Earlier this week Apple held an event to announce the new lineup of iPods, an event which has been breathlessly anticipated in years past. This year, reaction was lukewarm, and the stock price dropped 4% immediately after the event. This year, unlike years past when nothing was known about what would be announced until Steve Jobs took the stage, every announcement had been “leaked”, or “reported”, or “blogged” days or weeks in advance.

Other recent news has been reported on well before the “fact” recently, too. Bloggers were checking shipping invoices to determine new iPhone shipments from China, announcements both large and small are relegated to afterthoughts, and mainstream news outlets turned rapidly to bloggers to get a better handle on breaking news.

We’ve had our share of finds here at LiveSide, too. Some would call them leaks, and although we’re not going to go into details, we don’t look at them that way at all. 99% of what we report on LiveSide is the result of dedication, hard work, poring through hundreds of blogs and hundreds of web addresses, establishing a network of fellow enthusiasts, the kind of stuff that would be right at home in any investigative journalist’s office. At times we’ve found what is supposedly “unreleased” information far too easily. Again without getting into details, much of what we post is just sitting there, if you know where to look or care enough to dig a bit.

It’s been three years almost since Windows Live was launched back in November of 2005, and the road from there to here has been anything but smooth. Almost from the beginning, no one could seem to answer the simple question “what is Windows Live?”. Rather than usher in a new era of live services, Windows Live instead cast doubt on the future of MSN and seemed to be going off in all directions at once. At the same time, a little incubation project called Start.com became Live.com, MSN Search became an in-house project, which became Windows Live Search, which became Live Search. MSN Hotmail became Windows Live Mail, and then Windows Live Mail – desktop appeared, and Windows Live Mail became Windows Live Hotmail. No one could seemingly figure out what to call maps. Was it Live Maps? Live Search Maps? Live Local? At times, in various places on the live.com domain, it was all three.

And yet for the past year and a half, with a new management in place, and new organizational connections with Windows, the utter mess that had plagued Windows Live was slowly but surely being cleaned up. Some services were shut down (Expo, Favorites), others were relegated back to MSN (Live Search), and still others were just kind of forgotten (remember the rogue little service called Windows Live Barcode?). Now, with the advent of Wave 3, for the first time, Windows Live should have a coherent structure and a coherent face.

And done right, Windows Live is and can be a compelling set of services. No one else offers anything so complete, with common storage, common contacts, a common interface, and a common user experience on the desktop or online, all accessed by a single sign-on. And no one else will offer such a complete range of products, for both the web and desktop: Mail, Messenger, Calendar, Events and Groups, Photos and Movie Maker, Spaces, and storage through SkyDrive, all managed by a single sign on and a single contact list, with granular permission controls.

One of the reasons why we started LiveSide was to help to build a community around Windows Live, to share our thoughts and views with those who were interested in what Microsoft had to offer, and hear what they had to say in return. While we’ve done reasonably well with that aim, it’s been disappointing for us to see that Microsoft hasn’t seized this opportunity to do the same.

At the beginning of last year they were on the right track. Blogs were buzzing about what this new Microsoft initiative meant, and about the whole range of products that were being launched into beta. Windows Live Events were held in several European cities, reaching out to community leaders to explain what Windows Live was about, and giving demonstrations of new products. This was a pretty successful start by anybody’s standards and one we were hoping would develop with time.

Unfortunately there has been a steady decline since then, with Windows Live becoming more and more like the MSN of old. So why does the Windows Live community of late seem to be suffering?

It's been a little over a year since the Windows Live initiative was announced, in November 2005, and a year since we started LiveSide. Harrison has looked back on what the first year was like - lots of name changes, some new features and products, some disappointing numbers and some good ones, and lots of questions to be answered. In this post we'll take a look at what lies ahead - what's going to be done, what needs to be done. Let's start with what we see as the main areas of focus for Windows Live for 2007 and beyond:

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