Facebook’s ties to Microsoft go back to 2006 when they first signed an advertising deal. A year later they took a $240 million investment, and the advertising relationship was extended this year.

Those ties may explain why Facebook was willing to ignore its own privacy policy in March 2008 and give Microsoft access to Facebook user emails. Despite shutting down Plaxo and Google products that tried to access Facebook users over privacy concerns, they were ok with sending and displaying emails to Microsoft to let users invite Facebook friends to Windows Live Messenger.

Facebook’s privacy policy says “We do not provide contact information to third party marketers without your permission. We share your information with third parties only in limited circumstances where we believe such sharing is 1) reasonably necessary to offer the service, 2) legally required or, 3) permitted by you.”

But Microsoft’s Invite2Messenger appears to violate that policy. Messenger users are asked to log in to Facebook, and then the names and email addresses of all that user’s Facebook friends are then sent to Microsoft and displayed in clear text on a page they control (Facebook itself only shows friend’s emails as images to prevent scraping). You check off which friends you want to invite to use Messenger, and then Microsoft sends each of them an email to install the client and become friends with you. Screenshots of the process (with emails removed) are below.

When Microsoft announced Invite2Messenger they said that LinkedIn, Bebo, Hi5 and Tagged would participate, but none of those partners ever went live. Just Facebook. Another oddity – on a UK MSN site, Microsoft even noted that Robert Scoble was banned for doing exactly what Microsoft is now doing with Facebook’s apparent blessing.

As far as I can tell, Facebook has never allowed this with any other partner. And as I wrote above, they’ve shut down both Plaxo and Google for similar actions.

Why does Microsoft want these social connections imported into Messenger? Does it have anything to do with Microsoft’s surprise launch yesterday of the new Live.com social network, which pre-populates friends based on Messenger connections? From people we’ve talked to, the launch came as a complete surprise to everyone, including Facebook.

For months Microsoft has urged users to effectively import their Facebook social graph into Messenger, with Facebook’s consent, even though it appears to clearly violate the Facebook Privacy Policy. Then Microsoft launches a surprise social network based on Messenger contacts.

There’s a lot more to this story as well. Why did Facebook allow this in the first place (in other words, what did they get out of it)? We’ll update soon.

LOS ANGELES — Looking for growth in new markets where it is increasingly being bypassed, Microsoft said Monday that late next year it would begin offering a new “cloud” operating system that would manage the relationship between software inside the computer and on the Web, where data and services are becoming increasingly centralized.

Fred Prouser/Reuters

Ray Ozzie, a Microsoft software architect, spoke Monday to software developers in Los Angeles.

The company needs a new kind of operating system for a new computing world populated not by a single style of desktop computer, but by dozens of different kinds of Internet-connected appliances ranging from smartphones to mini-laptops called netbooks.

More of those devices use programs that reside on a remote server rather than on the device itself. The servers, in the so-called cloud, deliver what are called Web services, which can be anything from customer relationship software or a Facebook game.

Microsoft is a late entrant into a market that is crowded by a range of players offering every flavor of cloud computing, including Sun Microsystems and I.B.M. as well as Amazon and Google.

Although Microsoft has continued to have strong sales of its operating system software to corporate customers, growth of its Windows Vista operating system appears stalled. Moreover, the company has significantly delayed its next generation of software for mobile smartphones at a time when competitors like Apple and Research in Motion are using their own software to sell more cellphones to corporate customers.

The new Microsoft “cloud OS” — called Azure — gives Microsoft an opening.

But many of the giant software company’s competitors believe it is unlikely that Microsoft will be able to maintain its advantage either in market share or profitability in the future.

“Today’s announcement of Azure is the same Microsoft, keeping developers locked into their proprietary solutions, and failing to grasp the true power of cloud computing,“ said Mark Benioff, the chief executive of Salesforce.com, a San Francisco company that helped pioneer the commercial Web services market. “Microsoft continues to struggle with what to do about cloud computing because the cloud’s new technology and business models cuts into the heart of their software monopoly.”

Nevertheless, Microsoft, which is based in Redmond, Wash., declared a third era of operating systems in the hope that it will be able to repeat the success it had with its DOS and Windows operating systems of the 1980s and 1990s.

Azure was designed during the last three years by Ray Ozzie, a software designer whose company, Groove Networks, was acquired by Microsoft in 2005. Mr. Ozzie began taking the reins from Bill Gates as the company’s principal software architect in 2006.

Before an audience of 6,500 software developers, Mr. Ozzie tried to make the case that programmers who miss a shift to a new Microsoft operating platform are taking a huge risk.

Speaking as a software developer who had frequently sat in the audience at similar Microsoft events as a customer, Mr. Ozzie said: “Every time there is a major platform shift in our industry, it has turned into new opportunities for my apps and my business.”

His comment was a clear reference to an earlier juncture in the history of the computer industry, when companies like Lotus Development, where Mr. Ozzie worked, were late to adopt the first generation of the Windows operating system. That shift gave the Windows Office suite a significant advantage and helped Microsoft dominate word processing, spreadsheet and other office software.

While Microsoft’s software business for corporations continues its robust growth, there are increasing questions about whether the company will be able to strengthen its desktop computing business in an era that is increasingly defined by free or advertising-supported Internet services.

Microsoft would use Azure to harmonize traditional proprietary software with a new set of tools based on Internet standards that are widely used to generate the most popular Web services. “This is the first time they are showing all the pieces coming together,” said Peter O’Kelly, a computer industry consultant based in Andover, Mass.

Although Microsoft will not release a commercial version of Azure for a year or more, Mr. O’Kelly said that components of the system like Live Services were already being used by millions of PC users.

Microsoft gave only one significant demonstration of the kind of applications made possible with its new system. Sentient Software showed a mobile social-networking application called Bluehoo. The company said that Azure would make it easier to expand the service by using computing resources provided by Microsoft.

On Tuesday, Microsoft is expected to give its first lengthy demonstration of its Windows 7 desktop operating system, which is intended to rejuvenate the company’s sputtering consumer business. Microsoft has also hinted that it would show off Web versions of several of its Office applications for the first time.

by Erick Schonfeld on October 8, 2008

No, Microsoft is not getting into the car-wash business. But it is releasing “Touchless,” multitouch software from Microsoft Office Labs that uses a regular Web camera and everyday objects as input. You can think of this as a low-end version of its Touchwall technology, which uses more precise lasers to detect movement and objects. The software developer kit is available now under an open-source Microsoft Public License. The SDK only works on Windows (what did you expect?).

Like Microsoft Surface and Touchwall, the Touchless software makes it possible to create applications that turn hand gestures and physical objects into an input device like a mouse. Touchless detects both the size and location of “color markers” (which can be fingers, toys, pens, M&Ms) as they move through space. Microsoft engineers Ian Sands and Chris Pratley have created four demos to showcase the technology:

   1. Snake – where you control a snake with a marker.

   2. Defender – up to 4 player version of a pong-like game.

   3. Map – where you can rotate, zoom, and move a map using 2 markers.

   4. Draw – the marker is used to guess what…. draw!

Try it out. Free TechCrunch T-shirt to whoever creates the coolest Touchless app and uploads a video in comments.

by Steve Gillmor on September 29, 2008

This week two giants spoke to the technology wave known as cloud computing. Larry Ellison called it a new label on what everyone is doing already. He acknowledged he was going along with it to keep his marketing and sales guys happy, but basically he called bullshit on it.

Steve Ballmer talked at a deep level about intelligent caching between the cloud and the client. Over an hour of snappy questions by Ann Winblad and Obamaesque nuance from the Microsoft leader let some significant cat out of the bag. No longer software plus services, the net of Ballmer’s signals was cloud + client. If you believe as Jason Calacanis does that we’re on the brink of a startup depression, the technology industry should be very very afraid.

read more…

By Joel Hruska  | Published: September 29, 2008 – 09:20PM CT

Microsoft and Washington State officials announced a new partnership today aimed at fighting scareware in general and one specific vendor in particular. Today isn’t such a good day for one James Reed McCreary IV, of The Woodlands, Texas. Mr. McCreary is the sole director of Branch Software, which created the Registry Cleaner XP program, and the CEO of hosting company Alpha Red. Scareware, it should be noted, isn’t malware—at least, not technically. Instead of installing its own set of viruses, worms, or Trojans, a scareware program tricks the end user into believing he or she needs the program to correct a nonexistent error within the operating system. This type of falsified error was a common tactic in the days before Windows XP’s SP1 (supposedly) closed the door that made the random pop-ups possible; I still remember seeing ads pop up on customers’ desks insisting that they needed to download Program X for $9.99 to fix this issue. 

read more…

eptember 23, 2008 – 8:58 pm PDT – by Steven Hodson 6 Comments

eptember 17, 2008 – 12:13 pm PDT – by Paul Glazowski Add a Comment