In September, we announced the Tech Preview of the Office Web Apps on Windows Live. As you may know, the Office Web Apps on Windows Live are free online companions to applications like Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint that let you access, edit and share Microsoft Office documents from virtually anywhere.

While the Office Web Apps on Windows Live remain in Technical Preview (meaning they have don’t have all of the features of the final version*), today Microsoft is announcing the beta release of Office 2010 for Windows.

So what does this mean for you as a Windows Live user?

If you are already in the Office Web Apps Tech Preview, you get to experience much more of Office 2010 by downloading the beta and using it with Windows Live (see below).

If you are not in the Tech Preview, you can still join by downloading the Office 2010 beta and following the instructions at the end of the installation. If you don’t want to try the Office beta, you can still sign up for Office Web Apps Technical Preview in the US and Japan by clicking here.

What can you do with Office 2010 and Windows Live? Here are a couple examples:

Work and collaborate as you choose

Let’s say a friend shares a PowerPoint presentation with you on SkyDrive. With the Office Web Apps and SkyDrive, you can view and make quick edits to the presentation and share it right back using SkyDrive – all in a browser without Office installed. But let’s say you want to do more advanced editing – like adding a video. With Office 2010 installed, you can click “Open in PowerPoint” from your browser and continue in PowerPoint 2010 from where you left off. When you are done, you can save your presentation back to SkyDrive by just clicking “Save” and your friend will have access to the latest version.  

You can also create Office documents in Word, PowerPoint and Excel 2010 and use the new “Save to SkyDrive” feature in the Office File / Share menu to save the document directly to SkyDrive.  

In either case, you can be assured that your document’s formatting will have high fidelity.

Broadcast your PowerPoint presentation over the web

Imagine that you have created a PowerPoint presentation for a recent school field trip filled with photos, SmartArt and descriptions. Now you want to share it with your grandparents in another city – ideally clicking through the presentation at your own pace while speaking over the phone. With PowerPoint 2010 and a Windows Live ID, you can easily broadcast your presentation to your grandparents (or anyone) from within PowerPoint by clicking ”Slide Show” and “Broadcast Slide Show” from the ribbon (simpler than using the File menu). All your audience needs is a web browser*. They don’t need PowerPoint and they don’t even need to sign in!

For additional details on Office 2010, please visit the Office website.

Thanks,

Windows Live SkyDrive team

*During the Office Web Apps Tech Preview, OneNote Web App and certain features such as creating or editing a document in Word Web App are not available. Also, saving to SkyDrive from within OneNote 2010 is not supported. Please visit the Office website for additional details including browser compatibility information.

Phishing – what it is, and how it relates to your webmail credentials

Recently, the webmail industry experienced what was believed to be a phishing incident where several thousands of credentials from Gmail, Yahoo and Hotmail accounts were exposed on a third-party site.

For those who are wondering exactly what phishing is, and how it relates to general spam: phishing  is a criminally fraudulent attempt to acquire sensitive information such as usernames, passwords and credit card details by masquerading as a trustworthy person or institution in e-mail or on a website. These credentials are used for identity theft, financial transactions and other potentially harmful activities. While “spam” refers to being targeted with unwanted emails in general (eg the common “Viagra ads”), phishing refers to attempts to obtain your webmail credentials and other identity with fraudulent intent. And unfortunately, it isn't anything new.

But thanks to coordinated efforts across the tech industry, and partnerships between industry players who are a part of the Anti-Phishing working group, over the years most web services, users and other applications have become smarter at spotting tricks like link manipulation, phone phishing, and forged websites. Cybercriminals have adapted to improved vigilance by focusing on the consumers as easier targets than battling technology.

Unfortunately, even technologically unsophisticated attacks can be successful because people traditionally underestimate the value of their online identities, and the gates that this information can open.

In most cases, this type of phishing attack is carried out by sending a simple e-mail that appears to be from someone you know. It might appear to be from the customer support department of Hotmail or another webmail provider, or it may even appear to come from a friend of yours (most likely, the message went to their entire contact list) and asks you to provide the credentials for your webmail service or it instructs you to click a link. Probably every one of us has seen an attack like this by now!

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Some of the most common types of phishing attacks

1. Attacks that rely on forging identities. In one of the most common types of attacks, the attackers change the name that is associated with an email address to a trusted, familiar name, like for example, “Windows Live Customer Support” or "Bank of America," even though their e-mail address still is "yourfriendlyspammer@live.com". If you're not paying attention, it can be easy to mistake a message like this for a genuine request from Windows Live or your bank.

2. Attacks that use stolen accounts. In a variant of phishing, the attacker uses a previously compromised user account to send a link to everyone in the contact list for that account. If you unknowingly click the link, you land on a spam, phishing, or malware download site. As you can imagine, an e-mail you get from a friend’s account significantly increases the credibility of that message, and increases the likelihood of a successful attack. So, watch out for odd or uncharacteristic e-mails that comes from a friend’s account.

3. Attacks that ask you to provide credentials via phone. In a typical phone phishing scam, the scammer may direct you to call a customer support phone number, claiming that your account will be closed or other problems will occur if you don't call the number. A person or an audio response unit waits to take your account number, personal identification number, password, or other valuable personal data.

4. Attacks via forged websites. Many phishing attacks will convince you to trust them by including official-looking logos or other identifying information taken directly from legitimate websites. A common trick is to create a web address that resembles the name of a well-known company but is slightly altered by adding, omitting, or transposing letters. For example, the address "www.microsoft.com" could appear instead as: “www.micosoft.com” OR “www.mircosoft.com” OR “www.verify-microsoft.com”

5. Attacks using social engineering. Sometimes a scammer will include convincing details about your personal life that they found on your social networking pages. It is easy for a user to think that they are getting an email from a friend wanting to reconnect and may inadvertently provide personal information.

Once the attackers have your credentials they typically use the account for various things:

· They can use your account to send more phishing or spam messages. These could go out to people on your contact list. The response rates to campaigns using stolen e-mail accounts to send the messages are far superior to traditional campaigns because of the inherent trust your contacts have for e-mail with your name on it. Or, your email ID could be used for broader spamming, since this allows them to counter abuse detection technology for a while.

· They can sell or use information from other accounts that you've linked to the stolen e-mail account. If you've used the same password for other financial services, merchant sites, and more, the impact could be very far reaching.

· They can sell it. The resale value of a legitimate web mail account like yours is $2 a pop on the black market—twice the amount they can get for a credit card.

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How Microsoft helps protect you from these attacks

From a technology perspective, because so much phishing comes as spam (unsolicited e-mail, which may or may not contain phishing), our Hotmail spam filter, called SmartScreen, blocks over 4 billion unwanted e-mail messages per day by distinguishing between legitimate e-mail and spam. To put these numbers in perspective, let us assume on one day our filters were less effective on 0.01% of the blocked spam that is phishing. This would result in about 400,000 additional phishing messages getting through to peoples' inboxes that day. And if the response rates for these phishing attempts were anywhere close to what happened in this recent Facebook incident, then about 32,000 people would be victimized by these phishing scams, during that one day. While not all of the spam that comes through Hotmail spam filters is phishing, and the actual number of users impacted per day is quite a bit lower than it would be without spam filters, these numbers illustrate the magnitude of the problem faced by our e-mail services every single day.

We also offer (as do many other online services) various layers of protection to detect attempts at stealing user credentials. For example, after x number of efforts to log in, we require additional authentication before providing a new password. This prevents guessing of passwords by anybody other than the owner of the account. This method works well, generally, because it is not suitable for any large scale attacks but is not infalliable. Guessing can work particularly effectively with systems that employ self-service password reset. For example, in September 2008, the Yahoo e-mail account of Governor of Alaska and Vice President of the United States nominee Sarah Palin was accessed without authorization by someone who was able to research answers to two of her security questions, her zip code and date of birth and was able to guess the third, where she met her husband.

Beyond SmartScreen, there are complementary technologies that are part of your browser like the Microsoft Smartscreen Filter which is free with Internet Explorer 8, which can help protect you from phishing attacks by identifying suspicious or confirmed phishing sites, and warning you before you open the page. We have implemented Extended Validation certificates and Windows Live sign-in assistant to ensure the safety of your login credentials. Plus, always remember that Microsoft will only ask for your Windows Live ID credential pair on login.live.com – nowhere else!

In general, it is a good idea to download the latest Windows updates and keep your third-party security applications up to date as well, to keep your PC safe.

Microsoft also works with law enforcement very closely. Microsoft has supported 191 enforcement actions against phishers worldwide.  Microsoft has filed civil lawsuits and has made referrals and provides support for civil and criminal actions filed by international government and law enforcement agencies.

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Protect yourself: Tips on recognizing phishing attacks

But no amount of technology can substitute for an alert user. Because we realize that the key is making you aware, we make significant investments every year in user education and other ways of helping to make you aware of how to combat these attacks.

One thing you'll notice in Hotmail is that we provide several visual cues to help you detect and prevent problems. Going back to the first example we used, you can see that the safety bar at the top of the message indicates that the content might be unsafe.

We also make an effort to warn you when you may not know the sender:

Aside from the few cases when you communicate with a contact or another service for the first time, most mail you receive comes from known senders, that is, someone in your contact list or on your safe list. An unknown sender is a very important clue, telling you to use caution before interacting with the message or the sender.

You should also always look carefully at the "From" address:

The initial name shown in bold can be misleading; look for the e-mail address that is associated with it: yourfriendlyspammer@live.com (or more typically, you'll see random strings of letters and numbers in an e-mail address, like abcxxxx123@live.com).

Pay close attention before giving valuable information away to an e-mail address like this. Note that sometimes the address itself has been disguised to look legitimate, but when you click Reply, look at the destination address. Is it the same address as the one that sent the e-mail? If different, is it another suspiciously spam-like address?

You can find more cues in the message itself. Look for claims that are outlandish (for example, that you just won money in a lottery in another country!) or things that just make no common sense.

Microsoft will never ask you to verify your password or to provide it to us via e-mail. I just can’t reinforce this enough! We would never, ever ask for this information, period. The only time you should enter your password is on an official Windows Live ID sign-in page. So no matter why they say they need such information, please never provide your credentials over e-mail, in IM, or on a forum. Sometimes the justification provided can look downright silly, for example:

Really! Would we be running the largest email service on the planet if we had "congestion problems" that prevented us from being able to host your account anymore? And if we needed you to confirm your account, we would ask you to sign in to the service, not have you send us an e-mail containing your password.

The cases that are harder to detect are the ones where one of your friends' accounts has been compromised and the attacker is now hiding behind your friend's identity. That scenario also makes it difficult for the e-mail service to give you many visual cues to alert you, because to our spam filters, the message looks like part of an established, trusted relationship between the receiver and the sender. In these cases, be on the lookout for outlandish claims. Does the message sound like something your friend wouldn't usually say? If anything looks odd or uncharacteristic of your friend, the safe thing is to call up your friend and ask them (rather than replying to the sender, who may not really be your friend). You might indeed be helping your friend by letting them know that somebody has taken over their account.

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Here’s how YOU can help Microsoft fight phishing

Reporting spam and phishing messages helps Microsoft detect and prevent this and future attacks from making it to users inboxes. Even if this is from a friend of yours please do report because the intent is not to penalize the compromised sender but to protect the user base. The following graphic demonstrates how to report:

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What to do if you become the victim of a phishing attack

Let’s say you did your best, the technology did its best, and you still find that your credentials were compromised one way or the other. It happens to best of us – don’t panic.

Follow the steps outlined here to reclaim your account, and then take appropriate steps to ensure the safety of your other e-mail accounts, banking, credit card information, etc.

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Hopefully, these tips will make your online experience safer. Protecting users is our number one goal and with educated users on our side, the ecosystem is better equipped to tackle challenges like spam and phishing.

Best,

Krish Vitaldevara
Windows Live Hotmail team

Beginning today, Windows Live is rolling out 19 new web activity partnerships with leading global and regional web companies – including YouTube and Break.com. This means that if you choose to add, for example, the YouTube web activity to your profile on Windows Live, then whenever you post a video or mark your video favorites on YouTube, the people in your Windows Live network will see an update about your activity in their What’s new feed in Messenger, in Hotmail, on Windows Live Home, etc.  

The new web activity partnerships are a great win for our customers, for our partners, and for Windows Live:

• For customers, they make it easier to let your friends know about the sites you're discovering and the interesting stuff you’re doing on them, even if your friends aren’t using those sites yet.
• For our partners, they’re great because just like other viral sharing mechanisms, they help new people discover each site’s content within the context of global services like Messenger and Hotmail that are already used by nearly 450 million people a month. And, the content being shared is more relevant and likely to be clicked on by the viewer, because it’s coming directly from their friends.
• And of course, for Windows Live, partnerships make Messenger, Hotmail, and the rest of our suite an even better companion to all our partner sites that people already use and love.

With today’s update, we now have partnerships with 74 sites from around the world – localized into 35 languages, with broad coverage of leading sites worldwide in social networking, video sharing, photo sharing, blogging, reviews and ratings, and more.

Here is the list of our newest feed partners:

4Travel (Japan), Azbuz (Turkey), Baby Kingdom (Hong Kong), Biip.no (Norway), Break.com (US), BuscaPe (Brazil), CNET (US), L’internaute Copains (France), Doctissimo Community (France), IRC-Galleria (Finland), Libimseti.cz (Czech Republic), lokalisten.de (Germany), Multiply (US), MyVIP (Hungary), Neogen (Romania), PIXNET (Taiwan), Qype (Germany), Wat.tv (France), and YouTube (US)

Note: The region listed in parentheses after each website name indicates where the site originates, but you can add these web activities to Windows Live no matter where you live.

From a technology and standards point of view, here are a few additional fun data points about the web activities program:

• Windows Live is a co-author and active participant in the Activity Streams standards, an effort for safely exchanging activity feed content (with user opt-in) among sites and client applications. The spec is being co-authored by representatives from Facebook, MySpace, Microsoft (us), SixApart, and the DiSo project. Many other key companies like Google, Yahoo, and Netflix are participants and contributors as well.
• Activity Streams make it easy for partner sites to expose feed information or activity from their sites in a consistent format, once, so that their customers can import or connect what they’re doing on that site to other major services like Windows Live, MySpace, Facebook, etc. without their needing to implement service-specific tweaks to their feed. Likewise, service endpoints like Windows Live can expose a standard endpoint rather than implementing and maintaining custom feed ingestion for every partner.
• Windows Live is already consuming Activity Streams-compliant feeds from Facebook, MySpace, and about a dozen other of the current web activity partners who have begun publishing using the Activity Streams standard.

In related news, if you haven’t noticed yet, the newly redesigned MSN home page now has a module where, if you sign in with your Windows Live ID, you can see what’s new from your friends on Windows Live. This, of course, includes any of the activities your friends are sharing with you via our web activities partners.

If you’d like to learn more about sharing videos and other web activities on Windows Live, check out this video by my friend Angus Logan.

We hope you’ll add some web activities, try out the new partners, and help your friends on Messenger and the rest of Windows Live discover the great services you’re already enjoying.

Jeff Kunins
Windows Live engineering team

I’m Cheryl White and I’m a Program Manager for Windows Live Movie Maker. I’m here to say again how much we appreciate getting your feedback – it helps us to build a better product. Also, I’d like to talk more specifically about how users helped us shape the latest release of Windows Live Movie Maker. We’ve heard many questions about why we didn’t go with a traditional timeline model in the new Movie Maker. In this post we’re going to provide some insight into the primary reasons we changed our design, as well as a comparison between the old and new design based on organizing and editing media.

When we started building Windows Live Movie Maker, we looked at the feedback we received from our users. One of the points that stood out to us was that the average Windows Movie Maker user was intimidated by the timeline interface. Specifically, they felt there was a fairly steep learning curve to the product, and that many tasks were made difficult by the amount of steps it took to complete them. With this in mind, we wanted to use a visual solution in the new Windows Live Movie Maker that allowed both video enthusiasts and novice users a way to organize and edit their media quickly and easily. We wanted to eliminate intimidating interfaces, while still being able to manage more complex tasks. Below you will find a side-by-side comparison of the two versions with regards to organizing and editing media.

Windows Movie Maker (old) vs. Windows Live Movie Maker (new)

Adding media to your project

A big focus in the new release was to make it easy to add content and immediately see how the movie was put together. Compared to Windows Movie Maker, you first had to import your media to your collection, then add your media to your project. Only after which you would be able to preview your movie. In the new release, we simplified the process: Import your media to your project, preview your movie. The whole task can be done in seconds, yet you don’t lose any functionality. Another process we simplified in the new release of Movie Maker was to ensure that the preview window showed only the media that you were focused on in the Storyboard at any given time. The old release of Movie Maker could show media that was in your library as well as media that was in your project. There were advantages to this (as you could see photos and videos before you add them to your project) but this increased the complexity and confused novice users. The new design greatly reduces confusion, if it’s in your preview window – it’s in your project.

Based on a user study we performed in March, we made a late-breaking decision to add click on the Storyboard to add content. Since the Storyboard is the core of the application, we decided that we wanted to give you a range of options to choose from when it comes to adding media to your project: dragging and dropping files from your computer; clicking or right-clicking on the Storyboard; clicking “Add videos and photos” right in the Ribbon, from Photo Gallery clicking Make-> Make a Movie with media selected.

In the older Windows Movie Maker timeline view, users found it difficult to move items around easily and particularly difficult to adjust text. So we made adding text easier! Previously, there was a 4-step process to add title at the beginning of your movie. With Windows Live Movie Maker, one click adds the title and immediately puts you into editing mode right on the screen. It’s all WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) so you can adjust easily make adjustments by entering text and then grabbing the text box with the mouse to move it around.

Viewing the project

When it comes to viewing your project, the Storyboard view has multiple benefits over the traditional Timeline view. Something to keep in mind, both are technically linear ‘timeline’ views. But instead of the timeline being one long ‘scroll right, and right, and right to view your content’ view, the Storyboard starts at the top left, scrolls right to the edge of your application window and then drops a line to start again on the left (Like a book!). Which is automatically resized as your adjust the size of Windows Live Movie Maker. This allows users to have a broader view of what’s happening in their project. Compared to the Windows Movie Maker, the task of organizing content is made exponentially easier in the storyboard.

Below is an example of ‘viewing your project’. I have nine pieces of content plus a title slide (just for example) and I want to zoom in far enough to see thumbnails of each piece of content. On the left hand side, I have Windows Movie Maker. Here I can only see four and a quarter items in my movie. Compared to Windows Live Movie Maker on the right and I can see all my content easily with plenty of room to spare.

Zoomed Out/Full Storyboard vs. Storyboard

In making the move to the new Storyboard, we found that people who wanted to see a storyboard-like representation of their items were not getting enough information at that level. Conversely, people were getting too much information with the timeline representation, so we worked at hitting a happy medium between the two. We have a time scale zoom in the new Windows Live Movie Maker that allows you to adjust the ‘viewable’ length of your media. The scale goes from individual seconds (on the precise side – see right side Windows Live Movie Maker image below), to only showing each piece of media as a thumbnail regardless of length of time each piece plays for on the broader scale. This allows you to still use relative lengths with your clips, without it being an all or nothing approach.

Zoomed In/Timeline vs. Storyboard with Time Scale

Moving items in the project

Once people add in their content, we wanted to make sure that it was easy to move items around. Showing the thumbnail of each item at any timescale means that you can step back and take a look at the big picture and make sure everything ended up just where you wanted it. In the image below, I am dragging the Chrysanthemum picture to appear after the lighthouse. Super easy with the thumbnails, but it was very difficult to get to it in the timeline version without zooming in on the timeline.

Editing items in your project

And the last main area in which we focused was to make sure that it was easy to edit items once they were added to the project. With the new Storyboard, batch edits are a snap. Using the Ribbon, we put the tools you use most often in the most logical places. Edit a video clip is under Video Tools. Changing transitions is under Animations.

But when it comes to true ‘differences’ between the old Windows Movie Maker and the new Windows Live Movie Maker, batch editing is right at the top. By allowing users to multi-select and perform edits on more than one item at a time, we’ve dramatically decreased the time it takes to polish and edit your movie. In the case below, I had to drag and drop a transition onto each and every item. In Windows Live Movie Maker, we’ve made that so easy, you just select the items you want (or CTRL+A to select all), choose a transition and you can apply it to all of the clips. To tell if your item has a transition on it, look for the slightly transparent triangle in the lower left corner of your content thumbnails.

So there you have it. A little background into how your feedback helped us build Windows Live Movie Maker. Ultimately, we are creating the product for you to use, and if there are any areas in which you’re feeling pain, let us know. We want to change that!  We’ve already gotten some really good feedback, and hope to continue receiving more.  I love Windows Live Movie Maker and I hope you will too!

Cheryl White

Program Manager

Windows Live Movie Maker

Update:

We are happy to report that this issue with the “favorites sync” feature on Windows Live Toolbar has now been fixed and you can now re-enable this feature. As we mentioned in the original post, no data was actually lost and everything will work as expected and you can again get your favorites synced back to your browser on your PC.

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For anyone who uses the “favorites sync” feature on Windows Live Toolbar, we have an important notice. We’ve heard from some customers in the last 24 hours that in some cases, favorites have been removed from the Toolbar when they synced from one or more of their PCs. We have investigated, and we want to assure you, that if this is occurring for you, your favorites are still available on SkyDrive at http://favorites.live.com.  We apologize for this inconvenience and are diligently working on a fix to restore favorites from SkyDrive to your PC.

In order to prevent any further issues with favorites sync from Toolbar, we have temporarily disabled syncing of favorites for ALL Toolbar customers until we have a fix ready. We will update this blog once we deploy a fix and restore the favorites sync service. In the meantime you can sign in to Windows Live SkyDrive to access your favorites. Alternatively, you can also recover your favorites from the Recycle Bin on the PC where they were removed.  

Once again, we apologize for the inconvenience. We hope to restore the favorites sync service as soon as possible.

- Windows Live Toolbar team

The Windows 7 launch is a proud moment for us at Windows Live. Windows Live delivers the software and services that make your new, or upgraded, Windows 7 PC lots of fun. So, we want to remind you to get the latest and greatest of Windows Live for your new Windows 7 PC!

We recommend the following top things to do after installing Windows 7:

1. Personalize your PC: Make your Windows 7 PC your own by pinning your favorite programs to the enhanced Windows Taskbar, to easily preview and switch between Windows. Then, customize your desktop with one of the many new themes available in Windows 7 (or easily download a new one that suits your personality), and drag your favorite gadgets where you want them on your desktop.

2. Download Windows Live Essentials – the killer apps for Windows 7: Once you have Windows 7 installed, go to download.live.com to download free programs for email, IM, movie-making, photos and more! 

3. Organize your multiple email accounts in one place: Organize your multiple email accounts using Window Live Mail (including Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail Plus and Gmail) so you can receive email in one place, organized into separate folders. You can even add RSS feeds to stay up on your favorite sites and blogs.

4. Import and organize your photos: Your new operating system is a great excuse to finally organize the thousands of digital photos you’ve accumulated over the years. Windows Live Photo Gallery allows you to sort your photos easily by tags, folders or dates, then clean them up with easy editing features, including auto-fix, sharpen image, panoramic stitch, and more.

5. Make a movie in less than five minutes: Now that you have your favorite photo and video memories on your Windows 7 PC, make them into movies and slideshows that you can share on the web (including easy publishing to YouTube and Facebook) or burn onto a DVD in high definition (if your camera supports it). Windows Live Movie Maker features the simple-to-navigate Windows 7 ribbon, and time-saving features like AutoMovie that automatically turn your photos, videos and music into an impressive movie – complete with titles and transitions.

6. Snap to it! Need to compare two documents side-by-side? Snap, a new feature in Windows 7, is a quick (and fun) way to increase your productivity. Snap allows you to resize open windows simply by dragging them to the edges of your screen – left or right. Then, the window will expand vertically and fill the screen, so you can easily position windows side-by-side.

7. Shake away the clutter: Need to cut through a crowded desktop and quickly focus on a single window? With Windows 7, you can click a pane and give your mouse a shake. Voila! Every window except that one disappears. Jiggle again, and your Windows are back.

Have fun with Windows 7  :-)

- The Windows Live Team

Excited about the new Zune HD? We are! A built-in HD Radio receiver, high-definition (HD) video output capabilities, organic light-emitting diode (OLED) multi-touch screen, Wi-Fi and an Internet browser… Zune HD is the first portable media player to provide all of these technologies on one device.  Oh, and by the way, did we mention that its less than 9 mm thick and only weighs 2.6 ounces!... :)

If you don’t already own one, check out http://www.zune.net for more details. If you do own one, then check out these new custom profiles for Windows Live Movie Maker. They let you save movies in a format that’s perfect for the Zune HD.

We also have a new “HD Fullscreen” (4:3 aspect ratio) profile that saves high-resolution (1440x1080) WMV video files. This new profile is ideal for making HD movies without letterboxing. This works great when you’re using photos in your movie that have a 4:3 aspect ratio.

Note: When using the HD Full Screen profile, set your project to use a standard (4:3) aspect ratio to get the most out of this profile. (To set the project aspect ratio in Windows Live Movie Maker, on the View tab, click Aspect ratio, and then click Standard.)

At the end, we’ll provide a link to an article that explains how you can make your own custom profiles to use in Windows Live Movie Maker.

New Custom Profiles

We have two custom profiles for you that let you save movies in Movie Maker in a format that works great on the new Zune HD, as well as play from a Zune HD device to an HDTV at 720p resolution².

²Zune HD player screen shows supported 720p HD videos at 480 x 272—not HD resolution. HDTV and Zune HD AV Dock (all sold separately) are required to view video at 720p HD resolution.

The “Zune HD – Device” profile will create a WMV file with a resolution and bitrate that matches the playback characteristics of the Zune HD device (480x272).

Next, the “Zune HD - 720p High Definition” profile is optimized for playing back content directly from the Zune device via the Zune HD AV Dock. It uses a slightly higher bit-rate and more advanced Windows Media codecs (Windows Media Audio 10 Pro & Windows Media Video Advanced Profile) than the standard 720p profile built into Windows Live Movie Maker.

You can download and install these custom profiles (and the custom icon for the Zune profiles) by following these steps.

1. Download this compressed (ZIP) file: http://cid-2f7eb29b42641d59.skydrive.live.com/self.aspx/Public/NewProfiles.zip

2. Extract the files to a new folder on your computer. You will see the following files:

ZuneHDNative.prx

ZuneHDNative.ico

ZuneHD720p.prx

ZuneHD720p.ico

HD Fullscreen.prx

3. Copy these files to one of the following locations on your computer (depending on if your computer is running a 32-bit or 64-bit version of Windows):

- 32-bit version of Windows: C:\Program Files\Windows Live\Photo Gallery\Video Profiles
- 64-bit version of Windows: C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Live\Photo Gallery\Video Profiles

4. Restart Windows Live Movie Maker.

Creating Your Own Custom Profiles

If you want to make your own custom profiles to use in Windows Live Movie Maker, see the article Use custom settings to save a movie in Windows Live Movie Maker on the Windows website.

- Mike Morrison, Windows Live Movie Maker team

Windows Live Sync users,

We sincerely apologize for the extended period of downtime yesterday. We discovered a serious problem in Windows Live Sync that could cause problems in rare cases for people who used Windows Easy Transfer. As a precaution, at 9:15 Pacific Time (UTC-7) yesterday we decided to stop allowing people to sign in to Sync until we could fix the problem. Early this morning, we released an update to Sync and began allowing people to sign in again.

The next time you use your computers that are running Sync, you’ll be prompted to update the program. This is a required update and you won’t be able to connect until you install.

If your computer was already running Windows 7 before this update, you’ll have to go to the Sync website to add your computer back to all the folders you’re syncing. We know this is a hassle and we apologize for this inconvenience. You’ll also see that your computer shows up on the Sync website with a new name—you can safely go ahead and delete the old computer from the website. Rest assured that your files and folders are safe.

We found this problem in Sync through internal testing, and although it was very rare, keeping your data safe is our highest priority. We wanted to be absolutely sure that this problem wouldn’t happen to anyone.

Thanks,

Eric Doerr

Group Program Manager, Windows Live

On September 17^th, we announced the start of the Office web app technical preview. Today, we are excited to share the news that the Office web apps team has decided to expand the technical preview further, and they are inviting more people to try out the Office Web Apps. The preview is still limited to users in the US and Japan.

If you missed out on signing up for the technical preview earlier, this is a great chance to get in! Check out their announcement earlier today.

For a limited time, you can sign-up for a Technical Preview account here (if you are already a part of the technical preview, this link will generate an error): http://skydrive.live.com/acceptpreview.aspx/.documents?aobrp=browse

- The Windows Live team

Members of the Windows Live Writer team attended WordCamp Seattle on Sept 26, 2009. WordCamps are annual gatherings for learning about all things WordPress, hosted in various cities across the country. It’s a great way to learn more about WordPress and network with other WordPress users. The Writer team was there in force giving demos of Writer publishing to WordPress.  Many people aren’t aware of how well Live Writer works with WordPress. It gives users a completely WYSIWYG publishing experience and it makes publishing photos and video simple.

In preparation for the event, developer Brandon Turner created three new Live Writer plug-ins to use with WordPress blogs. These new plug-ins enable —comments management, custom fields, and blog title/tagline editor. If you are a blogger yourself, you might want to check these out.

Here is a quick overview of the plug-ins:

• The first plugin lets you change the title and tagline of your blog. Often times you have seen the default Just another Wordpress.com weblog. If you enter your Twitter username and click 'import from twitter' it will import a recent twitter status as your blog tagline. It will look for your most recent status that is not an @ reply and doesn't contain a link.

• The second plugin allows you to manage comments on your Wordpress blog from inside of Windows Live Writer. 'New' means that the comment has been posted but it is waiting for moderation. 'Approved' means the comment has been published and is visible to all users on your blog. 'Spam' are comments that have been detected as spam and are hidden from your blog. Clicking the words across the top will show you a list of comments in each of those sections.

• The, third plugin, called custom field plugin lets you add wordpress custom fields to your blog. This plugin shows up after you have clicked publish inside of Windows Live Writer. The first time you click publish once the plug in is installed it will ask you if you want to enable it. Click 'yes' when you see the dialog below.

Then the next dialog will show up. This will allow you to enter new custom fields for your blog. Enter the key/values for the custom field in the grid below. And when you are done you can close the dialog, it will save the custom fields to your blog. The next time you come back to this dialog, there will be links on the top with the keys you have entered in the past. This way, if you always insert the same custom fields, you will only have to enter them the first time. When selected on a custom field, you can click the checkbox. This will generate a snippet of PHP code which you can use in your Wordpress theme to display the custom field.

These plugins are available for use and further development (the linked DLL and Zip file contains all the new plug-ins)

Additionally there are many other Writer plugins available to do almost anything you can imagine.  Check out gallery.live.com for a list of free writer plugins.

Best,

Windows Live Writer team

Last month, due to a security issue in the photo upload tool, the Hotmail team temporarily removed it while building an updated version of the tool.  You may have already noticed this - the tool is back!

Instead of adding pictures as attachments to your Hotmail messages by clicking Attach and then File and then selecting the pictures you would like to include, Hotmail brings you a tool so you can more efficiently select and add multiple photos to a Hotmail message in Internet Explorer in a couple clicks: select Attach and then Photo.

Thanks for your patience,
The Windows Live Hotmail Team

We are aware that some customers may have experienced difficulty accessing their Windows Live Hotmail accounts today. We’re actively investigating the cause and have taken the appropriate steps to remedy the situation as quickly as possible.  Access has been restored to the majority of affected Window Live customers, and we expect access to any remaining affected accounts to be restored shortly. 

If you ever have trouble with your Hotmail account, please check the Windows Live Solution Center for help.

We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience and disruption this may have caused you.

- The Windows Live Hotmail team

Update, Oct 9, 2009: This outage has now been fully resolved. We apologize once again for the inconvenience caused by the outage yesterday.

As of 3pm PT: We want to provide a quick update, that as a result of our investigation we are taking measures to block access to all of the accounts that were exposed and have resources in place to help those users reclaim their accounts.

If you believe your information was documented on the illegal list, please fill out the following form to reclaim access to your account.

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Over the weekend Microsoft learned that several thousand Windows Live Hotmail customers’ credentials were exposed on a third-party site due to a likely phishing scheme. Upon learning of the issue, we immediately requested that the credentials be removed and launched an investigation to determine the impact to customers. As part of that investigation, we determined that this was not a breach of internal Microsoft data and initiated our standard process of working to help customers regain control of their accounts.

Phishing is an industry-wide problem and Microsoft is committed to helping consumers have a safe, secure and positive online experience. Our guidance to customers is to exercise extreme caution when opening unsolicited attachments and links from both known and unknown sources, and that they install and regularly update their anti-virus software.”  If you believe you’ve been a victim of a phishing scheme, it’s very important that you update your account information and change your password as soon as possible. More information on what to do is available on this page at our support community.

Microsoft recommends customers use the following protective security measures:

• Renew their passwords for Windows Live IDs every 90 days
• For administrators, make sure you approve and authenticate only users that you know and can verify credentials
• As phishing sites can also pose additional threats, please install and keep anti-virus software up to date

Answers to a few general questions about phishing scams

Q: What should you do if you fall victim to a phishing scam? How should you respond? What steps should you take?

A: If you think that you may have responded to a phishing scam with personal or financial information or entered this information into a fake website, you should take four key steps: (1) report the incident to the proper authorities, (2) change the passwords on all your online accounts, (3) review your credit reports and your bank and credit card statements, and (4) make sure you are using the latest technologies to help protect yourself from future scams.

1. For the first step:
   • If you have given out your credit card information, contact your credit company right away. The sooner a company knows your account may have been compromised, the easier it will be for them to help protect you.
   • Next, contact the company that you believe was forged. Remember to contact the organization directly, not through the e-mail message you received. Or call the organization's toll-free number and speak to a customer service representative. For Microsoft, call the PC Safety hotline at:
     1-866-PCSAFETY.
   • Then, report the incident to the proper authorities. Send an e-mail to spam@uce.gov to report it to the Federal Trade Commission and to reportphishing@antiphishing.org to report it to the Anti-Phishing Working Group.
2. The second step is to change the passwords on all your online accounts. The reason for this is that a lot of people use the same password for multiple accounts. Start with passwords that are related to financial institutions or personal information. If you think someone has accessed your e-mail account, change your password immediately. If you’re using Hotmail, go to: http://account.live.com.
3. The third step is to review your bank and credit card statements and your credit report monthly for unexplained charges, inquiries or activity that you didn’t initiate.
4. Finally, make sure you use the latest products, such as anti-spam and anti-phishing capabilities in e-mail services, phishing filters in Web browsers and other services to help warn and protect you from online scams.

Q: How can I recognize an e-mail scam?

A: There are several signs you should look for to identify a phishing e-mail: (1) Does it ask you to send your personal information? (2) Is it poorly worded or does it have typos? (3) Does it contain convincing details about your personal information? (4) Does it use phrases like “verify your account” or “you’ve won the lottery?”

• Any e-mail asking for your name, birth date, social security number, e-mail username, e-mail password, or any other type of personal information, no matter who the e-mail appears to be from, is almost certainly a scam.  Microsoft and most other businesses do not send unsolicited e-mail requesting personal or financial information.
• E-mails that are poorly worded, have typos, or have phrases such as "this is not a joke" or "forward this message to your friends" are generally scam e-mails.
• Phishing mail often includes official-looking logos and other identifying information taken directly from legitimate Web sites, and it may include convincing details about your personal information that scammers found on your social networking pages.
• A few phrases to look for if you think an e-mail message is a phishing scam are:
  • "Verify your account."
  • "If you don't respond within 48 hours, your account will be closed."
  • "You have won the lottery.”

Q: What should people do if they think they have received a phishing e-mail?

A: If you think you may have received a phishing e-mail, you should take three steps: (1) take some time to check up on it and do not click on a link or give out your personal information, (2) make sure you have created a strong password for your account and (3) report the phishing scam.

• The most important thing to remember is do not click on the link or give out your personal information.  It is possible for your computer to become infected with malicious software simply by visiting a phishing site – without you even realizing it. If you receive a questionable e-mail, take some time and check up on the information. Often sites like snopes.com list common e-mail scams.  Go to that website of the company you received the e-mail from and contact their customer service reps via phone or online to verify the validity of the e-mail.
• Another thing you should do is create a strong password for your e-mail account by using more than 7 characters and having a combination of upper and lower case characters, numbers, and special characters, like the @ or # symbols. It's also a good idea to change your password on a regular basis. The next time you change your Hotmail password, you can check “make my password expire every 72 days” to remind you to change it.
• Finally, help us identify new scams. If you use Hotmail and received a phishing e-mail, you can select the dropdown next to "Junk,” and select "Report phishing scam.” Whatever you do, do not reply back to the sender. You should also report phishing scams to the Anti-Phishing Working Group by e-mailing them at reportphishing@antiphishing.org.

Q: How common is this scam?

A: The most recent version of Microsoft’s Security Intelligence Report (Volume 6) shows that more than 97 percent of e-mail messages sent over the Internet are unwanted: They have malicious attachments, are phishing attacks, or are spam.

Q: Is Microsoft taking any proactive steps to prevent this from happening?

A: To help protect people from phishing attacks, Microsoft is providing education and guidance to customers, collaborating with other technology leaders, businesses and governments and supporting law enforcement actions against phishers.

• We provide guidance and information to customers about how to stay safe online at www.microsoft.com/protect and work with others in the industry and governments to educate people on online threats and safety tips.
• From a technology perspective, because so much phishing comes from spammers, our Hotmail spam filter, called SmartScreen, blocks over 4.5 billion unwanted e-mails per day by distinguishing between legitimate e-mail and spam.
• The Microsoft Phishing Filter, which is free as part of Internet Explorer 7, Internet Explorer 8, Windows Vista and as an add-on for the Windows Live Search Toolbar, also helps protect people from phishing attacks by identifying suspicious or confirmed phishing sites and warning customers before they reach them.
• Law enforcement also plays a big role here. Microsoft has supported 191 enforcement actions against phishers worldwide.  These include civil lawsuits filed by Microsoft, as well as civil and criminal actions by international government and law enforcement agencies for which Microsoft made referrals and subsequently provided support. 
• Microsoft is a founding member of the Anti-Phishing Working Group, a cross-industry association focused on preventing phishing. Microsoft also actively participates in DigitalPhishNet, an alliance between law enforcement and industry leaders in a variety of sectors, including technology, banking, financial services, and online auctioneering.  The group is focused on assisting law enforcement in apprehending and prosecuting those responsible for committing crimes against consumers through phishing. 

Q: Shouldn’t Microsoft be doing more to protect people from phishing?

A:  Combating phishing requires involvement from technology leaders, businesses operating online, law enforcement and governments. Microsoft plays a leading role in the Anti-Phishing Working Group, provides technologies to protect people from phishing and assists law enforcement to bring prosecutions against online criminals.

For all those out there looking for an edge when using Movie Maker, here are some examples of more advanced features we’ve added to Movie Maker.

Today we’ll examine three areas of Movie Maker that should appeal to more advanced users:

1. Video Editing Keyboard Shortcuts

2. Leveraging Multiple Monitors

3. Creating Time-Lapse Videos

Video Editing Keyboard Shortcuts

Advanced users typically appreciate having keyboard shortcuts for most common actions and commands. In Windows Live Movie Maker we support all of the standard Windows and Office shortcut keys (i.e. Save, Open, Undo, Redo, Cut/Copy/Paste, etc…). You can find a list of all of our keyboard shortcuts here (or by choosing Help and searching on the word ‘keyboard’).

Today I would like to call attention to some keyboard shortcuts that apply more directly to video editing. First of all a quick one is the Play/Pause toggle (the ‘space’ bar or the ‘K’ key). Why the ‘K’ key? Well, commonly used shortcut keys in video editing programs include “J”, “K” and “L”. The “J” keys steps back one frame while the “L” key jumps forward one frame. Since the keyboard repeats you can hold down the “L” key and depending on the size of your video (and performance of your PC) you can get almost real-time playback. When using the “J” and “L” keys it’s convenient to use the “K” key to Play/Pause the video.

Next, another common action is to Trim the beginning or end of the video and Split a video. In Movie Maker these commands are based on the current cursor (caret) position. So you can scrub to a specific point in a video clip then press the “M” key to Split the video at exactly that point. The “I” key will trim off the beginning (from the caret position) and the “O” key will trim off the end of the video (from the caret position).

While we no longer have the timeline in Windows Live Movie Maker we now have a simple storyboard. The new Storyboard is approachable to the most novice user yet, it can still represent time visually! To zoom in (expand time) on the storyboard use the “+” key while the zoom out shortcut is the “-“ key (go figure…). You’ll note however that when we zoom in that the thumbnail representing the video clip is simply replicated.

Quick Access toolbar

Admittedly there are a lot of features exposed in the new “Scenic” ribbon that don’t have keyboard shortcuts. The good news though is that if you add those features to the Quick Access area of the Ribbon then you can use the keyboard shortcuts ALT-1 through ALT-0 to access those features!

To add a QAT (‘Quick Access Toolbar’ as we call it) shortcut, simply right-click on any button in the Ribbon and choose “Add to Quick Access Toolbar”:

It will then show up in the QAT and you can use the assigned “ALT” key to access it (press “ALT” to see what key is assigned to your new QAT entry).

Multiple Monitor Support

Since Windows seamlessly supports multiple monitors, we do too! This means that you can size the window for Windows Live Movie Maker across two separate monitors to get a nice, large Preview Window along with a large screen to use with the Storyboard:

Time-Lapse Videos

Enthusiasts come in all shapes, sizes, and ages! My kids, ages 11 and 14 love making movies and one of their favorite types of movies is a Time-Lapse. Here you take a lot of photos (either manually or via software that comes with you camera) and load them into Windows Live Movie Maker. Then simply set the photo duration to “.03” seconds for each photo (you can do that quickly by selecting all of the photos at once before changing the duration).

Here’s an example of my son Jade building an airplane from Lego’s. I set my camera up on a tripod and manually shot a picture of him every couple of minutes.

Another example video is posted here

We’re planning on the next wave now, we’ve heard your feedback on network and codec support – we’re looking to add more enthusiast oriented features as well! Please send us your ideas and features you would love to see.

- Mike Morrison, Windows Live Movie Maker Team

By now you’ve already seen how quick and easy it is to make and share a movie using Windows Live Movie Maker.  So instead of showing you how to post a video to an online service, I thought I’d discuss an alternative way of sharing your content using Movie Maker, Windows 7, and Xbox 360.  With so many great web services available to stay in touch and exchange media with friends and family, it’s easy to forget that sometimes the most enjoyable form of consuming your own content is to sit down with the people you care about and flip through an album or watch a home movie on the television.  But how do you get your Windows Live Movie Maker creation up on the big screen?  Well, you could always hook up a PC to your TV or burn a physical DVD, but let’s try something a little more “on-demand” than that.

I’m an avid climber and I love taking photos up in the mountains, but sometimes the grandeur of the scenery is lost when I show people my photos and videos on a laptop screen or share them through a web service. Instead, I’ll put my movie together in Movie Maker and display it on the TV by streaming through my Xbox 360.  This way, when I have friends and family over, we don’t all have to huddle around the computer screen – we can sit back with a snack and share the experience. 

Keep in mind, this post assumes a few things;

1. You’re running Windows 7 on your PC.

2. You have an Xbox.

3. You have a home network set up.

If you’re running Windows Vista, you should be able to accomplish the same result. Click here for information on streaming using Windows Vista. With that said, here’s how I do it on Windows 7.

First, I need to make a movie. I want to put together a slideshow combining photos and short video clips I took during the climb with an awesome soundtrack.  I’ll start in Windows Live Photo Gallery, where I can see all of my content.  I’ll select all of the photos and videos I want to use, click on the ‘Make’ button, then select ‘Make a movie…’ to launch Windows Live Movie Maker.  I’m going to use AutoMovie to quickly compile my content into a polished movie.  Then, I output my movie using our 1080p profile for maximum resolution and maximum viewing experience.  I save the movie to my local hard drive in a folder that is part of my Videos library.  I have this library set up so that its contents can be streamed to other devices on my home network.  Here’s how you can do this:

First, click the start button icon in the lower left of the toolbar. In the Windows 7 Start Menu search box, type “media streaming” as follows:

Launch ‘Media streaming options’ and you’ll see this:

Turn on media streaming, and you’ll get the following options:

Be sure to name your media library, which by default will be the name of your computer.  That’s all there is to it!  You can customize the settings if you like, but as is, anything in your Pictures, Videos, or Music Libraries will be visible to other media-streaming-capable machines on your network, including your Xbox 360.

Now that my movie has been saved and my media streaming options are set up, I turn on my Xbox 360.  Under the ‘My Xbox’ heading, I navigate to my ‘Video Library’ and select it.  At this point, I’m asked to select my source.  My Xbox sees my computer as a source and lists it as an option, so I’ll scroll down and select it.  Once I’ve done that, I can navigate by folder and find the movie I just created.

And that’s it, I can control playback straight through my Xbox and watch the movie with friends right in my family room.  The great thing about this is that you only have to set up media streaming once.  After that, anytime you save a movie on your computer, it will be visible to your Xbox so it’s ready to go whenever you want to watch it on your TV!

On a similar note, since we live in such a digitally connected world, I get my friends asking me to share my movies online so they can watch it again later.  Sharing to YouTube is always a great option, but what if there’s a different online website they regularly visit?  No problem – Windows Live Movie Maker shares the same online publishing platform as Windows Live Photo Gallery, which means developers can write publishing plug-ins to any website or service using our Software Developer Kit (SDK) and whatever SDK is available from that service.  Check out this page for a list of plug-ins that have already been written, and for more information on how to write your own plug-in using our SDK, visit http://dev.live.com/photogallery.  If you’ve written a plug-in, please tell us about it!

Thanks and happy streaming!

- Karthik Anbalagan

Today is a real milestone for people who use Windows Live. Starting today, a select group of SkyDrive customers will be invited to try out a technical preview of the Office Web Apps which are online companions to Excel, Word and PowerPoint, available for free via Windows Live SkyDrive. Over time, as the final version is released, the Office Web Apps will become available to all 500 million+ users of Hotmail, Messenger and other Windows Live services.

While the tech preview doesn’t have all the cool features that will be available in the final offering, it does show off the exciting potential of extending your Office experience to the Web. You can easily access and work with your Office documents from virtually anywhere with an Internet connection.

When those of you participating in the Tech Preview upload or create a new document, you’ll be able to view them much like you do today using the familiar Office toolbars and user interface. The Office Web Apps provide a high-quality experience in terms of both features and fidelity. . And it will be very easy to share your documents in password-protected folders and give permission to whoever you want to have access – just like with any other SkyDrive files.

Personally, I’m excited that, in the final release of the Office Web Apps, I’ll be able to access Office documents from virtually any PC and then be able to share them, show them, edit them, and collaborate on them with people around the globe. I do a lot of presentations so it will be particularly helpful for giving presentations right from Internet Explorer (or Firefox or Safari). Because I’m kind of an Excel geek, I’ll be able to share my spreadsheets in all their glory – with conditional formatting, charts, and more. In the final release, I will also be able to share notes from OneNote in real-time with others.

Over the coming months here are some of things you can expect to be able to do in later versions of the Office Web Apps:

Why are we making Office Web Apps available as part of Windows Live?

We all use a lot of different services online – e-mail, social networks, photo sites, video sites, and so on. In many cases, we use more than one service for very similar purposes, using Facebook, MySpace , StudiVZ, Mixi or many others for social networking; Hotmail, Yahoo!, or Gmail for e-mail; Flickr, SkyDrive, FotoLog, or Photobucket for sharing photos.

That said, there are certain things we really just want one of. I really just want one place for storing contact info, one personal calendar I can share with my family, one primary mail service that also allows me to check all of my e-mail accounts, one place to get updates from all of my social networks, and one place to store, share, and manage my massive and ever-growing collection of photos, documents, music, and videos.

I can get all of that at Windows Live. And now, with the addition of Office Web Apps, I’ll soon be able to go to Windows Live to create, edit, share, and collaborate on Word documents, PowerPoint presentations, OneNote digital notebooks, and Excel spreadsheets –all online regardless of which PC I’m using and whether that PC has Office on it.

I’m super excited about today’s release and the future of Office Web Apps. Over time, we’ll add the OneNote Web App to this experience as well as expand both the functionality and the number of people who get to try out the services.

Today’s a great start on terrific things to come.

If you weren’t one of the folks that received an invitation today, sign up here and we will let you know when you can try it out too.

Stay tuned.

Brian Hall

The Hotmail team has started rolling out updates to improve your Hotmail experience. Most of these are improvements to current features and are meant to make your current Hotmail experience more efficient.

Look for these updates coming to your Hotmail inbox soon: more keyboard shortcuts, a new buddy list for when you sign into your web Messenger from within your Hotmail inbox, improvements to help you pick contacts for your messages, auto-save for your email drafts, and the ability to download all files in a message as a zip file (versus one by one)

In the coming weeks, we will post articles on how to use these updates. Be sure to check them out if you’re interested in learning more about the ever-improving Hotmail experience!

- The Windows Live Hotmail team

Last year, when we updated Windows Live services, we added a broad range of partnerships with leading web companies, to make it simpler for you to share your activities across a number of popular web sites with the people you care about the most.

We know that you have a busy life online, with multiple accounts on separate websites for sharing different things in many different contexts – from blog posts to status updates to photos, and more. That’s why we keep adding more feed and contacts partners to Windows Live – so that you have one place to visit to see what your friends are up to, and one easy way of sharing updates with your network.

Not only does this help simplify your life online, it also opens up the possibility of discovery. By adding these feeds to your profile, you can help your friends discover new things and ideas they hadn’t known, and you will get the same experience by learning about some of the things they decide to share.

In April, we rolled out even more partnerships, including some of the most popular international sites for our customers around the world

Today, we are happy to announce that 23 new feed partners are rolling out in Windows Live this week. New feed partners span a variety of online destinations like blogging sites, music and video sites, photo sites, news sites, reviews sites, portals and social networks, including Blingee, BuddyTV, Goodreads, Hulu, Judy’s Book, MySpace, Newsvine, OleOle, Qik and SlideShare. For a complete list of Windows Live partners, click here.

Adding feeds to your Windows Live Profile is easy. Simply click “Add Web activities” on the left side of your Windows Live Profile page, and select the partner sites you’d like to add. For more detailed instructions on how to add these feeds see our previous blog post.

Also, starting today, you will be able to easily invite friends from AOL Google and Hyves to Windows Live, and vice versa. These contact partners join existing contact partners like Facebook and LinkedIn. By providing you the option to bring in your contacts from different networks, Windows Live makes it simple for you to manage your contact lists from one place by consolidating them on Windows Live. For a quick tutorial on how to share contacts between Windows Live and third party sites, refer to this previous blog post by Rob Dolin.

To get started, visit your Windows Live homepage at http://www.home.live.com

Happy connecting!!

- Windows Live team

The rapid pace of innovation and competition among camera manufacturers has put increasingly impressive technologies into the hands of ever more people. The number of megapixels in consumer-level cameras has gone up, and new features in cameras and software like Windows Live Photo Gallery make it even easier to do creative things like making panoramas with your photos.

In the past, if you tried to upload your beautiful new panoramas to Windows Live Photos in their original size, you couldn’t view them right on the site. Today we’re rolling out a new release of Photos that bumps our limit on photo size up—way up. You are now able to get thumbnails and easily viewable versions of photos all the way up to 25 megapixels – more than enough to accommodate even this panorama:

 
Click for full-size image 

We’ve also taken a magnifying glass to the image quality of photos—in all their various sizes—throughout the site. We wanted to add more “wow” to your pictures, and we think our changes make everything from thumbnails to images viewed in the slideshow look noticeably better.

We’re super excited about those improvements, but we know that if moving through a photo album takes forever, it may not matter how beautiful your photos are. We’ve also put a lot of work into making photo albums faster to browse through—you no longer have to wait for the entire page to refresh when you move between photos. Plus, you can browse through your photos using the left and right arrow keys on your keyboard. You can try it out in this album:

To try out these new, cool features go to Windows Live Photos.

We hope all of these improvements make it even easier and more fun for you to tell your stories and share the exciting moments of your life with your family and friends!

- The Windows Live Photos team

On September 8^th, President Obama announced his Back to School challenge – the “I Am What I Learn” video contest for students. The President is asking students to create videos describing what they can do to improve their education, and the role education will play in fulfilling their dreams.

Let Windows Live help you tell that story. Windows Live Movie Maker is a powerful free video editing application from Microsoft, which is a part of Windows Live Essentials, that can help you quickly create and easily share your videos. Get up and running in minutes using content from the most popular types of cameras, camcorders, and webcams; and be able to share your video across a wide range of media.

The video posted below showcases some of the visual effects you could add to your movie easily by using Movie Maker

We put together a little step-by-step guide to help you create that awesome video!

With a webcam:

1. Most webcams come with software that allows you to capture/record video from your webcam to your computer. Using this software, record your story.

2. Once you capture your story on video using your webcam. Save the file to a folder on your hard drive.

With a camcorder or camera that records video:

1. Set up the camcorder/camera – record your story

2. Plug your camcorder/camera to your computer, import your files to a folder on your hard drive using a free application such as Windows Live Photo Gallery (a part of the same suite of software that Movie Maker is a member of).

Then make your movie!

3. With Movie Maker open, click on the Add Videos and Photos button or click on the Storyboard pane in the application to open up the explorer window. Find your recently captured video and click Open.

4. With the content in your project, you can now easily edit your video:

a. To trim a clip – select the video clip you want to edit, click Video Tools -> Trim Tools -> and use the Trim Bars on either side of the preview bar to find the exact spot in the clip you want to trim to.

b. Add a Transition between clips – select the clip you want to transition to, click Animations in the Ribbon toolbar, preview the animations before you apply them simply by hovering your mouse over the different effects, when you’re ready to apply the effect -> simply click on the animation and it’s added to your content. You can do this for as many or as few pieces of content as you wish.

c. Add a Visual Effect – similar to adding a Transition, select the clip you want to add a visual effect to, click on the Visual Effects tab in the Ribbon toolbar, hover your mouse over the different effects to preview what it would look like when added to your content, then simply click on the transition to add it.

d. Add a soundtrack – With your content organized in your project, you can add a soundtrack simply by clicking on the Music Note in the Ribbon Toolbar under the Home Tab. Once you click on the Music Note, an explorer window will open allowing you to select the music you would like to add. Once you found the song, click open and it is automatically added to your project. From here, you can fine tune the placement of the song (for example, have it start after the dramatic opening of your of your speech, or announce your movie with a rocking soundtrack that fades out as you begin your story). To fine tune the song, start by dragging the song across your content in the Storyboard to where you would like it to start. Just like editing video, you can also split and trim your soundtrack to fit your movie perfectly.

e. Use photos as transitions – a very cool effect to move from video clip to video clip is the use of photos as a transition. When you have two video clips next to each other without a transition, the result can look mediocre – but add a transition between the two and instantly your video looks more professional. Then take it to the next level by getting creative with the transitions used, for example; in a video clip of a speech talking about what you would like to see happen in the near future, use a photo as a symbol and transition to help better tell the story. To add this, simply find the spot in your video where you want to add this photo -> click Video Tools -> Split (which will split your video into two parts at that point) -> then insert the photo at the split either by dragging the photo to that point, or clicking Add Videos and Photos from the Ribbon toolbar and adding it separately. Once inserted, you can change the duration of time that the photo is shown by clicking on the edit tab and selecting an amount of time from the Duration drop down menu. Now add the final touches, adding a transition animation to the photo and the two video clips will really give some polish to your movie. Click on the Animations Tab, select your content – preview the transition animations until you find the one you want to add -> select the animation by clicking on it -> and be sure to do this for each piece of content (you can shortcut this by selecting all [Ctrl+A] or clicking and dragging your mouse over all the content and selecting an animation, this will apply it to all selected content – which is called Batch Editing).

You can follow the guide above, or, better still, you can use the resources posted below. These are links to videos that demo how to use Movie Maker. You will be a pro in no time!

- Introduction to Windows Live Movie Maker

- Create movies easily

- Easily share your movies

We hope you will have fun working on the Obama challenge. Don’t forget to earn some good karma by telling your friends about Movie Maker!

- The Windows Live Team