LiveSide - News blog : Home

What’s coming for Live.com?

damaster — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 01:54:00 GMT

If you’ve recently visited Bing by typing http://www.live.com into the address bar, you would’ve noticed the following notice across the top of the page:

When Bing first launched, this Q&A post over at the Bing & adCenter Community told us the following:

Q: What will happen to Live.com?
A: The Live.com URL will redirect to Bing.com for 45 days after launch. After this period it becomes the front door for all Live services including Office Live and Windows Live.

It’s now way past 45 days since Bing first launched in June, and this is the first sign indicating that Live.com will no longer redirect to Bing. After all, Microsoft should make good use of the easy-to-remember domain name for their “Live” offerings (did we mention Start.com too?). The question is, what will take the place for Live.com? Possible candidates are:

Windows Live Home (currently at http://home.live.com)
The good old Windows Live Personalized Experience (currently at http://my.live.com)
The current marketing website for Windows Live (currently at http://www.windowslive.com/Explore)
A brand new homepage linking to both Windows Live and Office Live?

Which one do you think will take the place of Live.com? And most important of all, what would you want to be placed there?

Windows Live Home New Feature: Word-wheel Contact Search in Header Search Bar

damaster — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 12:13:24 GMT

It seems like Windows Live Home has been silently updated overnight with a few new hidden features. Sunshine already uncovered one for us a few days ago regarding the new Web Slice support for your What’s New feed. Jamie also posted on his blog about the ability to update your Personal Status Message (PSM) directly on the page without page refresh.

We have also found a new little feature in the Windows Live Wave 3 header – word-wheel contact search in the search bar. When you start typing a person’s name into the header search bar, a list of your contacts beginning with the characters you typed will start to appear under the search box, in real time! It’s very similar to the contacts word-wheel in Messenger and Hotmail. When you click on the contact’s name, it will link you directly to their Profile. Try it out yourself!

We’re guessing this feature should be coming to all services that has the header search bar reading “Search People or Web” instead of simply “Search the web” (this includes Home, Profile, Spaces, Groups and Events). However, it seems like Windows Live Home is the only service that has this feature at the moment.

On a side note, we also noticed that OneCare is no longer listed in the “All services” page on Windows Live Home, marking the beginning of an end to the OneCare service.

Have you noticed anything else new to Windows Live Home? Drop us a note in the comments section below!

More Windows Live Mobile Wave 3 Updates for Hotmail, Messenger and Home

damaster — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 03:17:49 GMT

Last time we told you about the new Windows Live Hotmail Mobile beta. Yesterday the team on Windows Live Wire announced that the new Windows Live Hotmail for mobile is now final! Together with the announcement, the team also mentioned the new updates for Windows Live Home Mobile and Messenger Mobile – finally including the new Wave 3 Mobile look for Messenger Mobile! Here’s what they announced:

Windows Live Messenger for mobile has a new look and feel and now links directly to Windows Live Home, so you can easily navigate between services.

Windows Live Home for mobile has an improved What’s new list, with ten items appearing in the list instead of five. You can also see the things your friends are doing online at places such as Twitter, WordPress, Flickr, and more. And you can always read the full text of your friends’ personal messages.

I just went to the Windows Live Messenger for Mobile website on http://mim.live.com and although I’m seeing the new pips (instead of the old buddy icons to display your contact’s status), ~~the overall theme hasn’t yet been updated to the new look~~. Update (April 23): The update has been fully released! What I really hope they’ve implemented is the support for multiple places sign-in, as currently it’s quite annoying that Messenger will sign you out as you’re logged in to the mobile web version. We’ll just have to wait and see.

Check out http://mhome.live.com on your mobile browser for the updated Windows Live Home for Mobile.

Windows Live Home beta (accidently) available to public!

damaster — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 23:45:00 GMT

As I was checking my Calendar (using the dogfood address we mentioned earlier) today, I unconsciously clicked "Home" to take me back to the usual Windows Live Home, forgetting that I was on the dogfood server. Expecting that I would get to the 404 page not found, instead I was redirected to the new Windows Live Home beta (http://home-beta.live.com) that was previously available only to internal Microsoft beta testers. At the time of posting, the beta home page is still available to the public intermittently. Here's what comes up first on your Home page:

We can see several old features like the ability to see your Hotmail and Office Live Workspaces directly from your Home page (with slight improvements to allow you to show more than three headings), weather information, and a shortcut to all the other Windows Live offerings. What's important are the new features we've noticed, such as:

• "What's New" feed integration (similar to that in Messenger wave 3) - and the ability to post Notes (ie. comments) to each of the "What's New" activities
• RSS Feed support (limited to a certain pre-defined list)
• Adding your "Home Photo" on the top-right corner
• Sending "private messages" using Windows Live Profile
• "People you might know" feature suggesting friends' Network you may be able to join with Windows Live People
• Integration with Windows Live Calendar showing who's birthday it is today at first glance
• Ability to add "Web Activities" to your Windows Live Profile (more on this later)
• New Themes that changes according to the time of day and weather conditions

Here's a screenshot of the Themes currently available, notice the last four Themes on the bottom: Daisy Hill, Tugboat, Prairie, and Desert are dynamic and change according to the time of day (every four hours to be exact) and weather conditions according to the location you've set. These Themes will be shown across all Windows Live wave 3 services, with the exception of Spaces and Events (which you're able to customize separately):

What we're most excited about is the RSS feed integration within Windows Live Home. Unfortunately, it seems like you are only able to select from a predefined list of Feed providers, thus still not able to replace My.Live.com. Having said that, to our surprise we noticed the LiveSide is actually on the predefined list of Feed providers! This probably explain why we had been receiving hits from the http://home-beta.live.com address:

As many of the features are integrated with the yet-to-be-released Wave 3 services like Windows Live Profile, Groups and Peoples (such as the What's New feed - we know from the Messenger team interview that it's a big thing coming), we weren't able to play around with these new features. However, stay tuned with us as we cover about these exciting new features more in depth later.

Windows Live Wave 3 beta urls show up

Chris — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 22:38:11 GMT

A couple of weeks ago we started noticing an interesting referrer popping up in the stats for some of our posts. Turns out Microsoft moved their Wave 3 services from the dogfood servers onto beta servers, and as a result some MSFT employees were clicking through to us from http://home-beta.live.com. You won’t be able to sign in to any of the beta sites yet if you’re not on the approved list (the betas haven’t started yet if you’re worried), but here’s a few gems we learnt while digging around.

Note – as the new sites are locked down, these are just features we’ve spotted/inferred from looking around the existing sites that are running side-by-side. What’s great is that now new features can be tested before being rolled out to the general public, something which Spaces has needed ever since one of its updates rendered the service unusable for several weeks.

Windows Live Home Beta (http://home-beta.live.com) – As mentioned above, softies are clicking through to us from this site, thanks to the new homepage having default groups of feeds that users can subscribe to. Looks like this new homepage could have similar features to my.live.com, so it’ll be interesting to see how much functionality they duplicate.

Windows Live Profile Beta (http://profile-beta.live.com) – Sorry Jason and Sabina but you’re our demos (everybody else had personal photos up). You can see from these feeds that photo albums are now stored on Skydrive. That means you can now use your Skydrive storage across multiple services, which should please a lot of people.

Windows Live Photos Beta (http://photos-beta.live.com) – The front-end user interface to the photos stored on Skydrive, see below. This means you now start to share your 5GB of storage across Windows Live services, which hopefully is a sign of further consolidation in the storage area. Lets face it, we have too much scattered storage already (about 30GB worth!)

Windows Live Skydrive Beta (http://skydrive-beta.live.com) – With photos going to be stored on Skydrive, there’s more privacy options you can set, as shown by the new icon below. This means photos won’t necessarily be visible to the public, giving users some control over content that’s currently lacking in the existing Spaces photo albums.

And for completeness, the urls of the other beta sites:

Windows Live Groups Beta (http://groups-beta.live.com), Windows Live Spaces Beta (http://spaces-beta.live.com) and Windows Live Events Beta (http://events-beta.live.com)

Let us know if you find anything: tips [at] liveside d0t net

Windows Live Calendar and Events sightings, coming soon?

Kip Kniskern — Sat, 25 Aug 2007 21:56:00 GMT

Our friend PicturePan2 just noticed something interesting over at home.live.com, newly added icons for Windows Live Calendar, and what we assume is Windows Live Events:

(you won't see these unless you are signed out of home.live.com)

The new icons, a calendar page and a calendar with balloons (nice!), seem to give more evidence that Calendar and Events are coming soon. We can't wait!

PS: There's also a few g-links running around too, similar to the ones in the Hotmail and Spaces headings. Check out http://g.live.com/9uxp9en-us/hpg_hdr10 (Error - Events can't be found)
http://g.live.com/9uxp9en-us/hpg_hdr19 (Error - Events can't be found)

Microsoft launches new Windows Live Home beta

Chris — Fri, 10 Aug 2007 04:26:00 GMT

Yet another bolt out the blue (maybe not), Microsoft just launched the new Windows Live Home beta portal. At the moment it offers only basic functionality, ie no integration, just access to all the Windows Live services. Funnily enough, it also links to the new Windows Live Suite, though the page isn't up yet. Oh dear.

(Click to enlarge screenshot)

Your existing Live.com personalised page is still available. Check out the new Windows Live Home at http://home.live.com/