So many blogs, so little time. There are over 112 million blogs on the Internet! How do you keep up? You can take Live Spaces Vision for a spin! Yea really, a spin! Beware not to get dizzy while this shows you all recently updated Windows Live Spaces. Watch that Virtual Earth globe go round and round and round....

You can watch in 2D or 3D, the first time you start 3D mode you will be asked to install Virtual Earth 3D. To tilt and rotate the map, hold the 'CTRL' key on the keyboard whilst pressing your left mouse button. Scroll the mouse to rotate the globe on its axis.

Looking for a specific (interest) blog? There's also Interest Space Mode, as shown in the picture above. Just type in your specific interest in the search box, click submit and of you go! Interesting what/who you can find that way...I found John Bruno, Lead Program Manager at Microsoft (picture above).

To go to the Live Space Profile, click on the thumbnail in the recently viewed window (I'll call it the Collection Bar). This bar is shown below the map, scroll down a bit if you don't see it, I had to as well. I just wish the thumbnails wouldn't disappear when the search starts over to give me some time to click on them...I didn't find a way to stop the search either...

Live Spaces Vision is a stream of global updates to the Windows Live Space network of local market sites in near real-time. Live Spaces Vision joins FlickrVision, TwitterVision, and WikipediaVision in the vision map genre. This was achieved by using the publicly available Changes Feed and Virtual Earth SDK.

Evangelised by Rick Stock and Jason Christie in London, UK. Developed by Cyokin Zhang and Jamie He in Shanghai, CN.

Go and give it a spin, it can be reached through www.livespacevision.com or http://specials.uk.msn.com/livespacesvision

Whilst playing with this I thought how cool it would be to have this for your buddy list! Not only would you be up to date on their Live Spaces but it will show you where they reside at the same time! Could someone please.... *fantasizes some more* .... additional link in Windows Live Messenger, Windows Live Spaces friends list...

More info: Live Spaces Vision - MSN On Windows Live UK

Live Search for Windows Mobile has just received an update, bringing out the features announced at CTIA last month. While it provides the standard mapping and local search that we’ve come to expect, it now adds the following:

· Map a contact:  For any people in your contacts list/address book, immediately view their address on a map and get directions there.

· View Virtual Earth collections:  View custom maps of locations and events that are created on the PC by you, your friends, or the broader community.

· Web search: Launch web search directly from the client to find web pages, product price comparisons and reviews, news, images, and more.

· Weather: View the latest weather conditions and the 4 day forecast

In addition, UK users now get access to the Directions feature previously restricted to US users only. The collections feature is particularly cool, and Kip has a video of this that’ll be up shortly.

Check out the update at http://wls.live.com

Today, billionaire investor Carl Icahn sent a letter to the Yahoo! Board of Directors, announcing his intentions to force Yahoo! to work out a deal with Microsoft. He announced a slate of candidates who will be up for election at the annual meeting on July 3, and an aggressive plan to acquire enough stock to make sure they would be elected (and then to force a sale to Microsoft). In the letter, Icahn pulled no punches about his intentions:

It is clear to me that the board of directors of Yahoo has acted irrationally and lost the faith of shareholders and Microsoft. It is quite obvious that Microsoft's bid of $33 per share is a superior alternative to Yahoo's prospects on a standalone basis. I am perplexed by the board's actions. It is irresponsible to hide behind management's more than overly optimistic financial forecasts. It is unconscionable that you have not allowed your shareholders to choose to accept an offer that represented a 72% premium over Yahoo's closing price of $19.18 on the day before the initial Microsoft offer.

After Microsoft walked away from the deal, Yahoo! stock slid, but not nearly as far as the pre-offer price of $19.18. Clearly Yahoo! investors weren’t ready to walk away. First there were rumblings from large investors about ousting Jerry Yang, and now Icahn has stepped in. While some have said that the Microsoft pull-out was a ploy, there were clear indications that Ballmer had soured on the whole idea, and that the damaged goods Yang was offering was not what Microsoft was looking for.

Your personalized page has moved from Live.com, which is now Live Search Home page, to http://my.live.com

You can still reach your personalized page from live.com, just click Personalized page at bottom right.

The team wrote the following on their blog:

We have a new URL!  You can now access your Live.com personalized page by signing in with your Windows Live ID at http://my.live.com.

Visit http://my.live.com today to view your personalized page and make our new URL your Homepage or add to your Favorites.

Updated Directory

While you are on your personalized page, check out the new Directory items under the Add Stuff link.  We've reorganized and added new feeds from a wider variety of business, technology, and entertainment sources.  In addition, new collections have been added to the Windows Live > Collections folder for Business, Technology, and US Politics.

Our thoughts and prayers go out to victims of the recent earthquake in China, and MSN China is helping to remember those who suffered through the earthquake by remembering them with a Rainbow symbol in front of your nick:

An earlier campaign, one to show support for China in light of all the negative press surrounding the Olympic Torch tour, by including “ China” spread quickly and was very popular in China.

The rainbow is meant to express hope:

According to MSN, the rainbow represents hope and a good things to come: "We [MSN] believe that there is always a rainbow after the wind and rain."

To put the rainbow symbol in front of your nick, first type a set of parentheses (), then fill it in with a capital R – .

(Link to Windows Live Translator version of the MSN China post)

(via Danwei.org)

If you would like to contribute to relief efforts, another blog about China, Lost Laowai, posted instructions on how to place a badge redirecting to the Red Cross Society of China:

In another “not quite Windows Live but still cool” post, Moonlight, an open source implementation of Microsoft Silverlight for Unix systems, is now available in both Silverlight v1.o and 2.0 builds.  Silverlight, while it still has a long way to go to become as widely adapted as Adobe’s Flash, is leading the charge for Microsoft to become a more open eco-system for development.  Moonlight is not a Microsoft project, but Microsoft has been working together with Mono,  an open source project sponsored by Novell, to develop and run .Net client and server applications on Linux, Solaris, Mac OS X, Windows, and Unix, to make a Linux version of Silverlight happen.

While many pundits seem to be stuck in a “Microsoft isn’t open” mode, many indications are that the company has turned a corner, and with Silverlight, and Live Mesh, and the Windows Live platform, seems to be moving toward, if not actually embracing, a more open attitude.  Recent announcements by Google, Yahoo,  MySpace, and Facebook also indicate a general trend toward opening up the software world. 

(via Rohan Thomas)

While this isn’t strictly a Windows Live service, it is still very cool stuff and we told you about it when it was first announced, and now the World Wide Telescope is live and available for download.

Check it out now at http://worldwidetelescope.org

(thanks to Brandon and Twitter for the heads up!)

Now I’m off to download and check it out myself.  Have fun!

At the Wireless Enterprise Symposium in Orlando, Florida today, Microsoft and Research in Motion (RIM) are announcing an agreement to provide, Windows Live services, including Hotmail and Messenger, on Blackberrys.  The enhancements will be available “this summer”.

From the press release:

Windows Live Hotmail for BlackBerry will allow customers to:

• Use BlackBerry 'push' technology for automatic message delivery and message synchronization so customers’ online account is up-to-date with actions taken on their BlackBerry smartphone
• Use a dedicated inbox for Windows Live Hotmail messages, which are automatically delivered to the smartphone. Customers can also choose to receive their Windows Live Hotmail messages, along with messages from other e-mail accounts, within a single inbox on their BlackBerry smartphone
• Display HTML e-mail with the ability to view graphics, Web links, and contact photos in emails

Windows Live Messenger for BlackBerry will allow customers to:

• Send instant messages and join group chats
• Set status and see the presence of friends and colleagues within Windows Live Messenger or their contact cards
• Customize status messages
• Save conversations
• Showcase their Display Picture (Avatar)
• Send and receive pictures and files
• Use more than 60 emoticons

In the past few days a number of reports came in that Windows Live Messenger was blocking the ability to send legitimate urls through Messenger, including most noticeably www.youtube.com.  While there was some sinister speculation as to the nature of this blocking, the Inside Windows Live Messenger blog reports that the problem was caused by a third party partner who handles the blocking of malicious sites:

• There are a number of factors that can be used to determine whether a URL is potentially harmful: number of times a URL is sent, the frequency of the URL being sent, the number of accounts the URL is sent from, manually checking the URL, comparing with other "block lists", etc.
• When a URL is deemed harmful, a block can be instated for a specific URL (i.e. www.<domain>.com/<page>) or an entire domain (i.e. *.<domain>.com)
• This entire process for Messenger is managed by a 3rd party that is a Microsoft partner
• On Friday, Microsoft did not request to block any of the URLs that were accidentally blocked
• The blocks were made by our partner as a result of their process to block harmful URLs
• We are still investigating the specific reason our partner made these incorrect blocks and we will work with them to improve their process for detecting harmful URLs while not blocking safe ones

Everything's all back to normal, now.

Hello fellow LiveSide readers, my name is John O'Brien. Its my second season as a Windows Live Developer/Platform MVP and I'm pleased to announce many new developer related articles in the works for your reading pleasure here at LiveSide. Today I published Create a Deep Zoom Panorama with Windows Live on the Developer Blog.

Its a how to guide for taking a Panorama Photo, stitching in Windows Live Photo Gallery, crunching in Deep Zoom Composer, uploading to Silverlight Streaming and display on top a Virtual Earth map. I hope you enjoy the read, I had fun making it, even the 5am trip out to the Story Bridge here in my home city of Brisbane, Australia.