We've built on the real estate at http://shopping.live.com and Windows Live Shopping Beta is now live. Check out the official Windows Live Shopping Blog for details.

 

 

I'll let you get all the official scoop there but I thought I'd share a little more detail about how we built it. The short answer is "services".

 

When I joined the team in mid-2004 almost all of the team was focused on the core shopping platforms, Windows Marketplace and MSN Shopping. Those platforms are pretty monolithic with some deep technology around classification, attribute extraction, etc. and a huge selection of products but they are fairly complex and don't easily lend themselves to innovation either on the back or the front end.

 

I took over some responsibilities on the core shopping platform including optimization and search engine optimization but I ended up spending about 80% of my time driving the strategy and then development of a separate rating & review service that is now in use by our shopping platforms as well as a number of other groups around MSN and Windows Live. This was truly a loosely-coupled service and I'm pleased to see how easy it is for other groups to adopt it. The project was a pretty positive experience for me because I didn't have to take huge dependencies or deal with all the complexity of our current shopping platforms. Sure, I had to forge some new ground purchasing hardware and working with the operations and security teams but in the end it was well worth it. The project was well received within the org as well. I have a shiny plaque to prove it (if not a smelly tennis shoe).

 

That was arguably the first experience within the Shopping team in developing a truly loosely-coupled service. It prompted what you might call a services tidal wave within our team that pre-dated Ray Ozzie's mail by a few months. Literally three-quarters of the development team went off and worked on a host of different services using the agile method and for the most part, operating independently of the other teams. The cornerstone of our web service platform is the set of core shopping web services that expose the product catalog, attribute refinements, compare and other functionality. Other services include ratings & reviews, wish list and guides.

 

Windows Live Shopping is essentially a mashup of those services. The great thing is that since the services are not baked into the platform we can expose them outside of shopping to the rest of live.com land and perhaps...to the public. We've even got a few new services in the hopper that we'll expose through Windows Live Shopping in the next month or two. Stay tuned for more details.

 

Besides the services approach, Windows Live Shopping makes really good use of familiar AJAX technologies including inline preview and drag and drop. The interaction design makes for a much better experience working with the site. Check out the Windows Live Shopping blog for more details on specific features.