LiveSide - News blog

While this isn’t strictly a Windows Live service, it is still very cool stuff and we told you about it when it was first announced, and now the World Wide Telescope is live and available for download.

Check it out now at http://worldwidetelescope.org

(thanks to Brandon and Twitter for the heads up!)

Now I’m off to download and check it out myself.  Have fun!

At the Wireless Enterprise Symposium in Orlando, Florida today, Microsoft and Research in Motion (RIM) are announcing an agreement to provide, Windows Live services, including Hotmail and Messenger, on Blackberrys.  The enhancements will be available “this summer”.

From the press release:

Windows Live Hotmail for BlackBerry will allow customers to:

• Use BlackBerry 'push' technology for automatic message delivery and message synchronization so customers’ online account is up-to-date with actions taken on their BlackBerry smartphone
• Use a dedicated inbox for Windows Live Hotmail messages, which are automatically delivered to the smartphone. Customers can also choose to receive their Windows Live Hotmail messages, along with messages from other e-mail accounts, within a single inbox on their BlackBerry smartphone
• Display HTML e-mail with the ability to view graphics, Web links, and contact photos in emails

Windows Live Messenger for BlackBerry will allow customers to:

• Send instant messages and join group chats
• Set status and see the presence of friends and colleagues within Windows Live Messenger or their contact cards
• Customize status messages
• Save conversations
• Showcase their Display Picture (Avatar)
• Send and receive pictures and files
• Use more than 60 emoticons

In the past few days a number of reports came in that Windows Live Messenger was blocking the ability to send legitimate urls through Messenger, including most noticeably www.youtube.com.  While there was some sinister speculation as to the nature of this blocking, the Inside Windows Live Messenger blog reports that the problem was caused by a third party partner who handles the blocking of malicious sites:

• There are a number of factors that can be used to determine whether a URL is potentially harmful: number of times a URL is sent, the frequency of the URL being sent, the number of accounts the URL is sent from, manually checking the URL, comparing with other "block lists", etc.
• When a URL is deemed harmful, a block can be instated for a specific URL (i.e. www.<domain>.com/<page>) or an entire domain (i.e. *.<domain>.com)
• This entire process for Messenger is managed by a 3rd party that is a Microsoft partner
• On Friday, Microsoft did not request to block any of the URLs that were accidentally blocked
• The blocks were made by our partner as a result of their process to block harmful URLs
• We are still investigating the specific reason our partner made these incorrect blocks and we will work with them to improve their process for detecting harmful URLs while not blocking safe ones

Everything's all back to normal, now.

Hello fellow LiveSide readers, my name is John O'Brien. Its my second season as a Windows Live Developer/Platform MVP and I'm pleased to announce many new developer related articles in the works for your reading pleasure here at LiveSide. Today I published Create a Deep Zoom Panorama with Windows Live on the Developer Blog.

Its a how to guide for taking a Panorama Photo, stitching in Windows Live Photo Gallery, crunching in Deep Zoom Composer, uploading to Silverlight Streaming and display on top a Virtual Earth map. I hope you enjoy the read, I had fun making it, even the 5am trip out to the Story Bridge here in my home city of Brisbane, Australia.

We thought we’d seen it all when it came to viral videos used by Microsoft to advertise new products. From the “Hot Male” series (pretty good) through to the MSN “No one wants to look dumb” series (pretty bad).

Alas no, we’ve now hit a new low with the new Live Search videos.

Kip mentioned the Live Search UI issues already, unfortunately these videos don’t do anything to help restore our confidence in Microsoft being able to compete with Google.

Please, just stop.

News from the Machine Translator blog (via Vasudev), that a new version of Windows Live Translator is available, including links to the Encarta online dictionary, and a paid human translation service, from Live Translation.  The blog poster, Helvecio Ribeiro, a Microsoft Research Test Lead for the Machine Translation team, posted a quick webcast on SkyDrive which takes you through the new features:

The new features are only available for a subset of the available Translator languages, and you will not see the Encarta or Live Translator options unless you have chosen a supported language.

Encarta Online Dictionary language support:

• English to Spanish
• Spanish to English
• English to French
• French to English
• English to German
• German to English
• English to Italian
• Italian to English

Live Translation language support:

• English to Spanish
• Spanish to English
• English to German
• German to English
• English to Italian
• Italian to English
• English to French
• French to English
• English to Portuguese
• Portuguese to English

Not much word on other features/improvements, Helvecio promises a press release soon.

At Web 2.0 Expo, I was impressed by how open and talkative the Live Mesh guys were – of course that could have been because they’ve been locked away unable to talk for two years.  Well now they just won’t shut up, apparently, because they’ve been blogging up a storm.  Here’s a list of some of the Live Mesh bloggers and an OPML if you want to subscribe.  This dynamic list comes from NewsGator Online, in the same way we built our list of favorite blogs.  As Live Mesh moves ahead we plan to do a lot more on keeping track of the latest news, but this will serve to get us started.

One good example of some great Live Mesh blogging is this post by Roman Batoukov (via Steve Clayton):

We are building a v1 product that has a potential to help people solve many, if not most of  the connectivity and data availability problems I’m personally passionate about solving. The product brings together your data, people you share data with and various devices you use to process the data into a single “Mesh”. The bold statement is that you can access your data anywhere from any device. We provide multiple alternative access paths to your data through the Mesh. I’m working on the Accounts team – we are responsible for keeping track of users, devices and applications in the system, security, authentication and authorization.

We expect to hear a lot more from these bloggers in the coming months.  Can’t wait (and yes I included a few extra “Live Mesh guys” – consider them honorary).

Live Mesh Guys List

Want to subscribe? Here’s the OPML:

Live Mesh Guys OPML

(If I left you off the list, leave a comment and I’ll add you in!)

While we don't usually do these kind of late-night TV infomercials, this one should be of interest to a few of you. Amazon.com is currently running a $30 rebate on Windows Live OneCare 2.0, which means after rebate you get it for free. Its US-only (sorry!) but here's the link if you're interested:

Get Windows Live OneCare 2.0 @ Amazon.com

While we're talking about Amazon, I'll mention Mary-Jo Foley's new book, Microsoft 2.0. Seems like there's some juicy stuff in the Appendix too.

Remember Messenger TV? We've told you about the French version before. On May 8th Messenger TV will be released to the following 20 countries: Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Indonesia, Italy, India, Malaysia, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Philippines, Russia, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, and the UK. This means an almost global launch, only Japan and the USA are left out this time.

It will be available in the following languages (depending on your browser settings): Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish.

How to set/check your browser language? In Internet Explorer, you can select Tools, Internet Options to see your Language settings.

Should you want to set it to another language than the one you currently have, click on the Add button and select the one you wish to use and click OK. Next make sure the one you want to use is on top of the list, like so:

Messenger TV combines this language setting from IE with the navigation for MSN Video and creates the navigation in Messenger TV, so no two countries have the same menu/content! You will see Messenger TV as an activity within Windows Live Messenger.

Can't wait? Head over to http://MessengerTV.msn.com, add the Messenger TV Virtual buddy (or add MessengerTV@live.com directly) and start a conversation with it. A simple hi or hello will do, it just needs to get aware of your presence.

To watch with your buddy you will have to wait till the activity shows up in the activity list. You can't invite one in once it's running, and you can't beforehand either as multi user conversations are not allowed for this agent.

More info:
http://MessengerTV.msn.com
http://messengertv.spaces.live.com/
http://liveineurope.spaces.live.com/

Special thanks to Brian Groth for the thumbs up.

James Senior, a Microsoft UK blogger, has put up on his blog about an impending change to Live Maps in the UK. Don’t worry, we’re not going to see the farce that happened last time! The changes that will be coming are as follows:

• If you visit the URL http://maps.live.com you will get to Live Maps UK.
• If you go to maps via http://www.live.com then you will get to Multimap.
• If you go to maps via http://www.msn.co.uk then you will get to Multimap.

So at least now if you go to maps.live.com you’ll actually be going to the site you wanted to go to in the first place. James also posts the official statement for this move:

We recently announced the integration of Multimap into Live Search in the UK and will start to route users directly to the Multimap service from MSN UK and Live.com from 9^th May.

This release is part of our longer term consumer strategy to have one mapping and local search site in the UK, integrating the best of both Multimap and Virtual Earth (Live Search Maps) technologies. The management and development teams of Microsoft and Multimap are working collaboratively, with a common vision bringing localised products to market faster.  Given that Multimap resonates successfully with UK consumers serving over 45% of the UK mapping audience, building on this brand is the right strategic direction.

We recognise, however, that we must continue to offer users a choice of services while we complete the integration of all Virtual Earth features into the Multimap site.  We are therefore maintaining the Live Search Maps UK site and users can still access this at http://maps.live.com to use favourite features such as Windows Live Collections and 3D maps. Powerful VE Aerial and Bird’s Eye imagery has been integrated into the Multimap site to give consumers the broadest array of map styles on the market today.

Additionally, we are going to provide prominent signposting to Live Search Maps UK from the Multimap site for those who are redirected there. All Live Search and MSN UK mapping traffic through ‘Maps’ links will be redirected to www.multimap.com but any shared Collections links will not.

Developers and businesses that have invested in the Virtual Earth technology are unaffected by the redirection of our Live Search Maps and MSN mapping traffic to Multimap. We will continue to support both technology platforms and expect to offer an expanded set of opportunities and features over time.

We thank our users for the feedback and passion they have shared so far as we continue to evolve our local and mapping sites in the UK. We encourage you to try out these sites for yourselves.

So when is this all taking place? James states that this will be switching over on 9th May.

SL

Seems like every time the new-look Live Search Home Page was tested, we happened to be online and caught it, but now the new look is here to stay.  If you don’t already see it at www.live.com you will soon.

The new look started appearing last night, and the modules that were broken on my.live.com  (the personalized home page) including at least for me the Live Clock and CBS Sportsline scores, are now working again.

We notified you about the changes Microsoft planned for accessing Hotmail with Outlook Express, the disabling of the DAV protocol. The transition deadline has now been postponed:

Recently, many customers received notification regarding Microsoft’s plan to disable the DAV protocol, which allows you to access your Windows Live Hotmail inbox from Outlook Express. From the feedback we received, it became clear that you needed additional time to evaluate alternative solutions and with this in mind, we are postponing the transition deadline previously announced.  This means that you will continue to be able to access your Windows Live Hotmail accounts from Outlook Express beyond the June 30 transition deadline.

As Microsoft continues to evolve its products to meet your needs, we appreciate your feedback. This change to Outlook Express protocol is one such evolution and will allow for managing of multiple accounts and today’s large inboxes. We will update you on expected future changes and alternatives with enough advance notice to ensure a smooth transition.

We apologize for the inconvenience this change may cause.

-Windows Live Hotmail Support Team

No mention of another date but we will be keeping an eye out!

Don't want to wait? Download Windows Live Mail at http://get.live.com/wlmail/overview now and keep access to your Windows Live Hotmail on your desktop.

Read of interest:
OE migration to WLM - HowTo

What do you get when you combine Disney with Virtual Earth, Twitter and Flickr? You get Twisney! Chris Pendleton, VE Tech Evangelist, writes the following on his blog:

Here's a unique mashup - Twisney - Virtual Earth, Twitter and Flickr all based on Disney Parks in Orlando. I love this because it's so simple, yet has some great filtering and searching capabilities. You can filter listings on the months and/or days the Twitters were posted, the park you're interested in seeing people Twittering or (if you have a favorite user) the user Twittering. ...

So, for you Twitter-er's who are inside of a Disney park you can let people know what you're up to. Your friends (and other random people) can check out what ride you're on (like btmr, rnr, tot), where in the park you are or how bad your sunburn is. For you advanced users with camera phones you can upload pictures to Flickr so people can not only read what you're doing, but they can see a picture of what you're looking at. ..

And you think that's cool? Check it out in Bird's Eye and 3D. Greatness.

He also lets us know the Virtual Earth Team is hiring! So if you are interested in a job on the team check out his post: Virtual Earth - Now Hiring

I'm sure you know about the I'm Initiative for Windows  Live Messenger, but now you can also help out by sending mail with Windows Live Hotmail!

What is the i’m Initiative?

The i’m Initiative is a Microsoft program where Microsoft shares a portion of their advertising revenue for everyday activities – sending IMs and emails. Hotmail and Messenger have ads, like all free web services, and Microsoft makes money when a customer sees an ad. The i’m Initiative has successfully raised over 1.4 million dollars since it got started in 2007. It used to be available only in Windows Live Messenger, and now the Hotmail team is glad to say that you’ll be able to raise money for the cause of your choice each time you send an email.

The i’m initiative launched in March 2007 and in its first year raised more than $1.3 million for ten of the world’s most effective social causes, with each organization receiving a minimum of $100,000. With no set cap on the amount donated to each organization, the more customers who join the program and communicate using Windows Live Messenger and Windows Live Hotmail, the more money Microsoft donates toward addressing some of the world’s most urgent social issues.

You can choose to support any of the organizations on this list: the American Red Cross, Boys & Girls Clubs of America, the National AIDS Fund, National Multiple Sclerosis Society, ninemillion.org, Sierra Club, StopGlobalWarming.org, Susan G. Komen for the Cure, The Humane Society of the United States and U.S Fund for UNICEF.

How do I get started?

Go to http://im.live.com to join. You can choose to participate in Messenger, Hotmail, or both and you can pick a different organization for each service or dedicate all your efforts to one cause – it’s entirely up to you! This program is currently available only to customers in the United States. Once you’re set up, you’ll raise money for your favorite cause every time you send an email or IM. It’s really easy. Once you join, there’s no extra time out of your day, you don’t have to pay any money, and you get to know that you’re taking a step towards making the world better. The power of the collective can be huge – think of the difference that could happen if everyone swapped out a few plastic grocery bags each week for a reusable bag or took one less car trip a week.

i’m Initiative Momentum Data

• Microsoft’s i’m Initiative has quickly become one of the most successful online marketing campaigns ever conducted at Microsoft.  Consumers have truly embraced the i’m Initiative and its success has surpassed expectations, both from a social action/cause engagement perspective and for Microsoft's own business, proving that cause marketing can truly be an effective approach for social causes, businesses and consumers alike.
• From a business momentum point of view for Microsoft, with studies conducted in Nov-Dec 2007 comparing consumers exposed to the i’m Initiative via advertising versus those who hadn’t, the i’m Initiative created strong momentum in:
• New customer acquisition: More than 20 million downloads of Windows Live Messenger have been attributed to the i’m campaign itself. 
• Increased usage of other online offerings: Because of the inherent connections between Windows Live Messenger and other online offerings from Microsoft, such as Live Search, MSN and Windows Live Hotmail, the positive growth seen with the i’m program has had a halo effect of increased usage of these other services as well. 

We wrote about the benefits for Microsoft before, how it affected the number of Live Messenger users compared to other IM clients in the same period in the United States. In above excerpt from an email we received, we see that the other Live Services are riding along nicely too.

Now if only they would open it up to other countries.....

While Live Mesh is not nearly feature complete, not even in beta until later in the year, there are some features that would be really helpful, like knowing how far along a synch to the cloud has progressed.  Currently there is no way to find that out using the Live Mesh client, but as our friend Richard Chung pointed out in the Live Mesh Forums, there is a workaround:

There's no way to get these numbers on the client, but you can get them on the Live Desktop.  It's a little obscure, but here's how:
    (1) Open up Live Desktop.
    (2) Hover over the Live Mesh icon on the bottom right to pull up the Notifier.
    (3) Click the folder icon at the bottom of the Notifier (icon #3)
    (4) Click the "Manage folders" link.
    (5) Click the Live Mesh Folder you're interested in.
At the bottom, there should be two numbers: "Synchronized" and "Overall".  "Overall" is how much data the Live Folder contains; "Synchronized" is how much has been uploaded to the cloud.

Here’s a quick walkthrough:

Navigate to the Live Desktop (either from www.mesh.com, or from your Live Mesh icon on your computer), and sign in if necessary.  Follow the steps above, clicking on the Mesh icon (2), then the folder icon (3), and then the Manage folders link (4):

Then highlight the folder you are interested in (5), and check the progress:

We expect that the user experience here will get better as Live Mesh progresses, but it’s good to have at least some indication, especially when synching large files.