LiveSide - News blog : LiveSide

LiveSide: the latest on Link Spam

Kip Kniskern — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 01:23:00 GMT

If you’d been watching our membership counter in the past week or so, you would have noticed that we’ve gained about 300 users this past week, with more coming in all the time. Normally you might think this was a good thing, but most if not all of those new users are only here hoping to use this site to create backlinks to their sites, or sites they are “promoting”. From what we can gather, these people are getting paid to create backlinks in places like our user profile.

In addition, we blocked and then deleted about 1,000 more before we had controls in place to try to keep this site from becoming a quagmire. Of course we’re not alone in having to deal with link spam - Danny Sullivan, who runs a business based on search engine optimization, recently ranted about link spam on his personal blog:

No, the core problem is that the web has people who think nothing of vandalizing other web sites. That’s what link spamming is. You’re not adding value to a site. You’re simply spray painting garbage on someone else’s property, for your own personal benefit. You have no manners. You have no morals. You ought to be ashamed.

We thought we could get these people to go away by creating a provisional user profile that didn’t allow any html, and then allowing more access after a period of time. Well that’s not going to work, as we simply can’t take the time to go back and check on these hundreds of users to see if they came back after a month to “spray paint garbage” on our site.

So for now (in addition to adding “NoFollow” tags to all user links, including links in comments), we’re shutting down any ability to create html in user profiles. Sorry but it’s just not worth the trouble. You’ll still be able to choose or upload an avatar, etc., just no linkable bio entries. If you already had a bio you now need to edit, email us at feedback *at* liveside *dot* net, and put Edit Bio in the subject. Apologies for any inconvenience, this has been a big pain for us, too.

As for all those new users, while we wish they were actually visiting the site enough to make a difference in our traffic (or rss feeds or twitter followers), they’re not. Go figure.

LiveSide and link spam

Kip Kniskern — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 04:47:31 GMT

Sorry to have to air our dirty laundry again, but this weekend has been an interesting one. A month or two ago we came under an attack of bot generated new users, due to our automatic acceptance of any new user. We only have user registration in order to combat comment spam to begin with, so we had tried to make it as easy as possible to create a LiveSide account. A bit too easy, apparently.

We fixed that by enabling email authorization for new user accounts, which solved the bot problem. However this past weekend we noticed a significant increase in users, again. This time, the attackers weren’t bots, but human. From what we gather, these people are being paid to visit sites, fill out accounts, and fill the user profiles with link spam. We deleted probably 2 or 3 hundred new accounts, and shut down new user registration temporarily.

Thanks to Bryant over at AeroExperience, who has had to deal with both of these types of attacks and gave us the idea, we spent the weekend enabling a system where new users don’t have full access to their profiles until they reach a level of comments posted (we set it at 25, hopefully that’s fair). Unfortunately in Community Server no such ready made system exists, so we had to build our own. Not hard, exactly, but not entirely fun, either.

We don’t think we broke anything. If you had a user profile filled out previously, it should still be there (you just won’t be able to edit it until you hit 25 comments). And this isn’t an attempt to con anyone into commenting more, far from it. We just needed a way to allow new user registration without filling our site up with crap. We added a counter to the user profile pages, so you can see where you are (if you don’t see it, you’re over the limit ;) )

For new users, we’re leaving the admin approval on for a bit til the word gets our to our link spammer friends that they’re not welcome here.

We also updated our User Policy to reflect the changes, and to note that we won’t tolerate any gaming of the comment limits. We would love hear what you have to say (and even a few of the link spammers have left comments that have added to the conversation, we have no problem with that), but please don’t add to the spam by needless commenting. Anyway, here’s hoping that we have lots more to talk about than link spam, and soon.

As always, you can reach us at feedback *at* LiveSide *dot* net. Of course we’re happy to help with any user profile issues or try to fix anything we broke, just let us know.

m.LiveSide.net on MoFuse Premium: Mo Betta

Kip Kniskern — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 05:33:00 GMT

We’ve been using MoFuse to power our mobile experience for about a year now, and have been very pleased with the service. Basically MoFuse takes our RSS feed, optimizes it for mobile on a number of devices, and takes care of all the details. So when MoFuse upgraded their service and offered us an opportunity to try out MoFuse Premium, we jumped at the chance.

Our good friend and Windows Live Platform MVP (and LiveSide contributor) Chris Weeink helped us out with translating some PHP from MoFuse to ASP.net, so now if you go to www.LiveSide.net on a mobile device, you should be directed to m.LiveSide.net, with an experience customized for your phone or device. From there, you can even click through to the full LiveSide site. (We still have a little work to do here, and with images on the mobile site :) We're working on it).

With MoFuse Premium, in addition to our RSS feed, we’re able to add custom links and content, too. We included a slimmed down version of our Blogs We Like feature, and a section with some of our favorite mobile links, like Windows Live for Mobile, Bing for Mobile, and Mini-Techmeme. We even added a Click to Call link for Bing 411. We still have some work to do, but we like the idea of getting the latest from LiveSide, Windows Live on your mobile device, and a quick check on the latest news, all starting from m.LiveSide.net :) Here’s a quick look at what you’ll see:

MoFuse also has a free “MoFuse for Blogs” service, too. Highly recommended if you’re looking for a simple mobile solution.

By the way, while we really appreciate our good relationship with MoFuse, they haven’t asked us to promote them in any way, we just like their service. We even added their logo at the bottom, because we think it should be there, and we kinda like it.

Descent into the video posting maelstrom

Kip Kniskern — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 05:39:00 GMT

Yesterday I drove out to Redmond (which can take anywhere from 25 minutes to 2 hours depending on traffic - actually made great time) to meet with Mike Torres and talk a bit about Windows Live Movie Maker, which was released as version 1.0 on a couple weeks ago. I purposely travelled light, no laptop, no messes of wires, just a pocket sized video camera. Not only did I want to talk about Movie Maker, I wanted to try it out, as many more people will be doing in the next weeks and months.

Since the demise of Soapbox, we've been scrambling a bit to get our hosting strategy in order, but as much as it pained us to do it, we thought the easiest thing would be to click on the YouTube upload link from within Movie Maker, grit our teeth, and use the "G-word". Well that didn't go so well.

I had checked the video quality both from within Movie Maker and also on Windows Media Player locally, and did a quick spot check once the video finished processing, but to be honest I didn't watch it once it was up. This morning I headed out for a few hours, and while I was out I started getting text messages, emails, direct twitter messages, and phone calls about the audio quality of the video.

Sure enough, the audio sync was all fouled up. I tried uploading the video again, same issue. I tried uploading using the YouTube uploader, same thing. Tried a different .wmv video (one that hadn't been processed with Movie Maker), same audio sync problems. Tried it from another computer (with a brand new Windows 7 install from Technet), same same same. Searching on Bing for "youtube audio sync wmv" seemed to point to audio codec issues, meaning that, for me, on our LiveSide YouTube account, wmv files weren't working.

The video I edited using Windows Live Movie Maker is fine. There aren’t any problems with it viewed locally. I've posted a self hosted Silverlight player version in the original post, and also posted it to our LiveSide Facebook page (by the way, log in and become a fan of LiveSide on Facebook, if you haven’t already!). They both work fine (no guarantees on our self hosting bandwidth, though, but we should be ok).

UPDATE: Yay, figured out how to embed the Facebook video into a Community Server post :)

(Please visit the site to view this media)

Google had its share of other problems today, and this looks like it’s a Google issue and not Movie Maker. They are supposed to support .wmv files, so maybe this was just some weird glitch. Still, what was supposed to be a fun exercise with Windows Live Movie Maker turned into a bit of a nightmare, and if success with YouTube can’t be guaranteed, maybe the upload link from Movie Maker shouldn’t be there in the first place. Anyway, sorry for the bad experience, believe me it wasn’t near as bad as mine ;).

Soapbox video recovery: not so bad

Kip Kniskern — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 16:55:56 GMT

Lately all of our favorite services seem to be crapping out on us. We told you about the upcoming demise of MSN Soapbox, where we have a number of videos hosted. Users have until August 31, 2009 to head to video.msn.com, log in, and download their videos before they are lost forever. July 29th was the first day that a download link was available to even be able to get videos off the service, so today we somewhat reluctantly headed over to download our interviews. Hey, it wasn’t so bad!

After logging in and going to “my profile”, we first hovered over a video to find the download link:

While we had to download each video individually (and rename it from the default hashed name), we were pleasantly surprised by the speed of the download:

Speeds will vary of course depending on your internet connection, but seeing as how sometimes it took 2-3 hours to get a video uploaded and ready for viewing on Soapbox, we were happy with the download speed.

So all of our video interviews are safely stashed. To be honest we may wait a bit before we make them available again (after they go dark on Aug 31). YouTube looks to be out as a replacement, as it has a 10 minute limit, and most of our interviews run a bit over that. We’re also looking at whether we want to continue using our blog software, Community Server, so it may not be worth all the work to replace links just yet. CS is a great product, but we think we’ve found something that fits our needs a little better. We’ll know more in a few weeks, but we might as well make these changes all at once. We’re glad to have the interviews safe and sound for now, though.

One other note: the service we use to power “Blogs We Like”, Newsgator Online, is also shutting down, ironically on the same day, August 31. (Newsgator is doing fine, and their free RSS Readers, News Demon for Windows, and NetNewsWire for Mac, will continue to be available,just the free online service is closing). We’re not quite sure what we’re going to do about that, either. Funny but all these services seem to have the same advice: “go use Google”. Bleh.

More soon, as we get it all figured out. We’re not going anywhere, and we’re looking forward to bringing you lots of Windows Live news in the upcoming months, no matter what services we find ourselves using.

Microsoft ends Windows Live Butterfly beta testers program

Kip Kniskern — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 05:23:00 GMT

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.

In 2003, during a beta test for MSN Premium 9, Wendy Stidmon, who was a contract employee managing the beta program (Wendy is full time at Microsoft now, and currently running the Windows 7 technical beta), initiated a “cafe” newsgroup as part of the tests. Modeled after the MVP “Coffeehouse”, the cafe gave beta testers a place to get to know each other and post on interests outside of the beta. At the time, Microsoft beta tests were serious affairs, populated by curmudgeonly IT professionals who sounded alarms if anyone went anywhere near “off topic”.

However the beta for MSN Premium required a different set of beta testing skills. This was a consumer product, not a technical one, and it required more than a technical beta. The cafe took off, engagement in the beta was unprecedented, and after the MSN Premium beta ended, with more products in the pipeline, Wendy and her boss Jon Beck (also still at Microsoft but long gone from the beta testing program) set up what became known as the MSN Butterfly program.

The idea was to keep a group of testers available and engaged, and when betas needed testers, well there we were all ready to go. And it worked, for a time. We tested new versions of MSN Messenger, came together in Redmond for “Butterfly Tours”, and in 2005 some 30 of us became MSN MVPs. It was at the 2005 MVP Summit, held in September in Redmond, where the three LiveSide founders (Chris Overd, Harrison Hoffman, and Matthew Weyer - I officially joined LiveSide 3 days after it was launched) first discussed joining together to start an MSN focused blog. Little did we know at the time that we were being shown most of the elements of the first wave of Windows Live, and when the Windows Live initiative was announced in November of 2005, LiveSide found a name and a purpose.

So what happened to the Butterfly program? Well of course there were some systemic problems with having non-IT pros as beta testers. While the feedback we provided (and some of it was loud and long) ultimately made the products we tested better, turns out we couldn’t really write a bug report to save our lives. In June of 2006, what became known as “the big purge” dumped testers who weren’t filing bug reports (including, ahem, me), and pared down the program by (guessing) 75% or so. Attempts were made to make the Butterfly program relevant again, but actual betas were few and far between, and it’s really no surprise that the program has finally been put out of its misery.

Beta testing in general at Microsoft has moved away from the newsgroup/bug report model, you need only to look at the large public betas of Internet Explorer 8, Windows Live, or Windows 7 to see the writing on the wall. Get the product in a large number of hands, collect crash reports and public feedback, and refine. We can’t really argue with that.

Still, we’re going to miss the Butterflys. We met not only each other, but many of our Microsoft friends through the program. Together, we built a community, which is what we thought social networking was supposed to be about in the first place. And we tried to help make better software, and better experiences, for the users of Windows Live.

We know that many of our readers have been involved in the Butterfly program in some capacity over the years, and we’d love to hear your remembrances, or feel free to correct our memories or add to the timeline. What do you remember about the Butterfly program?

LiveSide registration temporarily unavailable, sorry

Kip Kniskern — Thu, 28 May 2009 03:24:14 GMT

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 in the last 2 days), we’ve shut off new user registration. We apologize for the inconvenience, and should have everything back up to normal shortly, we’ll keep you posted.

If you feel compelled to leave a comment but can’t because you’re not a LiveSide member (why not?!) send the comment to feedback *at* liveside *dot* net, and we’ll post it for you ASAP. We can manually create an account for you too, if you’d like, just let us know. Again, sorry for the inconvenience, we’ll get this all sorted out soon.

Email woes

Kip Kniskern — Tue, 19 May 2009 20:28:53 GMT

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 (and were the source of the “doh” moment that we wrote about last night). Some email coming from LiveSide (password change requests, etc.) may have been backed up in our system for quite some time, and been released all at once, yesterday.

Sorry for any confusion. Until we get this all straightened out, if you can’t remember your password (or if you have any other issues or questions), shoot us an email at feedback *at* liveside *dot* net and we can provide you with a temporary password that you can then change on the site.

Thanks for reading LiveSide, sorry for any inconvenience, and hooboy isn’t this fun.

kip

The one where we try out our backup solution

Kip Kniskern — Tue, 19 May 2009 04:21:01 GMT

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 after monkeying around and inadvertently deleting a couple of users, it seemed like a good time to try out our backup. Happy to say that it worked just fine, and things are pretty much all back to normal except that the last 2 posts (which were made after the nightly backup) are missing some views information, sorry about that.

Of course we try to use Microsoft and Windows Live products when we can (and we love Windows Home Server, and frankly couldn’t imagine going back to life without Live Mesh, for home use), but until a dead simple Azure solution comes along (and we know it will), it’s good to know our backup solution works.

A note on some LiveSide housekeeping

Kip Kniskern — Mon, 04 May 2009 19:59:18 GMT

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 of times recently. If you’ve subscribed via feedburner, this shouldn’t affect you, but we’ve updated the feed buttons to reflect the latest changes (which happened a while ago, but hey we’ve been busy!). Also, something that Feedburner did very recently affected our MoFuse mobile link at http://m.liveside.net. We updated our account with MoFuse to point to feeds2.feedburner, but if you missed our last post, that should be fixed.

By the way, we’ve expanded our Blogs We Like section, which now contains headlines from other independent bloggers and Microsoft watchers, Windows Live team blogs, and essential Microsoft blogs and news sources. Its a great way to quickly keep up with the latest on Windows Live from all across the web.

Members

We really don’t like spam comments very much at all, and are happy to have eliminated almost all of it by requiring you to log in to comment. Unfortunately we broke one of the pages in the “Join LiveSide” process in our last little update, and it slipped by us for a time. If you tried to join, and got an error message, so sorry. You actually did create an account, just the Welcome page was broken. Anyway all better now.

Messenger Web Toolkit

We’re very interested in adding the Messenger web toolkit (which was updated recently) to LiveSide, but we’ve been holding off, mainly because at this point logging in to the web toolkit, and logging in to LiveSide via Live ID authentication are disconnected processes. Without some custom code (and we’re looking into it, so stay tuned), logging into the toolkit wouldn’t necessarily mean that you were logged in to LiveSide – so you could utilize Messenger, but not be able to comment, or vice versa. Hopefully we can get it all working without much pain for our existing Live ID authentication users, we should know more soon.

Translator coming for websites; available for Office now

Kip Kniskern — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 06:54:00 GMT

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 Long Zheng had one, of course we threw a hissy fit and got ours a little early. You’ll have to tell us how good of a job it does translating, but hey it sure is fun to see LiveSide in Arabic!

If you haven’t signed up to try it out on your own site, you still can.

In addition, today the team announced a new download, one that installs Microsoft Translation as the default translator in Microsoft Office 2003 or 2007, in the Research bar. Their blog post has links to the download.

UPDATE: The Translator team was kind enough to give us one extra invite key, which we shared with our Chinese sister site www.LiveSino.net, now we can read what he's written when he IMs us links all the time ;)

Zune HD Specs, What We Do & Don’t Know

RyanRCRea — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 20:08:00 GMT

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 features as well as some crazier rumors that couldn’t be proven at this time.

An overview of the confirmed Zune HD specs:

3.6 inchish OLED full touchscreen
NVIDIA Tegra powered.
4GB, 8GB, 16GB, 32GB, and 120GB versions.
HDMI Connection to stream straight to your TV.
HD Radio.
Web Browser.
WiFi compatible, with wireless marketplace.
Released, early fall.
International release of the Zune device itself.
Home AV packs, Car packs, Charge packs.

Unconfirmed rumors (A Microsoft spokesperson declined to comment or confirm):

Camera?
Company insiders tipped us off with the possibility of a limited edition dock accessory in various colors.
3D Xbox Game Support?
Windows Mobile 7 preview bits included? (Maybe these reports mean an early WinMo 7 beta?)

Good stuff, huh?

Be sure to keep it right here, for all the latest Zune news.

Why All The Zune Leaks? The Buzz Is Deafening!

RyanRCRea — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 06:20:07 GMT

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 a leaky dike with a tissue. I have absolutely no problem with MS wanting to keep things under covers for competitive reasons. However all you have to do is look out there to see what this buzz is doing for Zune. Before the latest batch of rumors hit the interwebs , the Zune was lost in a wash of Apple news. Now that the leaks have started coming Zune is everywhere. This is the kind of exposure that MS couldn’t pay for, Yesterday the Zune HD story made it to the #2 spot on digg with 2000+ diggs. Zune has even been trending on twitter over the past few days.

Tonight the site WMpoweruser leaked the below image,

I’ve spoken to my sources and I can say the device you see above is real. However, besides Tegra the specs are still a big question mark. From what I’ve heard the UI is also different (how, I’m not sure). No confirmation on some of the crazier ideas. HDMI? Camera? Look for more Zune news in the coming weeks and months. Stay tuned to Liveside.net and Twitter for all the latest news.

What in the world is Tegra?

RyanRCRea — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 06:15:00 GMT

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 FX laptop uses a GeForce 8800 GTS & my desktop uses a 9800 GTX. Why are GPU’s good for computing? Once again take a look at the laptop. In most laptops the CPU does the heavy lifting for the GPU also, this is called “integrated graphics”. In the Gateway FX, a GPU handles the task of blasting pixels to the screen, allowing the CPU focus on more important stuff, like processing and cruching non visual data. A setup like this is called “discreet graphics”.

Everything above applies to phones as well, on a much smaller scale of course. Most phones and portable media players can barely handle standard-def content, much less HD. Tegra aims to change all of that with support for 720 & 1080P video, along with advanced 3D gaming capabilities. Tegra promises to revolutionize Phones, Digital Media Players and much more. In the videos posted below, you will see that Tegra has chance to change the way mobile UI's are thought of and used.

(Please visit the site to view this media)

Check out some of Tegras drop dead amazing specs

Processor and Memory Subsystem

ARM11 MPCore
32-bit LP-DDR
NAND Flash support

HD AVP (High Definition Audio Video Processor)

720p H.264 Baseline Profile Encode or Decode
720p VC-1/WMV9 Simple & Main Profiles Decode
D1 MPEG-4 Simple Profile Encode or Decode
Supports multi-standard audio formats, including AAC, AMR, WMA, and MP3
JPEG Encode and Decode acceleration

ULP (Ultra Low Power) GeForce

OpenGL ES 2.0
Programmable Pixel Shader
Programmable Vertex and Lighting
Advanced 2D Graphics

Display Subsystem

True dual-display support
720p (1280x720) HDMI 1.3 support
FWVGA (864x480) LCD and SXGA (1280x1024) CRT support
Composite and S-Video TV output

Wondering how this relates to Microsoft?

Back when Nvidia launched Tegra, Microsoft was one of their “featured partners”. Tegra is also primed to launch in "mid 2009" right around the time that MS has few big launches. If everything goes according to plan, expect to see a plethora of devices running on Tegra sometime later this year. If Tegra runs as good as it looks... Sign me up!

What about you, what do you think of Tegra?

The Future Of Zune, Windows Mobile & More

RyanRCRea — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 01:48:17 GMT

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 7, Windows Mobile 6.5, Updates to Zune & Windows Live Wave 4 all to make an appearance before the end of the year. Numerous sources at Microsoft have also confirmed to us two upcoming updates for Zune. The smaller “Spring” update and the much more comprehensive “Fall” update Which according to the gossip around Redmond will be more like a mid to late summer update.

Windows Mobile 6.5 & 7

As you already know Windows Mobile 6.5 will be arriving sometime this summer, and its a worthy stepping stone from 6.1 to 7. I’ve installed a very early beta version on a HTC Touch-Pro which you can see here. Windows Mobile 7 however promises to be the release that takes Win-Mo to the next level. With deep Zune integration and much more. There have been a lot “leaked” screenshots of the upcoming OS over the past few weeks. With even Microsoft itself teasing something or another on their “Software + Services” Web site. According to a source deep inside Microsoft, all of these “Screenshots” are ether fake, mock-ups or really really old.The source goes on to say, that Windows Mobile 7’s UI is much more radical and new-thinking then any of the screenshots that have leaked yet.

Zune

Zune has always been a touchy subject, Microsoft keeps telling us that Zune is doing well. The media and most blogs rail on the Zune like there is no tomorrow. Blogs had a field day earlier this year when Microsoft quietly broke the Zune team into two pieces. With the device team being absorbed by Windows Mobile team and the software team joining up with the entertainment and devices group. Unlike most splits, this one had good ramifications. For one thing it deeply embedded the Zune team within the Windows Mobile Dev. Team. Our source tells us that purchasers of the New Zune will see the benefit’s of this marriage 1st. Basically when the 3rd or 4th (depending on how you count generations) generation launches this late summer or fall. You will be getting a sneak peak at some of Windows Mobile 7’s features a year early. Of course this will not be the only update, The Zune team is working hard on bringing some completely new services to the Zune platform. These are services that will really set the Zune apart, trust me when I say that . One of these future updates will fill a gap in the Zune marketplace that has been a sticky spot for even for Apple & the iPod.

Are you excited yet? I know I am. Keep checking back right here on Liveside for all the latest updates. You can also follow me on Twitter for even more Microsoft news