LiveSide - News blog : Favorites

Quick Update: Favorites syncing on Windows Live Toolbar working once again

damaster — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 03:45:00 GMT

We reported a few days ago that Favorites sync was temporarily turned off in Windows Live Toolbar for all users due to a technical glitch on the server side. The Windows Live Toolbar team just announced today that this has been fixed and the feature has been re-enabled:

We are happy to report that this issue with the “favorites sync” feature on Windows Live Toolbar has now been fixed and you can now re-enable this feature. As we mentioned in the original post, no data was actually lost and everything will work as expected and you can again get your favorites synced back to your browser on your PC.

You can access your synced Favorites at http://favorites.live.com

Favorites sync temporarily turned off on Windows Live Toolbar

damaster — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 01:17:53 GMT

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!

Having problems with Windows Live Sync / Favorites sync? This might help

Kip Kniskern — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 19:16:50 GMT

An admission right off the bat: I’m not a Toolbar user. I guess I’m partial to as much browser real estate as I can get, but I don’t generally install any toolbars, from Windows Live or anywhere else. That being said, if you have the Windows Live Toolbar installed and are having issues with syncing your Favorites across computers, John Pollard, a Senior dev on the Live Search team, thinks he’s found an answer. From his blog post:

I had no idea what the problem was, and was going to try the trusted uninstall/reinstall route, but when I went to the uninstall control panel I realised I still had the old Favorites toolbar add-in installed:

John uninstalled the old Windows Live Favorites for Windows Live Toolbar, and his sync options re-appeared on his (new) Windows Live Toolbar. In one case he needed to re-install the new Toolbar, but after that everything worked.

So if you’ve had problems, make sure the old Live Favorites is uninstalled.

Also, if you’ve tried to install Windows Live Sync and have been getting a network error, there is a fix for that. From a comment (from Rachel Popkin MSFT) on the Windows Live Sync blog:

The issue you are experiencing should now have been resolved. To install Sync, please try the following steps:
1. Visit https://sync.live.com/clientdownload.aspx and select the Windows client
2. Save the program to your computer (Desktop, etc.)
3. Run the installation
4. Once the installation is done, run Sync from the Windows Live folder in the Start Menu.

Rachel also comments that there is a new Mac client, so if you’re having issues on a Mac, make sure you have the latest version.

Windows Live Toolbar – upcoming new features, Sync, SkyDrive and Favorites integration

damaster — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 05:06:31 GMT

Credits goes to Jamie Thomson for reviewing the upcoming “release candidate” version of Windows Live Toolbar. From the post we’re able to preview some of the high-resolution screenshots of what’s to come in the new Toolbar. Here’s what Jamie had to say about the new Toolbar:

Do you use toolbars? I generally don’t. Actually no, that’s not true; I didn’t, but I do now.

I’ve been using the new Windows Live Toolbar for about 6 weeks and so far so good, I’m still using it and for me that’s something of a toolbar record. The reason is the brand new toolbar buttons that allow me to see my What’s New feed and (importantly for me) my Calendar straight from within the Toolbar. In other words, without going to a website.

When the last Windows Live Essentials wave 3 suite got released into public beta, Chris reviewed the Toolbar and mentioned the lack of cross-service integration with other Windows Live services (no, “buttons” don’t count). Well, the new release addresses just that – integrating many of the upcoming Windows Live wave 3 services into one “useful” Toolbar. Instead of talking about what we already knew, we’ll focus on what’s new and updated in this upcoming release.

First, as seen across all of the new Windows Live internet services, we have the What’s New feed integration. Clicking on What’s New, Profile and Photos tabs will give you at-a-glance what your friends in your Network have been doing lately, and also instant access to your Windows Live Home, Profile and Photos web pages.

The Mail and Calendar also shows the latest emails from your Hotmail inbox and upcoming appointments in your Windows Live Calendar, with a nice little calendar to help you find out which dates you have events and appointments.

I guess what is most exciting about the new Toolbar is the new Favorites, Sync, and SkyDrive integrations. We mentioned in our last review that while installing Windows Live Toolbar it requires you to close down Windows Live Sync. We also knew that Microsoft is killing off Windows Live Favorites, but this also meant that the original Favorites syncing through the wave 2 version Windows Live Toolbar will no longer work. With the new version, we’ll see Toolbar taking advantage of Windows Live Sync and will be synchronising all your Favorites from Internet Explorer between different computers, provided you have Toolbar installed on both computers and signed in to the same Windows Live ID.

Previously we also noted that you can share favorites with SkyDrive using Windows Live Toolbar, however, exactly how Favorites, SkyDrive, Sync and Toolbar will interact together is ~~still a big question mark~~. Update: Jamie updated his blog today about how “Shared Favorites” works in Toolbar, integrating it with SkyDrive. Apparently there is a “Share” button in Toolbar which, if clicked on, allows you to add the currently viewing page as a link to the “Shared Favorites” folder on SkyDrive. This will also show up as an entry on your Profile’s What’s New feed:

However, Jamie also noted that in his build of Toolbar the “Favorites Sync” button isn’t available, so question still remains on how Windows Live Sync will play its part, and whether the Favourites stored on SkyDrive can be accessed from the Toolbar or not. Stay tuned on LiveSide as we cover the latest Wave 3 news in much more detail.

Microsoft looks to kill off WL Favourites – Skydrive becomes storage central

Chris — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 06:31:00 GMT

Its true, nobody is perfect. In fact during the May 22nd update to Skydrive, we missed the addition of Favourites support to Windows Live Skydrive (hey pp2 missed it until recently too!). Interestingly enough the team blog post didn’t point out the change either. (and nobody tipped us? Guess you’re all using Mesh too…)

Check out the not-so-new Favourites folder that now exists by default on http://skydrive.live.com.

So what does this mean for the existing Windows Live Favourites service? We’ve heard that by the end of Wave 3, favourites.live.com will redirect to this new Skydrive folder.

Obviously nobody will want to manually enter in their 100 favourite websites into Skydrive, which is why we’re expecting to see a new Windows Live Toolbar add-in for Wave 3. For those who have good memories, an add-in for the old service was rolled out 2 years ago - those who beta tested it will remember it with some fondness. This ability to synchronise favourites and thereby provide a compelling user experience with Internet Explorer 8, is something that Mary Jo Foley keeps referring to. She did so again today, quoting one of the “Big Bets” made by Chris Jones in a certain Wave 3 planning memo:

“Our experiences will be designed so when they are connected to Windows 7 they seamlessly extend the Windows experience, and we will work to follow the Windows 7 style guidelines for applications. We will work with the Internet Explorer 8 team to make sure we deliver an experience that seamlessly extends the browser with our toolbar and other offerings.Search and MSN.”

Lets not get ahead of ourselves here, we don’t even have the favourites synching yet, but the ability to synchronise RSS feeds from the Windows feedstore to Skydrive is something that definitely appeals.

The move to Skydrive is a welcome update, and potentially offers the ability to share bookmarks with your friends and thereby allow other users to comment on them. At the moment though, its all privately stored, with the comment form rendered somewhat useless for the time being. The old/existing stand-alone service has a top-favourite and also sharing options, suggesting that this move is less about developing the service, and more about taking Windows Live Favourites to a mainstream audience as part of Skydrive.

Make Skydrive the one-stop shop for sharing with your friends, and then there is less user confusion around which service to use. This makes sense when you consider that Skydrive could be used to share more than just files and favourites; photos as well, maybe even videos? Following the closure of Expo, we like the idea of deadpooling Favourites as a separate service - Mini-MSFT be proud!

(Note: We don’t fully understand either why Microsoft is putting so much time into Skydrive given the huge potential of Mesh as a platform, beyond the fact that Skydrive is a short-term solution for now, and Mesh has a much longer timeframe for development. That said, hopefully somebody will start clarifying these differences – why build 2 products that do the same thing?)

Live Mesh tutorial: Synchronising browser favourites across devices

Chris — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 20:55:00 GMT

With yesterday’s Live Mesh update that allows users to enable peer-to-peer synchronisation and miss out the cloud sync, we thought we’d take a look at one practical example of this – browser favourites. The scenario is familiar, you’re not on your main device and you come across a website you want to visit later. While you could just email yourself the link, or add it to Del.ici.ous, this is an alternative that requires no extra effort on your part once set up.

While we performed this using Internet Explorer, the process is exactly the same for the browser of your choice. Just substitute the folder locations in steps 1 and 3 as appropriate. For Firefox it would be the Profiles folder containing the bookmarks.htm file, and this would then save you from using the Foxmarks extension.

Step 1: Navigate to the browser favourites folder on your first device, right click and choose Add To Mesh – I’ll call the synchronised folder “Favourites” for the purpose of this example.

For Internet Explorer in Windows Vista the default folder can be found at <username>\Favourites, for Firefox it can be found at <username>\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles (more info).

Step 2: Change the synchronisation settings so that it only maps to the web desktop. The first time I tried this the correct way around (ie not mapping to the web) but it didn’t work so well - we'll reverse this in Step 5. Click Ok to turn this into a Mesh folder. Note that as its a special Windows folder, it won’t turn blue.

Step 3: In your second device, click the Live Mesh icon in the system tray to view the list of active folders. The Favourites folder shared in device 1 should be transparent, showing that its not currently being synchronised to this device. Click the folder name and then set the location to be the existing browser favourites folder. Here that folder is on the D:\.

Step 4: Live Mesh will then prompt you to merge the existing browser favourites folder with Favourites, your synchronised folder. Accept this prompt.

Step 5: In the web desktop, right click the Favourites folder and change the synchronisation options to remove the Web Desktop, leaving just the devices you have setup already. Accept the prompt by selecting Continue.

You’ll then notice the folder goes transparent, just like it was at the start of step 2 when we added it to the second device, implying no synchronisation. This is the “Ghosting” feature talked about in the Channel 9 video posted yesterday.

Step 6: Repeat Steps 2 and 3 for any other devices that you’d like to share browser favourites with.

While this is just a simple example, there are whole lot of other possibilities that are now open. For example, synchronising media libraries across multiple machines (Home & Work), sharing application settings that are not stored in the registry and above all, sharing the special folders in Windows: Documents, Pictures, Downloads, Desktop etc.

Give it a try and let us know if you come up with any great scenarios so we can feature them.

Windows Live Favorites Update

Chris — Thu, 20 Apr 2006 08:29:00 GMT

The Live Favorites Team will soon be releasing updates to Windows Live Favorites. Those updates include: New Windows Live Messenger Tab: A new tab for Windows Live Messenger allowing you to access your Live Favorites. New Windows Live Toolbar Add-ins...(read more)