One of the things I hear a lot when I talk to people is "how/why do you do that at Microsoft"?  I sense that there is a certain amount of mystique associated with us, and I suspect that sometimes the lack of transparency into the way things get done can breed myths (some of it obviously not so positive!).  One thing I learned in a communication class a long time ago was that human beings have a tendency to fill in the gaps and create reasons to relate two seemingly disparate data points.

On my recent trip around the world, a common theme was "why have there not been more features added to theSpoke?"  So today, I thought I'd try to de-mystify that.

We started theSpoke less than 1 year ago.  In fact, I remember launching it from Singapore on Thanksgiving last year (late November).  We launched it quietly, because we didn't want to make a big deal about it, and we wanted to make sure that this was a community for students.  In the beta launch, students told other students who then told other students...  We started with around 50 students in the US, and a few of our developers in Singapore, and soon, we had people from over 100 countries on the site, either browsing or participating.  Some of their blogs were in languages other than English, which was cool.

We soon came to the realization that in order for theSpoke to be a global community, we had to make theSpoke available in more languages.  Although we had a lot of features we wanted to add to theSpoke, including an UI overhaul, we thought that it was important for us to take the time to localize the site into different languages so that more students from around the world can participate.  So I made the decision that after the worldwide site introduced Hubs and My Network (which we had to do to support the Imagine Cup), other than fixing bugs, we would focus our precious development resources on making the site available, at first in 9 additional languages, then we added 5 more for a total of 14 more languages.

In the hopper were work that we had started to extend theSpoke (by exposing the APIs and web services).  We had also developed a mobile blogging component, a draft of the spec for SMS, and had also introduced Files (for upload and download) on the worldwide site.  Most of the additional work were put on hold as we prepared to launch the Simplified Chinese version, then the Japanese version, then Portuguese, German, and Spanish all at the same time (in time for the Imagine Cup finals in Brazil!).  Then we launched French, Traditional Chinese, Russian, and the most recent, Korean.  In beta are Romanian, Hungarian, Polish, Greek, and Italian.

We are now going to turn our attention to some feature work.  First to come, is the long promised extend theSpoke.  Mario and our developers are now testing the Extend theSpoke API set.  It will come with a starter kit, and we are figuring out a way for people to get some hosting space to test their creation.  I think this is an important milestone in the life of theSpoke -- and I'd like to do something around this to celebrate the upcoming 1 year birthday of theSpoke if we can pull off an interesting community feature integration in time.  Mario, who has been the tireless champion of this project, is in the process of testing this feature, so if you're interested in getting a sneak preview drop him a note.  He would really like to make this feature available in the next few weeks, but needs help to ensure that it isn't going to accidentally break everything else when it launches.

Another feature that we are going to re-release soon is an updated Files.  Soon after we launched Files we realized that the architecture behind it was not right, but since we had already gone down the path of localization, we didn't have development resources to fix Files.  But now it's in the final testing stages, so we will re-launch Files in the next few weeks, and then localize the feature to make that available in the different languages soon after.

So, theSpoke team has been busy, but I also realize that the availability of theSpoke in a new language isn't necessarily apparent to the members participating in an existing language.  However, in less than 1 year I think theSpoke has come a long ways in terms of building a solid worldwide foundation, and now, we're on the verge of finally being able to move forward together both as a global community and as a local community.

In less than 2 months, theSpoke will officially turn 1 year old.  I look forward to its birthday party, and hope that you will join me and the team in celebrating all that's to come in its 2nd year.