In the unlikely event that anyone was looking for me specifically, I hope you were successful.  I spent most of my time at or near the Metro Style Apps booth, which was fairly front-and-center in the Expo hall.  As I didn’t have a session of my own to present, my primary purpose was to answer questions and demo different pieces of the Windows 8 user experience upon request.  Because of this, I took to identifying myself as a “booth babe” when asked about my role at the conference.

Of course, my other primary purpose was to support my colleagues who were presenting.  Most relevant in this regard would be the talk given by Priya Vaidyanathan, the primary PM for the Windows 8 Search experience.  As the primary dev for this feature I was very excited to attend Priya’s excellent presentation (“Search: Integrating into the Windows 8 search experience”) and to help her address attendees’ questions afterward.  If you’re at all interested in how the search experience works in Windows 8, or would like to know how your app can add value to it, I highly recommend watching the video.

Other great session videos:

• Jensen Harris’ brilliant “big picture talk” from the first day: 8 traits of great Metro style apps.
• My friend and fellow SVC team member David Washington explains how to build great support for different screen sizes, aspect ratios, and DPIs.
• SVC team PM Lead Ed Averett gives an overview of how to build great “gallery” Metro style apps.
• Many, many more at the Channel 9 Build 2011 site.

Misc //Build Links

• Fellow “Metro Style Apps” booth babe Raymond Chen shared some notes about his experience at the conference, including documentation of a few of our booth antics.
• Cori Drew’s blog series “My week at //Build/” – unfortunately I didn’t get to meet Cori but her write-up is a great read!

I’m (seriously) overjoyed to say that I will there representing my team along with a few of our Program Managers.  If you will be attending, feel free to track me down and say hi.  I’ll post some updates about my schedule here when I’m at liberty to do so, and will also post (and tweet) some links which I expect many of you following along from home will want to check out.

In the meantime, the event website and Twitter account are probably the best places to watch for official details and updates about the event.

It’s going to be an exciting week!

The new “B8″ blog is making this a tradition with a post titled Introducing the Team, and I decided I should do the same.  So before I say any more, any guesses about which team from the list is mine?

If you guessed “Search, View, and Command” then you guessed right!

You’re also right if you guessed that this is an evolution of the Find & Organize team from Windows 7.  However, the new is far from a simple rebranding of the old.  In fact, I would estimate that only about half of our team’s roster can be traced back to F&O.  Along the same lines, our charter has evolved as well.  More about that another day

Stay tuned for the B8 blog to learn more about our team and the work we’re doing.  You can follow @BuildWindows8 on Twitter to get notified about the latest updates.

MS trivia: Our team is commonly abbreviated as “SVC,” which has on occasion caused some confusion.  That’s because the SVC abbreviation has long been used to refer to the Silicon Valley Campus down in Mountain View, CA.  Our team’s offices are in Redmond, WA.

Yes, that’s their e-bill notification (the only thing you get) being flagged as “very suspicious.”

Their solution?  Tell customers to ignore the warnings and add their address to your e-mail service’s “allow list.”  According to the customer service rep, it’s been this way for years.  How hard can this be to correct?  If anything, I would think bills like this should be using SenderID to make the mail *more* trustworthy, not doing whatever they’re doing that looks “very suspicious.”

In contrast, this is how they *should* make their bills appear:

And as of Wednesday we have finally shared a first glimpse at what we are (for now) calling Windows 8!

Here are three videos from Wednesday:

Jensen Harris’ overview video

Here’s a video of our group’s director of program management, Jensen Harris, giving an overview of some of the new user experience we’ve built.

Steven Sinofsky on-stage at D9

That video was posted just after our division president, Steven Sinofsky, gave an interview and on-stage demo (with VP Julie-Larson Green).

Video here (no embedding available)

Mike Angiulo at Computex

Finally, one of my favorite presenters, Corporate Vice President Mike Angiulo, demonstrates “Windows 8” at partner preview event in Taipei, Taiwan, for COMPUTEX.

I found the ads hilarious and edgy.

I also found them thought-provoking because the issues they highlighted are important ones which people (myself included) often take for granted. The fact that ad was jarring was, in my opinion, it’s brilliance. It made me laugh, and then feel bad and thoughtful about the fact that I laughed. You see, my brain had filed these issues in the “past” category, the sort of thing you get used to seeing used in this sort of humor.  When was the last time you heard anyone talk about Tibet or the rainforest?  Seeing these ads made me realize these things are still happening and jarred my brain into realizing its mistake.  And with any luck, correcting it.

Mission accomplished, I think.

Framing the discussion and defining terms
Ebert devotes a large (indeed perhaps the largest) portion of the article to a vain attempt at defining the term “art.”  Crucially, he neglects to define the other half of the equation he proposes: “video game.”  This is not to say that Ebert doesn’t have a definition, indeed it seems he does.  Instead I’d like to point out his unwillingness to share it with us or court any kind of consensus about it.  Ebert says:

Santiago might cite a immersive game without points or rules, but I would say then it ceases to be a game and becomes a representation of a story, a novel, a play, dance, a film. Those are things you cannot win; you can only experience them.

This seems either disingenous or daft.  He quite nearly states that a video game cannot be art because if it were to be art, it would cease to be a video game.  It is unfortunate that Ebert did not elaborate on what he believes constitutes a video game.  I believe this is the most interesting angle from which to approach the issue, in contrast to his approach of attempting to define art, failing, and then sneaking in an easily contested definition for a different term which turns his argument into a tautology.

A video game’s purpose
Ebert seems to imply that a video game’s purpose is to have “points” and to be “won,” dismissing any value in the associated experience.  My question to Mr. Ebert is then: what is the purpose of a book?  Is it not simply to be read according to a set of rules?  Surely one can’t go about reading page 42, then page 12, then page 100.  This would violate the rules which stipulate you begin on the first page and continue, in sequence, to the last one.  One could then argue that by following these rules and ultimately reading the last page, you have “won” the book.  Perhaps if the book contains 400 pages, we could consider those to be “points.”

No one would argue that the ordering of the pages, the rules for navigating the book’s content, is likely to be artistic.  I am thus confused why Ebert fixates on the fact that video games have an end and some mechanism to guide you from start to finish.  Many other artistic mediums have such things.

I propose that the distinguishing characteristic of a video game versus, say, a film – is interactivity.  Both share many of the same artistic elements: visuals, narrative, storytelling mechanics, acting, musical scores, and so on.  However films and books are not interactive.  That is, they do not adapt to input from the viewer.  They are static.

If Ebert would like to separate the notion of an interactive film from a video game, then I invite him to make such an argument.  However, I must note that such a redefinition would inevitably result in the reclassification of existing content.  I would have no hesitation in proposing that Mass Effect is an interactive film at least as much as it is a video game.  There’s no getting around the fact that much of the content we have today fits into both of those classifications (and perhaps others, if you wish to invent them).  Halo is undeniably a video game, and the multiplayer aspect is arguably nothing else.  But the campaign is about experiencing the story rather than achieving victory.  Just like a film or a novel, you cannot lose Halo.  You can only stop before you reach the end.

Parts versus the whole
Regardless of whether a video game itself can constitute art, it seems obvious that they can contain it.  Game developers employ artists to create art for their games.  This extends far beyond visuals.  The musical score for Halo, for instance, is phenomenal in its own right.  The same can be said of film.  So how does a film become art?  Do we measure the sum of its artistic components?  The artistry of its music?  Of its narrative?  Do we critique the performances of its actors?  Video games have all of these same elements, which themselves I believe Mr. Ebert will agree can be art.  So I ask, Mr. Ebert, what do you believe elevates a particular film to be worthy of being called art?  Is it the sum of the artistic value of its elements?  Is that sum orthogonal to the artistic value of the film itself?  Or must that sum meet some threshold which allows it to be considered, yet not be enough on its own to merit awarding the title?

Argument from ignorance
Ebert disappoints me by confessing that he has no firsthand experience with the medium, let alone with highly regarded specific examples.  This seems rather like an illiterate person trying to explain to me why Shakespeare wasn’t an artist.  Even if he stumbles upon a fair point, he’s not likely to frame it with anything I’d call insightful.  Ebert’s failure to recognize the importance of defining video games likely stems from this ignorance, and not from any ill will or intellectual ineptitude.  If that illiterate man had been explained the purposes of recipe books and instruction manuals, and then asked whether or not he thought books were a form of art, I wonder what he would say.

Kellee offered to provide Ebert with a Playstation 3 system to experience a game called Flower.  I am not familiar with this game, but I have some more mainstream recommendations to make.  I already mentioned Mass Effect and Halo, two of my favorite game series which each create massive (and ever-expanding) universes with engaging stories, deep and memorable characters, and top-notch performances from their respective voice actors.  I could recommend many others, but for someone familiar with the world of film, these may prove particularly enlightening.

What do you think?
Do you have an opinion on the subject?  Did I get something wrong?  Do you have an example you think is the epitomy of art from the video game industry?  Leave a comment and let me know.

Unfortunately, it seems they couldn’t live up to their promise.

The Investigation

I started out by reading up a bit on both devices.  I read complaints about performance on the Nook, but also saw mention that an update was released which improved the situation significantly.  The specs told me that the Nook was slightly thicker and ever so slightly heavier, but otherwise roughly the same dimensions and basic capabilities.  In theory the color touch screen and Android-powered nature of the device made it appealing.  In theory.

So one afternoon I took a drive over to the B&N store in Bellevue to take a good look at the Nook in-person.  My first impression was that the industrial design looked cheap compared to the Kindle 2 I’d seen.  I played around with the device a bit, and found the page-turning speed acceptable but not exactly impressive.  Navigating the device’s various functions seemed relatively cumbersome, but I didn’t have a basis to compare this to the Kindle at the time.

As I was looking at the demo device on display, a salesperson asked if I needed help and tried to tell me how much they’d like to get a Nook of their own.  I inquired about the return policy, and was told to wait while they called down a manager to talk to me about the device.  The manager (or supervisor, or whatever she was) was very enthusiastic about the device, but I was put off a bit by her pitch.  First, she told me there was a 15% restocking fee if I returned the device (I forget if it was a 14-day or 30-day return policy).  She said this was “standard for these kind of electronics” to which I replied that the Kindle did not have such a fee and neither did stores like Best Buy and Fry’s.  I also inquired whether there was a web browser on the device, and she said “no but the Kindle doesn’t have one either.”  I pointed out that the Kindle actually does have a basic browser, and she insisted it was only the Kindle DX which offered this feature.  Of course, I quickly confirmed using my Droid that she was indeed incorrect.

Given all this, I decided to leave B&N without one, and a couple days later I ordered a Kindle.

The Arrival

I ordered the Kindle late on a Thursday evening, and decided to take advantage of Amazon’s same-day delivery option, a concept which nearly blew my mind, to have it arrive on Friday.  Sure enough, it arrived at my building Friday afternoon.

Unpacking the Kindle is a delightful experience.  The device arrives pre-programmed with your Amazon account.  There was no registration process of any kind, it was as if this device knew me and was anxious to be my new reading companion.  The Kindle store was already populated with book recommendations based on my Amazon history, and the device happily sync’d the two books I’d purchased on the Kindle for iPhone app a few months before.

I was immediately glad I’d chosen this over the Nook.  Amazon had clearly put significant effort into building a complete end-to-end experience with minimal friction to purchasing and reading books or other content.  In some respects, it even seemed they’d outdone Apple, who many consider to be the king of this kind of execution.

The device looks and feels solid.  The plastic feels more expensive and higher quality than that of the Nook.  The size and weight are pretty much ideal for its purpose.  The button placement is well thought-out, and the labels make it trivial to pick up and start using.  They duplicate certain buttons (like “Next Page”) and seem to have considered all the different ways you might hold the device when reading on a park bench, in bed, etc.

Navigating the device may not be as delightful as an iPhone, but it’s easy to figure out and get around.  Common tasks are easy, what feels a little clunkier are secondary tasks like selecting text within a document – but it’s still easier than it seemed on the Nook.

The display updates slightly faster for page-turns than the Nook, which seems just fast enough to not be annoying when reading.  That is, the Nook is only marginally slower, but it seems to cross a threshold where it starts to feel slow.

Web Browser

The Kindle web browser is very basic, and given the performance characteristics of the hardware and lack of a pointer, it’s not hard to see why.  Typical web browsing tasks simply won’t work on this hardware.  That said, I think the basic browser is quite useful, and mainly for one application: Google Reader.  Now, to be honest, I haven’t spent a lot of time actually using this in practice… but the short time I did spend using it, it felt quite usable and useful.  I imagine I will use that regularly in the future, unlike most any other web browsing functionality.

One gripe with the browser was the inability to re-order bookmarks.  Or at least, if you can re-order them, I couldn’t figure it out.  Instead I had to delete all the built-in bookmarks (about a dozen) which is a slow enough process, just to get Google Reader to be at the top.  Given that the browser is labeled as an “experimental” feature at this point, I can’t really complain too much.

Verdict

At this point I’m pretty confident I’ll be keeping the Kindle.  At first I thought maybe an iPad or similar slate PC might obsolete it, but now I’m not so sure.  The iPad, for example, is about twice the weight of the Kindle.  I don’t think that’s going to be comfortable for extended reading sessions.  Once I get to try an iPad myself I’ll try to update this post with my impressions with regard to its usefulness as a book reader.  Until then, I’m happy to recommend the Kindle to any avid readers or gadget freaks.

In the responses to her post I saw a few comments along the lines of, “ageism happens, get over it.”  One commentor wrote:

“Truthfully, younger Folk will just not like you, simply because of your age, and in the workplace that has insidious ways of working against you no matter how good you are.”

This is completely counter to my experience.  If I ever had any preconceptions about how “with it” the older / more senior folks at Microsoft were, it didn’t take long for them to be washed away when I actually started working there.  In fact, one thing I love about my job is how closely I’m able to work with incredibly bright people who’ve learned so very much over their years in the industry or at the company.  I take every chance I get to learn from their experience. 

Yes I (and other younger folk) could shut them out and spend 20 years learning the same lessons the hard way, but that’s a terrible waste of the evolutionary gift that’s done the most to set our species apart from every other – our ability to pass on knowledge and experience from one generation to the next.

If you ask one of the people Mary Jo calls Millenials (which I read as ”you kids”), I’m sure most of us would be happy to extole the virtues of young engineers.  Today’s college grads know what it’s like to grow up with their own PC and cell phone.  They’ve probably gleaned a lot just from seeing their parents and teachers work with technology.  Their social paradigms have changed – many won’t know what it’s like to lose touch with friends from college or high school after they graduate and move away… they’ve got Facebook to automate the previously daunting task of keeping tabs on dozens or hundreds of people you’ve known.  Their world is smaller, their stages of life more connected with fewer seams. 

But the truth is you don’t have to be born in the 80s or 90s to understand these things.  I bet you Steve Jobs does, and he’s 54.  As much as the world has changed over the last couple decades, a heck of a lot has stayed the same.  Sure, maybe kids these days date differently, but I’m willing to bet that looking for ways to minimize your vulnerability and potential for embarassment is nothing new.  The medium is all that’s really changed.  You don’t have to be young to notice these trends or to empathize with young customers.  The best creative minds in any industry need to be able to put themselves in their customers shoes, whether you’re designing for someone 20 years your junior or 30 years your senior.

So I guess mine’s a two-part answer.  First, if you’ve got experience, it can be a tremendous benefit to you and to those with whom you share it.  Second, the ability to empathize with and understand others is an invaluable skill at any age.

As always, this is all just my personal non-corporate-approved perspective and may not reflect the experience of anybody anywhere (at Microsoft or otherwise).

Last month I traded in my car.  This involved having the dealer pay off the remainder of my auto loan which was financed through Chase.  The dealer told me it would be paid off, the account would be closed, and I wouldn’t have to worry about it any more.  Sure enough, the Chase website soon showed my account as closed and paid off.  Great, right?

Well, Chase decided last week to withdraw my usual monthly payment amount from my checking account despite the fact that the account was paid off.  Apparently their auto-pay system isn’t smart enough to know it shouldn’t draw payments when there’s no balance.  Ridiculous to be sure (in the past I’d used Audi Financial and they never had this problem), but I expected I’d just call them and they’d make it right.  After all, the payment shows up on my Chase.com page, complete with a transaction number.

Unfortunately it isn’t that simple.  They’re insisting that I mail or fax bank records and web site screenshots “proving” that the funds were deducted from my account, even though their own website clearly has a record of the transfer.  On the phone they gave me the run around with nonsensical explanations about how they can see all my other payments including the loan pay-off transfer, but not this additional erroneous payment because of “security reasons.”  They refuse to accept any of these details via e-mail or over the phone, and insist that I write a “cover letter” explaining the situation with all of my account details.

This is positively absurd.  If their system didn’t clearly have a record of the transaction I’d be more forgiving, but it knows it transferred the money.  It knows the date and time and has a transaction number!  Apparently that number is useless, and might as well just be a made up figure, according to the server reps I’ve spoken to.

So my question is this… after two 10+ minute phone calls, the time it takes to prepare a “cover letter,” and the time and effort to find access to a fax machine (heck I don’t even have a phone line), can I bill Chase for my time?  What about charging interest?  They’ve obviously been generating interest on my money which they essentially stole from my account.  Has anyone had experience with situations like this?  Is there any viable recourse that will make up for my lost time and money while also perhaps encouraging Chase to get their act together?

As a result of all this, when word of an office move arrives it is a safe bet that at least half the team will immediately begin compiling their own personal seniority list.  The goal of course being to see where they fall and estimate their chances at a window office.  Among the colleagues I share a hallway with, yesterday’s list compilation was group effort.

It occured to me that a lot of effort is duplicated at times like this.  For example, I’ve heard that each team’s admin was working feverishly on various logistics for the move, including compilation of just such a seniority list.  I began to wonder if there were any crafty admins out there who indirectly delegate this task by simply walking the hallway roughly 20 minutes after the move announcement is sent out and appropriating one of the various excel spreadsheets the team members had invariably just produced.

A bit of trivia:
In my roughly 4.5 years at Microsoft I have occupied 8 office locations.
Most of my office moves roughly correspond with a change in manager.
The longest I stayed in a particular office (my current one) was 1.5-2 years.
The shortest was about a month.
My office history includes being doubled up in an interior office, sitting in a “shared workspace” environment (basically a big room with about 8-10 fancy / large cubicle setups and a big common area with a projector and conference table), having rather nice window office for a few months, and most recently having a more run-of-the-mill interior office.

This time around, I fell exactly at the middle of the seniority list.  Most likely this means I’ll have my pick of non-window offices. 

Additional trivia:  The gap between me and the most senior person on the team is about 15 years.

When I went to get my phone replaced, I was informed that I would have to pay the “full price” for a new phone since I had just used my upgrade eligibility to get the iPhone 3G last summer.  That wasn’t unexpected… I had gotten a discount on the BlackJack I bought when I first switched to AT&T in 2006, then paid the full price for an iPhone in 2007, then got a 3G in 2008 at the significantly discounted price.  I was frustrated that there wasn’t a better option for dealing with a stolen phone, but I didn’t really expect AT&T to subsidize another phone 7 or 8 months later.

Not wanting to wait (as I’m quite dependent on my phone these days), I agreed to pay for the phone.  I also looked at the HTC Fuze, but was told that the price would be basically the same, roughly $400.  So I decided to buy a new iPhone 3G 8GB (smaller than my original 16GB, but it saved me $100 and I didn’t really need all that space for my usage).  As I was checking out, the salesman handed me a sheet of paper and said I needed to sign.  “What’s this for?” I asked, as it looked like a service agreement and I knew I wasn’t buying one of those.  He said, “Oh, this is just something Apple makes us to whenever we sell a phone, you have to re-sign your existing contract.  Any other phone you wouldn’t have to sign it, I don’t even know why they do it.”  I thought that was weird, but shrugged and signed it anyway.  But before I did I asked an important clarifying question: “This won’t affect my upgrade eligibility, right?  If it does I’ll just buy a used phone or get my 1G iPhone back and use that until this summer since I assume there will be a new model.”  I was incredibly explicit about this question, and he was very explicit in his response: “Nope, you’ll still be able to upgrade.”  Great.  So I bought the phone and went about my business.

Fast forward to June when I decided to grab a 3G S.  This part I’ve written about before in detail. Well, I did as suggested and went back to the AT&T store in Bellevue.  There I was told that I couldn’t get the full discount, but that I could get the “early upgrade” discount, which I think means $399 for the smaller 3G S model.  Fine, that seems good enough to me.  But they’re out of stock.  The sales guy asks me if I want to back-order one, and I say yes.  He starts the process, but hits some kind of roadblock.  He says, “Sorry, I can’t order one right now and get you the discount, but if you come back when they’re in stock we can do it.”  Fine, whatever.  I call the place a couple weeks later and am told they’re in stock.  I show up to buy the phone, someone starts ringing up my purchase, and then they hit a problem in their software, saying that I can’t get the discount until sometime next year.

She calls over a manager who explains to me that because I got a discount back in February, I can’t get another one so soon.  Wait a minute, what discount?  I was told I was paying full price in February, and was explicitly told by an employee of that store that my upgrade eligibility would not be affected.  I explain this to the manager who insists that none of his employees would have done that, and basically accuses me of lying.  I pressed the issue and he said he couldn’t do anything about it, but that he would contact his “regional supervisor” or something and request that they do some kind of override for me.  He says it’s too late to reach that person today but that he’ll take my e-mail and phone number and get back to me.

I waited.  I never got a call.  I never got an e-mail.

I went back a few weeks later and got the same run around.  This time I was told the manager wasn’t in, and was given his card.  I haven’t written to him yet, I’ve been too busy, and I’m pretty disenchanted with the whole prospect.

I’ve been a pretty good AT&T customer for several years now.  I pay extra for text messages that cost them nothing.  I never make late payments (except when their useless AutoPay system kept screwing up, so I gave up on using that ages ago).  Last year I paid a ton to to them to use my phone while I was in Europe (when I probably should have just unlocked it and bought a pay-as-you-go SIM there).

What bugs me more than not getting the discount is that they’ve made a habit of lying to me and giving me the run around instead of being straight with me.  First, when the salesman told me that buying the replacement phone wouldn’t affect my upgrade eligibility.  Second, when I was told I could get the discount if I came back when they were in stock.  And then once again when I was told that the manager would try to help me out and get back to me.

Given the hostile treatment I’ve received I may terminate my contract early, pay whatever ETF there is, and switch to another carrier – if only in protest to the way I’ve been treated by the Bellevue AT&T store employees.  So which phones and carriers look like the best options to you?  Palm Pre?  The new HTC Leo looks pretty sweet, but they don’t have any details on who will carry it or when.  Let’s hope it’s not AT&T…

I’m not in the same bucket at Raymond.  He doesn’t like driving a manual and doesn’t care to improve his ability at doing so.  However, when I bought my car I had a choice between the faster dual-clutch race transmission that Audi calls ”S-Tronic,” (which can work like an automatic or be controlled via paddle on the steering wheel) and a regular old-fashioned stick shift with a clutch pedal.

I chose the stick.  It’s what I was used to from my previous car, and it makes me feel more in control of the vehicle.  It wasn’t a simple choice, because the S-Tronic isn’t a regular automatic.  It’s lightning fast, way faster than I ever could be.  But ultimately I decided against it because I didn’t like having control and information taken away from me.  With an automatic I can’t just disengage the clutch and let the car roll forward or backward.  And with the paddle-shift option, I can’t easily tell which gear I’m in unless I look at the dash.  With a stick, I know just by feeling.

Taking that away would be like taking my debugger, my command line, or some other source of control or detailed input which I’ve come to rely on.  If you’re going to do that, you better offer something awfully compelling in return.

Despite that, I never really felt that I “got into” the whole twitter phenomenon.  I experimented with different interfaces for it… the basic Twitter web UI, the original Twadget sidebar gadget.  It was largely functional, but not the prettiest thing and had its bugs.  Eventually I stopped using it.

I’ve always had the SMS setup enabled for a small group of my former colleagues, but it was really just our own private backchannel, not the true “twitter” experience as most would describe it.

For a little while I tried various iPhone apps, like the PocketTweets web app, and later Twitterific.  But none of them really stuck.  Now I’m trying out TwitterFon and rather liking it, so maybe, just maybe I’ll start becoming a regular Twitter’er.  Why do I bother?  Well, I’ve attended three “tweet-ups” now hosted in Issaquah by my friend Chris Pirillo, the most recent of which was Thursday evening and featured special guest Chris Brogan.

This afternoon I tried to check on the state of Twitter gadgets for Windows.  Sadly, I have to say it’s not very good.  Of the slim pickings, I’ve installed one called Tweets – which to be fair is labeled as an early beta / preview release.  In terms of appearance, well, we’ll go with “acceptable” which puts it far above the competition.  In terms of features or options, well, it just doesn’t have any.

Now I’m starting to think of just writing my own.  One of the existing gadgets is a CodePlex project called Chirpr, but it looks pretty far from what I’d try to build if I just started my own.  In fact, I’d be tempted to cheat and just write one that uses .NET, or perhaps use it as an excuse to go play with Silverlight.

So now it’s time to get your feedback.  Do you Twitter?  What apps or interfaces do you use?  Do you try to read everything?  Or everything from certain people?  Or do you just respond to interesting tweets if you happen to be looking when one floats by?  Would you use a Windows (i.e. “sidebar”) gadget if there were a good one?  What features or options would be important to you in a desktop Twitter gadget or app?