We are happy to announce that Hotmail customers in the US, Canada, and Brazil can now add other e-mail accounts to Hotmail!* No need to sign into multiple services to check all your messages on the web. Instead, you can see any POP-enabled e-mail account (including Yahoo! Mail (Plus), AOL Mail, and Gmail) right from your Hotmail account. You can put all of your messages together in your inbox or each e-mail account in its own folder, your choice.

You can set this up in Hotmail in three simple steps:

1. Click Add an e-mail account on the left-hand side of the Hotmail inbox.
2. Type the e-mail address and password for your other account, and click Next.
3. Choose where you want the messages to go, and click Save.

Note: In order for this to work, make sure POP has been turned on in the POP-enabled e-mail service you want to add (this could involve signing in to the service and changing your settings there).

We hope this feature will help you simplify your digital life!

- Windows Live Hotmail Team

* This feature was launched earlier this year in the UK, France, Netherlands, Italy, Spain, Japan, and Germany, and was greeted with some very positive feedback. Today, customers in the US, Canada, and Brazil will see the feature for the first time. More countries will come later this year.

(Republished courtesy of the Hotmail team blog) 

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Unfortunately, we’ve had to temporarily block reader comments due to the volume of recent comments that violate our code of conduct. If you have feedback, now as always, we're listening. Please use the following links to send us feedback or get help.
Send us feedback | Get help with Windows Live | Get help with Hotmail | Get help from Microsoft Support

Let me confess this up front, I LOVE SMS. If you’re like me, or even if you only use SMS occasionally, then the new SMS for Windows Live service may become your favorite feature. We’ve just launched several new services in the United States that let you see and update your information on Windows Live using SMS (text messaging). No mobile browser or data plan needed – if you can send and receive text messages on your mobile phone then you should check out SMS for Windows Live. If you’re in the UK, you might have already tried these services out…if not, now is a good time to do so.

If you’re outside of the US or the UK, we don’t have any dates to announce yet about when SMS for Windows Live will be available in other areas. We’ll update you as soon as we know more.

So what will SMS for Windows Live do for you? In short you can:

• Update your personal message
• Check your Windows Live Calendar
• Invite people to join your network
• Get contact info for people in your Windows Live contact list

To use these services, first you’ll need to register your mobile number with Windows Live (if you haven’t done this yet, we’ll tell you more about it at the end of this blog post), and then you’ll just send a text message (SMS) with a “command” to a shortcode:

• If you’re in the US and your mobile operator is AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, Sprint, or Nextel, your shortcode is MyLive or 695483.
• If you’re in the UK and your mobile operator is Vodafone, Orange, T-Mobile, O2, or Virgin, your shortcode is 88804.

Standard SMS messaging costs apply in both the US and UK. So your mobile operator will charge your normal rate for each text message you send and receive. There’s no additional charge from Microsoft.

How to use the new SMS services

After you’ve registered your phone number, and started the service, you’re ready to start sending commands. Below are all of the things you can do with SMS for Windows Live, along with the commands you’ll need to know.

Update your personal message
To update your personal message ([Updated: June 12, 2009] the one that appears on your Profile page, not the one and in Messenger): create a new text message, type the command update followed by your personal message, and send it to the shortcode.

Check your calendar
To see your Windows Live Calendar events for today or tomorrow: Send a text message with the command today or tomorrow. Windows Live sends you a text message that lists the date, time, and subject of each event. To get more details about an event, reply with the event number.

Send this to get a list of today’s events	You’ll get a reply like this one (but with your events, of course)

Invite people to your network
With just an SMS command and an e-mail address you can use your phone to invite a friend to join your network. To send a network invitation: send a text message with the command invite followed by their e-mail address.

You send the invite	You’ll get a reply confirming that the invite was sent

Search your contacts
If you aren’t syncing your Windows Live contacts (or if you don’t have a Windows Mobile phone and can’t sync), you can use SMS commands to search your contacts and see contact details. To search your Windows Live contacts: Send a text message with the command srch followed by the name of the person you’re looking for.

Send srch and a name	You’ll get a reply with your search results

To register your mobile phone and start using SMS for Windows Live

To use SMS for Windows Live, you need to register your phone and start the service. Don’t worry, it’s simple. Here’s how you do it:

1. On a computer go to the Window Live Mobile website and sign in with your Windows Live ID.
2. In the text box under Set up SMS, enter your mobile phone number and click Next.
3. Check your phone info, if everything looks good, click Next. If any of the info isn’t correct, click change it and make your corrections.
4. We’ll send a text message with a four-digit PIN code to your mobile phone. Enter the PIN code and click Next.
5. Your mobile phone number is registered with your Windows Live account. Now you need to start the service. To start using the new SMS for Windows Live services, under Personal Message, Calendar and Contacts, click Start. You’re all set to go!
   If you haven’t tried the other Windows Live SMS services (they’re not new, but maybe they’re new to you) now is a great time to do so. Under Hotmail, Messenger and other alerts, click Start and check out how you can use text messaging with Hotmail, Messenger and alerts.
6. After you start the service you’ll get another text message with some additional info that our lawyers want us to tell you about.

Tip: Save the text message sender as a contact in your mobile phone, so you’ll have it handy when you need it.

Enjoy the new SMS for Windows Live services!

- Dawn Hollingsworth, avid texter
  Windows Live team

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

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Unfortunately, we’ve had to temporarily block reader comments due to the volume of recent comments that violate our code of conduct. If you have feedback, now as always, we're listening. Please use the following links to send us feedback or get help.
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Hi, and welcome to post #1 about the first official release of Windows Live Movie Maker. This is a follow-up to previous posts (here and here) on this blog about the Movie Maker beta, and will give you an update on where we are. My name is Mike Torres, and I’m the Lead Program Manager on the Movie Maker team. I joined the team last fall just around the time we were finishing the beta release, and I’ve been having a blast ever since.

We’re looking forward to the official release of Windows Live Movie Maker (“v1”) later this year.  Judging from the feedback we’ve heard from people using the Movie Maker beta, we know there are lots of questions about the product, and that there’s a lot of passion around Movie Maker in general.  We want to make sure we have an ongoing conversation with you as users of the product through this blog and keep you informed and up-to-date.  Equally as important, we’re actively listening to and considering your feedback to enhance and improve Movie Maker.  We know we’re at the very beginning of a long journey with the new Movie Maker, and we look forward to sharing the details with you along the way.

Last year we began with a simple mission statement that encapsulates our overall goals for the product:

Windows Live Movie Maker is the best way for everyday people to create stunning 5-minute movies with minimal time investment and share them online immediately. 

When we set out to build Windows Live Movie Maker, we heard loud and clear that people wanted their movies to simply look better with less effort. In order to meet customers’ needs, we first looked at how people were using Windows Movie Maker in Vista. What we found was that most movies were quite simple – often just a set of pictures with captions and a soundtrack with occasional small clips of lightly edited video with transitions. We also discovered that many people found the approach of Microsoft Photo Story 3 to be a great solution and loved the ease of selecting pictures, a soundtrack, and adding a narration track over their photos with basic animations. Increasingly, we found people publishing movies to popular video sharing sites to share with friends and family (in addition to occasionally creating DVDs).

We also found that lots of people used the timeline view in Movie Maker, and those who did were mostly interested in fitting their movie to audio or aligning videos and photos to music. There were many more features in Movie Maker than most people used or wanted to use, but some of them were not easy enough to find, or required them to switch to the timeline view to really take advantage of them.

Planning a “v1” (version 1) release of a product like the new Movie Maker requires input from Windows customers around the world with all levels of experience. Throughout the fall and early winter, we spent a lot of time collecting feedback through ongoing usability studies and from active users, as well as through the Customer Experience Improvement Program, which gives us information about how people are using the beta. We used this information and market trend data from our Planning team to solidify our approach. In January, we locked on an updated plan with a commitment to ship the first release of the new Movie Maker this year.  Throughout this process we’ve continued to learn a lot about what everyday Movie Maker customers use, want, and need. 

We also learned a lot by releasing an early beta of Movie Maker last year. People were surprised (or shocked, rather!) at the limited number of transitions, effects, and overall functionality in the program. We wanted to release the beta to start the conversation about the use of the ribbon and some of the overall changes to the software model, but in hindsight, the application just wasn’t useful enough for that. So, thanks for bearing with us as we’ve continued our work on Movie Maker.

Some of the top things we’ve heard from you:

• You’d like more transitions, more effects, multiple soundtracks, and more video editing features like trim and split. As movie makers ourselves, we’re in the same boat as you are.  We want those fun “shatter” transitions and “warp” effects just as much as you do!  We’re definitely working on improving this and plan to have a range of rich-editing capabilities in the first official version.
• You’d like something resembling a timeline in the product. In the Movie Maker beta, the storyboard didn’t have the ability to represent time like a traditional timeline would.  We’ve heard you say that you’d like to be able to drag and drop clips to get them to start and end where you want, and that you’d like to have music and text that span multiple photos or video clips.  We’ve also heard that you’d like to – at a glance – see which clips are longer than others, which clips have effects applied, and which clips have transitions.  Now, I don’t want to give too much away just yet (we still have work to do!), but we’re definitely aware of these limitations. We’ve developed a new approach that we think will help address some of the shortcomings of the beta and will scale well from novice to experienced users without requiring people to switch views in order to get things done.
• You’d like to use Windows Live Movie Maker on Windows XP.  Given the technical requirements, unfortunately we won’t be able to support Windows XP at this time. But Windows Movie Maker 2.1 for Windows XP is still a great option if you’re still using Windows XP. As we mentioned in our initial post about Windows Live Movie Maker last October, we’ve built a new engine for Movie Maker that makes use of some of the latest and greatest technologies available on the Windows platform.  Introduced in Windows Vista (and supported in Windows 7) is a new graphics driver model, which brings more reliable and stable support for high-end graphics. We’ve also built our new engine on top of DirectX, which improves speed and enables even more advanced capabilities over time. Finally, we’ve also built Windows Live Movie Maker on top of the new Windows 7 Scenic platform (and have brought it to Windows Vista as well) which makes our new user interface possible.

Given all this information about what people want, we set out to meet the following top design goals for Windows Live Movie Maker. We use these design goals as our “North Star” and make sure we’re addressing them every step of the way.

1. Make it easy to create a movie in a few steps (even if you’ve never done it before).
2. Provide a new user interface with “simple smarts” to ease creation.
3. Focus primarily on publishing online (and to DVD).
4. Allow more experienced people to go deeper when they need to (without sacrificing simplicity).
5. Deliver the highest-quality movies possible.

Over time, we’ll blog in more detail on these design goals and how they’re reflected in the product. In the meantime, we’d love to hear your feedback on them.

Thanks for joining us on this journey. We’re going to continue to monitor your feedback and jump into the fray where we think we can help. While we can’t respond personally to that feedback, we’ll absolutely be reading all of it.  In the meantime, stay tuned for more information on Windows Live Movie Maker!

Happy movie making,

- Mike Torres
  Windows Live Movie Maker team

Comments policy
Unfortunately, we’ve had to temporarily block reader comments due to the volume of recent comments that violate our code of conduct. If you have feedback, now as always, we're listening. Please use the following links to send us comments or get help.

Send us feedback about Movie Maker
Send us feedback about other Windows Live products
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Windows Live is available in 48 languages and 54 countries around the world, and so it’s only appropriate that the web activities we offer reflect the geographic and linguistic diversity of the people who use it. If you sign in to look at your updated web activities list, you’ll see the web activities that more people use in your region at the top, with the rest of the available web activities below that. For example, if you’re based in the United States, you’ll see Flickr and Photobucket listed in the top four, but if you’re in Russia, you’ll see wow.ya.ru and LiveJournal at the top:

Back in December 2008, when we launched our original dozen web activity partners, we were not sure if we should hide partners that were not translated into the language of the person viewing them. We decided to err on the side of making more partners available to more people. For example the Korean social network Daum is available to me, even though I am in the United States, so that Koreans living anywhere in the world can still add this web activity to Windows Live. Even though the number of people in the US who have added Daum to Windows Live is relatively low, we’ve still seen a few people in the U.S. add Daum nearly every day.

We’ve decided to continue in this direction, so you may see some web activities for services that are not offered in your language. We’ve translated the descriptions of each web activity partner, so if you’re Greek and you’re looking at the Israeli service Hevre, you’ll see a description of Hevre in Greek:

In building web activities for a worldwide audience we also considered the possibility that two friends might have different native languages. For example, I’m interested in the updates of a guy named PicturePan2, the author of http://livesino.net/ who writes about Windows Live primarily in Chinese. I only speak English (and a small bit of Spanish) so I can’t understand most of his status updates or blog posts, but when I go to PicturePan’s profile on Windows Live, the text provided by Windows Live is shown in English:

(And because I’m using Internet Explorer 8, if I want more of the details translated, I can just select the text and click the translation Accelerator to get a word-by-word translation.)

These are just a few examples of how we’ve made web activities work for people living around the world. There’s a full list of all web activity partners from around the world here.

For a quick overview of how web activities work on Windows Live, check out this video posted by my colleague Angus Logan:

Thanks very much—

- Rob

Yes, you’ve been asking us, and we promised you’d get it soon. Well, the moment you’ve been waiting for has finally arrived: instant messaging from the web is here! Now you can send instant messages from the Windows Live Hotmail and People pages! This means that, even if you’re on a public computer where Windows Live Messenger isn’t installed, you can still send IMs to your Messenger contacts! 

Customers in Brazil, Canada, China, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, and USA will see this feature for the first time today (as usual, rollout to different individuals is gradual, so if you don’t see it yet, please be patient). This feature rolled out to users in France, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Spain, and the UK last month. Not in your area yet? We will be rolling out web-based Messenger to more locations in the coming months.

Sign in to Messenger on the Web in Hotmail

Here’s what you get with the new web Messenger:

• You can sign in to and send instant messages from any computer connected to the Internet, even if it doesn’t have Windows Live Messenger installed.
• You can also send IMs to your Messenger contacts from the People page (your contact list). Just click the contact’s picture, and you’ll see Send an instant message on the dropdown menu.

 Send an instant message from a contact’s drop-down menu on the People page

• In Hotmail, if one of your Messenger contacts sends you e-mail, you’ll see their Messenger availability indicated in green, yellow, or red right by their name. If it’s green, click it and instantly start chatting.

 A chat window in web Messenger

• If you have more than one Windows Live ID, you can sign in to web Messenger and regular Messenger at the same time, with different IDs.
• Don’t worry, people can only see your availability if you’ve agreed to be their Messenger contacts. You can sign in and use Hotmail or any other Windows Live service without signing in to web Messenger, so nobody can start chatting with you until you decide to let them know you’re available.

Have fun, and let us know how you like it!

- Antonia
Windows Live team

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

We use your comments to help us improve Windows Live. For your own safety, please don’t post personal contact info. We’re sorry, but due to the volume of comments, we cannot contact you individually or respond to most comments. To get help, use the “Go get help” links at the top of the blog, and we’ll do our best to answer frequently asked questions not covered on the Help and Support sites.

Have you seen the completely new Windows Live Hotmail for mobile? You can try it out by going to http://mobile.live.com from your phone’s browser and clicking Hotmail. I’ve been playing around with the beta for the last month, and I’m a believer! Here’s a short list of what you can do on the new Hotmail for mobile:

• Search your e-mail messages   Hotmail searches all your folders and returns any message that includes your search term. It’s similar to Hotmail search on a PC. I’ve found this really helpful for finding stuff when I’m short on time (or battery), particularly because it takes longer on a phone to scroll through a long list of e-mail messages.

Search your inbox

• See all the cool stuff in your messages   If you have a phone with Windows Mobile 6 or later, an iPhone, or another phone with an advanced web browser, you can see pictures, images, “clickable” links, and other formatting in messages. Now messages look the way they were meant to when you read them on your phone, too.

Your messages look way better

• View long messages in a single page   No need to open a new page to “get the rest of this message.” This feature has been extra handy the last week since my neighborhood recently turned into a mini-Peyton Place. Reading all the replies in the most recent messages keeps me get caught up on the latest gossip and grousing. Ah, suburbia :)

Plus, the new service is faster and more reliable than the previous version.

And here’s some of the new stuff just released on Windows Live Messenger for mobile and Windows Live Home for mobile:

• Messenger for mobile has a new look and feel and now links directly to Windows Live Home, so you can easily navigate between services.

The updated Messenger on mobile

• Windows Live Home for mobile has an improved What’s new list, with ten items appearing in the list instead of five. You can also see the things your friends are doing online at places such as Twitter, WordPress, Flickr, and more. And you can always read the full text of your friends’ personal messages.

For those of you with a Windows Mobile device who like to install programs to use for Windows Live services (instead of using your browser), the full Windows Live for Windows Mobile software (with Hotmail, Contacts, and Messenger) is now available for free download.

Ohhh, the neighborhood is going to have some more juicy gossip today. The local police just rang my doorbell to tell me about some trouble across the street last night!

- Dawn Hollingsworth, Mobile fan and suburbanite

Windows Live team

Windows Live Movie Maker (beta) is a first generation product. That is, instead of adding new features to the original Windows Movie Maker, we started over and have been building the all new Windows Live Movie Maker from the ground up to meet the changing needs of working with digital photos and videos today. 

When Microsoft built the original Windows Movie Maker, it was designed to help you work with video you recorded with a camcorder, because that was what a lot people were using back then.  But these days, with so many devices that can record video, we needed to create a program that could work with movies using lots of different kinds of video. To do this, we really needed to start from scratch.

So, for the beta release of Windows Live Movie Maker a few months ago, we focused on making sure we had these key functionalities running smoothly first:

• adding digital photos and videos easily
• making editing commands easier to find with the new Ribbon user interface
• publishing movies quickly and easily

We know we still have a lot of work to do to get Windows Live Movie Maker ready for final release. We’ve been reading your feedback and comments on the first Windows Live Movie Maker beta post and are working to add more of the features and functionality we hear you asking for. Rest assured, there’s lots more good stuff to come.

If you haven’t tried it yet, we hope you’ll download Windows Live Movie Maker beta. We’d love it if you’d let us know what you think about our work so far, and what else you’d like to see in the final release. We’ll share more information about the final release of Windows Live Movie Maker as soon as it becomes available.

JP Wollersheim
Product Manager, Windows Live

Check out the LiveUpload to Facebook plug-in for publishing from Windows Live Photo Gallery. It allows you to upload photos directly from Windows Live Photo Gallery to Facebook. It even preserves the people tags you added in Photo Gallery and matches them up with your Facebook friends.

Since we’ve made the Photo Gallery upload API public, allowing third-party developers to create upload tools for Photo Gallery, a number of plug-ins have been created, making publishing to your favorite photo-sharing sites really easy.

LiveUpload to Facebook allows you to match your
Windows Live people tags with Facebook friends

Are you a developer?

Start building your own plug-ins for Photo Gallery or Movie Maker (beta) using our SDK. Take a look at the resources we've provided at http://dev.live.com/photogallery.  

Got any great plug-in ideas? Have you already built a cool Photo Gallery or Movie Maker plug-in? Please tell the Photos team about it! 

- The Windows Live team

Technorati Tags: Windows Live,Photo,Photo Gallery,Facebook,LiveUpload,Live,Movie Maker,photos,upload

Windows Live Tags: story,clubhouse,Windows Live,Photo,Photo Gallery,Facebook,LiveUpload,Movie Maker,photos,upload

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)

Windows Live wants to make it easier than ever to connect from your PC to the web and we give you all the pieces. But sometimes, we realize that you might have accounts with other companies, so Windows Live is making it really easy to connect with other websites, too. 

For example, in the coming weeks, as changes to Windows Live are released, you’ll be able to see updates from services like Twitter and Flickr on your Windows Live Home page. And now, with the help of plug-ins, Windows Live Photo Gallery beta and Windows Live Movie Maker beta allow you to publish photos and videos to sites outside of the Microsoft family, like Facebook or YouTube.

 
Installing and setting up a new plug-in that allows you to publish to Facebook

Because there is a continually evolving list of web services that you use and might want to publish to, we’ve shared our publishing API with anyone who wants to use it, so that creative and industrious developer types can create their own plug-ins to work with Photo Gallery and Movie Maker.

After installing the “Live Upload to YouTube” plug-in,
you can publish to YouTube from Movie Maker

Check this list of available plug-ins to see which ones you might want to install. Over time, the list will undoubtedly grow, so you can choose the ones that work best for you.

- Windows Live team

By the end of this week, all Windows Live Hotmail users will be upgraded to the new Hotmail. The rollout has been slow because we’ve been reading and listening to your comments. We’ve read all the comments, followed up with some of you, and changed the service as we went. Since our original announcement, we have read and analyzed several thousand comments, fixed several bugs, and released five updates to the code so far.

So, we want you to know that we’re listening, we’re making changes, and we want the service to be great.  

Here are answers to a few of your frequently asked questions.

Q: Why did you change? I liked the old version the way it was.

When we asked our users how we could make Hotmail better, the majority of people said they wanted the experience to be cleaner and faster. The new experience was designed with this in mind.

Now, we understand that everyone has different tastes and computer configurations. Although the majority of people in our tests preferred the new look and themes, some people didn’t.  So, while most of you have seen Hotmail improve, some of you have not, and we apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you.

Q: I find this hard to use. Was this tested with real users?

Yes, it was. We tested with several thousand people around the world and used their feedback to improve the design prior to releasing to all users. We interviewed hundreds of them to hear their opinions, measured their success rate accomplishing common tasks, and surveyed them  to see how much they liked the new service compared to the old one. The data from our tests showed that most users found the new Hotmail to be faster, more reliable, and more usable. 

Q: Can I opt out? Can I get the old version back?

A: We can’t provide two fast, secure, reliable experiences, so we have decided to just keep the new version. However, we will continue to improve the new version, based on many of your comments here, to make it work better for you.

And here are some specific concerns we’ve seen in your feedback, and what we’re doing to fix them:

Q: Where did my folders go? I can’t see enough of the page. The ad is too big. Can you give me more space?

A: We understand that the design isn’t optimal for many users who have smaller monitors, so we’re working on improvements to page layout that will give your inbox more space.

In the meantime, if you have a smaller display, you should maximize your browser window for best results (in Windows, look in the upper-left corner of the browser, click the Internet Explorer, Firefox, or Safari logo, and in the menu that appears, click Maximize).

Also, your folders are not gone — you may need to scroll the folder list to see them all.

Q: I can’t forward e-mail because I can’t find my contacts. I don’t know where my favorites went!

A: The new “contact picker” and “auto-complete” features were designed to save you time.

·         While addressing an e-mail message, just type a couple letters of the name and we will show just the names that match those letters.

·         Or, while addressing an e-mail message, click the To: button to see the full list of all of your contacts.

·         To set up your favorites, go to the Contact list and click the yellow star next to each name that you want to be a favorite.

While this may require an extra click for some of you, our research shows that typing a few letters of the name is usually a faster way to find an address than scrolling through a list. Once you get used to it, we hope you’ll find auto-complete useful, too. We also have some cool ideas about how to use the space where the favorites list used to be. We’ll keep listening to your feedback on this one.

Q: I don’t like the themes. What are you doing about this?

A: We agree that more themes are needed. Additional themes are being designed now, and will be coming soon.

Q: There aren’t as many messages on the page. I want to see more!

A: We hear you, so we’ll be increasing the default number of messages per screen, and providing the option for power users to see many more. Look for these changes in an upcoming release.

Q: Where is the spell checker?

A: For users of Internet Explorer, there is a Check Spelling button; clicking this button draws red underlines below misspelled words, and then clicking the underlined words shows you suggestions. For users of Firefox and Safari, you can just use the built-in spell checker in your browser, so misspelled words will be underlined automatically.

We are constantly reading your feedback, so please let us know what you think. We want you to love the new Hotmail!

- Mike Schackwitz, Lead program manager, Windows Live Hotmail

 

There have been a lot of questions in the blogosphere lately about Microsoft ChoiceGuard. What it is, and why it’s being installed when you install Windows Live Betas… So, here are a few answers.

Microsoft ChoiceGuard is a lightweight software component that enables the choices you make—like what you want to set as your default home page and search provider—during the Windows Live Beta installation process.

If you choose to do so (and ONLY if you choose to do so), Microsoft ChoiceGuard will set your home page and search provider in both Firefox and Internet Explorer. Typically this is a simple task. However, several of our competitors install a "service" that is always running on your computer that prevents your Internet Explorer search defaults from being changed, even if you requested the change yourself. So Microsoft ChoiceGuard looks for the presence of those applications that might be preventing your choice from being carried out, and works around their block to set the default.

It turns out that if you use Firefox, you have to install an add-on to do this. Since there is no point in having the ChoiceGuard add-on on your computer after setting your defaults, ChoiceGuard immediately sets itself to uninstall. That’s why you will see “Microsoft ChoiceGuard” in the Firefox add-on list, and that’s why it also says it will be uninstalled the next time Firefox restarts.

The good news is that Microsoft ChoiceGuard only sets the defaults once. If you choose to change these settings later, either programmatically or manually, Microsoft ChoiceGuard won’t get in the way.

I hope this clears things up a bit. Keep sending us your feedback—We’re listening!

- Hua Ai and Mikko Ollila, Live Search team

[Update, November 7, 2008]: Thanks for your thoughtful comments and questions! We're listening, and we've posted answers to many of your questions here.

It’s late September already, and time for that inevitable question: what did you do on your summer vacation? Well, this summer, the Hotmail team and I were hard at work on a new version of Hotmail, and we’re super excited to start rolling it out to you very soon.

Here’s a sneak peak at some of the changes.

• A great new look – We’ve done a little remodeling, and we think Hotmail looks much, much nicer and is easier to use. We did a lot of testing around the world to see what people liked and didn’t like. We’re really excited about the final results, and we hope you like it too! There’s also a whole new set of vibrant themes that replace our old color schemes.

• Classic & Full, together at last! – Our clever developers figured out how to take the performance of the Classic version of Hotmail, and combine it with features of the Full version, in a single experience. Now everyone gets the same features. You don’t have to trade off speed for functionality or decide which version is better for you. If you have been using the Full version, you’ll see much faster page load times, and if you have been using Classic, you now get to use the reading pane, drag & drop, and other features formerly limited to the Full version.
  
• A contact list that’s more than just contacts – Our contact list is now much more useful. Besides a new layout and improved look, we added features that are both fun and time-saving.
  • Fun - If your Messenger contacts have a display picture, that picture will appear in your list.
  • Time-saving - When you view a contact, you can see recent e-mail they’ve sent you, send them a message from right in the contact page, and view items from across Windows Live that you’ve shared together.
• Now THAT’s something to write home about! – We completely redesigned the experience of composing a new message. We have brand new auto-complete functionality for e-mail addresses, and a new contact picker that even detects commonly misspelled addresses. There is a new way to attach files and a new spell-checker that we think are much easier to use (especially if you were using Classic – no need to go to a new page to attach files anymore!). The text editor is completely rewritten, and we fixed a bunch of bugs – right-click now works!
  
• Updated Calendar beta – If you aren’t using the Calendar beta yet, now’s a great time to try it. Calendar sharing, an automatically generated birthday calendar for people in your contact list, a holiday calendar, iCal subscriptions to public calendars, to-do lists, and much, much more await you. Go to http://calendar.live.com, or go to Hotmail and click Calendar under “Related places” to sign up.

There is more to this release that I haven’t yet mentioned, including greater speed and more powerful spam fighting, and even more improvements coming soon (but I’ll save those for a later post that my boss is going to do.)

If you haven’t used your Hotmail account in a while, check out the changes at http://mail.live.com. You can also sign up for a new account from there.

I think this version is a big improvement in both appearance and performance, so I hope you love it! And, now that it’s done, I can finally take *my* summer vacation and kick back for a bit…

- Mike Schackwitz, Lead Program Manager, Windows Live Hotmail

[Update, November 7, 2008]: Thanks for your thoughtful comments and questions! We're listening, and we've posted answers to many of your questions here.

Have you downloaded the new Windows Live Photo Gallery beta yet? Very cool. Rodger Benson from the Photo Gallery team just posted on the Windows Live Photo & Video blog with details about all the features packed into this beta release. Take a look. And let us know what you think!

- Antonia

Windows Live SkyDrive announced several updates to SkyDrive today.

Now you can:

• Add captions to your files and photos to describe each item.
• Add comments to any file. Leave a note telling people what's new in a file, or comment on a friend's photo. Check out the recent comments others have made about your files.
• Get larger photo previews so you can see which ones to open.
• Flip through the contents of a folder without opening the files.

Also, SkyDrive is now available in 24 more countries or regions:

Bulgaria, Costa Rica, Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Latvia, Lithuania, Philippines, Poland, Romania, Russia, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, Thailand, Ukraine, Venezuela, Serbia, Indonesia, and Malaysia.

You can read more about this and other updates on the SkyDrive team blog.

The folks who work on Windows Live Spaces just announced some new feature updates, generated by feedback from people like you who have sent in comments. Here's what they had to say:

Your feedback = Changes to Windows Live Spaces

First, thanks again for all of your feedback. There's nothing like receiving comments and ideas directly from some of our 115 million monthly Spaces users worldwide. 

Based on what we've heard from you, here's the latest round of changes we've made:

• You now have the ability to remove updates from specific people in the what's new area of your Spaces home page. 

At the bottom of your (signed-in) Spaces home page, you now have an “Options” link. 

Clicking “Options” will take you to a “What’s new Options” page where you can choose who of your Spaces friends and Messenger contacts show up on your home page.

 

 

• We've added back your list descriptions for all lists when they are displayed in the narrow column
• The font for custom lists is no longer bold by default
• We changed the Sponsored Results module to reflect the transition of our partnership with Kanoodle
• We've made some additional smaller changes which you won’t see but which will further improve the Spaces service

We hope you enjoy these changes.   As always, keep the feedback coming. We are listening.

- Chris
Product Manager, Windows Live

Technorati Tags: Windows Live Spaces,Windows Live

 The Windows Live FolderShare team launched a new beta today, along with a new blog. Here's what their first blog entry has to say:

Introducing the new FolderShare!

Hello, and welcome to the blog for Windows Live FolderShare. It's a big day for us here at Windows Live HQ, and not just because we’re launching this new blog. We also have updated FolderShare, and published an all-new FolderShare website…at last!

Today we're unveiling:

• A new website designed to makes managing your FolderShare libraries and computers even easier.
• A new FolderShare with a better setup, a better system tray menu, and better performance on Windows Vista.
• Improvements on the backend to keep FolderShare running more smoothly and reliably.

(And of course, it's still free.)

To all the users who already have fallen in love with FolderShare, we thank you! We hope all the new users equally enjoy the features FolderShare has to offer: syncing files across your computers; sharing files with friends and family; and accessing your files from anywhere on the Internet. 

We’re proud of this release, and we really hope you like it. So without further ado, check out the new website, install the new FolderShare, and let us know what you think!

- The FolderShare Team

The Windows Live platform services team is releasing several updated tools and APIs today that will help web developers and Windows Live partners create new communication and sharing tools for their customers. These include the new Windows Live Messenger Library beta, an updated Windows Live Contacts API beta and other tools and APIs, all available from http://dev.live.com.

Get all the details from David Treadwell on Windows Live Dev News.

Some of you have been speculating about this for months, and finally I’m allowed to tell you about it! The Windows Live Calendar beta is now live and available to the public.*

You can enroll in the new Windows Live Calendar beta by going to http://calendar.live.com, and signing in with a Windows Live ID. 

What’s new?

What does Windows Live Calendar beta have that you didn’t see in the old MSN Calendar? Some of the changes may look subtle at first, but behind the scenes, a lot has changed. For one thing, it uses AJAX, a cool technology that lets you do stuff like drag and drop things on the page, or right-click for quick options. And the platform that the new Calendar runs on is completely new, which allows it to integrate better with other programs and devices (like your mobile phone).

Easier ways to organize your time

• You can add an event in seconds--just click a date and start typing.
• Lunch date changed? Drag it to a new spot on the calendar.
• Print your calendar using the easy-to-read Agenda view.

Share your calendar (or not)

• You can keep multiple calendars. Have one for your private use, one to share with family, and another to share with friends. You decide who sees what.
• View several calendars together. You can color-code them, so when you have a different calendar for each family member, it’s easy to see who is going where, when.

Get reminders when and where you need them

• Get calendar reminders via text message, e-mail, or Messenger.
• Use RSS feeds to get information from your calendar automatically sent to Microsoft Office Outlook, or to an RSS reader.
• Import schedules from a sports team or community group directly into your calendar.

You can learn more about the new release on the Windows Live Hotmail blog. Try out the new calendar and let us know what you think!

Antonia B.
Windows Live team

* For now, this beta release is available only to customers in the United States, United Kingdom, Japan, China, India, France, Germany, Spain, and Russia. We’ll let you know when it expands to other regions.

We’re rolling out the next generation of Windows Live products and services and want to let you know about a few more of the cool new features you can try.

Today I’ll talk about some features that have been recently released, but keep in mind that there is lots more coming out VERY SOON!

To download and try more new stuff (some of it still in beta), go to http://get.live.com/wl/all.

Get connected on the new Spaces home page

Without downloading a thing, you can already see lots of new features when you sign in to Windows Live Spaces.

The new Spaces home page now helps you stay even more connected with your Spaces friends and Messenger contacts. Whenever you sign in to Spaces, you’ll see at a glance when your friends and contacts add new photos, blog entries, friends, lists, or SkyDrive files to their space. You'll also see upcoming birthdays, how many people have visited your space, and new comments.

Share high-resolution photos using Photo Gallery, Spaces--even Facebook!

Windows Live Photo Gallery beta makes it super easy to organize and edit your photos, and then share them on Windows Live Spaces. Now there’s also a link to share photos from your space on Facebook.

But one of the most exciting new additions to Spaces is the ability to upload high-resolution photos–which means your friends and family can watch full-screen slide shows, download your pictures, or download entire albums. There’s even a link to instantly order prints.

Of course, only people you’ve given permission to can view your pictures. And now you can set different permissions for different albums.

Send vacation auto-replies in Hotmail

Next time you go on vacation, you can set Hotmail to automatically reply to e-mail that comes in while you’re gone.

That way, nobody will think you’re ignoring them. And you’ll look organized. But if you don’t want everyone to know you’re away, you can have the auto-replies sent only to people in your contact list. It’ll make your vacation more relaxing!

To compose your reply mail, go to Options, click More options, and then click Send automated vacation replies.

More ways to access your Hotmail

Because one size doesn’t always fit all, now there are more ways to check your mail:

1. On the web at www.hotmail.com or mail.live.com.
2. Using our free downloadable program, Windows Live Mail beta, where you can manage multiple e-mail accounts in one place.
3. Using Outlook Connector to get your Hotmail in Microsoft Office Outlook.
4. On your mobile device. Find out more about Windows Live for your mobile device here.

Access Hotmail using POP3

If you’re a Hotmail Plus subscriber, you can also now access your Hotmail using a POP3 e-mail program such as Thunderbird, iPhone, or other mobile devices. This feature is currently available to:

• Hotmail Plus subscribers
• Members of the @Edu program
• Users of our ISP partner e-mail programs such as Qwest and Verizon

Learn more about it on the Hotmail blog.

Link your Windows Live IDs

Lots of you requested this one, so we made it happen. If you have multiple Windows Live IDs, you can now link them for easier switching between accounts. Sign in once for all accounts, and quickly access information for any of your accounts. To link your IDs, go to https://account.live.com.

As always, let us know what you think!

- The Windows Live team