Doesn’t it seem like Twitter is officially “the thing” now?  Maybe that happened when Oprah joined Twitter. I’m not sure, but it certainly seems like it’s here to stay.

The Windows Live team has been tweeting away from http://twitter.com/windowslive for a few months now, and would welcome each and every one of you to follow us there. We tweet out news and information that hopefully will help you get even more out of Windows Live. Sometimes we take informal polls and ask questions to see what’s on your mind. And unlike some corporate Twitterers, there’s some give and take to our twitter stream--we don’t just blast stuff out. We try to follow those who follow us, and to respond to as many direct messages (“DMs” in twitterspeak) and @replies as we can, too.

Thanks to the Twitter web activity, you can also see our latest tweets under “What’s new” on the Windows Live team profile page.

So, who’s tweeting on behalf of @windowslive? You’ll see that our tweets often end with two letters preceded by a caret (“^”) symbol.  If you go to our twitter profile page, you’ll see those correspond to the initials of the real people tweeting on behalf of @windowslive. For example, I’m ^MS (Marcus Schmidt). We use a web application called CoTweet to manage all of that, which you can read more about in another guest blog post I did recently.

What would you like us to tweet about on @windowslive?  Please just leave a comment here, or better yet, send a tweet to @windowslive.

See you in the twittersphere,

Marcus Schmidt
Windows Community Manager

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From submissions of over 5,000 Web 2.0 sites and services received in the 2009 Webware 100 competition, the Webware editors narrowed the list down to 300, and then CNET readers cast votes for their favorites.

The votes (nearly 630,000 of them) are in, and Windows Live and Live Search were recognized in these categories:

• Communication: Windows Live Messenger and Windows Live Hotmail
• Infrastructure & Storage: Windows Live SkyDrive
• Search & Reference: Live Search
• Location-based services: Live Search Maps
• Editor’s Choice: (These are sites and services that Rafe Needleman and the other Webware editors picked for special mention, even though they may not be well known enough to have won the popular vote.)
  Rafe’s Favorite: Windows Live Sync
  Best Exit: Farecast

We want to thank all of you who voted for us and who have supported Windows Live through the years. Also thanks to all of you who have provided feedback on this blog and through our feedback site to help improve Windows Live. And finally, we owe a big thank you to the Webware editors for their work and support for us.

- Windows Live team

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One of the most common reasons people send e-mail today is to share photos. But photos can be really large files. When you attach several photos to an e-mail, their combined file size can really add up, making sending and receiving e-mail slow, especially if you or some of the people you’re sending them to have a slower or unreliable Internet connection. And if you exceed your attachment size limit, you’re completely out of luck!

Fortunately, if you use Windows Live Mail (free to download here), you can easily get around this problem with the photo e-mail feature, which lets you upload the full-size photos you want to share online, and attaches smaller, thumbnail-sized versions to your e-mail, making the download size of your message much smaller. The photo e-mail contains a link for recipients to view your photos as an online slide show. And after watching the slideshow, they can then download the full-size photos they like best.

Although the photo e-mail feature has been around for several years already in Mail, we made a few recent changes to the online slide show to make it even better. We took away a lot of the dead space in the old slide show, allowing for a larger viewing area, a much cleaner presentation, and the same beautiful effects you see in all our slide shows on Windows Live Photos. The new slide show uses Microsoft Silverlight technology to match the background color to your image, so it always appears in the best light.

Take a look (click to view larger images): 

Before:	After:

Much nicer, huh?

Hope you enjoy the updates!

Tanja
Program Manager, Windows Live Mail

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We’ve been seeing a few questions from people about the Facebook web activity in Windows Live. Here are a few answers and tips for you.

Q. When I add the Facebook web activity, which types of Facebook updates will come over to Windows Live?

Depending on your privacy settings in Facebook, you may see updates about your status messages, photos, videos, links, and notes (but not your comments on those items).

Q. I added the Facebook web activity. Why don’t I see Facebook updates from my friends on Windows Live Home?

You’ll only see Facebook updates from people in your Windows Live network who’ve also added the Facebook web activity. The Facebook web activity, like all web activities on Windows Live, is a way to push information about what you have done on other websites out to the people in your network, not to pull in information about your friends’ activities. Updates about your activities appear on your Windows Live Profile; people in your network will also see news about your Facebook updates in their view of Windows Live Home.

Q. I wasn’t able to add Facebook as a web activity. I keep seeing the same error, saying that Windows Live can’t add this web activity, or can’t get my information from Facebook right now. What’s the problem?

This web activity is working for most people, but a limited number of customers have hit this issue. We’re working to isolate and fix this as soon as possible. If you are one of the unlucky ones who can’t add Facebook yet, we apologize for the delay.

Q. I added the Facebook web activity, but I don’t see all of my Facebook updates on my profile.

Give it a little time. How long depends on several factors, but it typically takes about an hour for Facebook updates to appear on your Windows Live Profile.

If you’ve already waited awhile, and you still don’t see any updates, the problem probably lies with your privacy settings on Facebook. Facebook doesn’t currently allow us to share certain information with Windows Live users unless you are using the default privacy settings on Facebook (“Everyone” for notes, photos, and videos; “My Networks and Friends” for status and links).  If you’ve never changed any privacy settings on Facebook, then you shouldn’t have a problem. But if you have restricted access to some of these items, then they may not come over to Windows Live. To ensure your Facebook privacy settings will work with the Facebook web activity on Windows Live, here’s what to do:

For status and links:

1. On Facebook, point your mouse at Settings, and then click Privacy Settings. 
2. Click Profile.
3. Look for “Status and Links,” and set that to either “My Networks and Friends” or “Everyone.”

For notes:

1. On Facebook, point your mouse at Settings, and then click Application Settings. 
2. Next to Notes, click Edit Settings.
3. Under “Who can see your Notes?” select “Everyone.”
4. Or, if you don’t want to set ALL notes to Everyone, you can change settings for a particular note only. When publishing the new note, set the privacy setting for the new note to “Everyone.”

For photos and videos:

1. On Facebook, point your mouse at Settings, and then click Application Settings. 
2. Next to Photos, click Edit Settings.
3. Set this to “Everyone.”
4. Or, if you’d like to restrict access to most albums, but you want to share a particular album on Windows Live, go to your albums page, click “Album Privacy,” and set each album you want to share to “Everyone.”
5. When uploading a new video to Facebook, set the privacy settings for that video to “Everyone.”

I hope this is helpful. Please let us know if you have any more questions about web activities!

- Antonia
  Windows Live team

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Trying to find friends or family that you’ve lost contact with? Wondering who else you might know on Windows Live? Searching for people on Windows Live has improved a bit lately. For one thing, when you search from any Spaces, Home, or Profile page, you’ll immediately see search results from your contact list appear in a dropdown list, even before you finish typing their name. Just click the name of the contact you want, and you’ll go right to that person’s profile.

Search results from your contact list appear as you type

If they’re not in your contact list, instead of clicking a name in the dropdown, click Search people, or hit Enter on your keyboard.  If there are any matches, they’ll be listed on the page.

Here are a few tips to help you find the people you’re looking for.

• Narrow your search by clicking Advanced. Fill in any of the fields, and then run another search. Choices include first name, last name, interests, gender, age range, location, and work.
• The advanced search terms are quite precise, so be careful not to limit your search with too many of these. For example, if you search for a friend with the location “New York” but they wrote “Manhattan” as their location, they won’t appear in search results. If you get no results, try removing some of the advanced search terms.
• If you’ve found the person you’re looking for, click Add to invite them to be in your network. Or just send them a private message.

By default, your last name isn’t available to the public on your profile, but if you decide to make it public, you’ll make it easier for friends or old classmates who want to look you up to find you and leave you a note or invite you to their network.

To make your last name public, go to the page where you change your name (either click your picture in the upper-right hand corner and select Change name, or go to your profile details page and click Edit in the name section.) Then type in your name as you want it to appear across Windows Live, including your last name, select the check box right below your last name, and click Save.

Select the check box under you last name—people will see you’re on Windows Live and you can rekindle those old friendships.

Setting your last name to public lets people know you’re here on Windows Live and gives them the opportunity to connect with you. But rest assured that it doesn’t mean that everyone can see all the information on your profile—you always control the permissions for all of your info on Windows Live (like contact info, photos, personal message, etc.). Visitors to your profile generally see less info than you do when you view your own profile. Any information (or photos, or blogs) that you aren’t comfortable with sharing publicly, can be set to share with only the people you choose. Check out our earlier blog post about your privacy and permissions in Windows Live, or just go to the main permissions page and check your settings there.

Good luck with your searches—I hope you’re able to find some people to reconnect with, share some old memories, and make some new ones.

- Todd Colfelt
  Windows Live team 

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In our latest release, we’ve made some changes to the RSS feeds that are available from Windows Live. We made RSS feeds for various types of content easier to find, we removed some extra elements in the XML code of our feeds, and we made other changes to ensure that, as more people start using our RSS feeds, we will be able to support all of the additional activity. I’ll talk about each of these below and as usual, we would love to hear your feedback in the comments.

Easier to find

Whether you use RSS feeds avidly or just casually, you’re likely aware of the small icon in web browsers that lights up when an RSS feed is available on a webpage.

On the main page of your space, the RSS feed icon has been lit up for a long time, but now, specialized RSS feeds are also available for individual blog entries, for blog entries from a particular category, or for lists.

Check out these pages that have associated RSS feeds:

• All blog entries: http://windowslivewire.spaces.live.com/blog/
• Blog entries for a specific category: http://robdolin.spaces.live.com/?_c11_BlogPart_BlogPart=blogview&_c=BlogPart&partqs=cat%3dSearch *
• Individual blog entry: http://robdolin.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!3C8CA60F8F925FEC!2918.entry
• Book lists: http://cid-3c8ca60f8f925fec.profile.live.com/Lists/cns!3C8CA60F8F925FEC!437/
• Music lists: http://cid-3c8ca60f8f925fec.profile.live.com/Lists/cns!3C8CA60F8F925FEC!731/
• Movie lists: http://cid-3c8ca60f8f925fec.profile.live.com/Lists/cns!3C8CA60F8F925FEC!723/

* We found a bug where some category feeds don’t work right now. We’re working on a fix.

Removing some extra elements

If you’ve ever looked at the XML in one of our RSS feeds, you may have noticed a bunch of standard elements like <title>, <link>, and <description>, plus some extra elements like <msn:type>. After years of retaining these “extra” elements, which originated with RSS feeds on MSN Spaces, we’ve finally removed a few of them. This has helped to get our RSS feeds closer to fully validating, and allows them to load a little bit faster.

We realize that any code change like this has the potential to cause some issues. Specifically, we’re aware that it has caused problems with some digital photo frames set up to read our RSS feeds, and we’re working on a fix for that.

Preparing for more RSS use

We’ve started to see that more and more of our customers want to be able to take the stuff they share on Windows Live to other social aggregation services like FriendFeed, Plaxo, or others. One of the easiest ways to do this is to enter your RSS feed into one of these services.

To prepare for more people (or services) using RSS, we’ve made some changes to our RSS infrastructure. This included changing the URLs for all RSS feeds – there’s more about this change in the next section. We’ve also put redirects in place, so any RSS readers that were pointing to old URLs will continue to work. We expect to keep these redirects around for a very long time; just like we still have redirects in place for http://spaces.live.com/robdolin.

We’re aware that the URL change caused some RSS readers to revert all RSS items to “unread.” On behalf of the team, I want to apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you.

RSS and programmability

If you’re interested in some of the technical details about how URLs for RSS feeds work, I’ll try to explain. The feed at http://robdolin.spaces.live.com/blog/feed.rss is now hosted at: http://cid-3c8ca60f8f925fec.users.api.live.net/Users(4363044724778622956)/Blogs('3C8CA60F8F925FEC!106')/Entries?$format=rss20 . As you likely noticed, there are a bunch of numbers and letters in the URL to my blog feed. There’s actually a bit of method to what might look like a random jumble.

For example, the URL for my profile is: http://cid-3c8ca60f8f925fec.profile.live.com/. The letters and numbers “3c8ca60f8f925fec” are something our team refers to as a HexCID or a Hexadecimal Customer ID. If you ever studied this in math class, you may remember that you can represent a number in base 16 or hexadecimal. If you convert this number to decimal (base 10), it’s 4363044724778622956. And interestingly, the URL to my blog RSS is: http://cid-3c8ca60f8f925fec.users.api.live.net/Users(4363044724778622956)/Blogs('3C8CA60F8F925FEC!106')/Entries?$format=rss20 or

http://cid-{HexCID}.users.api.live.com/Users({DecCID})/Blogs(‘{blogID}’)/Entries?$Format=rss20

If you’re interested in learning more about this area (it’s pretty geeky ) please leave a comment. If I get enough responses, I may post more on this topic later.

A note about privacy

The RSS feeds described above are only for content that you choose to share publicly. If you don’t want RSS feeds to be available from your blogs or lists, go to the General options page of your space (http://<your_id>.spaces.live.com/Options/General/) and clear the Syndicate this space check box. Also, if your space is not publicly shared, RSS feeds aren’t available.

Thanks very much for taking the time to read about the RSS feed updates for Windows Live. As usual, if you have feedback or questions about this topic, please leave a comment.

- Rob Dolin
Program Manager, Windows Live social networking team

If you’re a tech enthusiast, you probably visit lots of different blogs for interesting tidbits of information about various Microsoft technologies. Ever wonder if you’re missing something good? Not sure how to find out if there’s an official blog about your favorite product?

Here's your answer: BlogMS Resource Guide - Directory of Official Microsoft Blogs

This directory lists over 240 blogs, including of course, our own Windows Live team blog, the Hotmail team blog (Your mail is here, come and get it!), the Messenger Says blog, and the Windows Live Photo & Video Blog (by the folks who work on Photo Gallery and Movie Maker). Every week the BlogMS website is updated with links to all content published the previous week on all the blogs, so you can see what’s new all over Microsoft, all on one page. The site also makes it easy to sign up for RSS feeds of any of these blogs.

- Antonia
  Windows Live team