LiveSide - News blog : Featured

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

MSN.com gets new look in US

Kip Kniskern — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 05:13:00 GMT

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.

Silverlight Streaming to be discontinued: new Azure service coming

Kip Kniskern — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 03:45:00 GMT

In a move that should surprise no one (in case you were wondering why we didn’t use Silverlight Streaming to host video after Soapbox closed), Silverlight Streaming, a Windows Live beta service for hosting Silverlight audio and video content, is being discontinued. A blog post today on the Silverlight Streaming blog (first post since March), summarizes the changes:

Microsoft Silverlight Streaming by Windows Live Beta is being discontinued and will eventually be taken down

A new Windows® Azure-based hosting and delivery service will be launched by the end of 2009, though this is not a direct replacement for Silverlight Streaming and will have costs associated with its use

You can access, retrieve and if desired remove your content that is currently hosted on Silverlight Streaming by following the instructions below

Key dates and information about the availability of the new Windows Azure functionality, and when the existing Silverlight Streaming beta service will be taken down, will be communicated in the coming weeks

More details on how to pull any content you may have off the service are detailed in the post.

We’re expecting to hear more about Live Services in general, and now this new Azure service in particular at PDC, which is only a month away now. Just for posterity, here’s the description of Silverlight Streaming from the website:

Microsoft® Silverlight™ Streaming by Windows Live™ is a companion service for Silverlight that makes it easier for developers and designers to deliver and scale rich media as part of their Silverlight applications. The service offers web designers and developers a free (*) and convenient solution for hosting and streaming cross-platform, cross-browser media experiences and rich interactive applications that run on Windows™ and Mac. Combined with the ability to create content with Microsoft® Expression and other 3rd party tools, web designers and content publishers wishing to integrate Silverlight applications into their online properties can enjoy complete control of the end user experience.

And yes we have some content to pull off SLS. Isn’t supporting Windows Live beta services fun?

SkyDrive to become the center stage of Windows Live?

damaster — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 14:44:00 GMT

With the recent series of updates to Windows Live’s web services (Calendar, Hotmail, Photos, SkyDrive and more), we’re seeing a tip of the iceberg of what’s to come with Windows Live Wave 4 (in fact, we know this because all of the web services have been updated to v15). However, these are no way reflective of what Wave 4 is all about and the recent updates seemed more to simply address what customers wanted with Windows Live. So if this is not it, what are we to expect for the future of Windows Live?

Recent developments seemed to demonstrate the idea that Wave 4 is all about “simplification”. One prime example of this simplification is the retirement of Events and having it replaced by Calendar. Extending this idea further, recent developments around Windows Live seems to show that SkyDrive will play a prominent role in the future of Windows Live services. We already have Photos built on top of the SkyDrive service, and earlier this year we’ve seen that Favorites has been integrated into SkyDrive. We’re even seeing that Office Live will be merged into SkyDrive with the Office Web Apps integrated well within (remember that Office Web Apps supposed to replace Office Live Workspace). With all these services built within SkyDrive, it looks like Microsoft is positioning SkyDrive to be the single destination to access, organise, share and edit all your files, photos and documents stored online.

But Microsoft’s ambition for SkyDrive is much more than that. As we’ve seen details leaking last month, Microsoft will soon be launching Windows Live Devices – its replacement for Live Mesh – in Wave 4, and SkyDrive is to play an essential role on its launch. It is expected that SkyDrive will become the storage-end of Devices, playing a similar role to the “Live Desktop” in the current Live Mesh. The next version of Windows Live Sync will also become “meshified”, so besides the original PC-to-PC synchronisation capability, Sync will also sync your files to the cloud – and you’ve guessed it, it’ll be onto SkyDrive. On this front, Microsoft is really positioning SkyDrive to become your online hard drive and an essential piece of the “Software+Services” model.

By understanding how Microsoft positions SkyDrive for the future, it’s not hard to imagine the possibilities Microsoft can achieve with Windows Live. Many existing Windows Live services can be consolidated and be built on top of SkyDrive, and we know that the first of them all could well be Windows Live FrameIt. Paul Thurrott also slipped out a few words regarding (another) possible Windows Live-oriented video service in his review of Windows Live Movie Maker:

One thing that's missing, of course, is a way to post your video creations on a Microsoft service. Since Microsoft killed the Soapbox service, there's been a void, and while the company has nothing to announce at this time, suffice to say they will be adding Windows Live-oriented publishing capability in the future.

While Microsoft already have Video Messages, that service seem to be underexposed and didn’t integrate well with other Windows Live services. Additionally, Movie Maker seems to be the only Windows Live “software” that’s missing the “services” component under the “Software+Services” model. Thus integrating Video Messages into SkyDrive seems to make strong logical sense for Microsoft. Please bear in mind though that this is purely speculation, but we’re certainly watching Microsoft to see if this comes to fruition.

Of course, with all these files to be stored on SkyDrive, the current 25GB of storage space certainly won’t be enough. It’ll be interesting what Microsoft will do regarding this, as one of SkyDrive’s competing service ADrive currently offers 50GB for each account, will Microsoft increase its storage size for SkyDrive? We at LiveSide will of course keep you posted with any updates relating to SkyDrive and the rest of Windows Live, so stay tuned!

Office Web Apps coming to Windows Live

Kip Kniskern — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 17:44:00 GMT

In a press release today, Microsoft announced that Microsoft Office Web Apps will begin a limited number invitation only Technical Preview. Office Web Apps will offer lightweight versions of Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint on the web through Windows Live SkyDrive.

Microsoft is also announcing the formal names for the Web-based applications. Together, the applications are called Office Web Apps. Individually, they include Word Web App, Excel Web App, PowerPoint Web App and OneNote Web App.

Microsoft Office Program Manager Michael Shultz takes us through Office Web Apps in a YouTube video:

(Please visit the site to view this media)

Brian Hall, Windows Live General Manager, has a post up on Windows Live Wire explaining the importance of Office Web Apps for Windows Live:

We all use a lot of different services online – e-mail, social networks, photo sites, video sites, and so on. In many cases, we use more than one service for very similar purposes, using Facebook, MySpace , StudiVZ, Mixi or many others for social networking; Hotmail, Yahoo!, or Gmail for e-mail; Flickr, SkyDrive, FotoLog, or Photobucket for sharing photos.

That said, there are certain things we really just want one of. I really just want one place for storing contact info, one personal calendar I can share with my family, one primary mail service that also allows me to check all of my e-mail accounts, one place to get updates from all of my social networks, and one place to store, share, and manage my massive and ever-growing collection of photos, documents, music, and videos.

I can get all of that at Windows Live. And now, with the addition of Office Web Apps, I’ll soon be able to go to Windows Live to create, edit, share, and collaborate on Word documents, PowerPoint presentations, OneNote digital notebooks, and Excel spreadsheets – all in high fidelity and all online regardless of which PC I’m using and whether that PC has Office on it.

Office Web Apps Press Release

Windows Live Wire post by Brian Hall

Office Web Apps blog

Windows Live Wave 4: M1 released; Hotmail changes

Kip Kniskern — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 16:51:00 GMT

We know Wave 4 is coming, and now thanks to WindowsLiveHelp.com, we know at least a few of the changes coming (here already?) to Hotmail. We don’t appear to be seeing any of them here, yet, do you?

In a post on August 28th (thanks mynetx for spotting this!) titled “New/changed features in Hotmail Wave 4 M1 Release”, we find out that M1 of Wave 4 was released August 31, and rolling out over the first few weeks of September. We haven’t seen anything else about these changes, but here they are, according to the Support Blog post:

Auto Refresh of Inbox: Inbox is refreshed when a user is logged into WebIM, instead of after 60 seconds.
Auto save Drafts: emails automatically saved to drafts as they are composed. Current auto save is set to 3 minutes
Keyboard Shortcuts: “Lots of keyboard shortcuts, including shortcuts to match both Yahoo and Gmail.” Here’s a list of the keyboard shortcuts.
Contact Picker Improvements:
- edit contacts in compose
- recent email data used in auto-complete and contact picker
- copy/paste enabled in IE
- a “verify recipients” feature added
Download all attachments: multiple attachments to an email downloaded together as a .zip file
WebIM Contact List: “view online contacts” added:

Mobile browser improvements: backend changes to improve mobile performance
Action Bar at bottom of page: Reply/Forward/Delete is now available from both the top and bottom of an email.

Windows Live Calendar updated, Events discontinued

damaster — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 17:19:00 GMT

Last week, on September 3, 2009, Windows Live Events was officially “retired” and users will no longer be able to create new events using this service, and users are encouraged to download all the files and photos associated with an Event (from the Event’s SkyDrive and Photos) before April 2010. Instead, Microsoft recommend users to use Windows Live Calendar to invite their friends to any events they’re planning. Read this post for further information on how to do this.

In conjunction with the discontinuation of Events, Microsoft also announced today that Windows Live Calendar has been updated, in particular in how Calendar handles your contact’s birthdays. Here’s what we first noticed as part of the change:

Under the “New” menu, instead of having the item “Social event” (which allowed you to create new Windows Live Events directly from Calendar), there is now a “Birthday” menu item. Clicking on it will get you this screen:

Previously, your “Birthday Calendar” would automatically fetch the birthday details from your Windows Live contact list, however you can only enter them using Windows Live People, Messenger, or Mail, and it would (occasionally) sync with your Calendar. With this new update, you can now add birthdays directly from inside the Birthday Calendar and they’ll automatically sync with your contact list! (Note: you cannot add a birthday to an existing contact, our testing showed that adding a birthday this way creates a new contact. However you can also solve this by clicking “Clean up duplicate contacts” right within Calendar to merge the new one with your existing contact). What’s also new in this update is that you can even give it a second reminder to make sure you don’t forget that person’s birthday.

Additionally, you are now allowed to delete your Birthday Calendar, and doing so will not make your contact’s birthday details disappear – in fact, you can add the Birthday calendar back and all the birthdays will still be intact. However, the best improvement must be the addition of a way for you to control when you want Calendar to sync your contact’s birthday with your Birthday Calendar:

Since Windows Live Calendar launched, one of the biggest complaint we’ve seen was the fact that when you add birthday details to your contacts (within Messenger for example), they don’t appear right away in your Birthday Calendar, and you have no idea when it will get synced. With this new release, click “Refresh now” in the screen shown above will sync your contact’s birthday details with your Birthday Calendar right away – no more waiting!

You can see the improved Windows Live Calendar now at http://calendar.live.com!

Windows Live Photos Improvements

Sunshine — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 20:51:00 GMT

As the number of megapixels in cameras increases, and making panorama pictures has been made easy with Windows Live Photo Gallery, it was time for Windows Live Photos to follow suit. Today a new release is being rolled out that bumps the limit on photo size up. You are now able to get thumbnails and easily viewable versions of photos all the way up to 25 megapixels. And not just that, the image quality of photos has been improved too!

Furthermore, with today’s release, photo albums got faster to browse through, you no longer have to wait for the entire page to refresh when you move between photos. Plus, you can browse through your photos using the left and right arrow keys on your keyboard. How neat is that? Go and have a look!

For all you webmasters/bloggers out there: the Windows Live Photos team has also enhanced embedding images and photo albums into blogs and web sites. You get a real preview now rather than just an icon. Sharing just got better!

Hotmail DAV Protocol retired; won’t work in Outlook, Outlook Express, or Entourage

Kip Kniskern — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 15:21:00 GMT

Last June, the Windows Live Hotmail team posted on some upcoming changes to the way Hotmail is handled by client email readers, and as of September 1st (yesterday, most places), the old protocol, DAV, (or Web DAV) has been retired.

If you hadn’t made changes to continue getting Hotmail in Outlook, Outlook Express, or Entourage, and accessed your mail using DAV, you won’t be able to access your Hotmail. The Windows Live Mail team blog has all the particulars on what to do. In a nutshell, either use the Outlook Connector, use Windows Live Mail, or set your Outlook Express settings to receive POP3.

These changes don’t affect Hotmail on the web, so you can always log in and get your mail that way while you get this figured out ;).

Upgrade your Windows Live Messenger service

damaster — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 02:12:00 GMT

From the Messenger team’s blog post today, Microsoft has announced that all users of Windows Live Messenger will be prompted to upgrade their client to the latest version (14.0.8089.726) in the following months, if not weeks, depending on your current client version:

Users currently using Windows Live Messenger 8.1 and 8.5 will be prompted to an optional upgrade starting August 25, 2009. Those who have not upgraded during this phase will receive a mandatory upgrade notice starting mid-September 2009.

Users currently using Windows Live Messenger 2009 (v14) will be prompted to an optional upgrade starting early October 2009. Those who have not upgraded will receive a mandatory upgrade notice starting late October 2009.

Users currently using MSN Messenger on Windows 2000, Windows NT 4.0, Windows 95, Windows Me or Windows 98 will not receive an upgrade notification.

Users are encouraged to upgrade their Messenger client now as those who do not administer the upgrade will not be able to sign in to Messenger after the mandatory upgrade phase. According to the blog post, the latest update provides minor code fixes, as well as addressing security vulnerabilities discussed in the Microsoft Security Advisory 973882. Those already using Windows Live Messenger 2009 (v14) will not notice any visible feature changes.

You can download the latest version of Messenger at http://download.live.com/messenger if you haven’t already done so!

Details on the latest Windows Live Mail update

damaster — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 00:46:05 GMT

The Windows Live Mail team has posted on their blog today about what was updated and fixed in the latest release (build number 14.0.8089.0726) that came along with the new Windows Live Movie Maker. Here’s a few of the main bugs that were addressed in this update:

Windows Live Mail can now properly import Outlook Express mail account settings that were transferred from a Windows XP to a new Vista or Windows 7 system using the Windows Easy Transfer wizard.

Some users had problems launching Windows Live Mail and we have addressed this. In some cases, after you closed Windows Live Mail, the application would appear to close, but the wlmail.exe process would continue to run in the background. That process would prevent Mail from launching in the future.

On Vista and Windows 7, Windows Live Mail wouldn’t connect properly to POP email servers using SSL. In particular, this affected some users of Yahoo! Mail.

If you have had sign-in issues with Windows Live Mail previously, try this new update to see if your problems are addressed.

It is good to see that the Windows Live Mail team has been proactive and publishing the details about this update. We’ll have to wait and see whether the other teams will be posting about their latest changes. Kudos to the Windows Live Mail team!

You can grab the latest Windows Live Essentials at http://download.live.com

Windows Live Movie Maker – get it now

Kip Kniskern — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 18:25:00 GMT

Microsoft has taken the wraps of Windows Live Movie Maker, “the the one-minute way to turn photos and videos into great-looking movies that are easy to share — for free”. You can download Windows Live Essentials now and get the new Movie Maker (and what appears to be some bug fixes for the other WL applications, no real signs of Wave 4 yet).

(updated to include moviemaker preview link ):

We’ll get to the program and the new features in a minute, but along with the “unveiling” comes a new site extolling the virtues of Movie Maker: http://moviemakerpreview.com/ - lots of info there including a number of how-to videos and some sample content to play around with. http://windowslive.com/desktop/moviemaker also has links to the download. Always best to get it direct from Microsoft ;)

Note: Not sure if the new bits will be live all over the place all at once - you can download and save the installer, right click, select Properties, and check the Details for build number 14.0.8089.0726, just to make sure you're getting the new stuff).

Easy Easy Easy

We had a chance to try out Movie Maker in advance, but didn’t need much lead time to create a quick video out of pictures and video (the subject: puppies, of course!). We found it easy to create and manipulate the video, with a few surprises (not being able to use files from a network location, for example). Actually if anything it was TOO easy to manipulate – we tried to figure out how to change transitions for a few minutes before realizing it had already changed. Here’s the video we created, not quite in less than a minute, but close:

(Please visit the site to view this media)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAunmskHRH4 (The music is Mumbles, by Oscar Peterson) (oops, YouTube pulled the audio. Movie Maker did a great job with laying down the slides and video to match the length of the audio, but I just grabbed an mp3 without thinking about publishing it - the next video we do we'll pay more attention)

Key Features

Microsoft is touting Windows Live Movie Maker as easy to use and the videos it makes as easy to share, above all else. Still, there’s a lot packed in to this new release. First off are an array of features to make movie/slide show creation easier. These include:

Auto Movie: … it’s back. Just select some images/video and some music, and let auto movie create your production for you. Yes it’s that simple.
Video editing: Select a piece of video, set in and out times, do a simple copy/paste to capture multiple pieces of video out of a longer piece. Again, very simple.
Fit content to music length: with one click, Movie Maker will fit your content to the length of video you select. Now that’s useful!
Share Online: While it pains us to give so much attention to the “G word”, publishing to YouTube, or to DVD. A publish to Facebook plugin is available, with more to come.

Next are tools and features to go beyond the basics:

Live Preview: just mouse over transitions and effects to see what they will look like, making it easy to choose the right transition (or reject the wrong one)
Ribbon interface: the familiar Office Ribbon interface drive Movie Maker, making it very familiar to users of Office and Windows.
Photo animations: animate your photos for more than a static slide show
Audio editing
Save in HD 480 and 720, and using Windows 7, in 1080p
Work with files in a number of formats:
- Windows Media Video (WMV)
- Windows Media, DV-AVI
- Microsoft Recorded TV Show
- 3GP
- 3GPP
- MPEG-2
- MPEG-1
- Motion JPEG
- JPEG
- TIFF
- GIF
- Bitmap
- PNG
- QuickTime .mov* and .qt* (Windows 7 only)
- AVCHD* (Windows 7 only)
- MPEG-4 files* (Windows 7 only)
And share to a number of destinations:
- Save to a mobile device
- Share via e-mail
- Burn to DVD
- Display on your PC
- Display on TV (Media Center Edition, Blu-ray) in high definition
- View via streaming media player
- Display on Xbox
- Display on Zune
- Display on iPod
- Send to file share Web site, such as Windows Live SkyDrive
- Send to a video-sharing Web site (YouTube, Facebook)
- Publish to other sharing sites (coming soon)

Windows Live Movie Maker is a free download, as part of Windows Live Essentials, and requires Windows Vista or Windows 7

Publish Your Photosynth To Facebook

Sunshine — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 10:10:58 GMT

So you got good at creating Photosynths. To share you can send the link to your friends or embed it into your blog but now there is one more: MySynth, a new Facebook app that publishes Photosynths right onto your Facebook profile page.

After you’ve added the application you can go ahead to the MySynth application page and fill out the form.

Title: the name you wish to give the Synth.
Source URL: the URL of the Synth taken from the address bar or from the embed code of the synth.
Thumbnail Image URL: the URl of the thumbnail.
This is not so obvious. Where do you find the thumbnail and its URL? You can find this by going to the user’s collection of Synths, right click the thumbnail of the Synth you wish to use and choose properties. Copy that URL.
Thumbnail Description: a short description that will be shown next to the thumbnail on publishing
Long description: will be displayed in the Synth view.
Location: where the Synth is taken.
More info URL: URL for linking to a page with more info on the URL. Example: website of the owner. this will be shown at the end of the long description.

Now make sure the checkboxes you want are checked and grant permission for Feed Publishing by clicking the link beside that checkbox, if you want it to be published to the feed. Done, click Add Synth.

Should you wish to edit or remove the Synth later, just go to the application page and click on the View/Edit Synths tab. This app can also publish Synths of others to your Facebook page if you want to share a nice one you saw.

MySynth is created by Speaktech and uses the latest cloud service features in Microsoft Azure for storage.

Source: Publish Your Photosynth to Facebook - Bing Maps Blog - Bing Community

Windows Live Events “retiring” in 2010

Kip Kniskern — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 20:12:00 GMT

Windows Live Events will be retiring in 2010, and instead you will be able to plan and manage social events all in one place through Windows Live Calendar, according to a post on Windows Live Wire.

In 2010, we’ll retire Windows Live Events entirely. At that time, you will no longer be able to get to any of your old events, and you won’t be able to download and save old event photos and videos.

Beginning in September 2009, you won’t be able to create new events at Events.live.com, but you will still be able to download and save your files and photos. Here’s a video that WL Wire posted to walk you through how to save the stuff you were dumb enough to trust you tried out Windows Live Events with:

(Please visit the site to view this media)

You can also create events on Windows Live Calendar today, although they don’t allow for saving and sharing documents and photos. More on Windows Live Wire.

Bing gains 1% US share in July, Google loses: StatCounter

Kip Kniskern — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 17:00:00 GMT

In a press release issued today, web statistics firm StatCounter showed an increase in US search market share from 8.23% in June to 9.41% in July. Google was down in the US from 78.48% in June to 77.54% in July. Global figures show Google still dominating, with 89.23% share in July (down from 89.80% in June).

It must be noted that Bing tracking is an inexact science, and each of the major web tracking services has their own methodologies, all somewhat different. The numbers from StatCounter come from websites that have installed the StatCounter “invisible web tracker”, so while the sample size is big, it may be skewed towards the type of people more likely to install the tracker, whoever they may be. According to the site:

Stats are based on aggregate data collected by StatCounter on a sample exceeding 4 billion pageviews per month collected from across the StatCounter network of more than 3 million websites. Stats are updated and made available every 4 hours, however are subject to quality assurance testing and revision for 7 days from publication.

Still, Bing seems to be gaining some momentum, which couldn’t have been hurt by the Yahoo! announcement, even though that won’t take place for a year or more. We’ll be interested to see what the other major web stats trackers say about Bing.