As reported by Mary Jo Foley, the Windows Live Butterfly program, a group of beta testers who signed on to test whatever was thrown their way, is sputtering to a close.  From a statement issued by Microsoft on the subject:

“The Butterfly group has been involved in beta testing MSN and Windows Live products for a number of years.  Rather than continue the program as something only focused on beta testing, we’re offering the group a variety of options to engage in the broader Windows Live community, including the opportunity to join the MVP (Most Valuable Professional) program and continued and future access to beta testing opportunities.”

(how one goes about “joining” the MVP program is beyond us, but hey)

In case you didn’t know, LiveSide came about largely as a result of the (then MSN Butterfly) program.  We all met as beta testers, and were all original members of the MSN Butterfly program, which later changed its name (along with dang near everything else in Red West not nailed down) to Windows Live.

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We’re having a little issue currently with our user registration as some jokers try to take advantage of our generous registration policies.  While we continue to figure out how to best deal with the problem (and clear out the hundreds of users created...

Well the fun just never stops around here.  Without going into detail, we’ve been fighting some email issues recently.  In an attempt to deal with them, we made some configuration changes yesterday that seemed to have caused a bit of a stir...

Thanks to our friend Robert McLaws, we’re set up here at LiveSide with a nightly backup using Jungle Disk and Amazon S3 .  We’ve been pretty impressed by it, especially with the ~$1.00/mo charges we pay to have our database backed up. Well today...

We’ve been doing a little spring cleaning here at LiveSide, and just wanted to note a couple of things: RSS Our RSS feed, from Feedburner, is http://feeds2.feedburner.com/liveside .  Feedburner (owned by Google) has changed their address a couple...

At Mix 09, the Microsoft Translator team announced a new web page widget , built on top of a new AJAX API , and put up a sign up sheet for anyone who was interested in trying it out. We hear those invites are about to be fulfilled, but when we saw that...

With all the rumors flying around this week, Its been difficult to discern the fact from the fan-fiction. To help clear up some of this fog, me and Sean Bradford over at neowin.net decided to put our facts together. We came up with a confirmed list of...

I don’t know about you, but my head is spinning from all this Zune news. Well the buzz from the leaks may be deafening, the silence from Microsoft is positively ear shattering. Trying to keep something under wraps in this day and age, is akin to plugging...

Tegra is Nvidia's 1st foray into the mobile computing realm. Nvidia is the company that makes the awesome video cards for your desktops and laptops. Most higher end machines use some type of powerful GPU made by ether Nvidia or ATI. For instance, my Gateway...

It’s that time of year again, every Spring & Fall the Microsoft rumors start flying (Hey, Apple can’t have all the rumors to themselves). With so many great products in the pipeline its no wonder people are excited. Most people are expecting Windows...

We here at LiveSide have really been inspired by Microsoft's new “Laptop Hunters” ads. They have really struck a nerve on the internet, whether or not they have any effect in real life, is yet to be seen. So far we’ve have seen Lauren &  Giampaolo...

The long awaited PDC , Microsoft’s Professional Developer’s Conference, gets underway unofficially on Sunday, and then in full force on Monday October 27, with keynotes by Ray Ozzie, Steven Sinofsky, David Treadwell, and others.  We’ll be there,...

Well, I’m excited anyway.  We’ve had a few small but quite annoying issues with our recent upgrade server move, and the one affecting our readers most has been the inability to upload avatars.  Well as of tonight that’s fixed :), so you are...

As we've been asked a number of times for some discussion forums, we've set one up for the Windows Live Wave 3 betas.

Check it out. (update: added a link in the sidebar)

This will not formally be moderated, so please keep things on-topic and respectful. Come the end of the beta (or when trouble starts, whichever is sooner!) the forum will be deleted.

As always, suggestions welcome in the comments or on email.

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Not really Windows Live news, per se, but Seattle P-I Technology reporter Todd Bishop has left the P-I to join the Puget Sound Business Journal , according to Twitter messages left by both him and fellow ex-P-I reporter John Cook.  Kind of stunning...