Windows Live
Earning your loyalty…one search at a time
From cashback to Live Search club we’ve been building programs to help increase engagement, usage, and loyalty. Today we’re expanding our efforts with the release of SearchPerks!, a new program designed to reward consumers with cool prizes — like frequent flyer miles, Xbox games, and music downloads — just for using Live Search.
To participate, visit http://www.getsearchperks.com/ and download the Perk Counter, a small download that appears as a toolbar in Internet Explorer. The Perk Counter keeps count of your searches using Live Search and awards "tickets" that you can redeem for prizes at the end of the promotion. We award 500 bonus tickets just for downloading and installing the Perk Counter. You’ll also earn an additional ticket for each of your queries on Live Search (up to 25 tickets per day).
You can accumulate tickets from the start of SearchPerks! today until the promotion ends on April 15, 2009. Registration will be open through the end of the calendar year.
Source- Live Search Blog
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Hotmail update coming soon
It’s late September already, and time for that inevitable question: what did you do on your summer vacation? Well, this summer, the Hotmail team and I were hard at work on a new version of Hotmail, and we’re super excited to start rolling it out to you very soon.
Here’s a sneak peak at some of the changes.
- A great new look – We’ve done a little remodeling, and we think Hotmail looks much, much nicer and is easier to use. We did a lot of testing around the world to see what people liked and didn’t like. We’re really excited about the final results, and we hope you like it too! There’s also a whole new set of vibrant themes that replace our old color schemes.
- Classic & Full, together at last! – Our clever developers figured out how to take the performance of the Classic version of Hotmail, and combine it with features of the Full version, in a single experience. Now everyone gets the same features. You don’t have to trade off speed for functionality or decide which version is better for you. If you have been using the Full version, you’ll see much faster page load times, and if you have been using Classic, you now get to use the reading pane, drag & drop, and other features formerly limited to the Full version.
- A contact list that’s more than just contacts – Our contact list is now much more useful. Besides a new layout and improved look, we added features that are both fun and time-saving.
- Fun - If your Messenger contacts have a display picture, that picture will appear in your list.
- Time-saving - When you view a contact, you can see recent e-mail they’ve sent you, send them a message from right in the contact page, and view items from across Windows Live that you’ve shared together.
- Now THAT’s something to write home about! – We completely redesigned the experience of composing a new message. We have brand new auto-complete functionality for e-mail addresses, and a new contact picker that even detects commonly misspelled addresses. There is a new way to attach files and a new spell-checker that we think are much easier to use (especially if you were using Classic – no need to go to a new page to attach files anymore!). The text editor is completely rewritten, and we fixed a bunch of bugs – right-click now works!
- Updated Calendar beta – If you aren’t using the Calendar beta yet, now’s a great time to try it. Calendar sharing, an automatically generated birthday calendar for people in your contact list, a holiday calendar, iCal subscriptions to public calendars, to-do lists, and much, much more await you. Go to http://calendar.live.com, or go to Hotmail and click Calendar under “Related places” to sign up.
There is more to this release that I haven’t yet mentioned, including greater speed and more powerful spam fighting, and even more improvements coming soon (but I’ll save those for a later post that my boss is going to do.)
If you haven’t used your Hotmail account in a while, check out the changes at http://mail.live.com. You can also sign up for a new account from there.
Source- Windows Live Wire Blog
Social Bookmarking Plugin for Windows Live Writer
Here is another version of my Social Bookmark Plug-in for Windows Live Writer. Based on the previous feedback I have changed a few things. The script errors that used to come in WLW due to the embedded scripts won’t bother you anymore. Besides, there are 4 more book marking sites incorporated, namely…
Microsoft Social
Microsoft Expression
Microsoft MSDN
Microsoft Technet
Install the plug-in from…
Once done click on Insert -> Bookmarking Tags (Ensure that your WLW is running as an Administrator!)
Select the book-marking sites that you prefer and click on Save My Favorite…
Click on Done
Try hovering on the icons above…
And when you click on it, it would automatically take you to the Bookmarking site and fill up the details…
Source- .net scraps
Live Searches Drop Below 1 Billion
August U.S. search share data shows ugly declines for Microsoft in 2008.
The month’s data, released today by ComScore, is but a snapshot of a longer trend. I went back to the historical data, which shows how big Google gains are compared to Microsoft losses.
Microsoft’s share of U.S. searches dropped 4 points, to 8.3 percent, between July 2007 and August 2008. During the same time period, Google gained 7 points, to 63 percent search share. For Microsoft, the heavier blow will be psychological. In August, its number of searches dropped below 1 billion, approaching the dregs occupied by Ask and AOL.
U.S. Internet users conducted 11.7 billion searches in August, 7.4 billion through Google. But, when including YouTube, Google searches top 10 billion.
The numbers should greatly disappoint Microsoft product managers, particularly considering how much improved Windows Live Search is. I now tend to use Live Search alongside—and sometimes instead of—Google. Live Search typically delivers different results and often better ones. But better often doesn’t win the market, otherwise DVDs would have replaced Betamax not VHS, and Netscape Communicator would have bested Internet Explorer 4 a decade ago.
Source- Microsoft Watch
Windows Live for Mobile Beta
Its Windows Live Betas time!
Among the various Betas avaliable there is also a new homepage for Windows Live for Mobile:
- New mobile homepage, which provides our users one place to go to get an overview of what is new in Windows Live for them, e.g. unread email, what’s new feed and ability to update personal message.
To access from your mobile device insert the following link: http://www.live.mobile.com
Source- MSMVP’s Blog
Windows Live Calendar Beta: To Dos and more coming soon
Our team is about to release another great set of functionality to the Windows Live Calendar Beta service. Once again, the team has listened to feedback from our customers to deliver more cool stuff. We’re excited to get your feedback after we release. This update will include the following new functionality:
- To Dos: Now you can manage personal and shared task lists with our new To Do functionality.
- Design and Usability Enhancements: A lighter weight user interface allows your calendar data shine through. You now have the ability to select from a variety of themes to personalize the look of your calendars. We’ve added a unified header that integrates with the other Windows Live services. And, a fly-out footer now gives you additional vertical space to show your events.
- Support for the Calendar in the Windows Live Mail beta: This free desktop client allows you to manage your mail, calendar and contacts online or offline in an easy-to-use desktop client. Download Windows Live Mail beta and the rest of the new beta client solutions today: http://download.live.com!
More news coming in a few weeks about additional languages for a host of new markets!
Okay, back to work now. We’ve got even more cool stuff planned for the future. Stay tuned….
Windows Live Calendar Beta will be upgraded September 18
The Windows Live Calendar Beta service will be upgraded on Thursday, Sept 18. The service is expected to be unavailable for a few hours starting around 3 PM Pacific time. Your data is safe and will be available to you after the upgrade.
We hope you’ll like the new features you’ll see in the Windows Live Calendar Beta. We’ll say more about new features after the upgrade is complete!
Source- Windows Live Mail Blog
Powerset’s First Live Search projects
Powerset officially became a part of Microsoft a little over a month ago, and Live Search has been hard at work collaborating with Powerset on several quick projects designed to be ready for testing within 30 days. These projects encouraged early collaboration between our two teams, as well as sharing of respective technologies.
Our first joint project was to expand the coverage of Live Search Answers. Today, many topical queries such as such as musicians, albums, and films don’t show Answers. So for this experiment, we selected some of these categories and used Freebase to return a topic summary with links, similar to the Freebase Answers in Powerset
Our second project was to use Powerset’s semantic technology to generate improved captions for Wikipedia articles. Because Wikipedia articles show up in a large percentage of Live Search queries, it’s important that the captions are top notch.
For our third project, we used Powerset’s Factz extraction to generate a list of related searches for a set of queries
For more details about these projects, including how Powerset is starting to incorporate Live Search technology into their site, see the Powerset blog.
All of these projects are currently being tested on a small, randomly selected audience, so watch out — you may see one! And stay tuned for more announcements from Powerset and Live Search.
Source- Live Search Blog
