First, credit where credit is due. Anytime you create an MS product name that makes users think of a Beatles song, you're doing something right.

A lot has already been written about the basic functionality of Live SkyDrive, but so far I haven't heard about my favorite feature: the bouncing ball game that pops up while you are waiting for a file to upload. It was completely unexpected, and turned what should have been a dull and frustrating user experience into something surprisingly fun.

Why is this important? Because it tells me that the team really thought through the user experience and focused in on all the little details that can make or break a service, especially one in such an already crowded space.

It's interesting to watch the Live offerings evolve. I used to look at Live and see three things: Hotmail, Messenger, and Search. Now I'm starting to look at Live from a different perspective. Hotmail is the front end to a robust, massive, scalable data center. Messenger is a social graph with a quarter of a billion active nodes, which is the foundation of any viral distribution platform (the social graph is Facebook's "secret sauce"). And Live Search could leverage their existing ad platforms and new acquisitions to build out a monetization engine that fullfills that magic Web 2.0 equation: 'users = currency'. Add to that a federated identity solution. New development tools. And a consistent set of APIs that can tie everything together.

That's why I'm excited to see the progress that Live SkyDrive is making. It's a compelling offering, for sure, but for me it's a taste of the types of applications that can be created when the pieces of the Live puzzle start to fit together.

First post titles are hard. For a split second I thought "There's a New Scoble In Town" had a good ring to it, but I figured Josh would kill me for linkbaiting in my first post. I could have gone with an old standby geek classic like "Hello, World!", but at the end of the day I settled on "Kisses and Interrogations". Why? Because I get to tell a story that lets me drop the fact that I was in a band.

When I was living in Detroit a few years back, we opened for a great little indie band called Judah Johnson. After the show they gave me one of their demo CDs which featured a song called "Kisses and Interrogations." What does that have to do with anything? Well, one key aspect of being a tech evangelist is to try to win the hearts (kisses) and minds (interrogations) of the developer community. Also, I think I'm a typical Microsoftie in the sense that I love my job and my company, but I'm also not afraid to ask a hard question from time to time. Hence the title "Kisses and Interrogations."

Did I mention that I was in a band?

Anyway, on with the introductions. My name is Kevin Leneway and I'm the newest member of the Innovate On team here at Microsoft. I have a personal blog over at www.AStartupADay.com where I attempt to post a new Web 2.0 startup idea each day (79 to date!). Josh was nice enough to invite me over here to make an occasional post - think of me as the Nick Gonzalez of visitmix.com. I'm a developer by training, I love Michigan football and the TV show Lost, and I still firmly believe that the best artistic work ever created in the history of mankind is the movie Wayne's World.

In closing, I'd like to say greetings and salutations to all you mix visitors out there. I'm definitely looking forward to our upcoming conversations. By the way, if you or someone you know are building out anything cool, feel free to drop me a line at kleneway AT microsoft.com or give me a call: 425.705.1119.