In the continuing effort to promote IdeaWeaver, our creative writing tool for authors, we really wanted to get the product listed on the Windows Marketplace. If you aren’t familiar with it, the Windows Marketplace is where you land when you click your Windows XP Start menu and select “Windows Catalog.” I guess they changed the name somewhere along the way.
We were hoping that we could get IdeaWeaver into the marketplace as a side-effect of it being Windows Platform Certified, but it turns out that there is no relationship or requirement there. Any Windows software can be listed on the Windows Marketplace (as far as we can tell), you just have to register the software with Upload.com. Once you’ve done that, it eventually makes its way onto Download.com and into the Windows Marketplace.
Confusingly, you must register with CNET’s Upload.com in order to get listed on their Download.com site. I’m sure someone thought they were being clever to set it up that way. Geek humor is a bit tedious at times.
In the process of registering your software, they try to upsell you on various services, including expedited listing time. They normally take two weeks or so to put up a listing. You can spend a bunch of money to shorten that time.
One very nice thing about their registration interface is that they let you pre-load almost all the fields with the info from your PAD file. A PAD file is a special XML file that software publishers (like us) can create to distribute information about our software product.
It took the expected two weeks to get listed, and then we showed up on the Windows Marketplace about a week after that. I have to say, it is very exciting to see our little software product listed by Microsoft on the site that is linked into every Windows XP computer out there.