Since late February 2006, Microsoft has been running the Windows Live Expo classfieds service. I’ve been genuinely impressed with Microsoft Live and like the fact that Microsoft is joining the race in creating innovative, and most importantly open web services.

At the start of 2006 Microsoft decided to get big on being small by spending $120,000,000 on an advertising / rebranding campaign. You can read my thoughts on this in a post I wrote the day of press release. Essentially what Microsoft wants to do is become smaller in the eyes of consumers in order to bring the company closer to the people. We’ve seen this in Microsoft’s commercial campaigns where it claims ‘the people’ are what make Microsoft and its products valuable.

My point is that Microsoft needs to put their money to work and actually practice what they preach.

While working on a product that you may or may not see (still determining its viability) I was interested in working with Live Expo, among other classifieds sites. The following is a conversation I had with the Microsoft Live Expo team:

Me (contact through web form):

“I would like to see an API for posting and finding listings.”

Them:

“Thank you for contacting Windows Live Expo Beta my name Is Steve. I understand you you are asking if there is a plan to add a API to the service.

First of all thank you for taking the time to email us . I apologize for the delay in getting back to you.
Currently during this stage of the Live Expo site this feature is not showing as coming online as of yet.
But we are just in the first stages of the beta testing of Live Expo.

I encourage you to go to the blog for Live Expo at http://spaces.msn.com/teamexpo/
You can send your feedback to the Live Expo site by clicking on the Contact us link at the bottom of the Expo page.

Sincerely
Steve B
Windows Live Expo Support”

Me:

“Are you considering an API for future developments?

I am a developer and I would like to know if I should plan to use a Live Expo API in the future.

Thanks
Andy”

Them:

Dear Andy,

Thank-you for contacting Windows Live Expo Support, my name is Tammy. I see you are inquiring about API. Please visit the blog that the developers have set up and post this questions there. http://spaces.msn.com/teamexpo/

Send our Product teams feedback comments or issues that you have with the Windows Live Expo Beta.
The more feedback that you send, the better Windows Live Expo Beta can be.

All feedback may be sent to http://feedback.live.com .
Click the product you would like to leave feedback about and submit the form.

Regards,
Tammy
Windows Live Expo Support Team

Thanks for helping out Microsoft. None of these interactions added any value to my experience nor did they help me out in any manner. Now, if they knew me as they should have I would have gotten an email from them when they release an API – instead of reading it on O’Reilly Radar. This is an example of poor edge management. They spent over a hundred million dollars to appear like they care about their users and developers but they haven’t gotten any closer to us.

Needless to say it is hard to find classfieds sites with API’s. Live Expo added it, but it only pulls listings and does not allow for push. My comment on their blog has yet to be answered as to whether a push API will be implemented. Craigslist, Yahoo classifieds, Google Base, Oodle, etc do not have APIs. I think this is a little ridiculous since these services rely on content and the value behind the services is the content. Why not give developers the ability to post content. Sure, this opens the services up for spammers but use Google’s method of registering an API key that works only from a registered domain. Figure out a spam solution instead of just not offering the service.

tags: microsoft, classifieds, Live Expo, web services