There is interesting news coming out of Microsoft’s TechFest event about a new research project called Social Desktop which is described as:
The Social Desktop blends the Web and PC by embedding Web oriented sharing inside your desktop, allowing every document to have the ability to have a backing social URL for sharing without having to upload or copy or move it from it's natural location. This url provides access not just to the file, but to a built in social experience which includes a rich preview of each item, comments, related items, tags, etc. Whenever friends comment with this social link via the web browser, the conversation is also available directly in Windows, and vice versa.
Essentially its a way of sharing your files with other people without having to physically move the file off your computer. Every file on the Social Desktop has a URL that you can stick in an email, post in an IM conversation, post to a website such as Digg or Facebook or potentially open up using the forthcoming online Silverlight-based version of Microsoft Office. Other people can leave comments on the files. Underpinning this is the .Net Service Bus which is part of the upcoming Azure Services platform (currently in beta).
This is a great example of RESTful techniques being employed in a useful way. One of the key tenets of REST –probably the most important tenet- is the notion of URI addressability; everything is modelled as a resource and can be pointed at using a URI. If the benefits of RESTful services aren’t obvious then Social Desktop looks to be a great way of demonstrating it.
If my understanding is correct Social Desktop only makes files available as resources but as a data guy myself I’m really interested in what else could be made available. The Social Desktop website talks about making a section of a word document or a single Powerpoint slide available as a resource but far more compelling (in my opinion) than those scenarios would be the ability to make a subset of an Excel spreadsheet available as a resource. For example, imagine I had a list of currency conversions available in a spreadsheet:
perhaps that data could be exposed as a URL such like:
and hence it becomes a recordset that I can reference from any application that talks HTTP (which,these days, is most things). Taking the idea further, perhaps the file being exposed is an XML file to which I could pass an XQuery path as part of the URI and hence make data available that way as well. Those would be incredibly enabling capabilities that, whilst giving IT departments endless headaches, could enable data to be made available in ways that are simply not possible today. Those of you familiar with Microsoft’s Gemini project should instantly realise the possibilities here – maybe I’ll explore that particular idea in a future blog entry.
Another thing to note about Social Desktop is that you sign-in to it using a Windows Live ID. That’s very fitting because if ever there were a technology synonymous with with the words “windows” and “live”, Social Desktop is it!
I really hope this gets released as a real product and the more I think about it the more I believe there’s no way they CAN’T release it – its too compelling a technology not to. I’m sure there are some seriously cool potential applications of this technology, most of which won’t have been thought up yet.
Just to play devil’s advocate to all that euphoria a little I am slightly concerned that Social Desktop could tempt people to simply leave their home computers on 24/7/365 and in these days of heightened Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) that impact cannot be taken lightly. I can’t imagine that releasing this technology into the wild would make Microsoft particularly popular with various environmental agencies. We have some people here at Conchango EMC Consulting that are becoming well-schooled in the arena of CSR so maybe I’ll raise this with them.
I look forward to hearing more about Social Desktop. Does anyone else out there think this is as interesting as I do?
-Jamie