As we all know, people don’t live their whole online lives on one site or on one network—and with the wide proliferation of services out there, it’s getting harder every day to share all the cool stuff you’re doing with the people you care about. Similarly, it’s easy to feel like you have to check so many different places to see what your friends are up to that in the end, you wind up missing out.

With the new Windows Live, it’s easy for you to choose to share more of what you’re doing with the people you care about. This feature, called “web activities,” lets you share the stuff you do on other websites with the people you add to your network on Windows Live. Updates about your web activities appear not only on your personal profile, but also in the “What’s new” list in other popular areas of Windows Live that your friends may already use every day—like Messenger, Hotmail, and the Toolbar. You can choose which web activities to share, and for each activity, you decide whether to make it visible to everyone (public), just the people in your network, or just the people you choose.

Check out this fun video we made to demonstrate how it works in Windows Live.

Discovering web activities

There’s a variety of ways you might discover web activities for the first time:

What’s new list:  On the home page, on a friend’s profile page, in Messenger, or anywhere else where you see a list of updates called “What’s new,” you will see an update when someone in your network adds a new web activity like Twitter, Yelp, or Wordpress. Just click Add this web activity, and you’ll go right to the page to start sharing the stuff you’re doing on that website with people in your network on Windows Live.

Home page:  On the home page, near the top of the right column, click Add web activities, and you’ll go to the web activities page, where you can choose from the various sites who have partnered with Windows Live. 

Profile page: On your profile page, if you haven’t added any web activities yet, you’ll see a module on the left side encouraging you to add some.  Click Add web activities, and you’ll go to the web activities page, where you can choose from the various partner sites to add.

Adding web activities

When you get to the web activities page, you’ll see a list of web activities to choose from. Windows Live has partnered with lots of different websites so that the people you care about can get updates on the stuff you do on their sites. The list of partner websites varies from one region to another and is continually growing, so keep an eye on this over the coming year if one of your favorite activities isn’t here yet—it may show up in the coming months.

Just click Add to choose the site you’d like to share your activities from….

All you have to do is enter your user name (or however you usually identify yourself to the partner website; for some sites, you’ll have to (securely) provide your password as well), and then click Add. Pretty simple. :)  

Experiencing web activities

Now whenever you do new things on one of the sites you’ve added (like posting a new blog entry on WordPress or reviewing a new restaurant on Yelp), those activities will automatically show up in the list of what’s new with you on Windows Live—just like the activities you might do on Windows Live.

This means that people in your network can see those items on your profile page, as well as in any of the places on Windows Live where they see what’s new with people in their network like the home page, Windows Live Toolbar, Windows Live Messenger, etc.

Web activities displayed on the profile page	Web activities displayed from Windows Live Toolbar	Web activities displayed in Messenger

And of course, clicking on any of your web activities in what’s new links directly to that content on the partner’s site.

A Yelp web activity	A Twitter web activity

Lastly, after you’ve added some web activities, you and your friends can easily get to your content and see what sites you’re sharing from by looking at the module on your profile page.

I hope you enjoy beginning to share your web activities on other sites with your friends and family on Windows Live. And stay tuned for a great, steadily growing list of partners for web activities over the coming year.

-Jeff Kunins, Group Program Manager for Social Networking