Tag: WINDOWSLIVE

Microsoft is working hard at beefing up its "Live" service offering. Right now it seems like they have everything under the sun listed in Windows Live. Current offerings include Mail, Messenger, Gallery, Mail Desktop, Q & A, Product Search, and now the Windows Live Hotspot Locator. The Windows Live Hotspot Locator is actually a nice way to check for WiFi access, both free and paid. Simply ...

Yesterday Microsoft announced the addition of video search to Windows Live.com Search, the currently-in-beta successor to MSN Search. The results are clean and uncluttered and the index seems to be pretty robust. Each result shows a thumbnail image and the video's title, length, and a short description where available. It pulls results from many sites, including big-media sites like ABC and ...

Windows Desktop Search has unfortunately had a bit of a spotty record as of late. Those of you early adopters that have been running the Office 2007 beta have been subjected to the previous version which had the UI stripped out of it. This wasn't a problem for searching Outlook, but otherwise it was pretty neutered. Worse, the indexer ate up a ridiculous amount of resources, and performance was ...

According to Richard MacManus, Windows Live General Manager George Moore told an audience at Microsoft's TechEd 2006 conference in New Zealand yesterday that Windows Live Spaces (formerly MSN Spaces) is "now the largest blogging service on the planet," and his assertion is causing a bit of a stir. Microsoft says there are 72 million Spaces in existence, but former Microsoftie Robert Scoble says ...

After Vista and Office 2007, Microsoft's biggest push this year has been Windows Live, its collection of internet-enabled apps and services that includes the likes of Windows Live Local (successor to MSN Maps), Windows Live Messenger (formerly MSN Messenger), and the confusing trifecta of Windows Mail (nee Outlook), Windows Live Mail (nee Hotmail), and Windows Live Mail Desktop. So how many ...

Microsoft has released a beta version of Windows Live Writer, a new desktop-based blogging tool. Despite Windows Live Spaces, I never really expected Microsoft to release a blogging tool, especially a general-purpose one, but it has. And I've got to say, for Microsoft, I'm impressed. I encountered a few of the same issues that Paul Kedrosky did: Writer forced me to use a wizard to set up my blog, ...

Last night Windows Live Spaces, Microsoft's shiny new successor to MSN Spaces, was launched. All old MSN Spaces blogs now redirect to their new Windows Live Spaces URLs. Apart from a newer, slicker interface and home page, the biggest new features in Windows Live Spaces are the friends module and--you guessed it--gadgets, a.k.a. widgets. The friends module is Microsoft's stab at social ...

Windows Live Mail Desktop, Microsoft's new e-mail client that aims to unify all your email-including AOL and Gmail-in one app, is now in public beta. In what will be sure to confuse some users, Windows Live Mail Desktop is a different product from Windows Mail, Outlook's successor, and Windows Live Mail, the successor to Hotmail. Its advertised features include: Speedy access to multiple ...

Not sure how this one slipped under my radar until now, but anyway Windows Live Favorites went into public beta yesterday. In case the name doesn't give it away, Live Favorites is a web-based bookmarking system similar to del.icio.us or Yahoo! My Web. It lets you export your Internet Explorer bookmarks to a web-based collection where you can organize them in favorites and/or tag them, naturally. ...

Windows Live Mail Desktop, the confusingly-named Microsoft app that will let you access e-mail from multiple sources including Hotmail, Gmail, and AOL, is getting contextual (targeted) advertising, according to ClickZ. The program, which is still in closed beta, utilizes integration with Microsoft's Active Search to display ads based on the content of your e-mail messages, much like similar ad ...

Until I read this post on the Unofficial Yahoo Blog, I had totally forgotten about Microsoft's promise way back in October to make Windows Live Messenger (the successor to MSN Messenger, currently in public beta) interoperable with the Yahoo! Messenger network. Somewhat surprisingly, though, they haven't forgotten, and according to Leah (apparently Microsoft developers don't have last names) at ...

After months of beta-testing, Microsoft has announced the official release of Windows Live OneCare, its Windows security and maintenance suite. OneCare includes anti-virus software, firewall, a backup utility, and spyware protection via Windows Defender, plus disk defragmentation, cleanup, and Windows Update features. OneCare is now available through the Windows Live web site and will cost you ...

Yesterday Microsoft rolled out a new version of Windows Live Local that includes quite a few new features. The most major improvements are real-time traffic information for major metropolitan areas via Traffic.com, Windows Life Messenger integration which allows several people to interact with the same map in real time, and "Collections," which let you add "pushpins" to mark locations, e.g. ...

At long last Microsoft has opened beta-testing of Windows Live Messenger, formerly known as MSN Messenger 8, to the public. The biggest new features are Sharing Folders, the fruits of Microsoft's acquistion of FolderShare, which aims to simplify sharing photos and files with your contacts, and Windows Live Call, a pre-paid service that lets you call regular phones, a la SkypeOut, via Verizon. ...

To be honest, I'm starting to get confused. It's been known for some time that the next version of Outlook Express, the one that will ship with Windows Vista, is going to be called Windows Mail. Windows Live Mail, on the other hand, is Microsoft's web-based successor to Hotmail. We've got the web and the desktop covered, right? But now here comes Windows Live Mail Desktop. Uh.. wuh? Fortunately ...