« Microsoft Equipt to be discontinued after April 30, 2009Windows Live ID Sign-in Assistant 6.5 beta for Windows 7 »

Live.com Images: pager coming soon?

Feb 20, 2009 9:34 am by Kip Kniskern | 6 comments

Today’s little flurry over the Live.com snow leopard isn’t a big controversy, but it does underscore the fact that people are catching on to Live.com images as something cool. Here in the US, we’ve had them since the Olympics, and personally we’ve found them to be well done. Beautiful images for the most part, sometimes brightening up a dreary winter day, sometimes making a statement or marking a holiday. Now thanks to LiveSide reader VasiS, we’ve caught a glimpse of what might be coming next for the Live.com home page, a pager (using Silverlight) to go back to that favorite photo from days ago:

Live Search Background from Srikanth on Vimeo.

Live Search has been known to try out new stuff in select market segments before, and it looks like VasiS is one of the lucky ones to be seeing this (not seeing it here, on any browser). Somewhat strangely he’s seeing it only on Chrome, not in FireFox or IE8, not sure why. Here’s a screenshot showing the pager:

Now of course pretty pictures aren’t going to boost market share, but hey if it gets people looking, and trying Live Search, it can’t hurt!

This entry was posted in News and tagged Live Search. Bookmark the permalink.

http://www.liveside.net/members/lbastie/default.aspx lbastie
Make those beautiful live search pages available outside of the US: France, UK, Germany, Spain, Italy, Swiss… As many users as in the US would enjoy it.
http://www.liveside.net/members/foaf/default.aspx foaf
What would boost market share is if they invested in inovation – they should buy leapfish.com asap! Ok so it’s only a skin over the top of a search engine, but it’s fast and actually useful.
Pretty pics are ok, but apparently MS’s servers couldn’t handle the load if they expanded it outside the US.
http://gordon-breuer.de Gordon
You can use the Live-Search with those images even outside the US when using http://www.live.com/?mkt=en-us
I’m taking a daily screenshot of those pictures since October, 31th 2008 – until this pager is available to all visitors you can take a look at my gallery: http://is.gd/keVc :-)
Oh, and I saw this silverlight pager a few days ago, too – on February, 7th 2009: http://is.gd/keVL This was with IE7 on Windows XP SP3
Greets from germany,
Gordon
http://msftandthefuture.spaces.live.com/ Quikboy
I saw that more than a month ago, and posted about it on my blog. It kept showing up in Safari on Windows, but not IE for some reason.
http://www.liveside.net/members/salmonsushi/default.aspx salmonsushi
Imagine you are using dial-up or your internet is capped. Will you go to google or live search with such a large image background?
http://www.liveside.net/members/Seika/default.aspx Seika
The pictures load later, until then the search box is usable. Of course, there’s always the search box in the top right corner of browser window.
I’ve just seen it tonight. Seems to be limited to the most recent one week. The text in the tip boxes also looks thicker (effect of anti-aliasing?)