesting since one of the things I’ve worked on recently is the What’s New page on Windows Live Spaces. He writes

I was reading this article on TechCrunch “ Facebook Targets FriendFeed; Opening Up The News Feed ” and I found it kind of interesting. As someone who uses FriendFeed a lot and uses Facebook less and less, I don’t think the FriendFeed team should spend much time worrying about this announcement. The reason is really simple.

In the beginning, the Facebook News Feed was really interesting. It was all information about my friend and what they were doing. Over time, it’s become a lot less interesting.
…
I would like to see Facebook separate “news” from “activity” - “news” is stuff that happened to people (person x became friend with person y, person x is no longer in a relationship, status updates, etc) and “activities” are stuff related to applications, content sharing, etc. Trying to stuff news and activity into the same channel results in a lot of chaos and noise.

FriendFeed is really different. To me, FriendFeed is a community of people who like to share stuff. That’s a very different product proposition than what the News Feed originally set out to do.

This is an example of a situation where I agree with the sentiment in Jeff Atwood’s post I Repeat: Do Not Listen to Your Users. This isn’t to say that Charles Hudson’s increasingly negative user experience with the Facebook should be discounted or that the things he finds interesting about FriendFeed are invalid. The point is that in typical end user fashion, Charles’s complaints contradict themselves and his suggestions wouldn’t address the actual problems he seems to be having.

The main problem Charles has with the news feed on Facebook is its increased irrelevance due to massive amounts of application spam. This has nothing to do with FriendFeed being more of a community site than Facebook. This also has nothing to do with separating “news” from “activity” (whatever that means). Instead it has everything to do with the fact that Facebook platform is an attractive target for applications attempting to “grow virally” to send all sorts of useless crap to people’s friends. Friendfeed doesn’t have that problem because everything that shows up in your feed is pulled from a carefully selected list of services shown below

The thing about the way FriendFeed works is that there is little chance that stuff in the feed would be considered spammy because the content in the feed will always correspond to a somewhat relevant user action (Digging a story, adding a movie to a Netflix queue, uploading photos to Flickr, etc).

So this means one way Facebook can add relevance to the content in their feed is to pull data in from more valid sources instead of relying on spammy applications pushing useless crap like “Dare’s level 17 zombie just bit Rob’s level 12 vampire”.

That’s interesting but there is more. There doesn’t seem to be any tangible barrier to entry in the “market” that Friendfeed is targetting since all they seem to be doing is pulling the public RSS feeds from a handful of Web sites. This is the kind of project I could knock out in two months. The hard part is having a scalable RSS processing platform. However we know Facebook already has one for their feature which allows one to import blog posts as Notes. So that makes it the kind of feature an enterprising dev at Facebook could knock out in a week or two.

The only thing Friendfeed may have going for it is the community that ends up adopting it. The tricky thing about social software is that your users are as pivotal to your success as your features. Become popular with the right kind of users and your site blows up (e.g. MySpace) while with a different set of users your site eventually stagnates due to it’s niche nature (e.g. LiveJournal).

Friendfeed reminds me of Odeo; a project by some formerly successful entrepenuers that tries to jump on a hyped bandwagon without actually scratching an itch that the founders have or fully understanding the space.

Now playing: Jae Millz - No, No, No (remix) (feat. Camron & T.I.)

Now playing: Supremes - Where Did Our Love Go?

UPDATE: This could also be done with the foreach() construct, but here — on my set-up at least — the for loop is a teensy bit faster.

I developed this PHP function for a project I’m working on. I’m posting it here in case I need it again, or in case you find it handy.

#Input text files must contain one item per line
function print_menu($txtfile_or_files){ $args = func_get_args(); $num_args = func_num_args(); $input = array(); for($i = 0; $i < $num_args; $i++){ // get contents of each text file specified $lines = file($args[$i]); // get each line from each file an add to array for($j = 0; $j < count($lines); $j++){ array_push($input,$lines[$j]); } } // sort alphabetically sort($input,SORT_STRING); for($i = 0; $i < count($input); $i++){ $value = str_replace(' ','_',strtolower(trim($input[$i]))); echo '<option value="'.$value.'">'.trim($input[$i])."</option>\n"; }
}

Configuration and use

The variable $txtfile_or_files should be a comma-separated list of paths to plain text files. This function accepts multiple arguments, in case you want to string multiple files into one menu.

Each text file should contain one item per line. For example:

Red
Blue
Orange
Green

Add another line or two of code if you need to indicate whether the form field value has already been selected.

On March 4-5, Michael McDonald will perform at the Blue Note in New York to celebrate the release of his new album, ‘Soul Speak‘. It’ll be a wonderful day for Michael, but will it be for the ‘Blue Note’?

The ‘Blue Note’ just blogged about Michael’s David Letterman performance which includes an ‘embedded’ YouTube video of the gig. There’s a ton of irony in this: Will technologically incompetent lawyers representing Michael threaten the venue with a “cease and desist” letter laced with false accusations like I received last July?

What the ‘Blue Note’ has done here is no different than several videos I’ve posted to my own site which were ‘embedded’ from YouTube. Unfortunately, I was chastised and chewed up as being the perp who uploaded the videos in question that I ‘embedded’ to my site (There’s a huge difference between ‘linking’ videos and ‘uploading’ them).

The hypocrisy — and ignorance — of an industry that is littered with far too many egos and often bemoans accountability to the very people which make the industry what it is (without ‘fans’, there’s no livelihood for the industry) is more than obvious here.

Chances are, the ‘Blue Note’ won’t be chastised for embedding this video, as they are a paid gig for McD.

To date, I still haven’t received an explanation on the mixup, how I was chosen and how my e-mail address was even known. The last thing in the world I’d do to a friend is cheat him of his rights or harm his brand, product or service by distributing unauthorized works w/o permission (and, no, ‘embedding’ is not ‘distributing’).

Personally, I believe an apology from Vector Management and Michael’s lawyer is long overdue — Michael needn’t be the janitor cleaning up the actions of others (and I did mention this incident to him, and of course, he apologized — But, again, it’s not his doing), for our friendship has been nothing but inspiring over an almost 10 year period.

My only desire is that those representing him should take better precautions to avoid the possibility of alienating those who are friends and supporters of Michael. The music industry continues to demonstrate that they are not in the business of listening — Just dictating (and bullying).

Don’t forget to pick up Michael’s new album, ‘Soul Speak,’ on March 4th:

If you liked this post, how about buying me a coffee?

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1. EGO...trip: Hate It or Love It? Cool. But this is still How We Do (Fresh '99)
   
2. MTV...goes hog wild on EA's bid for Take-Two. Now, where's Sumner Redstone?
3. PS3...maintains its open philosophy when it comes to in-game advertising
4. RND...Forgive them, for the Daniel Day-Lewis haters know not what they do

...(read more)

If you’re a public relations professional–or an above-average entrepreneur–you’ve probably wondered how you can get bloggers to talk about your business…in a favorable way.

Late last year, I was a guest speaker on a webinar that was geared toward PR agents. Prior to that I had had extensive conversations with business owners and PR pros about social media–and most honestly admitted they had no idea how to make social media work for them. They saw it as this black hole of yet more new technology that wasn’t going away as previously thought but, in fact, was taking the world by storm.

During my speaking tour last year a frustrated woman actually asked, “Who are these bloggers? What do they want from us? What drives them? Why do they care?”

Truthfully, most companies DO get it all wrong and end up angering the bloggers with whom they want to become allies. But, you? You’re lucky…you know me and you read this blog. That doesn’t have to happen to you.

That’s why I wrote The Blogosphere Cluebook–to show you, step-by-step, both what to do and what NOT to do when befriending bloggers. It’s not the War and Peace on social media influencers by a long shot, but it will serve as a bit of a North Star in the confusing world of widgets and wikis.

The book is free to download, post on your site or blog or e-mail to colleagues and friends.