LiveSide - News blog : Windows Live People

New Feed And Contact Partners Coming To Windows Live

Sunshine — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 20:00:00 GMT

This week 23 new third-party feed partners, including Blingee, BuddyTV, Goodreads, Hulu, Judy’s Book, MySpace, Newsvine, OleOle, Qik and SlideShare are rolling out in Windows Live (full list available here).

Adding feeds to your Windows Live Profile is easy. Click “Add Web activities” on the left side of your Windows Live Profile page, and select the partner sites you’d like to add. After following the steps, your activities on those sites will appear in the news feed of your Windows Live profile and throughout Windows Live.

But not only are more feed partners coming to Windows Live, there will also be new contact partners. Contact partners? Yes, contact partners. Contact partners are sites with which you can share/invite contacts back and forth. Just as you can already invite friends (contacts) from Facebook, hi5, LinkedIn and MySpace to Windows Live, you will now also be able to invite friends from AOL, Google and Hyves!

To invite people go to your Windows Live homepage at http://www.home.live.com and click “Add people”

Next select from which network you’d like to invite friends, click the arrow and follow steps. Done!

Windows Live Blog - Windows Live adds to its list of third-party partners ...

Hotmail update starts rolling out for all users, POP3 coming to the US

damaster — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 01:13:22 GMT

Today the Hotmail team has finally announced the start of the roll out process for all users worldwide to the latest Wave 3 update of Hotmail and People.

The Hotmail team has been hard at work since our last release in the fall, and we’ve got a bunch of new features coming out… and we’re rolling them out now!

If you haven’t seen any changes yet, they’ll be rolling out gradually, so you should see them in the next week or two.

If you’ve been keeping track of the latest at LiveSide, we’ve previously posted what new features are to come in this update. See our previous articles on the latest features for Hotmail and People. To recap, Windows Live Wire blog posted a summary of all the new features coming in this update:

More storage in Hotmail. Start with 5 GB, and watch your storage grow, as you need it.

More themes in Hotmail (including some that change based on time of day or weather)

The top banner ad moved to the side. (You’ve been waiting for that, haven’t you?)

Quickly add maps, directions, movie times and more to e-mail messages. It makes planning a night out so much easier. (UK and US-only, for the moment)

See “what’s new” updates from people in your network on Hotmail’s Today page.

Get Hotmail on your mobile phone’s e-mail program. POP3 access is becoming available to Hotmail users in the US and Brazil, in addition to United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, France, Japan, Spain, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands.

Create e-mail signatures in HTML. Get as fancy as you want to be.

The People page has been re-organized.

I’m surprised though that there’s no mention of the new Web Messenger integration anywhere on the two blog posts. I hope they’re just keeping it as a surprise. After all from the screenshot on Windows Live People above the “Messenger” button is clearly visible, and our friend Picturepan2 from LiveSino had also been noticing that Web Messenger is starting to show up on 2 of his accounts.

Have you received the latest update to your Hotmail and People yet? Leave us a note!

Managing your contacts with Windows Live People – Update being rolled out!

Sunshine — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 14:51:00 GMT

Managing your contacts is going to be easier as a new update is rolling out:

During the past year, we set out to build a few new things:

A unified contact list for all Windows Live users across all of our services

A unified invitations experience for inviting people to your network on Windows Live

A common look & feel for how you select contacts, view networks, and do other contact-based tasks

Before I continue, I want to be clear that we are not done with our releases and so some of these improvements are still coming – particularly the latest updates to Windows Live Hotmail and Windows Live People.

Here is a picture of the People page, which is rolling out shortly and and should be available to all customers within the next few weeks.

Yea, looks different than the one we have now....

...(read more)

Windows Live People Review – Your new Windows Live address book

Chris — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 09:02:00 GMT

With the announcement of the Windows Live Wave 3 (web) services today, there are a few new service names that have popped into the mix. One of these is Windows Live People and this new address book features all of your contacts, both Hotmail, Messenger, Spaces friends as well as Groups you are part of. Here's a brief overview of the main things that are new.

Homepage

Finally we have a consistent UI! Along with the new Wave 3 header, that makes it much easier to swap between services, the contacts service is now much more intuitive.

The sidebar features the categories (formerly groups) of all the various contacts, and lets you “favourite” any of your contacts with just one click on the star. Online presence is featured heavily throughout the address book, with the new status of Online/Away/Busy/Offline being shown through the display picture borders (just like in Messenger).

You’ll also notice the new Messenger sign-in link, which offers WebMessenger functionality through the new Wave 3 pages. We’ll have more on that separately.

Contact View

Clicking through to an individual contact brings up a funky new page. As well as showing the legacy personal information such as email, address, phone numbers etc, it now has several new parts.

The first allows you to send an email direct from the contact page. Its a nice touch, but as for actual usage, I’m not sure how popular it will be. I guess its useful for sending an email to someone you haven’t spoken to in a while, who you see while browsing your address book, but that was the only scenario we could come up with. As always, feel free to correct us via email or in the comments.

The second new part on this page is the recent emails box, which is definitely useful. Searching for recent emails in Hotmail has never been as easy as it should be, but now its a whole lot simpler thanks to this addition. The “more” link here takes you to the Hotmail interface with a pre-populated query for all that contact’s email addresses, allowing you to see the 400 most recent emails with that contact.

Finally there is also a separate “permissions” page for each contact, which shows you the information and files you are sharing with each contact through all the other Windows Live Services (not Mesh yet though).

There are also permissions pages for each category of friends you have, allowing you to update what you are sharing at a higher level, think Facebook friends lists.

Managing your contacts

To help manage your contacts, there’s now an improved feature allowing you to clean up your contacts. It lists the number of duplicates, along with the personal information in each, allowing you to merge or delete as appropriate. Note that if you have multiple IM addresses, you won’t be able to merge the contacts without losing one of these from your Messenger contact list. Hotmail will prompt you if this is the case though.

What’s New

Yes my favourite Windows Live Wave 3 feature also makes an appearance in Hotmail too. Now when you send an email to a contact, the email confirmation page will show you recent updates from those you just emailed. A powerful change for sure, and one that may just help start driving usage of these other services such as Photos and Profile.

Overall

Overall we really like the changes that have been made with the contact management, with the execution of the improvements being good too. Its simple, but effective.

Wave 3 urls start resolving, services betas coming soon

Chris — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 15:41:00 GMT

Ah its almost that time of the year, when we start posting 5 times a day with more screenshots than you can shake a stick at. Just to wet the appetite, the url for the Windows Live People service now works (people.live.com). Unfortunately if you’re not on the Hotmail dogfood servers, all you’ll see is your Hotmail inbox. Yes there is a Wave 3 Hotmail update, which should please a lot of people :)

Also of note is that profile.live.com now redirects to Spaces (photos.live.com has done for a few releases now).

One final point to make, is that if you signed into Windows Live Video Messages to try it out, you’ll have broken your Windows Live Calendar. If you try and sign in now, you’ll see an error message: “Windows Live Calendar wasn’t able to complete this request.” We’ve heard that it is a known issue, so it should get fixed in the near future. Maybe at the same time as a Wave 3 calendar update? ;)

Anyway, if you have any tips over the next month or so remember we have a dedicated tips line: tips [at] liveside dot net.

Fun times ahead!