Chris Anderson rebuffs a few of my comments about Avalon and WinForms.

"The idea that people should adopt WinForms because Avalon is 8 years out is just ridiculous. People should adopt WinForms because it is a great development platform for creating smart client applications. People should adopt WinForms because it puts them in a great position for transitioning to Avalon when they choose to."

If you don't know who Chris Anderson is, he's the public face for the Avalon team. Translation: he's an architect on the Avalon team and knows more about Avalon than probably anyone else on earth. Deep translation: what he has to say on any Avalon topic is far more important to listen to than me.

Whew, what a fun weekend. The MVP Global Summit is underway now. 1500 geeks from all over the world in one place. One MVP, thanks Craig, gave me some "Longhorns" and I was wearing those. Tons of people took pictures. Can't wait to see them. I met too many people to mention. I noticed that Gretchen and Zoe, Microsoft's famous JobsBloggers were there and were quite popular.

Here's the Feedster Query for "MVP Summit."

I'm getting a bit of misunderstanding about Kunal's Outlook posting tool. Some are worried that I'll post more to my blog and overwhelm them. First off, I'll keep that over on another blog. Right now it's at kunal.org/scoble but it might not stay there forever. That's an experimental site.

First of all, this will actually let me post LESS here. Why? Because now I won't feel compelled to post every cool thing I see on this blog. Instead, you can watch my link blog. Which is really an aggregated site, but it's aggregated based on what +I+ want on it. Nothing else.

Second, Dan J asked "what good is it if you just link to something 18 other sites point to?" Well, after reading 1400 sites, you'd be suprised how little "double linking" there is going on out there. And, you'd be suprised how much cool content is out there. But, you never know about it. Reading 1400 blogs is HARD. Normal humans won't want to do that. So, most humans will want to read someone who picks the good stuff out. I totally disagree that Dave Winer links to the stuff I'm interested in either. Watch my link blog's RSS feed over the next few weeks and see how it evolves.

Third, the real innovation here isn't for public blogs. It's for corporate knowledge management. When I left NEC I took one gig of email with me -- none of that is available to any of my former coworkers. All that knowledge is simply GONE. After 11 months at Microsoft I have hundreds of megabytes of stuff in my "resources" folder. This is a folder where I store anything interesting to me as a Microsoft employee. For instance, the internal link to get the latest Longhorn builds from. Now, if you're a new Microsoft employee, finding stuff like that is hard. It took me 11 months to build up a store of useful stuff. Why shouldn't I share that with my coworkers?

At the MVP Summit tonight I talked with a lot of people about Kumal's new Outlook feature. Some people said "why don't you use Public folders? Easy. Not discoverable. Not indexable on the intranet. Hard to email or IM links to specific things in public folders. Plus, I don't have control of public folders. Someone else might decide they don't like that folder and they'll delete it (that's happened to me at other companies). I can control my own HTTP server, though.

This is such an important feature to corporate knowledge management sharing that I can't sit still tonight. I'm serious. This feature has me tingling. It's what I've wanted for so long.

I just need to convince Kunal to hook it up to Sharepoint.

Reaction to my Windows Forms rant yesterday:

Chris Sells: Windows Forms has at least another decade in it.

Juval Lowy: The Road to Longhorn Goes through Windows Forms.

You know, Kunal's OutlookMT feature is, for me, a killer feature. One of those that'll change -- dramatically -- my life forever.

The Outlook team and Sharepoint team should hire Kunal to implement this feature ASAP. It is THAT IMPORTANT.

What does it do?

It adds a new folder to Outlook. OK, let's say Bill Gates emailed me right now. Let's say I wanted to post that email out to the world? In the old world I'd need to open up Radio UserLand, copy the email, clean up the HTML, then click post.

New "Kunal's" world? Copy the email over to the folder. It's posted. Done. No more work.

Do you have any idea how this is going to change knowledge management? You just watch!

Now, keep in mind, this isn't commercial quality. Lots of work to do. But he's responsive. I bet that by the end of the week he has it working well enough for almost everyone. The quality difference between yesterday and today is huge.

I met Bram Cohen last night at a party again. I keep running into him in places I don't expect. Don't know who he is? He's the guy who wrote BitTorrent.

He tells me he's had more than 10 million downloads. It came out in the summer of 2001. Think about that. BitTorrent has been out for less time than I've been blogging. And he's gotten 10 million downloads.

Yet another guy who has changed the world with software.

His marketing trick? He doesn't listen to those people who say he needs a marketing team. "The way to get adoption is to build a dramatically better product," he told me.

This is very astute and fits right in with what the Church of the Customer people are telling me. Build a product that people will tell their friends about and you'll have to spend less on marketing and advertising.

Holy crap. Kunal got his Outlook folder working. This thing absolutely rocks. You don't know what a big day this is in my life. I've been wanting a way to get data out of Outlook and into the real world for a very long time. Now, this is far from perfect. Needs a lot of polish to make it a commercial feature. But this now changed Outlook for me from an information silo to something where I can share with the world.

Anyway, I'll play with my aggregator blog for a while. This is where I'll drag stuff that I find interesting in the 1400+ blogs I'm reading.

Can one person change the world with software? Kunal Das just did. It'll be years, maybe, before the world realizes it, but wow. I gotta go think about what he just did for me for a while.