IPWalk has found that Office Live has now registered over 60,000 domain names, and counting. That’s a pretty sweet pace for a beta service with relatively little publicity, and represents a pretty good start. Considering Office Live, with its full-features web design system, free domain name and email accounts (completely free in the basic package), all puts anything Google or Yahoo offers to shame, when Microsoft puts the finishing touches on this service, it could wind up pretty popular.
(via Digg)
Here’s something interesting: Office Live gives you a free domain, but what if you just want to take Microsoft’s kindness and use the domain for your own purposes? MS isn’t going to help you with a simple option to change the nameservers, but they did do two things good enough that you can do it yourself: They registered the domain through Melbourne IT, not by themselves, and they register all the domains in the name of the Office Live user.
That means you can contact Melbourne IT’s San Francisco office (510.595.2003), register an account with them, add the domain to your account, unlock it, and change the nameservers. Tada! Free domain from Microsoft, at least for one year.
This solution was written by Bob Henry over here, but he also says:
Thanks Microsoft! Their product rules, and it’s great to see they are
willing to give back to their users 
I couldn’t have put it better myself. It’s nice and all that we are getting all these great web services, but more companies need to understand that holding onto our data only makes their services harder to use. The more open you are, the more we’ll want to sign up with you. Microsoft could have done more here, but at least they didn’t do less.
(via Digg)
May 7th, 2006
Posted by
Nathan Weinberg |
General, Live, Office Live, Windows |
no comments
Microsoft has announced a significant investment in DeepMetrix, a web analytics firm with 15 years of experience behind it. The plan is to integrate DeepMetrix’s web analytics into programs like Microsoft AdCenter, Windows Live Search, Office Live, MSN Spaces, and other MS products.
From Ben Charny:
DeepMetrix makes a number of different software applications, including graphical bulletin boards. But what most attracted Microsoft is its feature that provides real-time information about the traffic visiting a Web site, details Web operators greatly benefit from knowing.
There’s talk that Microsoft is trying to compete with Google Analytics, but more likely it is just realizing that it has a lot of its users and customers need powerful web analytics, and an investment in DeepMetrix was the easiest and cheapest way to provide it. Any company dealing in the sort of web services Google and Microsoft provide needs analytics software, and it makes more sense to pay for it than hope to develop a world-class solution in a few short months.
(via Mary Jo Foley)
May 7th, 2006
Posted by
Nathan Weinberg |
General, Live, MSN, Office Live, Search, Spaces, Windows |
one comment
Reports are coming in that Microsoft has shipped a second version of Windows Vista Build 5381, with the inspiring version number of 5381.1. Basically, this confirms that 5381 is going to be Beta 2, and that Microsoft has locked down and is polishing the build before releasing it to millions of testers. Expect to get your hands on Beta 2 before the end of the month.
May 7th, 2006
Posted by
Nathan Weinberg |
General, Vista, Windows |
no comments
The MailCall blog says that they are preparing to ship the “M6″ release of Windows Live Mail, which will come with some nice improvements. Included: Firefox users will get full drag-and-drop, right-click and reading pane support. Accounts expire after 120 days, and sent mail can get saved permanently, if you choose. Email signatures will now be supported. You can subscribe to contact info changes, and display names can be customized.
Also, there are speed improvements, annoyances fixed (first message no longer needs to be selected by default), customization options (change colors on the fly).
(via Neowin)
May 7th, 2006
Posted by
Nathan Weinberg |
General, Live, Mail, Windows |
no comments
