When you first install the Windows Live Toolbar, some of its best features might not be obvious at first glance. The Toolbar team wanted to allow users to decide for themselves how to personalize their toolbars, so before you can use many features you need to turn them on or install them from Options:

One of my favorite hidden features of the toolbar comes pre-installed, but it still isn’t obvious because it doesn’t appear on the toolbar itself: Smart Menus.

Smart Menus help you quickly get more information about specific kinds of text that you come across while browsing the web in Internet Explorer. When you select the text, the Smart Menu button appears:

Try out these Smart Menu tricks.

• Select an address on a website.
  
  • To map the address or get driving directions, click the Map button:
    
  • To get the current weather conditions and a three-day forecast for that location, click the Weather button:
    
• Select a stock symbol.
  
  • To get a stock quote, click the Stock button:
    
• Select any word or phrase.
  
  • To get more information about that word or phrase, such as its definition, click the Info button:
    

If you haven't yet, install the toolbar, try it out, and let us know what you think about Smart Menus!

- Kaarin Shumate
Windows Live Team

As we mentioned a couple weeks ago, the i’m Initiative has really taken off with people, and Messenger customers have now helped raise over $1.4 million as of today for social causes. But that’s not today’s only big news…

Today we announced that we’re expanding the program to include Hotmail too! Now you can use both Hotmail and Messenger to help contribute to the social cause of your choice.  

The Hotmail team just posted more information about it all on their blog. We’re really excited about this news and, judging from the amazing participation we’ve already seen from many of you, we hope you’re excited too.

Curious to know what online enthusiasts have voted the top 100 cool Web 2.0 tools of 2008?  Look no further than the 2008 Webware 100, an annual list from CNET’s Webware, representing the best Web 2.0 sites, services and applications, as nominated and voted on by their readers. Webware is a tech news site that highlights useful Web tools and the latest online trends.

Each year, readers nominate outstanding companies whose services best fit into ten categories. After collecting all the nominations (over 5,000 this year!), Webware editors narrow the list to 300 and invite readers to vote for the best companies.

After receiving 1.9 million votes this year, Webware announced the ten companies that won in each category. Windows Live services and Live Search were recognized in three categories:

• Communication: Windows Live Hotmail and Windows Live Messenger
• Browsing: Windows Live Home
• Search and Reference: Live Search

This year’s award recognition helps to showcase how Windows Live innovations on the web continue to shape and change the way people communicate, share data, and find information online. Webware reviewer Rafe Needleman spearheads the Webware 100 awards competition. You can see all the winners in one place, here.

This year continues a positive trend, as Microsoft also received similar Webware 100 awards in 2007.

Wow. The Windows Live Messenger team just posted on their blog about the progress of the i’m initiative in its first year in the US and, I’ve got to say, the widespread support for this program has been really amazing. In case you aren’t already familiar with it, the i’m initiative uses Messenger to help you support some great social causes. Once you sign up for the i'm initiative, every time you participate in an "i’m" conversation using Messenger, Microsoft shares a portion of the program’s advertising revenue with one of ten social cause organizations of your choice.

Actually, I probably don’t need to tell a lot of you that… so many of you have already joined the program and are i'm-ing away. Thanks to your overwhelming participation, Microsoft has already been able to donate a total of $1.3 million to ten of the world’s most effective organizations dedicated to social causes – and that’s just the beginning. 

Some of you responded to our post last week about the INSPI(RED) team that you’re also interested in social causes that can have an impact within the US.  Regardless of whether your interests are local or global, you should really check out the i’m initiative, as there is a wide array of causes involved. 

You can read more about it on the Messenger Says blog, including links to all the organizations involved. I've been taking part in the i’m initiative for awhile now already, and clearly you have too. Together, we're really helping make a difference for these organizations, just by talking to each other. Let’s keep it going.

Thanks, as always, for your comments.  We love hearing from you.

-Antonia

What do Windows Live, MSN, and Mt. Everest have to do with fighting AIDS?

Thanks to Jeff Dossett, Executive Producer and General Manager at MSN, a lot. Jeff has created Everest Team INSPI(RED), a group of three elite mountaineers who will attempt to reach the summit of Mt. Everest and in the process inspire change.

Jeff and his fellow Team INSPI(RED) members will face the greatest climbing challenge in the world in hopes of building awareness about PRODUCT(RED)—a business model designed to raise money for The Global Fund to fight AIDS in Africa—and inspiring individuals to pursue big, bold goals with passion.

Check out the official Team INSPI(RED) space on Windows Live to follow the journey, download the (PRODUCT)RED theme pack (which includes Hotmail signatures and Messenger emoticons and winks), and find out more about the (RED) effort. 

We hope you‘re as inspired by this cause as we are.

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

Your feedback = Changes to Windows Live Spaces

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

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

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

- Chris
Product Manager, Windows Live

Technorati Tags: Windows Live Spaces,Windows Live

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

Introducing the new FolderShare!

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

Today we're unveiling:

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

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

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

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

- The FolderShare Team

Ellie posted a great set of tips on the Hotmail blog today, about how to avoid scams from people who claim to be contacting you from Hotmail or Microsoft. She lets you know what sort of fake e-mail messages to look out for, and what to do when you get one.

Read the e-mail support blog for more info about malicious mail and websites that ask you for your Hotmail account name and password (or personal or financial information). Bottom line: Don't do it!! If it seems suspicious, it probably is. If you're not sure, send a description of the suspicious e-mail (subject line, who it is from, etc.) to Hotmail support.

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

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

Improvements to Windows Live SkyDrive, including 5 GB of free online storage, were released to the public today in 38 countries or regions around the world!

SkyDrive provides free, password-protected online file storage and sharing. It's a great way to make sure your files are available to you from any computer, without having to carry them around on a flash drive. I also find it really useful for sharing files that may be too big to send in e-mail.

It's dead simple to use, so go ahead and try it out.

New in this release:

• Free online storage is increasing from 1GB to 5 GB
• Now available in many more places around the world (see if it's available where you live)
• Faster and more reliable service
• Not in beta anymore--this time it's official!

SkyDrive takes its place in the ever-growing collection of Windows Live offerings (Hotmail, Mail, Photo Gallery, Calendar, Spaces, Writer, Messenger, Events, Toolbar, and OneCare Family Safety). With file storage and sharing on SkyDrive, you have one more tool to help you manage your online world.

Read more about today's release and tell the team what you think on the SkyDrive team blog.

Have fun!

- Antonia

If you use Messenger and haven't yet upgraded to Messenger 8.5 (the latest version that we released in November 2007), you will soon be prompted to install the optional upgrade. Read more about the gradual rollout of this upgrade in Jura's post on the Messenger blog.

You can read more about what's included in this update in Nicole's blog post (about the beta version of 8.5), or see the full list of features on the Messenger features page.

To upgrade now, go to http://get.live.com/messenger/overview. 

Our friends at MSN Movies just posted a new Academy Awards 2008 page on Windows Live Spaces, with photos, videos, news, and other fun stuff about the Oscars.

Hosting an Oscar event yourself? Use our Windows Live Events Oscar invitation for your own party. When you use this template, you automatically get a ready-made Oscars 2008 website on Windows Live Events, with links to movie trivia, a place for your friends to RSVP, a discussion board, and places to post photos of your party later. And of course, you can customize your event further by  adding links to your own favorite moviestar fan sites, polls, or whatever.

- Antonia

I know it's almost mid-January already (wow!), but Happy New Year, and welcome back to Windows Live Wire! You may have noticed the new set of links to our blog from Windows Live Home. I'm guessing it may bring in a few new blog readers, and you may be one of them. 

So, let me re-introduce myself. I'm Antonia, an editor on the Windows Live team, and one of several bloggers you'll see in this space. We all work at Microsoft on a variety of Windows Live products as writers, editors, designers, planners, developers, and managers.

We use this space to give you the inside scoop on some of our favorite things about Windows Live products, tips and tricks, solutions to problems that may come up (but we hope not too often), and new stuff for you to check out.

If you're new to Windows Live and not sure what it's all about, check out this Windows Live overview that my friend Kirsten put together.

More blogs you may want to check out

Visit these other Windows Live team blogs to learn more about specific services. Like Windows Live Wire, all these blogs give you direct access to the people who plan, design, and build your Windows Live services.

• Hotmail blog 
• Mail (desktop) blog
• E-mail support blog
• Spaces blog
• Messenger blog
• Photo Gallery blog
• Writer blog
• SkyDrive blog
• Live Search blog
• Live Search Maps blog
• Gallery (gadgets and personalization) blog
• OneCare blog
• Family Safety from OneCare blog

Let us know what you like—and don't like—about Windows Live, and what else you'd like to see in the future!

All the best in 2008,

Antonia Blume
Editor, Windows Live

A few days ago, we told you about how Windows Live Hotmail was created. Today, we’ll respond to some of the top issues we’ve heard about from our customers.

1. Why did you move me from MSN to Windows Live Hotmail when nothing was wrong?

Unfortunately, MSN Hotmail did not allow us to address significant customer needs, such as support for certain languages and accessibility for folks with different visual and motor disabilities. We also got complaints from many customers about MSN Hotmail being too hard to use. We spent a long time building a new version of Hotmail that the majority of our customers like better, and we want to focus our engineering team’s efforts on the new system. It is a bit of a change, but Windows Live Hotmail has a lot of the same functionality as MSN Hotmail. Before we started working on Windows Live Hotmail, we used to update MSN Hotmail a lot, so it would change, too. If you liked MSN Hotmail, you may prefer the classic version of Windows Live Hotmail. Make sure you’re using it by going to Options (or Options --> More options from the full version). Look at the first option on the page to see if you’re currently using the full or classic version.

2. Windows Live Hotmail pages take too long to load. Can you fix this?

Thanks for reporting this, and this is a high priority for us to fix. If you have a slower Internet connection, you may do better by switching to the classic version of Windows Live Hotmail, which loads about as fast as MSN  Hotmail did. The full version is fast once it’s fully loaded, but you do have to download a good chunk of JavaScript at the beginning, and this may be tough for folks who have slow Internet connections or live far from our data centers. Make sure you’re using the classic version by going to Options (or Options --> More options from the full version). Look at the first option on the page to see if you’re in the full or classic version.

3. When I don’t use Internet Explorer, Windows Live Hotmail doesn’t work very well, especially in Safari.

We added support for browsers other than Internet Explorer (IE) in 2005, and the non-IE browser we support best is Firefox 1.5+. It’s available for practically every operating system out there, so if you can’t use IE or don’t like it, try Firefox because it works well with a wide range of websites. We currently do not support the full version for Safari due to technical limitations, though we continue to monitor the issue. Safari users can use the classic version of Hotmail for now, and we are monitoring whether future versions of Safari will support all of our technical needs.

As far as I know, there are only four features that IE supports but Firefox doesn’t. Firefox users get Firefox’s built-in spell check while IE users get a spell check that stores its dictionary on Hotmail’s servers. Firefox users can’t resize the columns in the full version. The special photo upload tool is an ActiveX control and works only in IE, but non-IE users can attach photos just like any other file. Only IE users can see their friends’ Messenger presence.

4. I don't want an e-mail program that looks like Outlook; the interface of the new Hotmail is too complicated.

The classic version of Windows Live Hotmail looks and acts very similar to MSN Hotmail. If you preferred that simpler interface, make sure you’re using the classic version by going to Options (or Options --> More options from the full version). Look at the first option on the page to see if you’re in the full or classic version.

5. Why can I do some things in the full version of Hotmail that I can't do in the classic version?

The full version uses AJAX, which is a more advanced technology that provides you with a lot of rich and snappy interactions, such as loading the next message in your inbox without reloading the whole page. Some features, such as the reading pane, wouldn’t work well if the whole webpage had to reload, so they are available in the full version only.

6. Help! I've lost everything in my inbox!

We’re very sad whenever we hear this from a customer, because we know how important your e-mail data is. Our support team has done a lot of investigation into these issues, and nearly every case is due to account expiration.

Free Hotmail accounts expire if you haven’t logged into Hotmail for a certain number of days, which is a standard practice for web-based mail accounts because many users use an account for a little while, and then never use it again. MSN Hotmail accounts expire after 60 days, and Windows Live Hotmail accounts expire after 120 days. Advances in our data center have allowed us to extend our expiration times, which used to be 30 days.

If you believe your e-mail was deleted in error, please contact the Hotmail Support Team directly. We are not able to offer effective support through blogs. The email address is emailspt@microsoft.com and set the subject to “Data Loss Question.” There are great, real-life people there who can help you. They are the same folks who bring you the E-mail Support Space.

Thanks for your patience and feedback so far.

By the way, the best way to give us feedback is not on this blog, it’s via this feedback site.

- Ellie Powers, program manager, Windows Live Hotmail

P.S. This blog entry has also been published on the Hotmail team blog. You’ll find lots more info about Hotmail over there.

Hi, I’m Ellie, and I’m a program manager on the Windows Live Hotmail team. A lot of you have had comments and questions about how and why we decided to make all the changes that we did in going from MSN Hotmail to Windows Live Hotmail, so I thought I’d provide a little background for you.

The Hotmail team started working on Windows Live Hotmail back in 2004, with the goal of making web-based e-mail easier, faster, and safer. Our MSN Hotmail code base was also getting pretty rickety, so we wanted to start over from scratch to create a new code base that would be easier to maintain and develop on. When we started thinking about what belongs in the new Hotmail, we focused on the core features of e-mail and analyzed how e-mail fits into the lives of our hundreds of millions of customers around the world.

It’s not possible to build something perfect the first time (or maybe not even the 10th time), so we decided to start gathering your feedback early. We launched our public beta in the spring/summer of 2005. Customer feedback was such a high priority for us that we started our public beta when we still hadn’t added all the features we knew we’d need.

Some of you out there in blogland are the beta testers who devoted so much of your time and energy to trying new releases and submitting feedback. With each release, we identified the biggest problems by looking at customer feedback and surveys from the previous release, fixed bugs and designed new features to address the top issues, and then used usability studies to tweak our initial designs. What comes next? Yup, more beta testing and another survey to see how much better the new release was compared with the old one. You can read all about Hotmail’s adventures in betaland on our Hotmail team blog.

We did these iterations for about two years, until May 2007, when our data showed that Windows Live Hotmail was good enough to get out of beta. We did another release in the fall of 2007 that we have been moving our MSN Hotmail users to. We are eternally grateful to everyone who has taken the time to give constructive feedback. You have influenced what we built and which order we built the parts in. Windows Live Hotmail in 2007 is so much better than it was two years ago. And we are not done yet! Hotmail will continue to evolve for years to come – we have some really cool ideas for the next year that we’re just starting to plan.

With that said, Windows Live Hotmail is not perfect, and we are still planning to make changes. Change can be hard, especially when it’s not a change that you, personally, may have asked for. We did get feedback from thousands of customers, but it’s tough to make something that makes everyone happy.

In a few days, we’ll follow up with answers to some of the most common questions we’ve heard from our customers about Windows Live Hotmail.

You can post a comment on this blog if you like, but the best way to give us feedback is on this feedback site.

- Ellie Powers, program manager, Windows Live Hotmail

P.S. This blog entry has also been published on the Hotmail team blog.

Personally, I’ve never been a big fan of toolbars and other browser add-ins. But I’ve just come across a feature that makes the Windows Live Toolbar really, really useful: the Windows Live Translator button.

When you add this button to your Windows Live Toolbar, you can instantly translate almost any foreign-language webpage on the Internet. I love international travel and have dabbled in a few foreign languages (with varying degrees of success). Having an instant translator on my toolbar means I can expand my armchair travel to foreign language websites, and check out local information on all the places I plan to travel next.

The translator button is a spin-off of the Windows Live Translator beta website. On the website, you choose the languages you want to translate from and to, type in a few words, and it provides instant machine translation. Or, type in a web address, and it translates the whole page for you.

Because this is machine translation, it gives you a somewhat literal translation, which, I’ll admit, is far from perfect (hey, folks, this is still a beta). It doesn’t deal very well with complex sentences, and it REALLY can’t handle anything idiomatic, so it sometimes comes up with some, shall we say, interesting sounding sentences, (which personally, I find hilarious). But humor aside, it’s usually close enough to give you the gist of what any given sentence is about. It’s especially useful if you know a bit of a language, but need help with a word or two here and there.

Instant gratification

But to really take advantage of the services offered on the Translator website, I highly recommend adding the Translator button to your toolbar. Then, when you’re surfing through a foreign language website and come to a phrase you don’t understand, just click the button for an instant translation.

You can choose from 4 different views of the translated page: side by side, top over bottom, original with translation on hover, or translation with original on hover (the icons for each view are shown here, with the third choice, translation on hover, selected).

For a language I know pretty well (like French), I prefer the translate-on-hover view. I can still read the page in the original language, but when I get stuck, I just move my mouse over the sentence in question, et voilá! The translation appears.

For a language that I need a lot more help on (like Chinese), the side-by-side view is more useful.

Here’s how to get the Translator button:

1. If you don’t have it yet, install Windows Live Toolbar.
2. Close and re-open Internet Explorer to see the new toolbar in place.
3. Get the Translator button from Windows Live Gallery.
4. Close and re-open Internet Explorer again.
5. Set your default language pair by clicking the arrow next to the Translator button.
   

There are 25 language pairs to choose from in the Translator beta, mostly English paired with other languages (but French <-> German is also included). Additional language pairs will be added once this service comes out of beta.

Have fun, and let me know what you think!

Antonia Blume
Editor, Windows Live

I’ve been blogging on Windows Live Spaces for a while now, and life has been good. But I knew that by getting a fresher, shorter Windows Live ID, life could be even better. And now it is—12 keystrokes better every time I sign in. But while I did want to lose those keystrokes, I didn't want to lose the space I was slowly (very slowly) building with the old ID.

In a previous post, Kaarin explained how to move your photos from your old space to a new one, which worked out great for me. But I also had a few blog entries to migrate over. Thankfully, Windows Live Writer makes this step relatively easy, too.

Here's the skinny: Use Writer to download all of your posts from your old blog (on Windows Live Spaces or on another blogging service), and then upload them to your new blog (again, it doesn’t have to be on Spaces, but we recommend it!). That's pretty much it.

Get posts from your old blog

1. If you don't already have it (but of course you do!), install Windows Live Writer.
2. Add your old blog to Writer, either during setup, or by clicking Add Weblog Account on the Weblog menu.
3. To find the posts from your old blog, click More… under the Recently Posted list in the right-hand pane.
    
4. Click the name of your blog in the left pane. (You may need to click the Refresh Posts button if your blog has changed a lot recently.)
   

Add them to your new blog

1. Add your new blog to Writer, by (you guessed it) clicking Add Weblog Account on the Weblog menu.
2. Prepare to publish your old posts to your new blog by clicking More… under the Recently Posted list.
3. For each post that you want to migrate, double-click it in the list to open it.
4. At the bottom of the open blog post, select a category (you'll need to add your custom categories to the list), and then set the publish date to whatever it was on your old blog.
5. With the post from your old blog still open, point Writer at your new blog by clicking its name on the Weblog menu.
   
6. Then click Publish to add the old post to the new blog.

That's it. Some might say the physical actions required to migrate one's blog are so subtle that one could complete the task during the course of a routine meeting. Not that I would know anything about that.

Oh, by the way, the comments people have left won't follow your posts to their new home, so you’ll be making a fresh start in that sense. If you’ve formed a deep emotional attachment to the old comments, you may want to keep your old blog online and add a link to it in a custom module, as suggested at the end of Kaarin's post.

Happy blogging!

Lisa Andrews
Windows Live editor
http://perro-gordo.spaces.live.com/

If you live in India, the Philippines, or Spain, new Windows Live Hotmail addresses have just become available.

• India: You can now get @live.in e-mail addresses, in addition to @hotmail.com addresses.
• The Philippines: You can now get @live.com.ph e-mail addresses, in addition to @hotmail.com addresses.
• Spain: You can now get @hotmail.es addresses, in addition to @hotmail.com addresses.

To sign up for a free new Windows Live e-mail address , go here.

Through your feedback, we’ve learned that many of you have more than one Windows Live ID. You may use different IDs for different online identities (if, for example, you have a couple different blogs), for different activities (one for sharing photos with your family on Spaces, and one for sharing documents with co-workers on SkyDrive), or for different groups of friends (your family, your friends, your professional contacts).

To make it easier to switch between these different identities, we recently introduced linked IDs. You can now link up to four Windows Live accounts together, and switch between them without a password.

What you get with linked IDs

• Sign in once to access all your accounts. Once you've signed in to one account, you can instantly switch between all your linked accounts.
• No need to sign out, no need to enter another e-mail address and password. Just click your name in the sign-in area in the upper-right corner, and then click the ID you want to switch to.
• Easier switching between accounts from anywhere within Windows Live—Hotmail, Spaces, SkyDrive, whatever you use most.
• Easier management of multiple identities that you use for different purposes or with different groups.

How to link an ID

You can easily add or remove linked IDs by going to Windows Live Account (https://account.live.com), or by using the link in the sign-in area on any Windows Live webpage.

To link a Windows Live ID from any Windows Live page:

1. Sign in.
2. Click your sign-in name in the upper-right corner, and in the drop-down menu, click Link other accounts.
   
    
3. One the resulting page, enter:
   1. The password of the account you’re already signed into
   2. The Windows Live ID you want to link
   3. The password of your soon-to-be linked account
4. Click Link.

Change your mind?

You can easily unlink an account, without deleting or closing it.

1. Sign in.
2. In the sign-in area, click View your account.
   
3. On the account summary page, click Manage your linked IDs.
   
4. On the Manage Linked IDs page, click Unlink next to the account you want to remove.