I quite enjoyed Architect Insight this year - lots of useful sessions, and in particular the keynotes - which were mainly thinking about the issues surrounding the delivery and scaling of cloud services - were engaging and interesting.

If you were there, hopefully you enjoyed my session with Paul Dawson from Conchango - thanks very much Paul! - thinking about user experience for consumers and enterprise users.

The main things I took away this year:

• AtomPub is important. There's a lot of standardisation of Microsoft services on AtomPub and it seems to me that it will be increasingly important to understand and use this.
• POA. A new acronym: "Pod-Oriented Architecture". A Pod is defined as a unit in a datacenter capable of running an entire cloud service. So, to scale out, you just keep adding new pods.
• Brewer's Conjecture. This is the notion that one of Consistency, Availability or Partition Tolerance has to be traded away when designing distributed/cloud systems.
• Simon Thurman's 20/20 (20 slides lasting 20 seconds each) format session was very successful.
• Thinking about the use of cloud services from an enterprise perspective is a challenge.

I've mentioned that I think there is probably some use in Twitter somewhere before. The jury is still out on this for me. On the one hand, tweeting is very useful as a broadcast mechanism beyond bulk email with less need for context than blogging. But on the other hand, it's hard to follow more than one or two people. So, the value of the broadcast is rendered pointless if you know that there is no-one able to listen...

Seems to me that the best use of Twitter is search.

Possibly more cynically - but amusing nonetheless - is my colleague Simon's view that: "Twitter is SMS for people who don't have any friends".

This seems to be supported by the FriendFeed Imaginary Friend feature...

I think Angus Logan has the best compilation of information and reaction I've seen so far.

News from LiveSide that the workspaces are now available in English globally.

Although I'm typically a Groove user, and a bit of a fan, I've been working with the workspaces for a while to good effect.

Worth signing up and having a look-see.

My reflection on the last post, and the Live announcements as follows:

Firstly, these are all really positive steps forward for Live, and I think some of the services are really beginning to take shape.

The Windows Live Messenger Library is very interesting. Previously, it's been possible to to create bots, and activities and thus harness Messenger as a channel, or an entry into a web proposition, but WLML now gives the power to use Messenger as part of the proposition: perhaps just for the retention of eyeballs, but maybe for improved social capabilities and other sophistry.

Mentioned in the post, but covered in more detail by Andy Conrad is these services are going to ADO.NET Data Services (Astoria... keep up...) which "means we now support LINQ queries from .NET code directly against our service endpoints". Very cool. I'll be keeping an eye on the MIX session from Pablo on that subject.

With MIX almost upon us, there's going to be a raft of announcements on new technology. First set of stuff comes on the Live front:

• The main announcement around the next set of Live services.
• The next version of the 'Quick Apps' is here. These are a really useful learning resource, and in some cases a 'starter for 10'.
• Angus has also placed links for a bunch of presentations on the new Windows Live Messenger Library, Live Contacts API and Live ID Delegated Authentication.
• The new Silverlight-powered MSN Toolbar.

I think the trick to keeping up-to-date with Live services is links to http://dev.live.com, and the feeds from there,  Liveside.net and Angus' blog. Everything you need.

Angus is clearly working way too hard!

In response to my Bliki post, Steve suggested the use of Twitter to capture the random stream of thoughts I'm looking to organise. Not a bad idea. I already use Twitter (you can follow me here), though I'm not sure what for, so it seems like it is worth a try. I have an idea for a mash-up that might assist with this too, so I can code a little, which is nice.

Now, Steve and others put a lot of work into thinking about the conversation paradigm that Twitter provides.

What do I have to add to that? Well, a story...

Before BabyH was born, LadyH and I went along to the raft of antenatal classes offered by the National Childbirth Trust (NCT). Very good they were too, well done NCT!

Apart from a little education, these classes are designed to generate mini-support groups amongst the attendees for any given course, and in fact this is pretty effective.

So, LadyH spends quite a lot of time emailing baby-related happenings and socialising with the NCT gang. Good for here. I noticed that they predominantly use email and text messaging for this - don't we all - but here it seems there is a good match to Twitter for these reasons:

1. Although we know that all conversations are asynchronous, in fact text messaging sort of demands a response in the short term otherwise it can appear rude. (Don't get me started on the social inappropriateness of texting and the damage it's causing to the social skills and vocabulary of the next generation..!) Actually, a lot of the conversation is just one-way, fire and forget, so the request-response requirement of text messaging is not ideal.
2. Email is not the best mechanism either, as (again the generally accepted norm is that) email requires the construction of some surrounding content "hi, how are you?" around the key fact: in this case "my daughter smiled for the first time today". So even though the fact is of interest to all parties, you wouldn't want to generate a whole email around it, especially with potentially multiple factoids per day per person.
3. I've discovered that mothers of newborn children tend to be quite busy...

Twitter to the rescue: the idea of punching up the interesting stuff, and then being able to duck in and out of that simple stream of information and respond if desired, at any time, and in a simple way seems to be a perfect mechanism for the support group.

In the past couple of weeks my colleague, Dave Brown (no blog - come on Dave-o - join the throng), has been wow-ing me with some sensational Virtual Earth and Silverlight and WPF work.
Sadly, can't share this at the moment as it is PoC work for major customers. But it did remind me that I really need to get into and understand Virtual Earth capabilities a little more. Geospatial metaphors have been big for a while now, and I confess I wouldn't be very capable of throwing stuff together.

Anyhow, I see that Marc Schwiegert is making it easier for VE n00bs like me by developing a Codeplex project to enable javascript intellisense for the version 6.0 control. You can read more here, and find the project here.

Although we Brits can't access this yet, it's gone to beta in the US and looks pretty useful.

Seems to me like an obvious S+S offering - delivering a useful cloud storage and collaboration service through the various Office software clients. See Darren's blog for more info.

I'm a total Groove convert for working with the various vTeams, projects and locations I have to contend with - spend more than a few days with me and I'll force it down your throat - so I'm all for this!

As Simon points out, this is now live on MSDN.

Interesting issue this month: I would say that each article is important for any architect to consider with a lot of emerging technology up for discussion and explanation.

My architectural bent is leading me towards lots of experimentation with Biztalk Services, and already I've found a lot of value in exploring the samples that come with that SDK in terms of consideration of how they might help an organisation, and I'm also impressed with the approach: playing to the strengths of WCF, with surprisingly simple config.

Speaking of Software + Services, I've added the presentation I gave at the SOA & BPM event at Thames Valley to the Presentations page of the 'all new' Labs @ MarcMyWords section of this site. (Not much there now, but I'll gradually catalogue stuff I've done/am doing).

I've also tweaked the blog theme - you can still IM me - but without the "fixed width control" pain.