Windows Live Calendar

Windows Live looks good. Somehow they got the design just right. Consumers looking to communicate with others and manage their lives have options from 2 fronts:

1. Email / Chat services such as Hotmail, Yahoo, and Google that have been adding more and more social functions so that you can do things with your Contact List.

2. Social sites such as Facebook that have added more and more direct communication functions such as Email and Chat.

Microsoft obviously has a tremendous amount of leverage (the 90% of computer owners who are Windows users) in attempting to tie your Internal World with your Outreaching to others. Yet, it stumbles. Despite the nice layout, the Live experience suffers from Things That Don't Work, Continued Confusion About Names and Relations to Other MS Products, and from insufficient integration with the Rest of the Web.

I will examine the new version of Hotmail / Live over the next week.

Here is the first, Thing that Doesn't Work: the new Calendar's Birthday calendar. It is supposed to populate itself with the dates of your Contact's birthdays. That's a great idea. It merges one product (a Calendar) with info pulled from an existing source (a Contact List). It's one of the things that only a big software company like MS could offer. And yet it's one of the things that only MS would botch: it doesn't work. Go ahead and enter birth dates for any of your contacts. They won't show up in the Birthday Calendar. :(

More to follow....

Cooking is Fun

Cooking is Fun is a web site to share recipes and create shopping lists. The idea is to make a pursuit of cooking fun. The site features a large database of ingredients, the ability to add ingredients, predictive text.. and other Ajax features. A user can store recipes in a 'binder' and then take collective action on the binder: create a shopping list that is grouped by Grocery section, and printing a branded Packet of recipes.

The structure of a recipe is as follows:
I. Basic Info
Name, Output, Footnotes

II. Ingredient Groups
A group is something like "for the salsa."
A group contains items.
Items belong to a category such as Protein, Produce, Spices...

III. Preparation
Segments. Such as "for the sauce.."

***
That is the 'kernel' of the site. The search and social aspect comes from tagging of a recipe and scoring of other members' recipes. Tagging is provided for.. but the scoring will be handled by the Facebook API. Cooking is Fun will use Facebook Connect to integrate with the popular networking site.

It will be fun. I know this has been dry text... but the service itself will be a hoot. The demo version is now active. The next phase of development will involve Facebook integration, leading into a Beta Launch.

Here is the demo URL: http://cooking.phamper.com

* The default title is "Cooking with Sherry is Fun." When a user logs in, the name 'Sherry' is replaced with the user's first name. *