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Featured Article:

Windows Live Hotmail Wave 3: What’s New

Thanks to some great work by tophtucker and then BV2312, we managed to catch the new Windows Live Hotmail promotion site as soon as it popped up today. What we love about this site is that it has gone public with some of the changes for Windows Live Hotmail that are coming up in the Wave 3 beta. Here's the summary: Speed: The coming soon page says that for broadband users, the new Hotmail will be up to 70% faster on sign in (50% for non-broadband users). That's a pretty big claim, and one which should provide for some interesting testing once the beta is open to the public. Ever-increasing
Read the full article...
by Chris on 26 Aug 2008, 07:41 AM with 25 comment(s)

Latest LiveSide Posts

Live Search Maps Goes Live In Taiwan

by Sunshine on 29 Aug 2008, 03:00 PM with 3 comment(s)

Now Taiwan can also enjoy Live Search Maps (as Live Pages).

Microsoft Taiwan and Chunghwa Telecom realized this together making use of technologies from:

  • Chunghwa Yellow Page - geocoding engine, Business Listings and Point of Interest information
  • Kingway Technology - road map images
  • Multimap - mapping API to render road maps from Kingway and aerial maps from Virtual Earth

LiveSearchMapsTaiwan

Additionally a number of services were provided with this release, including: Local Search, Maps (Road and Aerial), CHT powered web call for their premium subscribers, a Messenger Activity and a Messenger Tab. Chris Pendleton has the full story and more screenshots.

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Photosynth: First Update

by ScottIsAFool on 29 Aug 2008, 10:42 AM with no comments

Photosynth, launched 8 days ago, got its first update:

  • Some improvement on the upload problems. If you've been upload errors or the dreaded "stuck in publishing" problem, you should know that we've been working very hard on these issues this week, and we've released a partial fix tonight. "Stuck in publishing" should be gone -- or much less frequent -- and we've added diagnostics to our servers to throw light on the remaining issues. Next week, we're going to do our best to get to the bottom of them.
  • A better quality "Recently Synthed" view
    We're not showing synths with very low synthiness scores.They're no fun!
  • We made the "Report Abuse" button more prominent. If you saw something inappropriate on the site it wasn't obvious how to report it.There's now an easy to recognize icon alongside the words "Report Abuse" just to the right of the synth as you view it.
    PSreportabuse
  • We made Photosynth work on IE8 Beta2. Give it a try!
  • We fixed some problems with the About page. All the info on our About page is now properly accessible.
  • We changed our featured synths on the front page. Check them out.
  • We've saved your printer cartridge As gypsyviking360 pointed out, our page design with the dark stripes across the top and bottom of the page really sucked ink. Check out our new printer-friendly version.

All back-end and site improvements, the viewer and app are still the same. Nothing wrong with those anyway. There will be another update as soon as they found a fix for the remaining upload problems. Not experiencing any problems with it myself, go ahead and give it a go.

Photosynth
Participate on the forums
Photosynth Blog

LiveSide, Photosynth - User Review

(Apologies for the seemingly double post here, we encountered one of those technical hiccups I’m always hearing about Winking Smilie)

SL

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Microsoft acquires Greenfield Online and Ciao for $486 million, expands further in commercial search

by Kip Kniskern on 29 Aug 2008, 09:20 AM with 2 comment(s)

Microsoft continued to expand it’s reach in commercial search today, acquiring Greenfield Online, Inc, owners of Ciao GmbH, for $17.50 US, in a transaction valued at $486 million.  According to the press release:

Ciao is a comprehensive source for intelligent shopping on the web, combining consumer reviews and ratings from a multimillion-user-strong online community with up-to-date price information from thousands of online merchants. It currently has more than 26.5 million unique visitors per month (source: comScore Inc, May 2008) across seven countries, who so far have generated more than 5 million product reviews.

Microsoft has secured a buyer for Greenfield Online’s Internet survey solutions, so it will retain Ciao and the commercial search piece, and get rid of the rest, apparently.  The move will help to strengthen Microsoft’s commercial search efforts in Europe, with Ciao websites operating in seven European countries:

The popular price comparison service will help to bolster Microsoft’s intentions to make Live Search a consumer destination to research and purchase goods and services online, not only in the US, but around the world.

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Microsoft continues testing different shapes of MSN.com v11

by Gregor on 28 Aug 2008, 11:35 AM with 3 comment(s)

Since we learned about the upcoming version of MSN.com featuring a tighter Windows Live integration and a fresh new look a couple of weeks ago, Microsoft has continued to evolve the page before releasing it broadly.

Some users are now forwarded to a version of the page that looks a little different. New to the first version of v11 was a column on the right side with easy access to your email inbox, video highlights and other custom content. This custom content column has moved to the left side of the page. Looks like MSN is doing some parallel a vs b testing to refine the usability of the page for prime time.

msnv11_a msnv11_b

If you want to check the new version out yourself, simply go to:
http://v11.www.msn.com/defaulta.aspx

Old version:
http://v11.www.msn.com/default.aspx

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Live Mesh: New Service Update

by Sunshine on 28 Aug 2008, 10:00 AM with 2 comment(s)

Live Mesh’es next update will air later today. No, it’s not available yet, I’ll update this post once it is ;) Its available now. Right click the Live Mesh icon and select Update Live Mesh

As always the software will update itself within 24 hours after release of the new build, or if you don’t want to wait you can force an update by right clicking the Notifier icon in systray and choose “Update Live Mesh”. There are a number of reliability and performance improvements:

  • Increased the reliability of Live Mesh folder behavior in Windows Explorer.
  • Fixed a problem with the ‘Save As’ dialog in Internet Explorer when downloading video files from the Live Desktop.
  • Enabled syncing of files greater than 2GB in size.
  • Greatly increased the speed of P2P synchronization.
  • Implemented a number of reliability fixes for backend services.
  • And, of course, a bunch of additional general performance improvements.

After updating the build number of both the software and the Live desktop will be 0.9.3103.13.

Windows Vista User Account Control (UAC) reminder

While we no longer require that UAC be enabled when running Live Mesh on Vista SP1, if you initially installed Live Mesh with UAC enabled, and then disabled it, you might have some issues upgrading. Please see the “NOTICE: Updating Live Mesh and User Account Control (UAC)” Announcement on the Live Mesh forums for further information.

And as always, thank you for all the great feedback!

The Live Mesh team

Feedback can be left as usual, through the online Feedback form or on Microsoft Connect.

Live Mesh
Live Mesh Blog
Live Mesh forum

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Auto Suggest, new in IE 8 with Search Providers (and coming to Live.com?)

by Kip Kniskern on 27 Aug 2008, 11:07 PM with 17 comment(s)

IE 8 Beta 2 just came out today, and one of the interesting new features comes in the search bar, in the form of Auto Suggest.  We’ve seen these types of suggestions to searches before, most commonly included in toolbars such as the Windows Live Toolbar, but this new feature, built in to IE 8 Beta 2, not only is built in and makes for a seamless experience, but has some great cross Search provider features as well.  To start, type something into the search bar at the top right of Internet Explorer:

ie8suggestions

A list of suggestions drops down, including most popular suggestions and also a list of suggestions stemming from your browsing history.  But to get the full effects of the feature, add in some other Search Providers:

searchproviders

and then run a comparison between search providers, or narrow your search to Wikipedia (or eBay, or Amazon, etc).  This way you can leave your default at Live Search but check results in other browsers, for example.  A really nice little feature, now built in to IE 8 Beta 2.  You can learn more about Search Providers on the IE website

And it looks like this same functionality may soon be coming to Live.com.  Currently in limited testing (and leave us a comment if you’ve seen it), Live.com may soon feature the same drop down auto-suggest functionality, depending on the feedback they receive from their limited flights of this new feature:

autosuggest

I’ve always liked these auto suggest features, but never liked having to install a toolbar to get them, so I’m looking forward to trying it out in IE 8, and looking for it on Live.com.

One additional note on IE 8 (thanks for the tip, Chuck!), this from the XP download release notes:

Windows Live Mail

Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 and Windows Live Mail are currently incompatible. If you install Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2, Windows Live Mail will crash when you create or reply to an e-mail message. No workaround is currently available.

Not good news for XP/Live Mail/IE users.  The note is not included in the Vista version of the release notes.

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