Need someone to lead product management at your software company? I create software for people that create software and I'm looking for my next opportunity. Check out my resume and get in touch.

Fix for spinning buddies at signin for Live Messenger

Freshness Warning
This blog post is over 17 years old. It's possible that the information you read below isn't current and the links no longer work.

19 Oct 2006

I’m testing some things with Windows Live Messenger and I suddenly found I couldn’t sign on. I didn’t get an error, just the two buddy icons sat and spun around with the message "Signing in..." on the screen. Left it on all night, but never signed in. Tried re-installing, rebooting, and all the other usual Windows "fixes."

Finally found the solution. You need to delete some things from your registry as described on the Windows Live blog.

Hopefully this blog will get a decent Google ranking and save some other poor soul the hours of hunting and searching I spent.

Recently Written

Too Big To Fail (Apr 9): When a company piles resources on a new product idea, it doesn't have room to fail. That keeps it from succeeding.
Go small (Apr 4): The strengths of a large organization are the opposite of what makes innovation work. Starting something new requires that you start with a small team.
Start with a Belief (Apr 1): You can't use data to build products unless you start with a hypothesis.
Mastery doesn’t come from perfect planning (Dec 21): In a ceramics class, one group focused on a single perfect dish, while another made many with no quality focus. The result? A lesson in the value of practice over perfection.
The Dark Side of Input Metrics (Nov 27): Using input metrics in the wrong way can cause unexpected behaviors, stifled creativity, and micromanagement.
Reframe How You Think About Users of your Internal Platform (Nov 13): Changing from "Customers" to "Partners" will give you a better perspective on internal product development.
Measuring Feature success (Oct 17): You're building features to solve problems. If you don't know what success looks like, how did you decide on that feature at all?
How I use OKRs (Oct 13): A description of how I use OKRs to guide a team, written so I can send to future teams.