InsideMicrosoft

Links for April 23, 2008

Vista Feature Pack Released
Microsoft has released the first “Feature Pack” for Windows Vista, adding some wireless features that, while nothing huge, could represent a growing series of feature packs that improve the operating system over the coming months and years. Feature Pack 1 adds support for Bluetooth 2.1 to Vista, as well as a Unified Pairing user interface and updates to Windows Connect Now. Get it here.

Download Windows Live for Windows Mobile
Microsoft has released a free download of the Windows Live for Windows Mobile 6 software that comes pre-loaded on some (but not all) Windows Mobile 6 phones. Pick up the download and get Push Hotmail, synchronized Live Contacts, a Live Search bar for the Home screen and one-click photo uploading to Live Spaces.

Microsoft Fastest To Deploy Patches
A Symantec report on malware discovered in the second half of last year shows that Microsoft was the fastest to respond to discovered software vulnerabilities. On average, Microsoft deployed patches within six days, compared to Apple, which took an average of 79 days, as well as faster than HP, Red Hat or Sun. There’s a lot detail in the article about the type of security vulnerabilities (most are caused by ActiveX), and let’s see how fast you can spot the Rent reference.

Turn Webslices into Vista Sidebar Gadgets
Webslices is a new feature in Internet Explorer 8, which allows you to add specifically selected portions of webpages to the menubar of IE, and have them automatically push updates to you. Sean Lyndersay has taken the Webslice out of the browser, and has designed a Vista Sidebar Gadget that lets you add any Webslice to your desktop. It works well, and Webslices as Gadgets are actually more useful than they are in the browser.

By the by, I learned that the reason the Facebook Webslice doesn’t work is that it needs to be installed while you are running IE as an administrator. That’s really a broken feature, and needs to be fixed for final IE8 release, or developers need to design their Webslices to not work that way.

Free Ford Sync and April Fools Xbox Live Downloads
Two Ford Sync picture packs and a Ford Sync-related dashboard theme have been released free on Xbox Live in the U.S. These are kid-themed, so get ‘em for your kid (or yourself, if you’re cute enough). There are also some April Fools-related pics, available for a limited time.

Secret Confessions Vista Sidebar Gadget
This Gadget lets you leave confessions anonymously for random others to read and to read confessions from other users. It has the annoying “feature” of reading the confession out loud with Vista’s text-to-speech system, and no way to turn it off, and the confessions thus far are mostly homophobic or racist, but it’s a great idea that could become something.

April 23rd, 2008 Posted by Nathan Weinberg | Vista, Apple, Live, Xbox Live, Sidebar, Hotmail, Xbox, Security, Windows, Spaces, Internet Explorer, Applications | 2 comments

News For March 18, 2008

Here’s some stuff going on today or recently:

Novell Free To Sue Over Long-Dead WordPerfect
The Supreme Court has ruled to allow Novell to go ahead and sue Microsoft for alleged antitrust infractions involving WordPerfect, which Novell sold 12 years ago. Novell is complaining that Microsoft used its Windows monopoly to depress sales of WordPerfect, resulting in the product dropiing in value from $1.2 billion in 1994 to $170 million in 1996. Novell only owned WordPerfect for two years, and much of the failures of WordPerfect that allowed Microsoft Word to trounce it in the marketplace occured before they bought the product, but the case is apparently strong enough to go trial. We’ll see if it’s strong enough to actually win.

OneCare Gets Marketing Campaign
Microsoft has a new marketing slogan for Windows Live OneCare, its all-in-one security suite. The tagline is, “Don’t Worry, We Took OneCare Of It” and the ads typically featuring some nasty virus it “took OneCare” of. You have to read it a few times before the sentence makes sense, but the ads are cute. I’m pretty sure I saw one of these ads in the Post yesterday.

Flash Coming To Windows Mobile
Microsoft has licensed Adobe Flash for Windows Mobile. Specifically, Adobe Flash Lite will be built into Internet Explorer Mobile in future versions of WinMobile as a plugin, so webpages with Flash should, for the most part, work as intended. That means full YouTube for Windows Mobile users, even as Apple complains that Flash doesn’t work on its devices. Boo hoo. I’d look forward to seeing Flash in Windows Mobile 7, but that’s pure speculation.

Become a Windows Mobile Fan on Facebook
Facebook has a feature that lets you become a fan of entertainers, celebrities or politicians, but apparently you can be a fan of a product as well. You can now become a fan of Windows Mobile and show your love for the platform. I’m in. Just head here while signed in to Facebook and click “Become a Fan”.

Live Spaces Loses 15% Of Visitors
Windows Live Spaces, Microsoft’s once high-flying social network/blogging platform, slipped badly in the last year. It’s still technically the biggest blogging platform around, but it failed to keep up with MySpace and Facebook, its real competitors, losing 15% of its unique visitors in the U.S. in the last 12 months. Live Spaces lost 1.4 million unique visitors, coming half a million of LinkedIn, which rose 271% last year. Guess the buzz on Live Spaces is over, and Microsoft has some work to do to keep the rest from leaving.

Bill Gates on Running A Good Startup
A student at the University of Waterloo stood up and asked a question of Bill Gates during a roundtable breakfast at the University (no, it was not a Q&A session, she just really wanted to ask), wondering how he had the courage to start Microsoft at 17. Gates answer says a lot about how he values his employees, and could be a good lesson for startups.

At 17 I didn’t have much to lose. I promised my parents that I would go back to university if things didn’t pan out. But I did worry about all those people who had spouses and children. They depended on the business succeeding. That’s what worried me at night. So I made sure that I had enough money in the bank to pay everyone’s salary for a year if none of my customers came through. That’s how I got through it. Eventually there came a time, though, when we needed to hire 30 people, and that was a real crisis. I really didn’t want to expand without a financial safety net in place. Ultimately, I compromised and said yes, go ahead and hire. But I want to know immediately when the increased revenues offset the costs of paying everyone a year’s salary … that way I could sleep again.

March 18th, 2008 Posted by Nathan Weinberg | Windows Mobile, OneCare, Adobe, Mobile, Bill Gates, Live, Corporate, Security, Law, Windows, Spaces, Word, Applications | one comment

Microsoft Announcing APIs, Silverlight Streaming and Windows Live Improvements

Microsoft is making a ton of announcements pre Mix ‘08. Let’s go through them:

The Windows Live Messenger API - releasing in beta, this lets developers build Messenger right into websites, offering most of the core Messenger features right on the page.

Silverlight Streaming has been updated, going from alpha to beta, up to 10 gigabytes of storage space and 100 megabyte file sizes. Files stream now at 1,400 kbps, with tit free as long as you use under 500,000 minutes per month. File manipulation is also improved, with the ability to use Windows Explorer, plus support for Visual Studio 2008 with Windows Live Tools for Visual Studio.

The Windows Live Contacts API allows users to use their Windows Live contact info with any site while retaining control of their information. Also, Windows Live ID Delegated Authentication allows web apps to request permission from users to access their information.

The Windows Live Photo API allows full control of photos on Live Spaces, without the need to go to the Spaces site. Third party sites can show Spaces photos, thumbnails and download links.

There are two new example Windows Live QuickApps, plus updates to Tafiti.

February 29th, 2008 Posted by Nathan Weinberg | Silverlight, Developers, Live, Spaces, Windows | no comments

Live Spaces Upgrade Adds Friends in Common, Photo Albums Module

Windows Live Spaces has been updated, and while the official Spaces blog has absolutely no information, users are slowly figuring out what is in the update. Here’s what I’ve heard:

• Spaces added a “In Common” feature, showing which friends you have in common with other people. This is a fun and extremely useful feature in Facebook, and a great addition to Spaces.
• It appears (and by appears, I mean I’m not sure, since the only source is translated from Italian) that you can now put a photo album module on your Space, with up to six albums. You can control the speed of the slideshow transitions in the album, choose which albums to display.
• A new module to display Windows Live Events.
• There’s a new API for accessing Spaces photos. An application or service using it can upload and download photos, create, edit or delete albums, request a list of albums, photos or comments, and other things.

February 20th, 2008 Posted by Nathan Weinberg | Live, Spaces, Windows | no comments

Some Microsoft/Yahoo Overlap You May Not Have Considered

Do you really have any idea how big Yahoo is, or hell, how big MSN is? There’s a lot of overlap between the two, and Long Zheng & Josh Philips have been kind enough to generate a nice chart to show the two. The chart is reproduced below, with some notes added by me regarding what I think about which service will be rolled into the other.

What do you think? What is missing from the table?

February 4th, 2008 Posted by Nathan Weinberg | Windows Mobile, Office Live, Live, Windows Media, Mail, Zune, Yahoo Acquisition, Sidebar, Maps, Vista, Hotmail, MSN, Media Player, Applications, Search, Windows, Messenger, Yahoo, Spaces, General | 8 comments

A Look At Windows Live Flickr

Thomas Hawk, photographer extraordinaire and CEO of Zooomr, has a post on how Microsoft’s proposed buyout of Yahoo will affect photographers. Yahoo doesn’t have much in the way of photo-related services, except, of course, for Flickr, a hugely popular photo sharing website. Microsoft has:

• Great Windows Live Photo Gallery software, for navigating, editing, and uploading your photos to the internet, including to Flickr
• Ten million photo uploaders on Live Spaces
• The next killer photo format, JPEG XR, in the process of being finalized and added to cameras
• Photosynth, the software that combines thousands of photographs into a 3D space

… and lots of other programs and research initiatives that are paying off in the digital imaging space. The one thing Microsoft doesn’t have is a social website where users can share, rate, tag, and otherwise build an amazing photography community. With Flickr, Microsoft ties it altogether, and gains the best photo search engine on the internet. Flickr alone is worth, I’d guess, between $500 and $700 million to Microsoft, more than it is currently worht to Yahoo, and twenty times what Yahoo paid for it.

Thomas lists at least five other ways the buyout affects photographers. Read his article.

photo of LEGO Photographers by turkguy0319 under CC license

February 4th, 2008 Posted by Nathan Weinberg | Live, Yahoo Acquisition, Yahoo, Spaces, Search, Windows, General | 2 comments

Microsoft Joins DataPortability.org

Last week, Microsoft joined the Data Portability Working Group, a group that aim to get companies to use standards for moving information between different websites and social networks. Earlier this month, Google and Facebook joined, and many major social sites have also pledged to make it easier for users to switch networks or combine their data from multiple places. Hopefully, this will mean Live Spaces users will gain the ability to output their data, as well as import data from other websites.

January 31st, 2008 Posted by Nathan Weinberg | Live, Spaces, Windows | 2 comments

Bill Gates CES Keynote Features Guitar Hero, Sync, Surface, Humor, Windows Live, Silverlight Olympics, Canadian Zune, MGM and Disney, MediaRoom, Sync

Bill Gates gave his keynote at the Consumer Electronics Show tonight, and I was liveblogging it, but this site was down due to the massive coverage of my Windows Mobile 7 scoop. Here’s what happened:

Bill Gates talked about how this was his last CES keynote, and his last year at Microsoft. For the first time since he was 17, he won’t be a Microsoft employee. He showed a video package of how his last day might go, working out with Matthew McConaughey, producing an album with Jay-Z, asking Hillary Clinton if he can be her Vice President, asking Bono if he can be the new guitarist for U2, with Brian Williams reporting around the video (Brian said Bill doesn’t believe in paying more than seven dollars for a haircut). Later in the evening, during an Olympics-related video, Bob Costas told Gates to “lose my number”.

Bill mentioned the cloud and services. Will he FINALLY talk about What Ray Ozzie is doing? We can only wish, maybe at CES 2009.

Bill has decided that in his last keynote, he won’t fix the problems of previous keynotes, but instead, once again, focus almost entirely on “vision” and possibilities for the future. He spends a lot of time talking about connected applications and devices, but nothing specific. At least the super-wide-wraparound-screen for his PowerPoints is cool.

Says 100 million people are using Windows Vista, 420 million Windows Live, and 20 million on Windows Mobile, 10 million added in the last year.

Mika Krammer, direct of Windows product management, gets up to talk about Windows. She shows off Windows Live Calendar, Windows Live Events, Windows Live Photo Gallery, all the while subtly using IE7’s Quick Tabs, Windows Vista’s Flip 3D. She creates, live, a panoramic photo in Photo Gallery and uploads it to Live Spaces. These are great features and great integration that roughly 1% of users are aware of. She shows off the live video thumbnails in Windows Live Search.

Mika picks up an HTC Touch and shows off how to send a photo from a mobile device to a Live Space.

Bill is playing around with a Surface computer.

Bill is announcing a new partner for Silverlight: NBC’s coverage of the 2008 Olympics. They will make available video of the events, live and on demand, courtesy of Silverlight.

Robbie Bach comes out. We don’t see him enough! Robbie talks Xbox, mentions 17.7 million consoles shipped, 10 million Xbox Live members, and new partners for Xbox Live: Disney and ABC, bringing shows like Lost and High School Musical, plus MGM for movies, bringin movies like Terminator and Legally Blonde.

Next, he talks Media Center and Media Center Extenders, says Samsung and HP will be announcing today new Extenders, including HP’s Extender TVs. Also, Mediaroom, Microsoft’s IPTV service, which now has 1 million TVs subscribed. He announces DVR Anywhere, which will let you stream shows you record to watch anywhere else, and special applications linked to specific channels that will surround channels like CNN with detailed interactive information. Also, British Telecom will be the first to bring Mediaroom integration with the Xbox 360 as a set-top box.

Next topic is Zune, which is finally being sold outside the U.S., starting this Spring in Canada. Out comes Molly O’Donnel to explain Zune Social. She mentions how Zune Social is becoming a well-used social network, with 1.5 million beta users, and user-created applications for sharing with Facebook.

They bring out a Lincoln car to show off Ford Sync, which is now winding up in a million cards. They also show off a TellMe application on a cellphone. It accesses GPS to see where you are, and then shows a list of movie theatres in the immediate area, when you say just the word “movies”. Then you can say “Buy two tickets for Sweeney Todd at 9:30″ and it’ll actually work.

Bill comes out and shows off a device that can look at people and buildings and actually recognize them. This is extremely impressive, recognizing Robbie Bach, different Vegas buildings, and does some really cool animations. They’re talking about some unnamed device that categorizes videos for you, something phone related. It’s not all clear, because Microsoft just doesn’t do keynotes as well as Apple, but it does look cool.

At the end, Bill and Robbie faced off against each other in Guitar Hero III. Or rather, they would have, if Robbie hadn’t brought out Kelly Law-Yone, Guitar Hero champion, as a ringer. Not to be outdone, or outspent, Bill brought out his ringer: Slash, lead guitarist of Guns N’ Roses. Nice ending, though it felt like the keynote was just a little too short and didn’t reveal anything.

January 7th, 2008 Posted by Nathan Weinberg | Xbox Live, Live, Windows Mobile, Zune, Silverlight, Windows Media, Vista, Windows, Spaces, Xbox, Xbox 360, Search | 2 comments

Live Spaces Grows 8% To 9.5 Million Uniques

Nielsen released stats on the top social networking websites, and Microsoft’s Live Spaces moved up one spot over the last year, passing the declining AOL Hometown to take fourth place. Live Spaces’ growth was small, a respectable 8%, more than MySpace’s 7% but far below the 89% of Facebook or 245% of LinkedIn. According to these stats, Live Spaces has 9.5 million unique visitors, up 700,000.

A seperate chart shows the top blog sites. If Live Spaces is classified as a blog site and not a social network (it shouldn’t and isn’t), it would be in fourth place as well.

December 19th, 2007 Posted by Nathan Weinberg | Live, Spaces, Windows | one comment

Live Spaces Tops Downtime Report

Pingdom tracked 12 top social networking sites from October 19 to November 19, and found that Microsoft’s Live Spaces had the most downtime, with the site failing to respond for a total of three hours over the course of the month. By contrast, that’s more than Facebook (10 minutes), MySpace (10), Bebo (30), LiveJournal (40) and Orkut (85) combined, and worst on the list.

Number one was Yahoo 360, but that service was so unpopular it’s being closed, so I suspect the zero minutes of downtime can be attributed to zero server load.

November 29th, 2007 Posted by Nathan Weinberg | Live, Spaces, Windows | one comment

New Windows Live Admin Center

LiveSide has the details on the Windows Live Admin Center, which replaces the old Live Custom Domains and lets you do more than just use a hosted Live Hotmail domain name. You can now customize all sorts of subdomains to Windows Live services, such as setting a blog.yoursite.com URL to a WIndows Live Space, or setting a maps.yoursite.com URL to a custom Live Maps Collection mashup.

November 14th, 2007 Posted by Nathan Weinberg | Maps, Live, Hotmail, Spaces, Windows | no comments

Live Spaces Gets Facebook-style News Feed

Windows Live Spaces recently* added a What’s New page, which gives you the latest updates from your friends. Much like Facebook’s News Feed, it lets you know when your friends have added other friends, blogged something, uploaded photos or files, published lists and edited their profiles. While it isn’t perfect and is missing some things (like Events listings), its a much-needed feature.

Facebook’s News Feed made this a necessity for any social network, and its good to see Live Spaces take it on. While some people like to scream “rip-off!” every time someone, especially Microsoft, adds a feature someone else came up with, News Feed is such a game-changing feature that every network needs one now, or they can’t even compete. If you don’t know the power of the News Feed yet, friend me and some other people on Facebook and see how useful it becomes.

* - apologies on some slightly old news, but I’m having some tough times lately, and am slowly catching everything up. The big news will be current, everything else will be slightly older for another week, I guess.

October 22nd, 2007 Posted by Nathan Weinberg | Live, Spaces, Windows | no comments

SkyDrive Updated, Storage Doubled

Microsoft has updated Windows Live SkyDrive, apparently making it a sub-service under Windows Live Spaces. They’ve doubled the amount of free storage space to one gigabyte, and they’ve added RSS feeds for public storage folders. They’ve also made it easier to share folders with groups of people you know, letting you add both contacts from your contact list and any email address you enter.

I wonder if there’s a way to share audio or video files in a public folder and the RSS feed acts as a podcasting feed.

October 12th, 2007 Posted by Nathan Weinberg | Live, Spaces, Windows | no comments

Windows Live Events Launches

Microsoft launced Windows Live Events, a new service underneath Windows Live Spaces that lets you schedule events, invite your contacts and handle who’s coming.

When you click to create an event, you have to choose the type of event, which in turn give you a Live Spaces-like page template, completely ready with everything you’d normally want for an even of that type. In other words, you get a fully detailed page, customized to your type of event, with a single click.

Template types are:

Featured templates
• Default

Anniversary

• Anniversary

Baby

• Baby
• Baby shower
• Baby shower - blue
• Baby shower - pink
• Baby shower - pink blanket

Bachelor/Bachelorette Party

• Bachelor party
• Bachelor party lounge
• Bachelorette party

Birthday

• Birthday for her - 2
• Birthday for her - flowers
• Birthday for her - pastel gifts
• Birthday for him
• Birthday for him - blue
• Kid birthday - cake friends
• Kid birthday - candy
• Kid’s birthday
• Surprise party

Club/Group

• Book club - blue
• Book club - green
• Book club - library
• En plein air
• Knit and chat

Cocktail/Dinner Party

• Cocktail party - black
• Cocktail party - color
• Dinner party - forks and spoons
• Dinner party - table

Family

• Family reunion
• Father’s Day
• Kid’s performance
• Mother’s Day

Farewell

• Bon voyage
• Retirement
• Serene

General

• Art opening - green and blue
• Art opening - yellow and green
• Business open house - blue
• Business open house - gray
• Business open house - tan
• Dandelion
• Fish
• Luminous
• Open house - blue
• Open house - green
• Party
• Party - 2
• Party - balloons
• Street fair
• Treetop birds
• Weekend Brunch

Holiday

• Chinese New Year
• Christmas - 1
• Christmas - snowflakes
• Cinco de Mayo
• Easter - eggs
• Easter - flowers
• Easter - grass
• Father’s Day
• Fourth of July
• Halloween party - 1
• Halloween party - 2
• Halloween party - 3
• Halloween party - ghosts
• Hanukkah
• Hanukkah - menorah
• Mother’s Day
• New Year’s Eve - black
• New Year’s Eve - dots
• St. Patrick’s Day
• Thanksgiving
• Valentine’s Day singles - dark blue
• Valentine’s Day singles - pink
• Winter snow
• Yom Kippur breakfast

House Party

• BBQ
• Costume party
• New home
• Oscar party
• Party - neighborhood

Night Out

• At the movies
• Girls’ night out - shoes and bags
• Happy hour - green
• Happy hour - purple
• Happy hour - red
• Karoake
• Mystery party
• Poker night
• Wine tasting

Religious

• Bar Mitzvah
• Diwali
• Diwali - lights
• School
• Class reunion
• Formal dance - 1
• Formal dance - 2
• Graduation party - blue caps
• School open house

Sports

• Football
• Soccer
• Super Bowl
• Super Bowl - green
• Super Bowl - purple

Wedding/Engagement

• Engagement party - 1
• Engagement party - cheers
• Engagement party - gay
• Engagement party - lesbian
• Rehearsal dinner
• Wedding - bells
• Wedding - flowers
• Wedding - gay
• Wedding - lesbian (green)
• Wedding - lesbian (silver)
• Wedding shower BBQ

Those are a lot of templates, and hopefully they’ll keep adding new ones, like a few missing religious events, and maybe someone will remind them that any wedding I get invited to online is a wedding I might not want to go to. Seriously, have you ever gotten an eVite to a wedding?

Anyway, besides choosing a template, you choose the date, time and place. Not only do you list the place, but you can add a Windows Live Map showing the exact location of the event. You enter the address and the map is automatically created, but if you don’t like where it places the pushpin and you want something more accurate, you can move it on the map to the exact right spot (like for a barbecue in the park).

You also get to choose a personalized web address of the style eventname.events.live.com. Talk about making it easy to remember and share the website!

Once your event is created, you can start inviting people, including sending it to your entire Hotmail contact list and anyone else. You can start customizing the page, including showing local weather. Events have a link to add it to Microsoft Outlook, Apple’s iCal, Yahoo Calendar or Google Calendar, as well as blog it to Windows Live Spaces. There’s a discussion board and space to upload photo albums.

If your page template doesn’t have a module you want, you can click to add it while customizing the page. You can add music and video, a blog, custom lists, custom HTML and an RSS feed. If you really want to get into it, you can do some serious editing and customization of everything on the page, or you can create a pretty advanced page with about twenty seconds of work.

If you’d like to see my fake barbecue event (there’s actually a real BBQ I’m holding at that time and place, but I don’t think you’d be interested), go here and see what a typical event listing is like. Feel free to invite yourself to see how it works.

Looks like a very powerful, yet very easy to use service. Considering the popularity of Windows Live Spaces, and the ease with which you can create a powerful page, I wouldn’t be surprised if it becomes a big success. Check it out, and you’ll probably find its more worth using than eVite, and a lot of the features make it worth considering over Facebook.

October 12th, 2007 Posted by Nathan Weinberg | Live, Spaces, Windows, General | one comment

Windows Live Suite Launches

Microsoft finally delivered the first Windows Live Suite, a single installer that allows you to install a number of Windows Live programs as a single download that updates regularly. Go to this site and configure your 1.8 megabyte download, picking from these products:

• Windows Live Mail - the ad-supported desktop email client that integrates well with Windows Live Hotmail, but lets you add any regular email account, plus RSS feeds, spell checking, PhotoMail and Windows Live Contacts. Replaces Outlook Express in Windows XP and Windows Mail in Windows Vista.
• Windows Live Photo Gallery - software for managing, finding, sharing, tagging and editing photos. Replaces Windows Photo Gallery in Vista and is a completely new feature for XP.
• Windows Live Writer - blog posting tool, supporting almost all popular blogging software. Considered one of the best products in its category.
• Windows Live Messenger - instant messaging, compatible with Yahoo Messenger. By getting it as part of the Suite, you don’t have to worry as much about installing new versions.
• Windows Live Sign-In assistant - required install, helps you sign in to Windows Live ID. When you visit a Windows Live ID site in your browser, the sign-in assistant can help out by displaying large buttons for various Live IDs and, in some cases, letting you just click on the account you want to sign in.
• Windows Live OneCare Family Safety - parental control software, allows parents to monitor and restrict a child’s internet access
• Windows Live Toolbar - Internet Explorer toolbar, very powerful toolbar for accessing Windows Live sites and services.

All the software included features newer updated versions. Live Messenger has some bugs fixed. Live Mail has a new List View for contacts, contacts import/export improvements, toolbar customization, Quick Views, improved Layout Dialog options, changing your sign in account, Photo E-Mail updates and Newsgroup updates.

Live Writer is hugely improved. The new version has video insertion (from Soapbox, including your own account, and other video websites), image uploading to Blogger/PicasaWeb, the ability to publish XHTML-style markup, 28 new languages, printing blog posts, justifying and aligning post text, and better image handling, including a fix for the blurry images problem, in addition to bug fixes and installation issues.

Live Photo Gallery gets improved color adjustment and cropping capabilities, image sharpening, shadow and highlight levels, image resizing, batch image resizing, a picture import tool that grabs pictures from your camera in a much better way than Vista or XP do, publishing photos to Windows Live Spaces and videos to MSN Soapbox. This is the first public beta of this software, also.

One complaint: The Suite is not yet available for 64-bit systems.

Curiously, the Suite offers to set your homepage to MSN.com, not Live.com, which probably indicates the change in strategy away from the personalized homepage.

September 6th, 2007 Posted by Nathan Weinberg | Mail, Writer, OneCare, Live, Spaces, Messenger, Windows | one comment

Live Spaces Gets High Res Photos, Snapfish

Windows Live Spaces added two new photo capabilities. You can now upload images at higher resolutions than before, and even click to optimize photos for printing. The printing comes in handy due to the second feature, Snapfish integration. The feature lets you send off your uploaded photos to Snapfish in order to get prints of your photos.
(via LiveSide)

September 5th, 2007 Posted by Nathan Weinberg | Live, Spaces, Windows | one comment

Windows Live Coming To Nokia Phones

Microsoft and Nokia announced an agreement bring Windows Live applications to the Nokia S60 phones in 11 countries. Customers will have the Windows Live Suite available on their phone, including Windows Live Hotmail, Messenger, Contacts and Spaces. LiveSide has some details and screenshots, including that Live Hotmail will not feature push email (it does have that on Windows Mobile phones), but that the phone’s camera can take pictures and video and attach them to emails.

The services included, from Phil Holden:

1. Live Contacts. Once you sign in for the first time your Live Contacts is auto-magically synchronized within the address book of the Nokia device. As well as names, address’s, email and the other usual stuff what’s nice about this, and I think pretty unique is that the online presence and status of your contacts show up within the phone list. So now from within the device address book you can find whoever you want to communicate with and leverage the presence/status to determine the best way to reach them.
2. Messenger. At sign-in you can change your online picture and your status. Once online you obviously can browse your messenger contacts and take part in multiple conversations as you would expect. What I love is that the services integrate features from within the phone, so when you are within a conversation you can send a voice clip, file or picture - either from the gallery or snap one with the camera. When I think about how powerful voice and pictures are this enables a great scenario for traveling: sign-in, find your friend and start conversation, then speak “hey honey, I just got into the hotel in Sydney, look at my amazing view” and then take a picture out of your hotel room of the Opera House.
3. Hotmail. So here there is good integration with the Nokia email client and your Hotmail gets loaded into a separate folder within the client. Because the emails are downloaded they are available when you are offline. Right now your email isn’t synchronized auto-magically, but its a simple process to goto options, select sync etc. When you are composing an email, just like messenger the phone features are integrated so that you can insert a picture, voice clip, video or other phone right into the email message.
4. Spaces. Not surprisingly there is good Spaces support. On Nokia devices there is an application called ‘online share’ which comes with plug-in’s for Flickr and Vox and now we added Spaces support. There is a simple process to activate the service by adding your Live ID and once that is done the Gallery is now Live enabled. It’s super easy, select the photo you want, goto options, open online service and it will promote you to add a title and text and the the image is load up to your blog.

August 26th, 2007 Posted by Nathan Weinberg | Live, Hotmail, Messenger, Spaces, Windows | no comments

Windows Live Spaces Turns Three

My Opera web browser, normally the king of stability, crashed and completely screwed up my saved tabs, so I’m posting everything old right now, in order to set things right.

Wish a happy third birthday to Windows Live Spaces, celebrating three years in which it has become the biggest blogging service on the planet. Some stats from the blog:

• Over the past 3 years, we have grown the number of visitors to Spaces from 1 visitor when we launched the Beta version in August 2004 to over 115 million monthly users worldwide
• This month when one of you signed up for Spaces, you created the 100 millionth Windows Live space. This means that during the last 3 years, there have been over 100 million Windows Live spaces created for people to express themselves and share their thoughts, photos, and interests.
• With the latest release, Spaces is now available to people in 55 countries and in 33 different languages. It is amazing to see that over the last 3 years, there have been as many spaces created in Turkey as in Australia, Germany, or Taiwan. Looking back three years, Spaces was only available in 1 country.

My first impressions of Spaces, back in 2004, were that “Out of the box, users can do more with Spaces than Blogger”, “new users will be thrilled”, “Spaces is more than enough for 95% of bloggers, while the other 5% can use Blogger and Typepad”, “Spaces has a good chance at actually winning”, “Maybe Google had better create a smarter and more versatile interface for Blogger before it realizes Microsoft has stolen all of its users”.

I don’t always toot my own horn, but I was 100% on the money. Spaces has been tearing up the blogging marketplace, and it forced Google to renovate blogger after Microsoft stole all their users.

August 22nd, 2007 Posted by Nathan Weinberg | Live, Spaces, Windows | no comments