LiveSide - News blog : Windows Live Home

What’s coming for Live.com?

damaster — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 01:54:00 GMT

If you’ve recently visited Bing by typing http://www.live.com into the address bar, you would’ve noticed the following notice across the top of the page:

When Bing first launched, this Q&A post over at the Bing & adCenter Community told us the following:

Q: What will happen to Live.com?
A: The Live.com URL will redirect to Bing.com for 45 days after launch. After this period it becomes the front door for all Live services including Office Live and Windows Live.

It’s now way past 45 days since Bing first launched in June, and this is the first sign indicating that Live.com will no longer redirect to Bing. After all, Microsoft should make good use of the easy-to-remember domain name for their “Live” offerings (did we mention Start.com too?). The question is, what will take the place for Live.com? Possible candidates are:

Windows Live Home (currently at http://home.live.com)
The good old Windows Live Personalized Experience (currently at http://my.live.com)
The current marketing website for Windows Live (currently at http://www.windowslive.com/Explore)
A brand new homepage linking to both Windows Live and Office Live?

Which one do you think will take the place of Live.com? And most important of all, what would you want to be placed there?

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 ...

Windows Live Home New Feature: Word-wheel Contact Search in Header Search Bar

damaster — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 12:13:24 GMT

It seems like Windows Live Home has been silently updated overnight with a few new hidden features. Sunshine already uncovered one for us a few days ago regarding the new Web Slice support for your What’s New feed. Jamie also posted on his blog about the ability to update your Personal Status Message (PSM) directly on the page without page refresh.

We have also found a new little feature in the Windows Live Wave 3 header – word-wheel contact search in the search bar. When you start typing a person’s name into the header search bar, a list of your contacts beginning with the characters you typed will start to appear under the search box, in real time! It’s very similar to the contacts word-wheel in Messenger and Hotmail. When you click on the contact’s name, it will link you directly to their Profile. Try it out yourself!

We’re guessing this feature should be coming to all services that has the header search bar reading “Search People or Web” instead of simply “Search the web” (this includes Home, Profile, Spaces, Groups and Events). However, it seems like Windows Live Home is the only service that has this feature at the moment.

On a side note, we also noticed that OneCare is no longer listed in the “All services” page on Windows Live Home, marking the beginning of an end to the OneCare service.

Have you noticed anything else new to Windows Live Home? Drop us a note in the comments section below!

Home.live.com: Is This The “More”? Web Slice For What’s New With Your Network

Sunshine — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 18:01:33 GMT

Might this be the “more” spoken about here? Picturepan2, spotted something in Angus Logan’s vids that were posted in Rob Dolin’s post:

A web slice* icon on home.live.com! Now what might that be for? From what we see in a screenshot in Seika’s post, it is for “What’s new with your network.” Very handy indeed, but don’t we already have something like that? Well, yes and no.

If you have the Windows Live Toolbar installed you will see that also has a “What’s New” button:

So no, we don’t have a web slice like that yet, and yes, the ”What’s New” in Windows live Toolbar looks a lot like it. The biggest difference is that by the looks of it the new web slice (might this also be released in the coming week?) will ~~only~~ feature 3 10 updates, whereas the Toolbar one does 5.

*Web slices are a feature of IE8, should you not have IE8 yet please download and install it from the Internet Explorer homepage.

Edit: The web slice just appeared for me on home.live too, and it indeed shows 10 updates. To see all of them, just stretch out the slice as far as you can by holding the bottom right corner with your left mouse button and drag ;)

CTIA Keynote Preview

RyanRCRea — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 04:04:52 GMT

On April 2…. yes April 2nd ,Robert Bach will take to the stage and make the day 2 keynote at CTIA’s 2009 trade show.

He is president of the Entertainment & Devices, a group that includes Zune & Windows Mobile. You can expect the usual dog & pony show for Windows Mobile 6.5 and its upcoming app store.

According to sources close to MS, You can expect at least one surprise announcement related to Windows Live wave 4. Which is due this fall

The announcement may be the long rumored Windows Live-Facebook integration. Which would allow users to link both networks together and view Facebook’s updates on www.home.live.com.

It would seem Microsoft is very intent on making Windows Live a one stop social gateway. With the ability to view Tweets from Twitter & now with the addition of Facebook updates, You have a very well rounded social experience.

Keep a close eye on the keynote.. you’ll be glad you did.

Windows Live Home beta (accidently) available to public!

damaster — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 23:45:00 GMT

As I was checking my Calendar (using the dogfood address we mentioned earlier) today, I unconsciously clicked "Home" to take me back to the usual Windows Live Home, forgetting that I was on the dogfood server. Expecting that I would get to the 404 page not found, instead I was redirected to the new Windows Live Home beta (http://home-beta.live.com) that was previously available only to internal Microsoft beta testers. At the time of posting, the beta home page is still available to the public intermittently. Here's what comes up first on your Home page:

We can see several old features like the ability to see your Hotmail and Office Live Workspaces directly from your Home page (with slight improvements to allow you to show more than three headings), weather information, and a shortcut to all the other Windows Live offerings. What's important are the new features we've noticed, such as:

• "What's New" feed integration (similar to that in Messenger wave 3) - and the ability to post Notes (ie. comments) to each of the "What's New" activities
• RSS Feed support (limited to a certain pre-defined list)
• Adding your "Home Photo" on the top-right corner
• Sending "private messages" using Windows Live Profile
• "People you might know" feature suggesting friends' Network you may be able to join with Windows Live People
• Integration with Windows Live Calendar showing who's birthday it is today at first glance
• Ability to add "Web Activities" to your Windows Live Profile (more on this later)
• New Themes that changes according to the time of day and weather conditions

Here's a screenshot of the Themes currently available, notice the last four Themes on the bottom: Daisy Hill, Tugboat, Prairie, and Desert are dynamic and change according to the time of day (every four hours to be exact) and weather conditions according to the location you've set. These Themes will be shown across all Windows Live wave 3 services, with the exception of Spaces and Events (which you're able to customize separately):

What we're most excited about is the RSS feed integration within Windows Live Home. Unfortunately, it seems like you are only able to select from a predefined list of Feed providers, thus still not able to replace My.Live.com. Having said that, to our surprise we noticed the LiveSide is actually on the predefined list of Feed providers! This probably explain why we had been receiving hits from the http://home-beta.live.com address:

As many of the features are integrated with the yet-to-be-released Wave 3 services like Windows Live Profile, Groups and Peoples (such as the What's New feed - we know from the Messenger team interview that it's a big thing coming), we weren't able to play around with these new features. However, stay tuned with us as we cover about these exciting new features more in depth later.

Get ready for a new Live.com - Windows Live Home

Chris — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 11:29:00 GMT

At a briefing given to Japanese press about Windows Live, Tetuya Onoda (Windows Live Director) held up a nice big picture of the new Windows Live Homepage that looks set to replace the existing personalised Live.com page. Featuring the new Wave 2 UI, the portal acts as a true Windows Live Home, featuring modules that allow you to monitor and access the Windows Live services that matter to you. A few examples of this cross-service integration are:

Providing access to your emails and contacts through Windows Live Hotmail
Showing the upcoming calendar items from your Windows Live Calendar
Allowing blog and photo publishing direct to your Windows Live Space
Showing the status of Windows Live OneCare installed on your home pc

Also of note is the inclusion of links to Folders/Skydrive and Windows Live Events, though whether any interaction is available directly from your homepage remains to be seen. Users can also customise the weather display shown in the top left of the screen. We'd love to have the ability to remotely run a OneCare virus scan or upload a file to Skydrive, however as we saw with the original Live.com development, good performance right from the initial availability is very important.

As always, the appearance and functionality of the final product may differ slightly from that shown. Currently http://home.live.com/ redirects to the personalised live.com homepage.

The press briefing also mentioned some other juicy bits, including single sign-on for Windows Live ID (sign in to one passport and be able to use any others you might have), Windows Live Skydrive, and Windows Live Drive. Of course as with Windows Vista SP1 they could all be typos, maybe.

Thanks for a great tip hey07.