Ever since Microsoft launched Live Search last year, they’ve been keeping a steady pace of new services integrations as they grow the Live Suite, specifically integration between interfaces for mobile, desktop, and web, as well as between the users themselves via Live Spaces. The biggest piece to fall in place recently was the replacements for Hotmail and Outlook Express, the Windows Live Mail desktop and web client, which also featured Messenger integration.
Eventually Microsoft plans to release all the pieces of the Live Suite as a single upgradeable download as well as separate programs and services.
Tonight Microsoft has announced two more steps toward beefing up the Live Suite: Windows Live Photo Gallery Beta and Windows Live Folders Beta.
Windows Live Photo Gallery
Windows Live Photo Gallery beta is an improvement on the initial version of Photo Gallery they shipped with Windows Vista now made for XP as well. Photo Gallery is a free program that lets you easily download photos from your camera, organize, edit, and upload them to your Spaces account. Photos are organized by a familiar file tree structure by folder, date, tag, or album. Editing features include brightness/contrast, cropping, color control, and red eye reduction. You can even edit the photos into a video slide show using Microsoft Movie Maker (WMV MPG AVI).
Uploaded photos will eventually be linked to the ones on your desktop, allowing changes to tags, albums, and eventually photo captions to be synced with one another. Microsoft is planning to implement a service that will enable users to securely grant access to their photos for third party sites to use. All the galleries will be available on your phone through your browser.
The cool new feature for this release however, is photo stitch, which sews together multiple photos into a panorama. The Microsoft team demoed the feature for me by snapping some photos of the San Francisco skyline as they walked around their hotel’s patio. Live Photo Gallery did an excellent job of nearly seamlessly stitching the photos into one continuous strand even though they were taken from different vantage points. Although photo stitch isn’t powered by recently acquired Photosynth, the team will be integrating the companies Seadragon technology into the program in the future.
Here’s some before and after of the photo stitching:
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Windows Live Folders
Originally called “Live Drive” and widely anticipated, Live Folders is getting off the ground before the rumored GDrive. The service is being launched into a managed beta which will give a select group of testers 500MB of free online storage space. The new storage system will be located on an entirely new computing infrastructure Microsoft has been building to power Silverlight Streaming service and Hotmail system.
The beta system is pretty straight forward. Users can upload files via a webform and possibly an ActiveX control in the near future. Once on the system, files can be marked public, private, or be shared with other Live users by user name or through email by permalink. Files will be download only since Microsoft doesn’t have an office web suite yet. They will also be continually adding greater integration between Spaces and Folders so that files uploaded to one show up on the other.
The Folders beta is mainly meant to get user feedback to be used in future iterations. Microsoft already has plans to incorporate file syncing into the storage cloud powered by FolderShare, which they acquired back in 2005, stepping on the toes of quite a few startups along the way.
Update: I’ve been able to join the Folders beta at folders.live.com with no restrictions.
I think it’s interesting how Microsoft can roll out a slew of new services and get almost no recognition. Meanwhile if Google was rolling out services at this speed, there would be a countless number of blog posts and oh, about 100 techcrunch comments at this point. But it’s Microsoft, so nobody cares…(?)
Where can the Windows Live Photo Gallery for XP be downloaded from??
I would think that in an article about new web services you could either link directly to the services or to the announcement if the services aren’t live yet. Is that too much to ask for?
@Derrick Shields
I totally agree with you.
Google is buying a lot of products but they do nothing when comes time for integration. And yes, everybody seems to be over-excited. After all, they aren’t evil.
On the other hand, I like the way Microsoft works on integration.
Windows Live suite will be awesome.
Continue the good job Microsoft!
Microsoft seems to think that English is only spoken in the US as their customers outside the US like myself are taken to a rather bare Live.com pages for our area with half the released Live products and naturally the new betas totally missing.
At least Google does not pull such dumb stunts when they release beta products.
Online backup has been in the news lately. MS Live has jumped in this business, the latest to announce entering the business is Dell.
I wonder where Microsoft’s standing will be at the online backup review website,
BackupReview.info
I have been reading this site for a while now, it aggregates all news from the backup and storage industry. The site lists more than 400 online backup companies and ranks the top 25 on a monthly basis.
MS certainly seems to have changed their ways, but they are still $100B+ larger than google. People love the “underdog”.
These are not being released until Wednesday. Live Folders will be limited beta for now. Didn’t dig deep enough to find out for how long, but beta limitations is rumored to be 50 megs/file with a total of 500 megs.
i don’t like it.
http://www.ptptips.cn
MS and Y to work together only after MS buys Yahoo –
– Looks like a good product, I wish they would have just released a better XP – instead of a weak sauce Vista –
-RB
I think this looks good!
Interesting, this sounds like a proto cloud / web os. Is this market finally getting some traction within the consumer market? Enthusiasts have been arguing over the utility of such systems for sometime now, perhaps it is the time that John Q. Public casts a vote?
Looks very cool…. We’re working on a similar project called Sea Drive, which has all of these features but we’re looking to partner via API with various application providers.
Im waiting till they give the xbox(whichever one is out by then) livedrive support
it would defeat the purpose of modding if they made the xbox more multimedia oriented
but if it happens expect it to come with restrictions(drm)
This looks pretty good. I’m not a Live user (besides maps), but its great to see MS really building out a solid suite of products and integrating them reasonably well.
It’s not that microsoft doesn’t do a good job. Clearly they have the resources to do whatever they like. It just seems they always copy someone else. I run xp and love it but I’m already entrenched on myspace, google maps, youtube, and picassa so their late entry into these areas are simply not on my radar. You can argue all day about who’s better but one thing’s clear. They weren’t first.
This is kind of an AllPeers thing, but limited to files and folders
To answer earlier questions, Folders is a managed (private) beta, so there is no link and Photo Gallery didn’t have a link in the info provided to me. Looks like folders.live.com is actually working. I just signed up for an account.
I really like what MSFT is doing around Live with web and desktop integration through software. I think it’s just hard for some people to see the whole picture when there are so many releases going on.
Nothing short of curing cancer will give Microsoft the kind of publicity Google gets.
Well, with over 300 million users on their platforms and Windows updater, they have a pretty robust method of pushing releases.
I agree as the other’s said, Microsoft is always one year too late on technology.
Box.net, Picassa, Flickr, all these just work perfectly for me, so why would I want to switch to another product, nevertheless a Microsoft product?
You get the point!
Because it integrates with everything else you own.
The Windows Live Drive is great news. I hope Microsoft will push ahead in this field and up the ante as Google’s GMail did for storage limits on email.
Thanks for confirming why I have not found a download for Windows Live Photo Gallery Beta for XP. I used several search results and read several blogs before it finally dawned on me as I read the comments here. I was convinced that I was looking for something that was already available.
Photosynth wasn’t acquired by Microsoft – it was developed within Microsoft Research.
While it was great to finally see Live Folders hit beta, it shocked me to see how tactical its value proposition it (both in terms of space and intelligent asset management). In a time that Microsoft needs to position itself as an entrypoint for consumer information access, it feels like a missed opportunity. More feedback on what a winning play in the space might be at http://www.grea...llsventures.com.
Live Folders is currently pathetic in terms of features.
For example, upload an image …it does not even auto thumbnail the image for you. That is really sad.
They need a better multi-file uploading tool. I suggested they use a java applet or some kind of tool created using silverlight.
500MB is nothing these days, but rumor has it they will offer 5GB+ of storage once this goes publicly available.
It’s a start, but it’s a VERY basic start.
Box.net owns this, hands down.
@#7 bdb
I think at this point, we can safely say that Google is steadily climbing further away from “underdog” status. As markus said, the kind of publicity Google is receiving at present just for blowing their nose is astounding. They’re kind of like the Paris Hilton of the tech field.
As for the technology, it certainly needs to get a bit more robust, but I am glad MS is finally offering this, putting my faith back into the potential of the Live suite.
-Mary from BINC
I lost some pictures when they shuttered MSN Photos (http://photos.msn.com) a few years ago. Didn’t have enough time to move my pictures. I hope this new service won’t have the same fate.
@Garth:
Learn English, you ingrate!