As we mentioned, the live.com 8/9 release also included many "under the hood" changes. We've made a lot of improvements that you can't see in order to improve our quality of service for the long run. What does that include?

New gadget host - We've unified the way that gadgets run on Live.com with the way that gadgets run on Windows Live Spaces. This will help make sure that gadgets will run well on both sites, and allow for easier future gadget development.

New web services - We've optimized and cleaned up our entire web services layer. This means that Live.com now "speaks" to our web servers much more efficiently, and will let us make many exciting future improvements ;-)

Better error reporting - The new release includes a improved error reporting system. While we hope you never hit any errors, this system will allow us to respond faster to serious site issues, if they ever pop up :)

Overall, we hope you can tell that the team has been taking your feedback seriously, and is working hard to make live.com your favorite place on the web. Now it's back to work on our next release! Please continue to leave feedback for us here, or email the entire team directly at: livefb-at-microsoft-dot-com. We can't respond to every message, but we read them all (promise).

Last night we released a significant update, some visible improvements and many under the hood.

 

- header improvements

you've probably noticed that our header is now consistent with the look and feel of other properties such as Windows Live Spaces.

 

- improved directory including four new gadgets

based on a lot of feedback from you, our users, we have revamped our directory categories to improve discoverability. We have also added four new gadgets: Today Show Recipes, MSNBC photo stream, Local News and New Media releases ( you can find them under the gadgets folder in 'add stuff')

 

- consistent settings model

again based on a lot of feedback from our users, we how now moved to a consistent 'edit' metaphor for accessing settigns for all gadgets

 

- 3 new markets

live.com is now available in 3 additional markets: Korea, Norway and Mexico!

 

and many other updates.

 

let us know what you think!

 

update: We have encountered some issues with RSS feeds and some gadgets as a results of our rollout. We are actively working on fixes and will be rolling them out soon. Sorry about the inconvenience.