Search Champs Non-NDA Session

I've seen some great stuff at Search Champs, and heard some even better ones (for instance did you know that ________ rumor is completely accurate, and that _________ happened because ________ said ________?) Problem is, so much of it is under NDA. Personally, I'm grateful for the opportunity to see these products and do what little I can to help out, but I still wish I could share more of it. Well, late today, we finally had a session we could blog about. Well, mostly, since every so often a speaker paused and said, "Oh, this isn't bloggable". At the top, we saw a demo of what Windows Local has, basically a familiarization with the service, then go off NDA (arghh). I already know all about Live Local, but I did learn a few things about Local I hadn't noticed, all of them useful. The NDA stuff? Well, it looks good. As did most of the NDA stuff. I didn't get demos of any crap, is what I'm saying. After that, Live.com Program Manager demo'd Live.com's current and some future feature. He described Live as a sort of desktop for the web, and that they are bringing in user experience expectations to the web, like right-click context menus and drag and drop. The Live.com gadgets were shown off, and we get full confirmation that the Windows Sidebar will run the Live.com gadgets, and that Windows XP will get that functionality, likely before Windows Vista ships. We're informed that you will be able to drag Live.com Gadgets off Live.com and put them on your desktop instead, which makes the whole system a lot more useful. I could see people loading up their Live.com page with every interesting Gadget, dragging Gadgets back and forth from the desktop depending on whether they needed them there more often. Lets see OS X / Yahoo do that. One thing that looked great was a TV recommendations Gadget, which will launch eventually. It talks to your Media Center PC, takes what you watch, shows you what you've watched, lets you rate them, and recommends other shows for you to watch/record. If you agree with it or just see a show you want to record, you can tell the Gadget and it'll schedule a recording. Take a look:

InsideGoogle