It is hard to believe that with just 2 ½ years behind us, we’re on our way to deliver the forth major update to Channel 9. We hope this will be released in beta form in about a month.
We’re focusing on 4 things in this major release:
1. Experience – Ajax may be all the rage, but it might not necessarily be the best experinece for a message board and forums. We’ve experimented with the experience on 10, learnt what has worked and what hasn’t and think we’re on the path to deliver one of the best conversation experiences on the web. We worked really close with the Niners to figure out an experience that flows well, is easy to participate in for the high volume discussions that take place on our sites. In fact we have a logo from that famous discussion. 
This totally related to a recent post made on Dare’s blog, in reference to the talk Marissa Mayer gave at Web 2.0 (more on techmeme), Dare writes:
If you are a developing a consumer web site whose revenue depends on the number of page views you get, you need to print out that post and nail it to every bulletin board in your offices. One big problem with the AJAX craze that has hit the Web is how much slower websites have become now that using Flash and DHTML to add “richness” to Web applications is becoming more commonplace. My mind now boggles at the fact that I now see loading pages that last several seconds when visiting Web sites more and more these days.
So we’re trying to strike a balance there and I think we finally got it.
2. A common code base - All of the communities (past and future) that are ran and built out of my team: Channels 9 and 10, Student Union and even www.VisitMix.com will all run on the same code-base with a common infrastructure. We’re going to strive to maintain a unique style and tone that each audience deserves, do a better job of cross-linking when appropriate and leverage the power of the overall network. This experience is built from the ground up using ASP.NET 2.0, SQL 2005, XHTML and Atlas. Most of this code is running today with Channel 10.
3. Making content easier to find- We have content being created across DPE and around the globe for both Channel 9 and 10. Thank you. The new design focuses on bubbling up all new content to our homepage so that we can make shows, screencasts, podcasts more discoverable. We’ll still have a space where we control editorially what is happening, but we want to bring all new media to the homepage. In the new design our UI scales and gives visibility to it all. Soon Channel 9 will ship its 1000th piece of media, we need to create an experience that works with this.
4. Expanding the types of content we support- We’re taking our existing tag centers to the next level. Our plan is in addition to aggregating video, audio and screencasts into a single view and we want to enable Microsoft employees to upload draft whitepapers (wiki based with revision history) , samples from our sandbox, and relevant content from other sites into this view as well.
A fun part of the design is that we’re collaborating with the folks from eboy (http://hello.eboy.com/eboy/index.php) to create a set of mastheads for Channel 9 that we’d rotate through as folks navigate the site. The design work from EBoy was the inspiration for the design of the very first version of Channel 9. The mastheads will be similar to this, will be about 150 x 750 in size and will highlight cool moments in Developer, Channel 9 and Microsoft history. We’ll rotate through them as people navigate through the site. Our hope also is that the graphically inclined in our community will also create their own renditions, adding to the mix. Some ideas we have so far for mastheads are famous moments in Microsoft, C9 and Developer history that we want to pay tribute too in this effort like:
- Building 18 with our team active in front
- Bill Hill Interview – walking around the wooded of campus, should be pretty visual, maybe a map of the path they walk
- Bill Gates Interview – very popular video, him in his office mainly
- The first team video – a full set, 5 distinct characters (even though three have black shirts on )
- WM_IN / Hoppers– Famous women in technology
- PDC – LA Convention Center
- Visual Basic 1.0
So today, we shipped sreenshots of this new Channel 9 to give everyone a sneak peak of what this next version will look like. Please take a moment to check it out and give us your feedback.
We’re listening and we hope that by working with you we’ll continue to keep Channel 9 one of the finest developer communities on the web.
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