The European Union granted approval today for the Microsoft deal to purchase Yahoo!’s search business, and in a press release, Yahoo! announced that “implementation of the deal is expected to begin in the coming days”.  From the press release:…

We’ve been a bit obsessed busy with Windows Phone news this week, but we wanted to circle back and catch up on a news item from last week, where Facebook opened up Facebook Chat to 3rd party clients using the …

With the announcement of Windows Phone 7 Series at Mobile World Conference at Barcelona yesterday, the blogosphere has been flooded with Windows Phone news, and LiveSide is no exception. If you watched the press conference by Steve Ballmer yesterday (if …

Just about everything on the Live.com domain is down, for us and for our readers around the world.  A ping to live.com times out:

EDIT: Well you learn something new every day: Microsoft does not respond to pings, according to …

Just a follow-up on this morning’s Live ID sign in issues, the problem lasted for about an hour, as explained by Arthur de Haan on the Inside Windows Live blog:

As some of you may have noticed (we heard

Looks like the msn.com/preview has been updated, or at least the “my apps” portion of the home page.  Before, there were three tabs, for Facebook, Twitter, and Windows Live, and a separate Hotmail section, but now two new apps have …

More news from the TED conference, this time it’s Dr. Gary Flake presenting Pivot, a Live Labs project that just “wouldn’t have been possible five years ago”:

Pivot is an experimental technology that allows people to visualize data

Always fun to catch some little tidbits in official Windows Live blogs, and we noticed two recent ones, thanks to a tip from Picturepan2 from LiveSino.net.

First, did we just get a glimpse of an Emoticon makeover?  In yesterday’s …

Jeff Kunins, the Group Program Manager for social networking across Windows Live, wrote an interesting post about the history of Windows Live Messenger on the Inside Windows Live blog. 

He tells us that the instant messaging category got …

The Winter Olympics, this year held in Vancouver, B.C., are just a few days away, and promise to be the most internet friendly Olympics, so far (especially if you’re in the US, we’re checking on the non-US story).  NBC Universal …