Windows Live
Alex beat me to it, so you can read his quick summary for something about software and services. What you’ll be getting here is the Richard™ version of it. Without further ado…
So just under a month ago, I let all you faithful readers (Alex, Alice, Charing, Scott… you know who you are) know that Windows Live, the team Alex and I work on, released the beta for the upcoming update. Little did you know that there was an entire web suite being tested internally to go along with the client suite that was being tested publicly. And now that the curtain has been lifted, I can talk about what my team has been chugging away at for the past year.
Windows Live Home

Your launchpad into your realm of the Windows Live Social Networking (SN) experience. It has a What’s New feed that will show you all the activity your friends have been up to. It plugs into your Hotmail and pulls in content from some RSS feeds just to keep you up-to-date. Now it isn’t a fully featured RSS aggregator like Netvibes, but then again, Netvibes isn’t a social networking experience (well it somewhat tries to be…). You can also add photos to your Home page and it’ll cycle through them just like a digital photo album. It’s a nice, subtle addition that really makes it feel like home. Kool-Aid, anyone?
Windows Live Profile

What’s cooler though is your Profile where people will come and see what you’ve been up to. If the Home page What’s New feed shows you what everyone is up to, your What’s New feed will let others know what you’ve been up to. One of the coolest syncing aspects is the level of synchronization that’s built into Windows Live. When you change your Windows Live Messenger status message, it will automatically sync to the status message of your Windows Live Profile, and vice versa! I guess that’s the software and services that Alex was mentioning. So just to let you know that when the Windows Live web suite launches, if you don’t have anything interesting to say, then your What’s New feed will read something like - “@work”, “dinner”, “sleeping”. I’m looking at you, Tony.
Windows Live Photo and Windows Live SkyDrive
SkyDrive has been bumped to 25GB, which is an incredible amount of free Internet space, considering that we used to be running our websites off of paid accounts offering you a whole 10MB! With this increase in size, I think I may just have to start backing up all my RAW files on there.
What’s even cooler is that Microsoft and Windows Live gives you the control of your content. When you upload photos using the photo upload tool, you’re just uploading them to your SkyDrive account. You can upload full-resolution pictures and then just use the Photo module to view your pictures. Think of it as a nice UI skin stretched over your online storage. Much nicer than Facebook’s totalitarian strategy.
As for Windows Live, there’s much, much more. For more information you can skim through the Windows Live Wire post, or The Space Craft post, or the multitude of other links in Alex’s post.
What I’d like to discuss now is what many of you may be thinking. No, what many of you are thinking. Why is Microsoft just copying Facebook? Well they aren’t. Believe it or not, Windows Live is now going on its third major release and they’ve been going strong since 2005, only a year after Facebook was first founded (and when they weren’t necessarily super popular yet). They’re no strangers to social networking. And really, how many ways can you accomplish the basics? A page that shows you all your details with maybe a display picture. And what about a wall guestbook where people can leave you messages? And that What’s New feed? It’s been around since at least the second version (which is what’s online right now). And think really far back, people were bitching and moaning about how stalkerish the Facebook newsfeed was. Now it seems you can’t live without it.
I’ve talked at length about the difference between Facebook and Flickr before, so I’m not just advocating on Microsoft’s behalf because I work for them. But let’s take a look at this argument again, but this time throwing in Windows Live.
Facebook has this totalitarian view of the web, similar to Apple - it’s my way or the highway. I still don’t understand why people go back to put their photos on Facebook when it resizes them, shifts the colours, and locks them in there forever. You never really share photos because they’re only 604px across, so they’re too small to print or even view at full screen. You never want to keep a copy too because it’s too difficult to download each and everyone of those photos!
Flickr takes a slightly better approach. They’ll let you upload as many full-resolution pictures as you want (for $24.95 a year) and you can let other people download those too, but again, it’s difficult because you have to go through each and every photo to download.
Windows Live gives you the flexibility and storage options all for free! You can share full-resolution pictures from your latest 14MP camera if you want and download them easily because the backend is exposed to you and it’s just an online file store. Even at 7MB a picture, you can fit over 3,600 photos on there! More information pending my reviewing of what I can disclose. Windows Live gives you the control of what you want to do with your pictures. When you upload them to SkyDrive, you still have complete access to it, with all its permissions and everything. Can Facebook or Flickr really boast those?
I will continue to use Flickr because of the community aspect, but Facebook? I’ve already loathed Facebook for that, and expect links from social events to start showing up on Windows Live Photo.
Um… it’s late, so don’t be surprised if what I rambled on gets edited tomorrow morning… Note to self: start blogging earlier.
November 13th, 2008




