Angus Logan has posted on dev.live.com that Microsoft will be switching off the end points for Photos and Application Storage. From Angus’ post:

The Photos API CTP especially has been extremely useful for us, as we learned a ton about the functionality developers want and previewed our first AtomPub endpoint – this AtomPub endpoint drove some of the thinking around the Live Framework. But the time has come for these CTPs to end. In the future, we will be back with another Photo API, but we don’t have the exact schedule yet.

Community Technology Previews are designed to shape the technology by giving developers early access to a technology to allow them to “kick the tires” and provide us valuable feedback. CTP releases explicitly do not allow for use in production-style environments (see terms). This allows us to get our offering right before we have customers bet their businesses on us.

So, after the Windows Live Agents SDK has been retired, this is another couple of Live APIs that are being retired. Now, you could be forgiven for looking at this negatively, but as Angus points out, there will be another Photo API, and my hopes for that will be its inclusion in the LiveFX. Of course, the discontinuation of the Photo API coupled with the Contacts section of the LiveFX means pretty much the end of my own little pet project, LiveNet. Still, it’s good that Microsoft will [hopefully] be offering all these services themselves.