In the latest version of Messenger, you can personalize how you express yourself during conversations by changing your “scene.” Your scene appears at the top of the main Messenger window, behind your display picture and name. Also, when you start chatting with someone, they’ll see your scene at the top of their conversation window, and you’ll see theirs.

To change your scene, point to the top of Messenger’s main window, and the upper-right corner will appear to peel back to reveal a little paintbrush.

Click that corner, and then choose from one of the scenes included with Messenger. Better yet, you can use one of your own pictures as your scene. (You can also change the color scheme of your Messenger main window here.)

If you want to use one of your own photos as your scene, it’s easy: just drag a photo from your computer and drop it at the top of Messenger’s main window.

Now, when you start a conversation with someone, they’ll see your scene at the top of the conversation window, and you’ll see theirs.

To see more great features of Windows Live Messenger in action, check out this video demo. You’ll also find some great tips on the Messenger team blog.

Take a tour through Windows Live Messenger 2009

Have fun!

- Tatsuo, and the Windows Live team

P.S. If you need help with Messenger, click the Help menu in Messenger. You’ll also find help for Messenger errors in the Messenger Support Space.

Over the course of the past year, Windows Live has made some large investments in simplifying and advancing what you can do with your contact list. Before I start, let me set the stage a bit.

I’m Omar Shahine, and I’m the lead program manager for the new Windows Live People. When I joined our team almost 5 years ago, we had two large address books – one for Hotmail and one for Messenger. We found that many of you used both of these products and were asking for us to make this easier by giving you one contact list to manage. So we formed a team to build a single store for all of these contacts, and this is what we internally call the Address Book Clearing House (ABCH).

When the ABCH made its debut several years ago, it let you access all your contacts from Hotmail and Messenger. Today, it also lets you manage your contacts using Windows Mobile, Microsoft Office Outlook (via the Outlook Connector), Windows Live Mail, and more. This service stores billions of contact records for our users and its Contacts APIs have become an integral part of how other companies like Facebook and LinkedIn integrate Windows Live contacts into their websites.

But in recent times, we’ve added several new services and some of them were not using the ABCH service. So some of the people you cared about did not appear in your main address book. And because you now had multiple lists of contacts, you also had to manage multiple sets of invitations.

During the past year, we set out to build a few new things:

• A unified contact list for all Windows Live users across all of our services
• A unified invitations experience for inviting people to your network on Windows Live
• A common look & feel for how you select contacts, view networks, and do other contact-based tasks

Before I continue, I want to be clear that we are not done with our releases and so some of these improvements are still coming – particularly the latest updates to Windows Live Hotmail and Windows Live People.

Here is a picture of the People page, which is rolling out shortly and and should be available to all customers within the next few weeks.  

Windows Live People: your full address book

Windows Live People will now contain all your contacts. You can use it to manage the standard details like addresses and phone numbers. You can also use Windows Live People to do a number of other things such as clean up your address book of duplicate contacts, import contacts from a number of programs and services, and print or export your contacts. If you haven’t tried the clean up feature, you should. You might be surprised at how many duplicate contacts you’ve collected over the years and how easy we’ve made it to fix that.

Your network: keeping in touch with the people you care about most

I want to highlight two types of contacts that are particularly important –your “Messenger contacts” and your “Profile contacts.” Here’s a quick explanation of each type:

• Messenger contacts – These are the people you invited to Messenger. You see when they’re online and can instantly start a chat with them. Your Messenger contacts are private—no one else can see that they’re your contacts.
• Profile contacts – These are the people you’ve selected to appear on your Windows Live Profile page (as shown below) to those whom you’ve given permission to see the page. Your Profile contacts are public—they let your friends discover other friends through you. Unlike Messenger contacts, these contacts can’t see when you’re online or instantly start chatting with you (unless you’ve also approved them as Messenger contacts).

This picture shows how your Messenger contacts and your Profile contacts make up your network:

These two types of contacts are important because you can receive regular updates from them:

• Contact information updates—If a contact shares a mailing address with you and then moves, the new address will be saved in your address book automatically. This is something a lot of people tell us that they love because it means you always have the latest contact information. You also get birthday reminders for contacts in your network.
• “What’s new” information—These are updates that people in your network decide to share with you about what they’re doing online. They cover activities in Windows Live (for example, changing a picture, joining groups, or publishing a blog post) as well as activities on other websites (for example, updating on Twitter or publishing photos on Flickr). You’ve likely started to see “What’s new” information appear in Messenger, on home.live.com, and in many other places (soon including Hotmail when you sign in and when you send e-mail).

We think that lots of users will want to put contacts into the middle “Messenger & Profile” bucket in the last picture. If you want to “upgrade” your existing Messenger contacts to add them to your profile, you can do it from this page: http://profile.live.com/connect/upgrade.aspx?ru=windowslive.

Categorizing your contacts

There are a lot of other things you can do with your contacts. One that I really like is adding categories. Adding a category lets you:

• Organize contacts the way you want—you can create as many as you want and call them what you want. For example, I have the categories “High school friends,” “Family,” “Microsoft,” “Soccer club,” and “College.”
• Set permissions for things such as events, photo albums, profile details, and files to an entire category of people. For example, I have a lot of pictures that I share with only my “Family” – I can now do this by just selecting that category.
• Send an e-mail message to a category to send it to everyone in the category. This makes it a lot easier than remembering to include everybody when you send mail to large groups of people.

We also created a special category called Favorites that appears across Windows Live. You can mark someone as a favorite by clicking the star icon in the contact list or moving the contact to that category. In Messenger, your Favorites appear at the top of your contact list so they’re easier to find. In Hotmail and the other Windows Live web services, you will see a tab for Favorites when you select a contact.

As I said earlier, some of the things that I’ve mentioned here are just starting to roll out and it will be a number of weeks before everyone worldwide will see them all. Thanks for your patience while we continue to roll out the new services!

- Omar Shahine (Lead Program Manager, Windows Live People)

We’ve heard that a small number of you are experiencing audio and video problems with your webcam after installing the latest version of Windows Live Messenger. After looking into this, we found that for users who are seeing error code 0x8AC70013 or 0x8AC70202, this may be caused by an incompatibility with McAfee Site Advisor.

McAfee is working on a patch to fix this, but until it becomes available, if you’re having audio or video problems with the new version of Messenger and are running McAfee, McAfee has posted a workaround on its website at: http://service.mcafee.com/faqdocument.aspx?id=TS100601.

UPDATE: McAfee has published an update to their Site Advisor program to fix this problem. For more info, please see the McAfee FAQ here: http://service.mcafee.com/faqdocument.aspx?id=TS100601

Thanks,

The Windows Live team

Over the past several months, Windows Live Calendar has been in beta. We’ve been experimenting with features, listening to your feedback, and polishing up the service. Now the calendar is finally ready for prime time, and is being rolled out in more than 45 languages.

There’s tons of new and improved stuff to play with, like the to-do list, charms, support for multiple calendars and shared calendars, a birthday calendar for all the people in your contact list, and better integration with Windows Live Events, Groups, and Hotmail on the web, and Windows Live Mail on your PC. You can read all about the new and updated features on the Hotmail team blog.

Coming out of beta also means that within the next few months, people still using the original (MSN) Calendar service will gradually begin to be moved over to the new Windows Live Calendar service. Don't worry, all your current calendar appointments, meeting requests, tasks, and notes will automatically come with you to the new Windows Live Calendar. Your tasks and notes will be transferred to the new to-do list. This Window Live Calendar FAQ has more information about the upcoming move, and some actions that you may need to take to prepare.

If you haven’t tried the new Calendar yet, check it out at http://calendar.live.com/ and let us know what you think! Please send us feedback here, or leave us a comment about what you do or don’t like about the new Calendar. 

- The Windows Live team

PS. If you need help with Hotmail, you’ll find it in the Windows Live Solution Center.

We are happy to announce that POP3 technology is now available to Hotmail users in the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, France, Japan, Spain, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands. If you don’t see your country or region in this list, never fear, we’ll be rolling POP3 out to more parts of the world later this year.

UPDATE: As of March 12, 2009, POP3 access is now available to Hotmail users WORLDWIDE.

What is POP3? It is a protocol that allows almost any e-mail software program that you’ve installed on your mobile phone or PC* to get messages from your e-mail inbox on the web and deliver them in the designated program.

Although you always could access Hotmail on your web-enabled mobile phone by going to mobile.live.com, now that Hotmail has POP3, you can get to it more conveniently using the e-mail software on your PC or mobile device* such as a Windows Mobile phone, iPhone, or BlackBerry.

When you set up Hotmail in the e-mail program on your PC or mobile device, you may be asked for the following information:

POP server: pop3.live.com (Port 995)  
POP SSL required? Yes
User name: Your Windows Live ID, for example yourname@hotmail.com
Password: The password you usually use to sign in to Hotmail or Windows Live
SMTP server: smtp.live.com (Port 25)  
Authentication required? Yes (this matches your POP username and password)
TLS/SSL required? Yes

In addition to POP3, Microsoft offers additional technologies that can provide you with an even richer experience of your e-mail. Try viewing your Hotmail using Windows Live Mail, Microsoft Office Outlook via the Outlook Connector, or Windows Live for Windows Mobile phone.

Looking for help with Hotmail? Visit the Windows Live Hotmail Solution Center! The Solution Center has instructions on how to set up your e-mail software to send and receive Windows Live Hotmail messages using POP3. You’ll also find instructions on how to set up Hotmail on the web to give you POP3 access to a non-Windows Live e-mail account. If you have problems using POP3 access, Windows Live Hotmail Solution Center also has links to report a problem with Hotmail.

We hope you enjoy the many ways in which you can access your Windows Live Hotmail!

- The Windows Live team

* If supported by your device and e-mail program

Last week, we added a new, centralized Permissions page to Windows Live, so you have one place to find the permissions settings for all the things you do on Windows Live. With this, you should find it easier to choose what information you share, and with whom. You can go directly to the page at http://profile.live.com/permissions/ or look for the Permissions link on your profile or on the Windows Live options page.

We heard from many of you here on the blog that you’re concerned about your online privacy, and being able to easily limit what information you share. In December, we posted a detailed list of how to set permissions, to help clarify where to find each setting on Windows Live. After hearing feedback from so many of you about this issue, we’re happy that we could also quickly put together this new permissions page to help make the whole thing even easier, and to make this information available to all Windows Live users in all languages. 

Thanks for all the great feedback so far. Please try out the new page, and let us know what you think!

- The Windows Live team

As Steve Ballmer just announced during his keynote speech at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, Windows Live has three big pieces of news to share with you that underscore our continued commitment to simplifying your digital life.

Messenger	Mail	Photo Gallery	Movie Maker (beta)	Writer

First of all, today we’re releasing the final version of Windows Live Essentials, our suite of downloadable programs for your Windows PC. You can get Windows Live Essentials, including Messenger, Mail, Photo Gallery, Writer, Toolbar, and Family Safety, all for free from http://download.live.com. (Windows Live Movie Maker is also available, but remains in beta.)

Our second big announcement is that Dell will be including Windows Live Essentials pre-installed on most of their consumer and small business PCs worldwide starting in February. Because Windows Live Essentials helps with so many of the things that you do every day on your PC (like e-mail, instant messaging, and photo sharing), now when you get a new Dell PC, you can get started as soon as you take it home.

And finally, we’re excited to announce that you’ll soon be able to add Facebook as one of 50+ web activities on Windows Live. This means that in the coming months, if you’re a Facebook user, you can choose to allow info and photos that you post on Facebook to show up in “What’s new” for anyone in your network on Windows Live. 

So, go download Windows Live Essentials and as always, leave us a comment here on the blog, or send your suggestions to the team via our feedback page.

- Brian Hall

Hello, and happy new year, everyone!

My name is Piero Sierra, and I’m the Group Program Manager for Windows Live SkyDrive.

Last year, Windows Live introduced its first online file storage solution for consumers: SkyDrive. We got a terrific response, but we also heard from some folks that it was confusing to have two ways to share a photo (the old way on Spaces, and the new way on SkyDrive). We agreed. We also heard concerns that we didn’t provide enough sharing options—folders were either public to the whole Internet, or required people you were sharing with to get a Windows Live ID. As much as we love Windows Live ID, we know not everyone can be expected to sign up for one.

So in our latest release of Windows Live, we have consolidated all photo and file sharing into SkyDrive. To make things easier to find, we’ve provided several entry points to your files—Photos (just for images), Spaces (for those who want to display things in a more personalized place), and SkyDrive (where you can access all your files and photos in one place). At the same time, we began to provide one consistent set of tools to help you manage all of your files, whether they are images or documents. And the tools we offer are getting better too— now, you can easily create a beautiful slideshow, move and copy items, and you have a lot more storage space—25 GB. But that’s just half the battle—we’ve also tried our best to make sharing super simple.

Let me show you how.

Let’s imagine I’m a college student, and my friends and I are working on a project about the current economic crisis for our “Econ 108” class. The project includes some Word and PowerPoint documents and a few photos. From anywhere on Windows Live, I can click the More menu, and then click SkyDrive:

Now I’m on the SkyDrive home page. I can see my recently updated folders, as well as what people in my network have been doing with files and photos lately.

This is very similar to the Windows Live Photos page, since both are powered by SkyDrive. The Photos page simply filters out all file activity that is not related to photos.

From here I click Create folder, which allows me to quickly name my folder, select whom to share it with in the dropdown, and start my upload. But since I want more precise control over who can access this folder, I’ll go ahead and click Select people… from the dropdown menu:

This reveals several more sharing options. I can share with all my “Econ 108 buddies” at once (because I created a category for them earlier in my Hotmail contact list). I can also control their level of access:

I’ll set it up so they can “add, edit details, and delete files,” since they’ll all be contributing to the project.

Now comes the fun part. Windows Live provides a little ActiveX control that makes uploading to SkyDrive easy. All I have to do is drag the files I want from a folder directly onto the webpage:

Then I click Upload, and in a few moments my documents are up on SkyDrive:

Now the documents are online, and my friends can get to them. Of course, they’ll also be notified in the “What’s new” list that they see on their respective Home and SkyDrive pages:

So far, so good. But what about my friend Bob, who uses Gmail, and doesn’t have a Windows Live ID? How can I ensure he gets these files without having to sign up for an account?

All I have to do is click Send a link at the top of the folder page, and then type in his e-mail address:

Checking the little box that says “Don’t require recipients to sign in to Windows Live ID” will send Bob a special link that will let him see the album without signing in. If I later change my mind, I can break this link by clicking Edit permissions, and then clearing the check box. It’s as easy as that.

And of course, I can add as many folks as I want to the list of people I’m sharing with, and even share with other categories of people like “Friends” or “Favorites.”

Now, all my Econ buddies have access to our homework folder. They can view the documents and comment on them, download them, and, if they want to, make changes and upload new versions.

Sharing files is much easier now, while still offering flexibility for more advanced needs.

Try it out for yourself and let me know what you think!

- Piero