You might be thinking again if you expect elegance out of Microsoft’s FrameIt.live.com service.

Gifts (somewhat) abound this season including a setup I built for friends using two wifi photo frames. The build I assembled included using FrameIt for the final RSS push to the photo frames. Here’s what I discovered in the process.

• Finding frames in stock anywhere was job one – nice to see a these products taking off.
• My setup used Smartparts SPX8WF frames, which have a nice UI – fairly stable, though they tend to lockup in RSS mode – daily – but I suspect that will ease. SmartParts frames have email (nice), but cannot “blend” media (local, email, and RSS) into a common presentation.
• The real challenge with my build seemed to be with Microsoft’s FrameIt, which re-formats inbound RSS feeds – in this case, a Picasa RSS feed, and an Astronomy Picture of the Day stream.
• The challenge with FrameIt seems to be the TTL, or Time To Live settings on MS’s side. As an example, using Microsoft’s own weather feed shows time delays from hours to “overnight”. My suspicion is that MS built the thing as beta, and hasn’t touched it since (May 08′). In the case of Picasa, the Google’s feed updates instantly, but Microsoft’s takes a dozen hours.

I’m sure lots of folks will be pounding the tech support lines this season with similar concerns. Hopfeully MS will get the message and finish what they started with FrameIt. When it works (ignoring delays), it works very well.

Personally I contacted MS, and two “partners” on the project to help drive the train. Besides the glitches, I tried to point out that as partners, all these “brands” are now linked – that failure to fix means they are a sinking ship together – hopefully that will juice the process.

Peace on earth Ya’ll.