In a press release issued today, comScore breaks down the time spent online globally by properties, with Microsoft sites leading the way with nearly 15 percent of all time spent online (out of some 27 billion hours per month!):

However in an interesting little sidelight, comScore reveals that “Microsoft’s Windows Live Messenger representing nearly 70 percent of time spent on the property during the month”:

In September 2009, nearly 27 billion hours were spent on the Internet globally by a record online population of 1.2 billion Internet users age 15 and older. Microsoft Sites accounted for 14.5 percent of total minutes spent online in September, making it the most engaging global property, with Microsoft’s Windows Live Messenger representing nearly 70 percent of time spent on the property during the month. Google Sites captured 9.3 percent of total minutes (2.5 billion hours), with YouTube accounting for nearly half of total time spent (1.2 billion hours) at the property. Yahoo! Sites ranked as the third most engaging Web property at 1.7 billion hours, followed by Facebook.com at 1.4 billion hours. Facebook’s share of attention reached 5.1 percent in September, an increase of 2.9 percentage points from the previous year, as its continued growth in popularity precipitated this surge in share.

So a little quick math, and 70% of 3,92 billion gives Windows Live Messenger some 2,744 billion hours of time spent online worldwide in a month: that’s more than all time spend online on Google, or Yahoo, or Facebook sites, wow!

For those of us in the US this may come as quite a surprise, as Messenger is not quite as popular as it is elsewhere, but looking at the comScore breakdown of numbers by region you can see where Microsoft (and Messenger) are most popular:

Of course these numbers do not reflect revenue generated, perhaps a far more important number than raw minutes, but we sometimes forget the vast global reach of Microsoft and Messenger online.

The Windows Live Messenger Team notifies Messenger users in a blogpost that the mandatory update for version 8.5, as announced back in August, has begun. Users on Windows XP will need to ensure that they have installed Service Pack 2 (SP2) or higher, otherwise the upgrade will not work.

Incase you have issues or questions during this upgrade process, the team provides the following resources:

• Troubleshooting Login Issues
  This post from the support team provides some guidance into how to determine what error you are getting and steps to resolve many of these.
• Online Help
  You can also try the online help pages.  On the left hand side, you can select ‘Table of Contents’ (near the bottom) and get information on troubleshooting and error codes.
• Contact the Support Team
  If you have already tried the going through the online help suggestions and still having difficulties then you should consider contacting the Messenger support team and providing them with more information about the problems that you are encountering.

Users on Messenger 2009 (version 14) will have to upgrade too starting November 9th, unless they already installed the latest version (Build: 14.0.8089.726).

Wondering which version you have? You can find out by going to Help > About in the menu. Don’t want to wait? Go get the current version from http://download.live.com/messenger

Due to some glitches with Windows Live Toolbar’s favorites syncing, several users reported that their browser’s favorites have disappeared as a result. The Toolbar team has responded by posting the following announcement:

We’ve heard from some customers in the last 24 hours that in some cases, favorites have been removed from the Toolbar when they synced from one or more of their PCs. We have investigated, and we want to assure you, that if this is occurring for you, your favorites are still available on SkyDrive. We apologize for this inconvenience and are diligently working on a fix to restore favorites from SkyDrive to your PC.

In order to prevent any further issues with favorites sync from Toolbar, we have temporarily disabled syncing of favorites for ALL Toolbar customers until we have a fix ready.

In the mean time, you can still access all your favorites on Windows Live SkyDrive by accessing http://favorites.live.com. Alternatively, you can also recover your favorites from the Recycle Bin on the PC where they were removed.

We’ll keep you updated when this issue has been fixed!

Are you ready for the Winter Olympics? With the Olympics still 100 days away, NBC sure is. They made some changes to their site, NBCOlympics.com, for that.
 
Just as last year with the Summer Olympics there will be a Video Player based on Microsoft Silverlight which will deliver full HD videos. But that’s not all! This year the video player will have DVR-like functionality, with the ability to rewind the video, highlight clips and save them. How awesome is that? But wait, that’s still not all, the video player also incorporates Facebook Connect, so you can immediately share your favorite videos with your friends.
 
More share options are: Windows Live, Twitter, Digg, De.licio.us and Reddit.

As you may have noticed in the screenshot above, International users may be disappointed as due to Olympic broadcasting regulations, NBC is only allowed to show Olympic competition video on the internet to users in the United States and U.S. Territories (including Puerto Rico). Users outside of those locations will still have access to an extensive set of non-event video content on NBCOlympics.com though.

The site, according to TechCrunch, will also include Deep Zoom photo galleries and slideshows, so you can zoom in to every detail you’d like to see. I have yet to find out where those are, found pictures and slideshows yep, but zoomable ones…nope. Maybe that part hasn’t been updated yet? What I see sure differs from the screenshot at TechCrunch.

Also on site are Medal Counts, TV listings, headlines etc. etc. So yea, even without the competition vids there’s enough to see for international users too. Go on, have a look, the site went live today! Oohh, and ehh if you do find those zoomable pictures, let us know in the comments below.

MSN.com is about to unveil a new look based on cleaner lines, a focus on select verticals, and easier user configuration.  Along with a new logo, the home page will feature inline access to Windows Live, Twitter, and Facebook, with abilities to update them right from the home page.  An uplevel Silverlight experience is coming, too, with additional added features.  Video will receive prominent placement on the home page, and an uplevel Silverlight experience there will feature full screen HD video viewing.

We talked to Bob Visse, the MSN Product Management Group General Manager, about the changes, including the US and worldwide aspects of the changes.  He said that “different pages work differently across the world”, with for example Eastern Europeans not being nearly so interested in entertainment gossip as we are here in the US.  Additionally, a number of markets have received recent updates of their own, so in the case of for example Canada, which was just updated, it may be a while before they see something similar to the changes occurring in the US.

Visse had some interesting statistics to pass along, saying that MSN is the top global info site with over 600 million unique visitors a month, the number one site in 25 markets, and that 45% of Bing traffic comes from MSN.  MSN plans to focus on some key growing trends: local, video, social networking, and search:

Microsoft announced the new MSN in a press release tonite, and you can take a look at the new site at MSN.com/preview while it rolls out across the country.

Following a bumpy upgrade for the Windows client last week, the Windows Live Sync team had been hard at work on their Mac client to add support for Snow Leopard. Today the team is proud to announce that it is now available for download:

We’re happy to announce that Windows Live Sync for Mac now supports Snow Leopard! Thanks so much for your continued interest in Sync, and for your patience while we worked out some stubborn compatibility issues we had with Snow Leopard.

If you’re a Snow Leopard user, you can get the new Sync software for Snow Leopard here. Mac users currently not using Snow Leopard do not require this update.