It’s finally summer in Seattle, and baseball games when the roof on Safeco Field is open are the best. With Windows Live Calendar and subscriptions to a couple of online calendars, I can figure out when the Seattle Mariners are playing at home and what the weather forecast is. Then I’ll know when I should try to score some tickets.

Why subscribe instead of import calendars?

Well, there are a few differences between subscribing and importing:

• If you subscribe to an online calendar, whenever the third-party calendar is updated, your calendar is updated as well. This is great for calendars on the web, like sports schedules. To subscribe to an online calendar, all you need to know is the URL for the calendar and then paste it into Windows Live Calendar.
• If you import an online calendar, you don’t get calendar updates, you get a copy or “snapshot” of the calendar. This is great for uploading calendars from a computer, like migrating from an old calendar to Windows Live Calendar. To import a calendar, you need to save the .ics file to your computer and then import it into Windows Live Calendar.

After a little web searching on Bing, I found the two calendars that I need: the Mariner’s home game schedule for 2009, and the weekly Seattle weather forecast.

To subscribe to an online calendar:

1. Go to Windows Live Calendar and sign in with your Windows Live ID.
2. Click Subscribe at the top of the web page.
3. In the Calendar URL box, paste the URL for the online calendar, name the calendar, change the color (if you want), and click Subscribe to calendar.

Subscribing to the Mariner’s home game schedule

Windows Live Calendar lets you know that your subscription was added. Just click Done to see your calendars. And if the events don't show up on your calendar right away, check back because it will be updated shortly.

And now, just repeat for the Seattle weather calendar.

Voila, the Seattle weather forecast is there, too

Darn, no home games this week. I guess I’ll just have to keep checking my Windows Live Calendar.

Dawn Hollingsworth, CrackerJack fan
- Windows Live team

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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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With new web-based instant messaging (IM) now available in Windows Live Hotmail worldwide, we are preparing to retire MSN Web Messenger. The old MSN Web Messenger experience will end on June 30, 2009.

With Hotmail’s new web-based IM, you can chat from your Hotmail inbox or contact list, instead of going to MSN Web Messenger (http://webmessenger.msn.com/). Go directly to the Windows Live People page (also known as “your contact list”) at http://people.live.com and sign into Messenger (orange arrow in the picture below) to continue instant messaging on the web with your Messenger friends.

Instant messaging from Hotmail makes it easier to communicate and share in new ways in comparison to MSN Web Messenger. For example, our integration with the suite of other Windows Live services allows you to see when your Messenger friends are online while reading an e-mail and immediately start a chat to clarify something in your friend’s e-mail message.

Give it a try! We hope that you’ll enjoy Hotmail’s web-based IM, the new version of Messenger on the web.

- Your Windows Live Hotmail Team

(Republished courtesy of the Hotmail team blog)

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As we mentioned last week, Windows Live Messenger is turning 10 very soon and as part of our celebration, we will be sharing, here on our blog, different stories from our users, tips/tricks and fun facts, leading up to big day, July 22nd 2009.  We’ll also have special guest posts from people that work on Messenger and from around the community.  It’s going to be a great month so stay tuned.

Today’s Fun Factoid

If Windows Live Messenger was a country, it would be the third largest country in the world (behind China and India, and before the United States) and almost 10 times the size of Canada.

Today’s Messenger user story

Thanks everyone for the stories.  We’ve gotten an overwhelming number of funny, touching and odd stories and there is still time to submit one.  If you want to share your story and let others participate in your special moment with Messenger, please send your short story in English to IloveMessenger@live.com by June 28th.

Our first story comes from Clem from Canada.

“I had just met a really cute girl and we started exchanging IMs on Windows Live Messenger.  Even though we were on IM, I was still pretty nervous (yes, lame i know) but of course, tried to keep it cool.  Things seemed like they were going pretty well and we chatted for a little while until she said she had to go, to work on a finance homework problem that she was stuck on.  Being the helpful guy that I am, I offered to help… (limited finance knowledge, but hey, I had to try).  She sent me the problem over IM and I was in luck, a good friend of mine, Jon, was online.  He’d know the answer.  Quickly, I drafted the IM…

“Yo Jon, I’m trying hard to impress this really cute girl I just met, do you have a moment to help me figure out the answer to a finance problem so I can send it on to her.  You need to help me out, she is so hot!”

…then hit send.  It would probably take him a moment to respond, so I went back to the conversation with the girl… I read the last message and saw my message to Jon posted there… oh I guess I hadn’t switched windows, so I doubled checked… and that’s when I realized that I had posted that message to HER instead of Jon by accident.  My jaw hit the ground and stomach fell out.  I can’t really explain how embarrassed I was, and although I didn’t look in the mirror, I could feel my face heat up and I’m sure I was glowing with embarrassment like a tomato…

I didn’t know what to do… I wished you guys had built in an ‘undo’ at that point. :)  All I saw from her end was ‘Jen is typing’… but no message… then ‘Jen is typing’ but no words… that went on for about 4-5 minutes, then finally, she said something like “I have to go to bed, bye” and went offline.

We actually ended up becoming friends but nothing beyond that.  We never mentioned that ‘incident’, but my friends still get a good kick out of telling the story to people (yes, I have great friends) ;).  Anyways, I hope you enjoyed that and keep up the great work.”

I actually LOL’ed when I read that the first time.  Thanks for sharing Clem.  I bet many of us have done something similar. :)

Tip/Trick – Create your own custom emoticon

Did you know you can make your own emoticons from your own photos/images?  This has been around for a little while and is a nice way to be creative and have some fun in Messenger.  Here’s how.

	Step 1 – Click the Show menu button Step 2 – Click Tools Step 3 – Click Emoticons Now the Emoticon window will pop up.
	Step 4 – Click Create. Step 5 – Pick a photo/image to use. Note: It can be a bmp, jpg, png or even an animated gif. Step 6 – Type the keys that you want to use to bring up the emoticon.  In this case I’ve picked “woof” because it’s a picture of my dog.  Note: You can pick any keys you’d like. Just make sure it’s not something you type too often or it will keep appearing in your sentences. :) When you are done hit OK.
	Step 7 – Now scroll down to see your “Custom emoticons.” Step 8 – Your emoticon now shows up and you can use it.
	I open a chat with Dharmesh, since he loves dogs, and I send him the emoticon just by typing “woof.”  Once it shows up in his conversation window, he can right-click and add it to his collection. Have fun!

Thanks for reading.

- The Windows Live Messenger team

(Republished from the Windows Live Messenger blog)

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Hi – I’m Ann and I design stuff in the social networking area of Windows Live. One of the things I love about Windows Live is the variety of settings you can change to suit your preferences. You can pick different layouts and themes, what kind of content you want to see, and how you want to be contacted.

Earlier I wrote a blog entry on how to decide who can see your stuff on Windows Live, but this entry is devoted to deciding who can send you invitations or private messages, or ask to see your space. You may be getting contacted by people you don’t know (and don’t want to know!). It’s really easy to stop the insanity.

How to change who can contact you

1. Go to your general options page. You can get there from the options dropdown on your homepage or profile. Click Options, and then click More options.
   
2. On the general options page, in the Notifications section, click Communications preferences.
3. Use the dropdown menus to set who can contact you. The different choices are:
• Anyone – this means anyone on the Internet can contact you
• People in your network - these are the people on your profile, in Messenger, or both
• People in your extended network - these are the people connected with the people in your network (you can think of them as “friends of your friends”)
• No one
4. If you make any changes, be sure to click Save.

How I decided on my settings

There are benefits and drawbacks to each of these settings, depending on your perspective. For “Who can invite you to their network?” I chose “People in your extended network.”

That means only people who know my friends can invite me to be friends. This seems reasonable but doesn’t account for long-lost friends who might Bing me and want to be friends but don’t know anyone I’m currently connected to. I’ve decided that’s ok because, for sending private messages, I chose “Anyone.” I have it set to “Anyone” because sometimes people read my blog and want to comment privately about something I wrote and I want them to be able to do that.

However, using the extended network setting is only as good as your network is choosy! One of my friends, Chris, has 873 friends! Now, I know he doesn’t know 873 people – he’s just accepting every invitation he receives, so some of them might be spammers. That means all of those people can send me invitations, which some of them do. For now, I’m living with it, and Chris gets a ribbing from all of us at every opportunity.

The remaining option is for space access requests, which are irrelevant for me since my space is public. Your space may not be public, so this setting might be valuable to you.

So that’s how you set who can contact you. If you have any comments or suggestions, please send us feedback.

- Ann, Social Media UX
  Windows Live team

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It’s almost moving time! We’ve been busy getting Windows Live Calendar ready for when we move all MSN Calendar customers over to the new and improved service on Windows Live.

Over the coming months, we will be moving all existing MSN Calendar customers over to Windows Live Calendar. The move will be gradual, that is, not everyone will see their calendars change on the same day.

If you’re just trying Windows Live Calendar for the first time, you may notice that while MSN Calendar already gave you easy scheduling of appointments, reminders, and calendar sharing, Windows Live Calendar gives you even more:

• Multiple calendars that can be individually colored and shared
• An easy way to subscribe to public (iCal) online calendars
• Drag-and-drop rescheduling of events
• Holiday calendars based on your location
• A birthday calendar that pulls dates from your Windows Live contact list
• A to-do list to help keep you organized (we’ll move all of your MSN Calendar’s tasks and notes into your new Windows Live to-do list)

Here’s what you need to know for the move:

• If you only access your MSN Calendar through the web, we’ll move all your stuff for you. You won’t have to do anything.
• If you use Microsoft Office Outlook to view your calendar, make sure you’re using the newest version of Outlook Connector. This will allow Outlook to connect directly to your Windows Live Calendar. To find out which version of Outlook Connector you’re using, open Outlook, click Outlook Connector and then select About Outlook Connector. If the version number is 12.0.6414.1000 or greater, you’re good to go. If not, you’ll need to download and install the latest version.
• If you’ve published or shared any of your MSN Calendars, you’ll need to publish or share them again in Windows Live Calendar.

That’s it—we’ll do the rest.

Note: Windows Live Calendar doesn’t currently support displaying attachments or sending reminders to a secondary e-mail address.

See you on Windows Live Calendar!

-  Windows Live team

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(Republished from the Windows Live Messenger blog)

Wow, who would have thought that it has been almost 10 years since Messenger was launched. Windows Live Messenger (called MSN Messenger back then) was released to the public on a warm, sunny Seattle day on July 22nd, 1999.

With more than 330 million active users every month, Windows Live Messenger has grown quite a bit over the last 10 years! But for a 10-year celebration it’s not all about the numbers – even more important is how Messenger has enabled friendships, changed lives, or just brought a lot of fun to a quick chat with a good friend or family member.

We want to learn about those very personal stories and moments for you, and we’d like to ask you to share your story with us. What was your funniest, most unexpected or most emotional moment with Messenger? If you have a great story and you’d like to share it with others, please send it to us! Please note that we will publish the best anecdotes in our Windows Live Messenger marketing or public relations communications. Of course we will do that anonymously, only mentioning your first name and home country (and maybe a related picture if you decide to add one).

If you want to share your story and let others participate in your special moment with Messenger, please send your short story in English to IloveMessenger@live.com by June 28th. Please add your first name and home country – you can also add a related photo if you like. We will share the best stories during the month of July on the Windows Live Messenger blog.

We’re looking forward to reading your personal Messenger story!

The Windows Live Messenger Team

Disclaimer:

By submitting your Messenger story and/or photo you agree that your entry only includes material that you own, or that you have permission from the copyright/trademark owner to use.  By submitting your entry, you agree to allow your entry, in its entirety, to be exhibited on the Internet and in other media, without compensation.  You further agree to allow your first name, likeness and country to be used in connection with your entry, including exhibition on the Internet or in other media, without compensation.

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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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Last week I posted about the future of Windows Live Movie Maker and what we have in store for you later this year.  We’re committed to only releasing a product that meets the high quality bar set by our customers, and we’re working hard to deliver the first official version of Movie Maker soon. Until then, we’re extending the time that Movie Maker beta can be used to the end of this year. If you want to continue playing with the beta version after June 30, 2009, you’ll need to extend the beta by installing a small software update.

Starting July 1, 2009 when you open Movie Maker beta, you’ll be prompted to install the update. If you decide not to install it, you won’t be able to use the beta until you do. By installing the update early, you can continue to use Movie Maker beta without any interruption.

The software update to extend the beta is available here. First choose which language you’d like, and then download and run the update. It’s less than three megabytes, so it’ll only take a minute or two to download over a high-speed connection, or about seven minutes over dial-up.

Again, the official release version of Windows Live Movie Maker is expected to be available later this year, as part of Windows Live Essentials. We’ll let you know on this blog as soon as that official version is available.

Thank you for your continued feedback and for helping us build a great new storytelling product.

- Mike Torres
  Windows Live Movie Maker team

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If you have a family and you worry about keeping them safer online, Windows Live Family Safety can help you do that. If you’re just getting started using Family Safety, or you’ve already been using it for awhile, there’s a terrific article on the Windows Help and How-to site called Staying safer online. In it, Gloria Boyer from the Windows team tells the story of how she set up Family Safety for her sister’s household.

When Gloria set up her sister’s computer she created separate Windows accounts for each family member.  Family Safety works better with separate user accounts (because parents can view reports about the sites each child visits). Plus, this means that each person can also:

• Customize their desktop: Little kids can set a picture of their favorite cartoon character as their desktop background; the older kids can use a picture of their favorite band.
• Set up their own Start menu and taskbar.
• Set their own Internet favorites. Parents’ money management websites won’t appear on the kids’ Favorites lists, and CartoonNetwork.com won’t be on the parents’ lists.

If your family’s used to using just one account, it might sound like a big deal to ask everyone to use separate accounts and passwords.  But there are a few ways to make switching between accounts easier for your family:

• When you leave the computer, lock it using this quick keyboard shortcut: Hold down the Windows key and press the L key.
• Use Fast User Switching so you can switch right to a different account without logging off, which would close down your work.
• Or log off by clicking the Windows Start button, pointing to the arrow next to the Lock icon, and then clicking Log Off.

The next person who wants to use the computer is then free to log on with their own user name and password, and all of their desktop settings and favorites will be just where they left them.

How does all this locking and switching work with Family Safety? Great!  When you switch to a different Windows account, you are still signed in to the Family Safety Filter, no more signing in and out. That’s one less thing to do, and when you have a family to take care of, you have more than enough to do!

-Sylvia French
Windows Live Team

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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

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As technology has evolved, we’ve developed new and better ways to access your e-mail, and it’s important to us that we provide you with the most efficient ways to do so. With that in mind, Hotmail is preparing to stop using the DAV protocol on September 1, 2009.

What does this mean? Well, if you currently access Hotmail using a desktop mail program like Microsoft Office Outlook, Outlook Express, or Entourage, you may still be using the DAV protocol in these programs, and you’ll need to take action in order to continue getting your Hotmail. We’ll be sending mail to customers who are likely to be affected to let them know what they’ll need to do. Here is a quick summary.

What is the DAV protocol?

The DAV protocol is a communications method that mail programs use to display your e-mail. Outlook, Outlook Express, and Entourage may use it to display your Hotmail.

Why are you changing this?

Outlook, Outlook Express, and Entourage have historically used the DAV protocol to access Hotmail. Because the DAV protocol is an older communications method, it doesn’t work very efficiently for processing large inboxes such as the one you may have in Hotmail. Because Hotmail now provides you with ever-growing storage,* we’ve developed alternative communications methods that are more efficient and better able to accommodate large volumes of archived mail. Now that these alternative methods (including the POP3 protocol) are available to all Hotmail users for free, we’re retiring the less efficient DAV protocol.

Will this affect me?

If you use Microsoft Office Outlook, Outlook Express, or Entourage to view Hotmail, the DAV protocol retirement may affect you. To continue receiving e-mail from your Hotmail account in one of these mail programs, please follow one of the recommended solutions below before September 1, 2009. After that date, new e-mail can only be delivered to your mail program through the following alternative solutions. As always, you can also view your e-mail on the web at http://mail.live.com or http://www.hotmail.com.

• If you use Microsoft Office Outlook to view Hotmail, download Office Outlook Connector (it’s free) to continue accessing your Hotmail within Outlook 2003 or 2007. If you’re using Outlook 2002, you’ll need to change the settings in your Outlook program. Learn more about this from the Windows Live Solution Center article on Hotmail and Outlook.
• If you use Outlook Express to view Hotmail, you can download Windows Live Mail (recommended) for free, or change your settings in Outlook Express to continue accessing your Hotmail there. Learn more about this from the Windows Live Solution Center article on Hotmail and Outlook Express.
• If you use Entourage to view Hotmail, you’ll need to change the settings in Entourage to continue receiving Hotmail messages there. Learn more about this from the Windows Live Solution Center article on Hotmail and Entourage.

Have more questions?

View our FAQ page or visit the Hotmail Community Forum.

Thanks for using Windows Live Hotmail.

- Irene Lee
  The Windows Live team

*Assumes a reasonable growth rate.

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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

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