I rarely get to do this, but looks like one of my old features that shipped last May got another mention indirectly through a post on the new Windows Live Custom Domains service.  This service is actually pretty neat as it allows you to offer hosted Hotmail email, but the email addresses are in your domain. So if you own trevin.com, you can offer friends and family email addresses in your domain, all hosted by Hotmail (eg. mom@trevin.com, dad@trevin.com, etc). That is, you can sign into www.hotmail.com with your new email address and send/receive mail all from within Hotmail.  To top it off, all these accounts are also full fledged Passport accounts, so you can use them for Messenger and all our other services that use Passport authentication.

But the real point of this post was to point out that my feature got a mention over at Greg Hughes’ blog :)  Cynthia, a long time friend and PM over in the Custom Domains team, sent me a link to Greg’s post praising her service.  The best part was this:

“But even better than that, as I typed the new password, a color-coded ‘password strength’ bar showed me the complexity strength of my password. It went from Red (weak) to Yellow (so-so) to Green (strong) as I typed. Nice! That’s what we need more of - simple, powerful tools to help end users be more secure in real time. Great work, whoever decided to put that in, and to whoever built it. It’s quite effective.“

Cool, that password strength meter is the feature I PM’d! :)  

We shipped that back in May 2005 and it’s been part of the registration process ever since, but since users only go through registration once, many people haven’t really seen it.  But with new Windows Live services rolling out that involve credential creation and management (like Custom Domains), elements of our registration experience are getting seen by more people more often, including the Password strength meter.   The funny part of this actually, is that this is one of the smaller features that I’ve PM’d during my time at Microsoft.  I’ve shipped redesign sign-in UI, Xbox Live authentication, smart client authentication libraries, etc.  It seems that this little UI/Security widget really resonates with users, i guess more so than even my Xbox Live authentication work

I’ve always been jealous of other products in the company that get lots of super cool press coverage (eg. Kahuna, start.com, etc).  My team always gets passed over because we’re not shipping e2e customer scenarios, but rather the glue for other services to deliver their scenarios.  I’ll going to go bask the warm glow of my 30 seconds of glory now…