Today, Microsoft is rolling out some of the sweeping changes to Windows Live it announced two weeks ago. Windows Live seems to be gradually replacing MSN as Microsoft’s central hub for everything you do on the Web.
The new home page shows both your email and an activity stream of what your contacts are doing across the Web. It’s more FriendFeed than Facebook, with a little MyYahoo thrown in. You can also customize it to show the local weather, your calendar, and news headlines. A handful of recent your photos are displayed at the top, along with a search box and links to other Live services (Profile, People, Mail, Photos, Events, Spaces, Groups, SkyDrive, and even MSN).
The new services here are Groups, Photos, and Profile. The Profile page shows all of your activities on Wndows Live as well as other Web services like Twitter, Flickr, and Yelp. Groups lets you set up collaborative pages with others and includes a group calendar. Windows Live Photos also has a nifty slideshow feature that uses Silverlight to change the background color to match the dominant color in each photo.
With this redesign, Microsoft is also boosting the storage limit of its online file storage service, SkyDrive, from 5GB to 25GB. Primarily that is to make Windows Live Photos a more competitive photo sharing service. The photos take up storage in your SkyDrive account.
Two big thumbs up to Microsoft! Will definitely give it a try. Thanks.
This won’t be out until 4pm PST today.
Waiting for over-the-top Google fanboys to start decrying the service in 3… 2… 1…
It’s now 4:25pm PST, my Windows Live account has not switched to the new “sweeping changes” yet, so even if I want to say something nice, I can’t.
I’ve just checked, the only pleasant surprise is that my SkyDrive storage capacity has increased from 5GB to 25GB.
hey thanks! I was just about to sign out when i saw this!
well these are good news but i am afraid, if new services do not take off they will shut them down in 6 months and all my photos, etc. will be deleted.
Don’t worry, they’ve already taken off. They already have millions of users, 300m+ on Messenger for starters and roughly the same on Hotmail. This isn’t going away.
Live is very much a work-in-progress for Microsoft. They’re going to be investing in it without much expectation of profitability for years to come, and they know it. So, even in the worse possible case, you’ll get the use the services for free for a few years. If they do shut them down eventually, you’ll have plenty of warning, and at least a few months to get your stuff out (which should all already be stored locally anyway).
Still, I don’t see that happening. I think that Microsoft’s Live services (and software) are actually pretty good, and will certainly find an audience. I’ve been using FolderShare and SkyDrive for a while now, and they’re only getting better. When the new wave is officially launched, I’ll definitely be giving some of the other services a try.
Is that US only rollout or 100% Worldwide ?
Hope it works in Canada as well.
Worldwide!!!!
this place also related books like windows live
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I worked on this when I was at Microsoft — it’s gonna be awesome.
windows live was down for about 4 hours yesterday
No it was not!!!
Yes it was!!!!!!!
The best feature of windows live is live cashback.. It blows away all the other cashback sites.
Aaron, how much have _you_ saved from using CashBack? I am sorry. I would love having meaningful competition to Google but as far as I know CashBack is a short-term strategy to boost number of queries.
No. Live Search is investing heavily with comercial intent. I bet you will see more Cashback parteners coming soon and more integration with other Search verticals.
Windows Live != Live Search Cashback
Windows Live = Hotmail, Home, Profile, People, Groups, Spaces, Calendar, Skydrive, etc.
the only problem is anything microsoft does sucks.. not because they’re microsoft but because you get excited but in the details they suck.
Whether its their enterprise software licensing crap, whether its functionality, whether its complete incompetence regarding mobile os (ever wonder why MS took a decade and all they come up with is Win mobile, while google cranks out a kick ass android in 3 years), or look at Vista a complete failure and with so many bugs everyone still prefers xp, completely missing the boat with cloud computing… fact is they’re trying but at the end you have the same incompetent people running the show.
And here is the best reason why… try moving a hotmail account to gmail… ok you put an autoreply on.. and forward emails to gmails. Guess what you can’t forward to a gmail address (reminds me of AOL trying to force customers to stay we all know how that ended).. however they allow you to forward to a custom domain.. but then because they are so incompetent the custom domain forwarding does not work…
Anyway Microsoft has too many consultants, trying to nickel and dime and force their customers to stay. What they should do is take 25 teams each one consisting of 25 people (pick the brightest ones).. and start from scratch.
Any service any product I have looked at from Microsoft has bugs, is flawed, leaves out things that matter… and I’d be surprised if it would be different with this one….
oh same thing with cloud computing…. they can’t even keep their own sites up…. but want to do cloud… come on give me a break.
Just read the article “Microsoft’s Data Center Strategy” and you’re going to change your opinion about Microsoft
http://www.azur...enter-strategy/
who cares?
we want POP/imap for live mail.
POP will be enabled to all live mail users once mail wave 3 ships
Thanks Michael. I have no use of a mail system where i have to log on. I wonder what they think about when desig products. Who cares 10 gb or 20 gb? its a useful feature that will make the difference.
The irony of “SkyDrive” is that Microshit doesn’t even have a control to allow it to sit in Windows Explorer AS a “drive”.
Argh.
https://www.mesh.com/
You all have to make a disclosure before_going_crazy with all of these replies with obvious insider knowledge. It is called transparency, and is sadly lacking in your “social media strategy” currently. At least you got the blog comment participation right
I have been using Windows Live Spaces for a long while now for blogging, photo sharing and a little skydrive uploading. The system is friendly but only a Spaces level IMO. As far as I can tell it isn’t friendly with bloggers that are members of other free platforms.
This is great, now, is there a bulk opload tool to get my 15gb of photos up there, or is it a matter of uploading them 4 at a time?
you can try gladinet. it is currently in beta but the SkyDrive integration into Windows Explorer may work. so you can drag and drop your photos within Windows Explorer to SkyDrive.
I really really want to give them a chance, but why can’t they do the simplest things that everyone else already does? such as some concept of tagging for photos on live spaces…..multiple categories for a blog post….etc. These aren’t rocket science.
I am definately going to give this a try. Lets face it, Microsoft have a market penetration on PC’s bigger than any company will ever have. Why? Windows… Once they get it all together, and build a fantastic portal rich with features, it’s only natural to expect that *most* users will jump right on board. Not necessarily out of choice, but because they probably don’t even realize there is much option out there. And once they integrate it as part of the Windows OS / System experience, there will be no stopping them.
Very nice they have been coming out with new design.
still can’t use Chrome to access MS Live:(
I like a similar service that I found through my university called Kadoo.com – its from some of the founders of Blackboard and has integration for Blackboard’s 20M students & teachers around the world.
Best of all works equally well on both the Mac and PC.
10 FREE Gigs with a full Portal, Email, Social Network(s), Content Storage and Search/Tagging/Sharing/Commenting and rating across all.
I can keep all my photos, original & streaming videos, documents and bookmarks all in 1 place. Share them internally, to anyone with an email address or publish to any of 40 different social networks (not that I would ever join that many!)
Works just as well with Safari, Firefox, IE7 and Chrome.
Sign up today for FREE at http://www.kadoo.com!
This smells like spam. I tried Kadoo and I thought it was confusing, slow and difficult to use.
dude.. they are great at publishing and articles… have been for decades.. but reality what you really see is different.
Fact is with datacenters/cloud they suck. They can’t even keep their own sites up. I am glad you like reading their bs marketing crap.. but after a few years of BS you kind of know the reality.. look at vista.. all the super hyped up features.. and over time it all got cut out.. and all they left is their aero interface big deal.
Quite frankly you don’t know what you are talking about…
Just checked out Windows Live. Very nice to use. All they need to do now is buy facebook and import all the data into Windows Live
Big thumbs-up for Micro$oft!!!
…and it’s a very clean look. Bravo
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