Today, let us take a little break from work. The ’80s were a time, to many, filled with new wave music, Brat Pack movies, and bad haircuts. There is an even more simple side to the to the time period though, and that is what we aim to look at here. Let’s take a look through some awesome cartoons from the decade. Remember the time when Saturday mornings meant sugary cereal and awesome cartoons? Here are some cartoons that bring back childhood memories to quite a few people on Facebook.
Transformers


Not sold on the Transformers movies yet? I have to agree with you. The cartoon is a legend though as Optimus Prime and his fellow Autobots and Megatron’s Decepticons have been battling since the the cartoon premiered in 1984. Transformers has over 44,000 fans on Facebook. “Autobots, roll out!”

Duck Tales


When Uncle Donald leaves, Dewie, Huey, and Louie end up living with Uncle Scrooge McDuck. Duck Tales premiered in 1987, and the film followed in the start of the next decade. 41,000 fans on Facebook keep the Duck Tale cartoons spirit alive.

ThunderCats

The ThunderCats premiered in 1985, and is still being milked for some cash in various formats today. Is that film ever going to be released? Lion-O, Jaga, and crew battled Mum-ra and various other villians for four seasons. Almost 36,000 are a fan of ThunderCats on Facebook. “Thundercats, HO!”

Fraggle Rock


I know Fraggle Rock isn’t technically a cartoon, with the exception of the spin-off series that lasted a season. It is hard to bring up ‘80s television and not mention the awesome Fraggle Rock world though. Jim Henson’s genius ‘80s show with Gobo and crew was a mega hit of the ‘80s and still today. 26,000 are still singing the theme song from Fraggle Rock on Facebook.

Smurfs


Putting aside the whole political Communism controversy, the cartoon The Smurfs was a staple on the decade. The show premiered in 1981 and had many specials throughout the decade in addition to the cartoon show. Over 21,000 are still fans of those lovable blue guys and girls. My favorite Smurf was always Grouchy. Who was yours?

GI Joe


The action figures, GI-Joe, found their way into the animated world in the eighties in a few different series. The real American hero must stop Cobra, and in the process became an awesome cartoon from the decade. Kudos to the 10,000 plus fans of the show on Facebook.

He-Man And The Masters Of The Universe


“By the Power of Grayskull!” The phrase transferred Prince Adam into He-Man. It was He-Mans duty to protect his home planet, Eternia, from Skeletor. A Master of the Universe has progressed to a slightly different meaning as the years progressed, but it all stemmed from the classic He-Man and the Masters of the Universe cartoon from the early ‘80s. Almost 5,000 fans of the original Master of the Universe are on Facebook.

The Real Ghostbusters


“Penfold, shush!” The popular catch phrase Danger Mouse often shouted to his sidekick. The greatest secret agent in the world, and his cartoon show, premiered in the UK in 1981, and made its way to US a few years later. Over 2,700 on Facebook continue to show their love for Danger Mouse and Penfold.

Danger Mouse


“Penfold, shush!” The popular catch phrase Danger Mouse often shouted to his sidekick. The greatest secret agent in the world, and his cartoon show, premiered in the UK in 1981, and made its way to US a few years later. Over 2,700 on Facebook continue to show their love for Danger Mouse and Penfold

Dungeons And Dragons


Dungeons & Dragons was been a classic game for years, and the cartoon, based on the game, premiered in 1983. The realm of Dungeons & Dragons was a rollercoaster ride filled with twists and turns as Hank and the kids ventured through a mythical land trying to make their way home. At times, I never thought the seven of them were going to make it home. How evil was that Venger? D & D’s cartoon Facebook page has over 2,200 fans.

When we kicked off this blog 8 months ago, I talked about how we’d be responding to comments and as part of that gathering feedback from all of you. This blog is clearly an important channel for feedback, but we also gather a lot of other types of feedback, and I wanted to share more about how we bring this together and use all of this feedback to improve our products. This is particularly relevant right now as we just completed the rollout of Hotmail to our entire customer base, and we’re getting a lot of feedback on the beta of Windows Live Essentials (our suite of programs for your Windows PC). Both of these are great opportunities for us to hear from you and make improvements to Windows Live.
Balancing all the feedback

We have a responsibility when we design any product or service to be thoughtful about what we are trying to accomplish, the improvements we are making for customers, and the context behind those improvements. This is definitely a complex task as we have to weigh factors like how many customers will benefit, whether customers will get more benefit from one feature or another, the effect of added features on our release schedule, the impact of any change on customers who know how to use the existing products, and all the other tradeoffs that are made in the process of developing products.

We also need to balance competing requests from people who want more and more, against feedback from others who are happy with what we have today. And then there’s the simple fact that we just can’t do everything. Our goal is always going to be to create the best possible set of products and services for customers, but it’s always going to be a complicated equation.

Feedback comes from many places. First, we have the product telemetry that is built into our products, including data about setup failures, product crashes, script errors, and instrumentation that shows which services are being used how often. These provide a quantitative view of how you’re using our products and some of the issues that you’re encountering. Of course, any information we collect is governed by our privacy policy.

We also get a lot of input through the Windows Live Solution Centers (our support and help forums) – this is a mix of quantitative feedback (how many people hit a particular problem) and qualitative feedback (verbatim comments from people in the forums, and conversations with support professionals).

Windows Live Solution Center logo

We also track issues reported through social media avenues (including this blog, Messenger, Facebook, and Twitter), and direct feedback from our MVPs and from customer research–focus groups, surveys, informal discussions with customers, and more.
Feedback can span a broad spectrum – from something that is simply not working right, to suggestions on how we have designed specific features; from new things you want us to create, to less tangible things like our branding. We have to bring this all together and determine a balanced response. This means we sometimes need to change our approach as we go along, and figure out how best to communicate that change. And even when we choose to make changes to a product– the change can be immediate, or it could be in a few weeks or months.

In Windows Live, figuring out how best to balance all the feedback we receive is quite important, because often we get contradictory feedback. One person’s “improvement” is another person’s “unnecessary feature.” A good example in the recent Hotmail update is the update itself – we had some customers who wanted the change “right away” and wondered when we would deploy, and others who wanted us “not to change anything.” Managing this conflicting feedback is part of designing software on a large scale. In the end, we try to find the right balance by picking the right features and changes, on the right schedule, with the right communication plan.

As we look at feedback, we find it falls into three general areas:
Things that aren’t working as planned

First, there are times when something that we built isn’t working as you (or we) expect. This could be that our product isn’t living up to what we intended to deliver, or it could simply be a bug or issue that we didn’t catch in our internal testing, or that only became visible when the product was released to the public. In general, these are things that we want to make sure we fix. During a beta, we get a lot of feedback that falls in this category, and many of the issues are new issues which we only uncover through the beta process. These can be things that don’t get discovered until we have millions of people using our products, and that’s one of the important reasons that we release betas. As we make fixes, some of these will get packaged in a refresh to the beta, some will come in the final release, and others get fixed within our back-end infrastructure and don’t require you to download anything new. We measure our response to these reports by changes in the software that address the issues.
Things we would have liked to do

The next category of feedback is suggestions for features that are aligned with the goals we’ve set for the product, but, for one reason or another, we chose not to do. These are things we would have liked to do and probably thought about, but we chose to do other features first because we believed most of you would find them to be of higher value. These are often some of the hardest trade-offs to make because we are balancing different perspectives. Something that is critical for one person may be only nice to have for another. The good news is that we intend our value propositions to be enduring and so we will get to a number of these updates in the future. So we will consider these features and suggestions as we plan future updates to our software. We try to avoid promising features in next releases, and instead talk about new features when we have a clear plan to deliver them in our products.
Things we decided against

The last category of feedback is for feature requests that conflict with other feature requests, or that don’t fit into the larger goals of our product offering. We look over this type of feedback carefully, and when we know something does not fit into our product scope we do our best to make sure we’re communicating this clearly. While not everyone will agree with our decisions, we do try to be clear about our reasoning, and let you know what to expect.
Letting you know where we’re headed

Hopefully that provides a little more insight into the different types and categories of feedback we receive, how we use it, and how you should expect us to respond. While we cannot respond to every reported issue or suggestion, we do read through all the feedback and will use this blog to summarize what we’ve heard, and summarize any changes we’ve made. In subsequent blog posts we’ll cover some of the recent feedback we’ve been receiving on Hotmail, SkyDrive, Messenger, and the rest of Windows Live Essentials, and how we’re using this feedback to release additional updates to our products.

As always, please continue to send us your thoughts – here on our blog, in other social media and in our support forums. We won’t respond to every suggestion, but we’re definitely listening and bringing this into our discussions on what to build next.

Developers are wasting no time building applications on top of the newly released API for Facebook Places. Earlier this week mobile game SCVNGR announced its integration and today it’s PlacePop.

The stated purpose of the PlacePop app is to let people begin to organize, visualize and make use of the stream of “check-in” data on Facebook. The benefits for users include the ability to see what places are trending among your friends, track statistics about your own check-ins, and see your entire location history, see what places are most popular in your friends’ network, and get a real-time feed of where your friends are.

Business owners would benefit as well because PlacePop would provide local recommendations, loyalty programs and ultimately rewards via the Facebook platform. Through both mobile and web-based applications, PlacePop would provide businesses with a marketing platform for reaching their customer base through Facebook Places.

PlacePop believes that local advertising through Facebook Places would represent an ever bigger opportunity for third party developers than social gaming. While the social gaming/virtual goods market is estimated to reach $1.6 billion in 2010, the company cites figures suggesting that the traditional local advertising market was valued at $141.3 billion in 2008. The digital side of local advertising is expected to grow from $14 billion in 2008 to $32.1 billion in 2013.

The only problem is that by packaging up data from the way people use Facebook Places, the service is doing nothing to alleviate the public’s privacy concerns over the service. Judging by the messages spreading on Facebook, people are very worked up by the idea that your friends can tag you when they check into places. Many of these concerns are simply unwarranted since the first time that someone tries to tag you, Facebook will ask you whether you want to authorize or deny the request, or defer the decision until later. Nonetheless, the backlash is spreading fueled by a dangerous mix of truths, half-truths and outright falsehoods.

Now it’s NOT true that Facebook will automatically track your location just for being logged into the site. But that doesn’t mean that all privacy concerns are unwarranted. Personally I would be unlikely to use PlacePop because it would mean giving the application access to my Places data for marketing purposes. I get enough advertising in my life and I’d like recommendations to be purely based on where my friends are going, without commercial messages mixed in. There would have to be some pretty serious benefits, such as hefty discounts at my favorite local businesses, to convince me otherwise.

I might also think twice about actually using Facebook Places knowing that friends could use PlacePop to gete a live feed of my real-time location. I have over 450 friends on Facebook and as much as I value my interactions with them, I don’t really want to make it quite that easy for them to track me. It’s also not clear to me whether a friend using PlacePop would be giving the application access to my data as well as their own.

PlacePop is probably on to something when it talks about the business opportunity in local advertising. But they need to think carefully about the privacy issues and genuine benefits for users.

Today we’re releasing an update to Windows Live Essentials 2011 beta. One of the main reasons we release betas is to allow early adopters to enjoy our products and provide feedback on their experience. First, we want to say thank you for your help. For Messenger alone, we had over 3 million unique users, 3.5 million updates to display pictures, 6.2 million video calls, and 7.6 million updates to status messages.

Your beta feedback and usage has helped shape the many improvements we’ve made and continue to make across Messenger, Photo Gallery, Movie Maker, Writer, Mail, and Family Safety. Today I’d like to summarize some of the more visible changes you’ll see in today’s update, and we’ll follow up with more details in later posts.
Performance and quality of service improvements

We’re always working to improve the performance and quality of our services and we’ve made significant progress in this area in today’s beta update. This includes things like decreasing the time it takes to start each program or render each webpage, and improving the quality of your experiences. It often takes hundreds of small improvements and optimizations to better the final experience. Here are some of the many improvements you’ll see in this area:

* A quicker Messenger – The time it takes to sign in, and to refresh contacts and social feeds, as well as animation speed, are all faster than in previous versions of Messenger.
* More efficient video chat - Messenger video chat uses 30% fewer CPU resources by offloading work to the GPU.
* Better facial recognition - Photo Gallery facial recognition is improved significantly and works more quickly.
* Larger movie uploads - Movie Maker will upload higher resolution movies to SkyDrive (480x640 vs. the previous 320x480).
* Higher bit-rate movies - Movie Maker now supports higher quality (bit-rate) content.
* Better spell-checking - Writer has significantly improved the quality of its spell-checking.
* Better integration with Office - Writer is much better at retaining all formatting when you copy and paste from Word and other Microsoft Office programs.
* Better handling of Gmail – Mail now automatically handles Gmail’s spam and trash folders properly.
* Faster web filtering - Family Safety web filtering is 35% faster than in the previous version.

In addition, we’ve been able to improve the quality of the software and have fixed over 75% of reported crashes. We’re not always able to reproduce all of the reported crashes internally, but we do look at this on an ongoing basis.
Facebook chat in Messenger

Many of you have been asking for Facebook chat, and it’s finally here. More than half of all Messenger customers also use Facebook. With the previous beta, you got a rich social view that brought together all your updates (including those from Facebook) and gave you one place to see and comment on them. With the new Facebook chat integration, you now also have one place to chat with all your friends. And if you use Facebook but don’t use Messenger today, you now have an always-on “people app” on your PC that gives you instant access and notifications as people come online in Facebook or Messenger.
From a technical perspective, this is a significant task. We’re connecting Messenger’s ~300 million customers (who are already connected to Yahoo! Messenger and Office Communicator) to Facebook’s ~500 million customers. To make sure this happens smoothly while Windows Live and Facebook both build up the needed back-end infrastructure, we’ll start by releasing this chat capability in the US, UK, France, Brazil, Germany, and Russia today. We’ll continue to expand this offering to additional regions over time.

We know some of you want to connect Facebook to Windows Live, while others prefer to keep things separate. This is a major part of our design and you get to decide when to connect Facebook, and if you do what types of activities you want to allow, including chat. You can change your preferences at any time from your profile page.
Quick previews and improved tree view in Photo Gallery

One of the benefits of the new ribbon user interface in Windows Live Essentials is the ability it gives you to preview a change before you apply it simply by hovering over the option. With the beta update today, we’ve also added preview capabilities to the “Find” tab in the ribbon. So before you apply a filter (date, rating, people tags), you can hover over one of those filters and see the results instantly.

We’ve also added back date and keyword to the tree on the left hand side. While we know many customers will use the Find ribbon to sort through their pictures, we heard loud and clear that others found the tree more useful.

The tree helps to sort pictures
Flickr video publishing and Snapshot in Movie Maker

With the new Snapshot feature in Movie Maker, you can select a single frame from a video as it appears in the preview window and add it to your movie. This allows you to quickly grab an image that you want to keep or perhaps use for your movie’s intro or closing.

In addition, because we know many of you use Flickr for photo sharing and have enjoyed publishing to Flickr right from Photo Gallery, we’ve extended support to Movie Maker, so that you can now publish videos directly from Movie Maker or Photo Gallery to Flickr too.

We hope you’ll download today’s update of the Windows Live Essentials 2011 beta and try out the changes. And today, in addition to English, Spanish, French, Dutch, Portuguese, Japanese, and Simplified Chinese, you can also now get the beta in Russian or German. In this post I covered just a few of the things you’ll notice when you use the new beta update. In subsequent posts we’ll go into more detail on other improvements we’ve made, as well as feedback we’ve received on the new Hotmail.

Today is the day that the Windows Phone team has been driving towards, and we’re very excited to say that we’ve reached the biggest milestone for our internal team – the release to manufacturing (RTM) of Windows Phone 7! While the final integration of Windows Phone 7 with our partners’ hardware, software, and networks is underway, the work of our internal engineering team is largely complete.

Windows Phone 7 is the most thoroughly tested mobile platform Microsoft has ever released. We had nearly ten thousand devices running automated tests daily, over a half million hours of active self-hosting use, over three and a half million hours of stress test passes, and eight and a half million hours of fully automated test passes. We’ve had thousands of independent software vendors and early adopters testing our software and giving us great feedback. We are ready.

I last posted on this blog when we reached the Technical Preview milestone, and we’ve received some great feedback since then which we’ve been able to respond to and improve the smart design throughout the OS. For example, folks loved the Facebook integration in the People Hub, but they also wanted ways to filter their contacts so only the Facebook friends they really know will show up in their contact list – we’ve added support for that. We’ve also made it easy to “like” a post right from the People Hub, or quickly post a message to someone’s Facebook wall directly.

This has been one of the most incredible product development efforts I’ve ever been a part of. Today’s milestone is exciting not just because of what we’ll deliver to customers later this year, but how it sets us up for success over the long term in the mobile space… we’re really just getting started.

We reached today’s milestone because of the tremendous efforts of the entire team including our partners, early adopters, and independent software developers providing feedback. I want to send a huge THANK YOU to this extended team– we couldn’t have done it without you!