Late last week, Microsoft Research shared a couple of things about Social Desktop, a prototype of which they are debuting at TechFest 2009 in a couple of days (along with dozens of other things). From the looks of it, this will be a much talked about product even if it stays in proof-of-concept phase for now.
And if they decide to open it up even just a little, this could be a major breakthrough in tearing down the virtual wall between the desktop and the web, a trend we’ve been noticing for years.
The service would essentially be capable of providing you with a secure unique ID for all the files and folders on your desktop, enabling users to share, comment on, tag and search files like photos and videos via a dedicated web page powered by .NET. Think of this as social URLs that link to files which could easily be pushed to third-party services like Twitter or Digg but also Microsoft’s own Windows Live Messenger without the need for you to copy, move or upload anything. Furthermore, social interaction around the files would be visible from inside the Windows desktop OS, blurring the line between the desktop and the web even more.
You can have a URL drill into a subportion of a document or a PowerPoint deck, or data can come from a Web service or a database. Social Desktop is a local service that maps the user’s local data into a .NET service bus service, enabling local data to be accessible through firewalls. Social Desktop also provides a Web-service view over the same data, with inherent RSS event streams for any container. New data sources can be mapped into the URL hierarchy, enabling a distributed view to be built. There are simple sharing paradigms that enable URLs to be shared temporarily or permanently.
Social Desktop runs on Silverlight and leverages both the Windows OS and Windows Azure, the software giant’s very own cloud services platform which Microsoft announced in October 2008. TechFlash reviewed the service as well last week, and asked the project leads how Social Desktop differs from Live Mesh. The response came from Lili Cheng, who manages Microsoft Research’s Creative Systems Group: “In the Mesh model, you can almost imagine your PC being pushed to the cloud,” she explained. “In this, you can almost imagine the Web being embedded inside your desktop.”
I don’t know about you, but to me this all sounds very promising and I’m curious if using Social Desktop would change my file sharing habits. Even with the plethora of free, simple and fast online backup and sharing services around, there’s still a trust barrier not easily overcome by startups who need to market their services extensively on an inherently low budget to reach any kind of scale. Besides, Social Desktop even relieves you from the not-so-cumbersome task of moving a file to the cloud in order to store or share it, so that makes for one hell of a substantial benefit compared to other services where you’d be required to register and do a series of actions before that happens.
Unfortunately, a Microsoft spokesperson told NetworkWorld that Social Desktop at this point is merely a research prototype which will not be a feature in Windows 7, nor will it be available for public use.
But I still want to get my hands on Windows 7 Beta (it makes use of the new operating system’s file-preview functions) right now even if just to test this application once (and if) they release it.
“In this, you can almost imagine the Web being embedded inside your desktop.” You mean, like as if it where within a web browser?
haha!
I disagree with the thought that just because we could have a desktop on the browser it can’t be the other way around. Actually i think it could very well work better having the internet withing the desktop instead of the browser. How do you figure? Well if you can’ configure every single website within your desktop then it would make things easier for the end user. Keeping your information local but at the same time having your hosted information around the web local to your desktop…
to figure out what i mean take a look at the tasty looking longhorn concept we were all were wishing for before they went Vista.
http://www.yout...h?v=b9ifQvQCO7Y
Another example would be our OpenSearch support in the Win7 shell, which I *think* this is actually building on top of
were* even
I think my comments fail almost as much as this prototype, in fact they do.
What about security? Giving the world, or even various online services such direct access to your computer is a frightening concept, especially given Microsoft’s security track record.
I can just see it now, millions of people’s Quicken or Money files available to anybody over the social networks and the user won’t even know. This takes P2P sharing to a frightening level.
Exactly my thoughts — truly scary security implications if even the slightest thing goes wrong. On the flip side, it would create a huge opportunity for the various security software companies to plug all the holes in MSFT’s product.
this is a new concept!? maybe, maybe not, but one thing is for sure, MS would like to do something different in social networking, and I think they might get the chance this time.
It’s a DESKSITE !
“Think of this as social URLs that link to files”
social urls? domain names? structure? tags? organized content? indexing? how interesting. now if someone could just rolodex the internet we would know where everything is…………naturally.
MicroLocator.com – little things matter most
We published something very similar to this idea two years ago at IEEE Portables 2007 (linked above) and before that at the Personal Information Management workshop in 2006.
Good to see the idea make it into a product prototype, and hope they release this in a usable state for all major platforms soon.
and BTW the Microsoft Social Media Desktop will allow you only if you have a Windows LIVE account. Any sites/apps of Competitors [Yes Google] will give a Blue screen of Death! [This is a feature].
Praveen
http://spraveen...ro.blogspot.com
If my understanding of this is correct then I could share a file that pysically exists on my home computer with anyone in the world.
That sounds cool but…..doesn’t it pre-suppose that my home computer is switched on? In these times of corporate social responsibility is it wise for Microsoft to build a product that encourages people to leave their computer on 24/7?
Sorry for sounding like a killjoy but I think its an important point!
I used Live Mesh briefly and I believe everything that you shared was mirrored on their servers (”the cloud”). So, I am guessing it would work in a similar fashion since it shares that technology. With that said, this would probably require a large amount of servers always switched on. So, I am not sure that it is much better.
Matt,
I’m pretty sure it requires your home computer to be left on which is much worse than Live Mesh/.Net Service bus which both live in a data center in a multi-tenanted environment. Leaving one computer on just to share a single file (or a few files) is far more detrimental I’m sure.
-Jamie
No, it only requires that your machine is on at some time. The point is that we can do smart caching…if your machine is on all of the time we can know that, and if it isn’t, we know that as well. If people are accessing it a lot, we know that, and likewise, you can always use Mesh as a sync technology to smartly sync with the cloud as well.
The point is you shouldn’t have to worry about all of that, it should just work.
Tom,
Well that sounds A LOT better. You say “we” – are you from the team working on this?
-Jamie
Woops, did I say “we”?…darn english language.
Ummm…yes, I am.
I just want to say that I appreciate the feedback people have been giving. We think there is a lot of potential with this project and one of the great things about showing it publicly is to see what people think of it. It is really helpful!
I wouldn’t want the whole world to have access to my computer heck I have a user name so whats mine is only seen by me, and I have to agree with Jamie Thompson this would require your computer to be on line 24/7 and what happens if I log off and my daughter logs in.
Well I see the security issues being almost endless but if Microsoft can figure out how to make this work it could be a really amazing tool.
Microsoft Research do come up with some good ideas, and I really feel this is one of those! It’s quite simple, but having it embeded in the system would be nice. Shame it won’t be in Windows 7. My guess is the security just isn’t there. I feel Microsoft need to keep pushing out ideas, some will be stupid, and others (like this) very well may make it into Windows 8 (Except for the EU, which by the time of Windows 8 will no doubt have a Windows(R): Feature Free Version.)
Sharing “public” on the web almost always gives access to anyone with an Internet connection. In contrast, the public folder on the Desktop only shares with people who use my PC, and sometimes- people on my local network- and honestly, isn’t used all that much.
In fact, usually sharing from the desktop involves email attachments
Comments on security, are right on. It’s probably the trickiest part of the design… to work for people with really different comfort levels for sharing.
IMHO, sites like Twitter do a great job, letting people decide if things they do are private or public, merging direct messages and @’s and keeping it simple and easy. (i’m @lilich)
thanks all- now back to working on the demo–eek. there are cameras on the floor and we’re getting setup for techfest tomorrow! coding on the show floor the day before… check out the other projects in the public room…. http://research...09/default.aspx
I’m stuck half way inbetween laughing and yawning. microsoft research would do so much better if they instead had their heads up someone else’s asses.
no doubt, Lili Cheng equates creativity with tying microsoft’s latest copy-of-product-X together with somehow trying to be social. it smells of a desperate attempt to claw people back to a dependency on microsoft.
fuck you, microsoft, and all who believe in you. you did your best to cripple the web, I don’t believe you deserve another chance.
Dave a peace of advice, Please… STFU which means have a great day…
Wow Dave. You sounds like someone I should respect and listen too – NOT! You. Are. Sad.
Anyhow, unlike you I applaud anyone, no matter what person or company it is, for innovating and creating prototypes.
I am very sad, I have no-one’s respect, no-one listens to me and I re-visit web pages to see if a provocative comment has garnered any attention from anyone so clever as to think that microsoft innovates. show me the innovation!
seriously though, they really did their best to cripple the web, starting just around the time DHTML surfaced, before it actually became usable. I still haven’t figured out whether this was to defend their revenue or because their engineers liked taking a lot of short cuts to avoid using their brains.
webcome to my blog
Didn’t IBM do something like this years ago?
http://www.alma...w02_youserv.pdf
Hey, thanks for the link, I hadn’t heard of that project.
Social Desktop is similar to youserv, and Microsoft Folder Share for that matter, except that what we are interested in is exploring an inherent social experience, leveraging existing social networks and deeper integration with the desktop.
Try to sit down with a non-tech friend and read aloud the bit here that’s quoted from the MS Research site. Or anything from this article actually.
This is exactly the type of thing that gets technology folks excited and has everyone else scratching their heads.
I need to hear the story about how this is enriching people’s lives and relationships … hint: deep linking into a PowerPoint deck isn’t it.
A simple scenario is that I can send a link to my family which allows them to see any photos in my family picture folder. Any time she want so to see the latest pictures I have taken of her grandchildren she simply has to click on the link and browse or search.
She should be able to mark her favorite ones and the rest of my family should be able to benefit from that when they browse photos.
Why should I have to upload photos to get this experience? Why do I have to transition from the desktop to a web experience and back?
The same goes for documents we gathered up for our recent trip to Mexico. We should be able to just collaborate without having to think about the technology behind it.
You know, there’s a huge issue of copyright here.
How much of the stuff on your computer was actually created by you? If you did not create everything, then you’re most likely going to be violating someone’s copyright if you open all your files up to the Internet.
Copyright and its impact on the free flow of information is a topic that always generates a lot of discussion (which I’m not going to get into), but people should be aware of this issue that needs to be addressed/solved in such a product.
Read: Some time in the future, Microsoft will fix a problem that has been around for 15 years. Fingers crossed.
Not that any other company has anything better.
Honestly, this kind of blatantly, stupid simple stuff should have been in windows/OS X/linux years ago.
I have a PC; it’s connected to the internet 24/7. I want to take my text file to school/work/my friends/kinkos to print/edit/finish it. Instead of just using the internet to make a direct transfer, i’m going to use my flash drive/cd/email/cloud/3rd party web server as a middle man because, hey, transferring things twice is always better than just once.
The current tech giants might have made the computer cheap and personal, but the next group is going to have to take out all the stupid.
lol – I can see the sticker on the Windows 8 Box already…
“Now with 50% less Stupid!”
There is a newcomer on backup software market. http://cloudberrydrive.com is a new backup software powered by Amazon S3!
Wow, this looks cool – it’s very similar to the way that Infovark (my startup) is sharing enterprise information within the firewall – (for our impending release, we decided the security challenges of sharing publicly outweighed the benefits.) The internet has proven the importance of REST accessible content. It’s about time that the desktop caught on.