My.live.com blog: Blog

Reminder about our URL change to http://My.Live.com

Thu, 25 Sep 2008 17:56:36 GMT

Just a quick reminder that our URL has changed to http://my.live.com. The link to the personalized page from www.live.com was removed last month. Your customized pages are still there, but you may need to update your bookmarks or homepage settings to point to http://my.live.com.

- The My.Live.com Team

Reminder about My.Live.com Suggestions and Feedback Forum

Thu, 14 Aug 2008 00:20:29 GMT

In case you missed it in our last update, we have created a new "My.Live.com Suggestions and Feedback Forum" over in the Forums Community on Microsoft.com. You can access the forum at http://forums.community.microsoft.com/en/MyLiveCom/threads/

Check out what others are saying about the recent updates to My.Live.com, tell us your own opinions, ask questions of our developers, and report problems directly to the team. We've gotten a lot of great feedback and welcome more!

- The My.Live.com Team

Important Update to My.Live.com

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 22:03:43 GMT

Exciting news today as we're pleased to annouce the release of an important update to the My.Live.com personalized pages! The biggest change that everyone will notice is the new header, along with some slight usability changes, other improvements based on user feedback, support for both IE 8.0 and FireFox 3.0, and corrections to a handful of bug. Overall, we took time out of upcoming project to address a total of 74 changes and bug fixes.

Header Change

The new header provides a cleaner, more streamlined look to the page, along with links to Hotmail, Spaces, OneCare, and other MSN services, all from your My.Live.com homepage.

Additional Windows Live services are available by clicking on the Windows Live jewel:

Usability Improvements
Based on usability studies and feedback from you, we've added a confirmation prompt to prevent accidental deletions of gadgets and feeds, renamed "Add Stuff" to "Add Content" and increased the visibility of the link, changed "Edit" to "Customize" in the gadget chrome and added more space between the Customize link and the delete gadget "X" icon.

Delete Confirmation:

Usability improvements to the gadget chrome:

IE 8.0 and FireFox 3.0 Support
My.Live.com now supports the Beta for IE 8.0 and the final version of FF 3.0. Users will now be able to access their pages and feeds using these browsers.

Add Content Directory Updates
Check out the Add Content directory for new feeds and gadgets. The updates are part of our on-going effort to ensure quality content, provide better organization, eliminate dead feeds and redundancies.

New items include the full line-up of content from Xbox.com, selections from Office Online, MSN Video, WeatherBug, and more!

Minor Bugs and Glitches Fixed
As part of our switch to My.Live.com, embarrassingly, we forgot to change some of the wording on the site to reflect our new name! That's been fixed, along with some minor quarks and hiccups that have been reported.

Suggestions and Feedback Forum
Because you asked for it, we've created a My.Live.com Suggestions and Feedback forum on Microsoft.com Forums. This forum will provide users with a way to interact with our development team by telling us what you think, ask questions, and provide your suggestions for what you think will make My.Live.com better. Access the forum at http://forums.community.microsoft.com/en/MyLiveCom/threads/.

What's Next?
We'll start planning for our next update to My.Live.com, aiming for a minor update in the Fall. Right now, most of our time is being devoted to another project that we'll have more information about in the coming months. Until then, we hope you like the changes, and look forward to reading your feedback in our new forum.

- The My.Live.com Team

Turning off comments for a few days

Mon, 19 May 2008 21:25:45 GMT

Since we began to dust off the blog we've been inundated with spam messages in the comments section. Over the last week we've deleted at least a few hundred spam comments. We've gotten most of them but it seems like every day more and more just pop up.

We're going to continue with the clean up for a few more days but to give us time and a chance to recover from the task, we'll be turning off comments for at least a couple days.

We love hearing your feedback, but spending an hour or two a day cleaning up junk messages isn't our idea of time well spent.

Thanks for your understanding,

- The My.Live.com Team

We have a new URL: http://My.Live.com!

Wed, 14 May 2008 20:34:12 GMT

We have a new URL! You can now access your Live.com personalized page by signing in with your Windows Live ID at http://my.live.com.

Visit http://my.live.com today to view your personalized page and make our new URL your Homepage or add to your Favorites.

Updated Directory

While you are on your personalized page, check out the new Directory items under the Add Stuff link. We've reorganized and added new feeds from a wider variety of business, technology, and entertainment sources. In addition, new collections have been added to the Windows Live > Collections folder for Business, Technology, and US Politics.

Performance Updates

We're very happy to announce an update that will provide increased performance for returning users. Changes to our backend infrastructure will provide returning users with faster feed and gadget load times.

Changes on the horizon...

We know it's been awhile but since February, the new My.Live.com team has been working diligently on some big projects and we've just started our third development sprint. That's all we can say right now, but more information will be available in the next few months.

So get ready and check in often - we're back and it's full steam ahead for the new My.Live.com team!

- The My.Live.com Team

Where’d my personalized page go?

Wed, 07 May 2008 20:27:57 GMT

Live Search has a new look and the Live.com Personalized Pages have a new location on http://my.live.com! We'll have more on the update later, but for now, we're getting reports that some users are unable to access their personalized page - clicking on the link from www.live.com just redirects back to the same page.

We're working on the solution that should be ready soon. In the interim, you can access your personalized page by going to http://my.live.com/?personalized=true.

Thank you for your patience and check back for more updates.

- The My.Live.com Team

Monday Outage

Wed, 23 Jan 2008 22:38:01 GMT

The site is back up and running normally after a database error took down Live.com and our Partner portals on Monday.

What happened?

We started receiving reports of users being unable to login or being served the search only page when accessing the site on Monday afternoon. An investigation into the issue discovered that one of the database servers had gone offline, preventing users from logging in and accessing their personalized pages. The server was back online at around 5:30pm after all issues were resolved. No data was lost and users should be able to login to their personalized pages normally.

We sincerely apologize for this error along with any hassles it caused and are working with our operations teams to ensure this doesn't happen again.

- The Live.com Team

Back again with some great news and more updates

Thu, 22 Nov 2007 01:10:25 GMT

Unbelievably it’s been over 6 months since we’ve blogged on live.com. The lull is not intended, but can be attributed to the fact that the team is diligently working on strategic customer focused products for the next wave of my.live.com.

Microsoft Online Services Division released a few phenomenal products and had a terrific quarter. The Live Search team revolutionized search and released the “new live search” for a whole new online search experience. We heard the feedback from our customers about real-time traffic re-routing and delivered it as part of this release. It also includes many more breath-taking visualizations and enhancements. Also did you know, you can now talk to “Live-search” on your mobile and it will fetch you the results in a jiffy! The live.com team personally urges everyone to checkout this feature on their mobile handsets… Check here for more details of the new live search.

Considering obvious advantages of co-branding arrangements that associates a single product or service with more than one brand name, partners.live.com team worked closely with some of our partners to foster Live.com's flexible architecture to create co-branded portals. In doing so, we provided our partners with:

- Cobranded URL

- Flexible Logo, Jewel, and page structure

- Customized templates and tabs

- Customized Folders, Feeds, gadgets

We’ve launched the following co-branded live.com pages so far:

Qwest – Launched 07/02/2007 - qwest.live.com

Verizon – Launched 08/01/2007 - verizon.live.com

Lenovo – Updated 10/31/2007 - lenovo.live.com

The Windows Live Product Suite made its official debut earlier this month, delivering a comprehensive array of new and updated services. The integration of the products is really cool, giving you the ability to edit pictures in Windows Live Photo Gallery, share them on Windows Live Spaces, e-mail them directly to family and friends in Windows Live Mail, or put them into your blog via Windows Live Writer – all quickly and with just a few clicks.

The full suite includes:

· Windows Live Mail

· Windows Live Messenger

· Windows Live Photo Gallery

· Windows Live Writer

· Windows Live Toolbar

· Family Safety from Windows Live OneCare

Installation is easy and offers the option of installing the full collection of products, or selecting only the ones you need. Find out more and download Windows Live at http://www.windowslive.com/default.html

As a team we shall continue the great work on new stuff. We know you all are eager to know the details! Unfortunately it’s not yet ready to be disclosed. But stay tuned to hear back from us sooooon:-)

Mail is Back!

Fri, 18 May 2007 05:01:52 GMT

We are VERY HAPPY to announce that you can once again see your Windows Live Hotmail using the Live.com mail gadget. You can add the gadget back to your page by clicking here.

Remember, you must be a Windows Live Hotmail user to see your mail - be sure to upgrade if you haven't already!

Thanks everyone for your patience. Please let us know if you're seeing any issues.

Small Update

Tue, 08 May 2007 01:45:15 GMT

Late last week, we released a minor update to Live.com. This update included the following changes:

International Collection Sharing - Users in many more countries can now share their collections in Windows Live Gallery. While all users have the ability to share their collections via email, we're excited to launch gallery integration for users around the world. We can't wait to see the collections our international users come up with!
Bug Fixes - We fixed a number of bugs, including one that caused some users to have their name displayed incorrectly. We'll continue making quality improvements to the site with every release.
Digg Feeds in the directory (U.S. only) - We've added some Digg feeds to the directory. Digg is very popular with several members of the Live.com team, so we thought we'd make these feeds easier for others to find :)
Mail gadget infrastructure - It's not turned on yet, but this release includes the big changes we need to get the mail gadget working again. There's a bit more work required from both us and the Windows Live Hotmail team, but we're happy to get this milestone behind us. We still can't offer any dates, but we're inching closer and closer to restoring this functionality. We'll keep you posted as we continue to make progress.

Thanks everyone - keep the feedback coming!

Mail Gadget Update

Mon, 23 Apr 2007 22:18:44 GMT

Well, it's taken longer than anyone (including us) expected, but we can finally offer an update regarding the mail gadget. We're hoping that sharing this information doesn't jinx us and cause further delays :)

The gadget was pulled due to a security issue, which we initially believed could be fixed in a relatively quick fashion. We take security very seriously, and once we became aware of the issue, disabling this gadget was the best way to protect our users.

As our developers worked with the Hotmail developers to see how we could restore the gadget's functionality (while ensuring your data was secure), it became evident that the task was originally much larger than anyone anticipated. The gadget had to be rewritten to "talk" to Hotmail in an entirely new way, and the Hotmail team needed to add new functionality on their end as well. The time needed to design, implement, and test this new functionality is the reason that the gadget has been broken for so long.

However, there's hope on the horizon! While we can't yet give you a definite date (that would be really bad luck), we believe our developers have entered the home stretch with their bug fixes, and the light at the end of the tunnel is growing ever closer. Once the gadget comes back online, we'll return it to the directory so you can once again add it (if you have removed it), and of course, we'll post a very happy blog post here :)

There is a slight catch, however, that we wanted to alert you to. When the gadget returns, you will need to have a Windows Live Hotmail account to use it. This is the "new" version of Hotmail, which offers much richer functionality than the old one. The good news is that upgrading to Windows Live Hotmail is free, and can be done today, by clicking the link in the upper left hand corner of the screen after you log in to Hotmail. The link should look like this:

If you haven't yet tried Windows Live Hotmail, all of the cool new features are sure to keep you occupied until we get the gadget back online. :) Your email address will not be changed when you upgrade to Windows Live Hotmail.

Thanks very much for everyone's understanding - we know you've been anxious to get this gadget back, and we're doing everything we can to get it to you.

Sincerely,

The Live.com Team

Mail Gadget Issues

Wed, 21 Feb 2007 00:24:58 GMT

Due to circumstances beyond our control, checking your mail with the mail gadget will be temporarily unavailable. This has nothing to do with our recent release (and is not specific to Live.com), but is a technical issue that the Mail team is actively working on. We know many of you rely on this functionality, and we'll be looking to get it working for you as soon as possible.

Thanks for your patience,

The Live.com team

Happy Collections Day!

Sat, 17 Feb 2007 02:35:20 GMT

We're very pleased to announce the newest release of Live.com! This latest update includes some great additions to the site. Here's a rundown of what is now available.

Live.com Collections

Have you ever created a page on Live.com and thought to yourself "wow - I wish other people could see this?" Well, now they can! Introducing... Live.com Collections.

You've probably already seen some of the Collections we've created, including our special holiday and celebrity themes (these can now be found under the "Windows Live" folder in our directory), but now we're letting you create your own!

Collections include all the feeds and gadgets on the page (including any settings that you've customized), as well as the page's name, layout and theme. You can choose to share your page via a link (which can be sent to anyone including your friends, you mom, your dog...) or in Windows Live Gallery, where you can share your creation with the world (Gallery sharing is not yet available in all markets).

To create your own collection, first sign in to Live.com, and then follow these 4 easy steps:

     Step 1: Customize your page. If you need help, be sure to check out our product tour.

     Step 2: Select the "Share" link (remember, you must be signed it).


     Step 3: Choose to share your Collection using Gallery or a link:


    Step 4: Enjoy sharing your Collection!

Looking for ideas for types of Collections to create? Here are some to get you started:

Your Hometown: Name a page after your hometown. Add the town to the weather gadget, add the local sports team to the FoxSports gadget, add feeds from the local papers, and share with your neighbors!
Your Friends: Add feeds from all of your friends' blogs and send them a link to add the collection to their Live.com page.
Pretty Pictures: Create a Collection filled with feeds to some of your favorite photography blogs. Set the number of items displayed in each feed to 1 for some extra color and pizzazz. Share it in Gallery!
Anything you want - Live.com is your page. Use your imagination and get creative!

Of course, Collections are not just fun to create, but they're fun to add as well. Be sure to keep your eyes on the Gallery as the number of available collections begins to grow. In the spirit of Live.com, once you add a Collection, feel free to customize it however you see fit.

We'd love to see your collections! After you create one, be sure to post the link in the comments of this post. It's a great way for us to see what you're up to.

Send to Mobile

Been wanting to try out the Live.com Beta for Mobile, but haven't figured out how to get it on your phone? We've now simplified the process! Simply sign in, and click the "Add Stuff" button. There you will find the "Send to mobile" option. Clicking that link will allow you to send a specially formatted text message to your mobile device, which will let you access your Live.com content from anywhere you go (currently the first page only).

(This feature is not yet available in all markets)

Performance

As always, performance was a major focus for the team as we worked on this release. We worked on improvements in a number of areas, but here's where we think you'll see the biggest differences:

RSS Feeds - The majority of optimization work was done in this area. You should see your RSS feeds appear on your page much faster than in previous releases. Additionally, the amount of data you download has been significantly reduced, which will help speed up page load times (especially for users with slower connections). Finally, we've improved the way we show feed images to be significantly less resource intensive.
Page switching - We put a lot of work into speeding up the experience of moving between pages. Previously, there would be a noticeable delay after selecting a page before the content could be delivered to you. Now, you should see much better performance in this area, with more of the page being available to you sooner.
Responsiveness - The team spent a lot of time ensuring that the page is as responsive as possible as it loads your content. This means that if you just want to search, you'll be able to do so even if the page has not finished loading. This is a subtler change, but that's the point :)

And much much more...

We've worked hard to make sure that this is the best Live.com release to date. We've made lots of little changes and bug fixes that we think will improve your overall experience. This release also includes the groundwork for several other features that we'll be rolling out in the near future. Stay tuned to the blog for more information as soon we can post it :)

So, there you have it - hopefully you're just as excited to start using this release as we were to ship it. As always, let us know what you think in the comments, or by emailing us directly at livefb-at-microsoft-dot-com.

Let's see those Collections!

Updates Updates Updates

Wed, 24 Jan 2007 03:36:24 GMT

Wow, has it really been over 2 months since we blogged? First of all, the entire Live.com team wishes you a very (belated) happy new year! Despite some stormy Seattle weather, we'd also like to assure you that we haven't been hibernating. In fact, we're hard at work finishing up some very exciting features which we'll be looking to launch soon. We're not quite ready to announce dates or specifics, but everyone who has seen what's coming agrees that it's very cool. :-)

While we finish that work up, how about some new content for your existing Live.com page? Here's some of the things that we've recently made available:

MSN TV Listings Gadget - You can find this by clicking "Add Stuff" and navigating to the Gadgets -> Music, Movies, & TV folder. You can customize the gadget to show your local listings and your favorite channels so that you never again miss an episode of American Idol (or anything else you may want to watch).
Valentine's Day Collection- In the mood for love? Maybe just some chocolate? Either way, try adding the Valentine's Day collection to your Live.com for some fun holiday content. http://www.live.com/?addTemplate=valentinesday
Celebrity Homepages - Check out http://celebrities.live.com/ for the latest news on Celebrity Collections for Live.com! Not only are these are some great looking collections, but there are cool prizes you can win as well.

(Note that all of this content is available in the U.S.A. - availability may vary by individual country)

Also, we'd like to call your attention to the "Click for the Cause" campaign. Each time you search from http://Click4TheCause.Live.com/, Microsoft will contribute to ninemillion.org, a UN agency-led campaign providing education and sports programs for the nine million refugee youth around the world. Please let your friends, family and colleagues know about this campaign and encourage them to use http://Click4TheCause.Live.com/ when they search. You can also become a friend of ninemillion by visiting the Windows Live Space at http://nine-million.spaces.live.com. Time to start searching!

Updates to Live.com

Sat, 11 Nov 2006 02:44:38 GMT

Yesterday, we released a small update to Live.com, intended to fix a number of bugs and improve the overall experience. While there aren't too many drastic changes that you can see, a number of items are worth calling out:

Performance Improvements - We told you that we were serious about performance, and we still are. Every time we release an update, the team makes sure that the site is only getting faster. We made several improvements with this release that should make things snappier. Speed is our priority, and we hope you're feeling the benefits. Watch for even more improvements coming soon!
Rename Your Gadgets - You can now rename any of your gadgets right on the page. Simply use the "Edit" menu (found on any gadget), select "Rename" and type in any name you would like.
Start Over - Is "My Stuff" stuffed? Want to start customizing Live.com all over again? We now offer an easy way for you to start from scratch, and erase any changes you have made to your page. When you are signed in, simply click the "Start over" link that can be found next to your name (we'll ask if you're really sure before we change anything). Erasing is forever... be sure you truly want a fresh start before clicking that link! We will not be able to recover you data once it is gone. This functionality was previously offered to our anonymous users, but we're happy to now give our signed in users a chance to start over as well.
Stock Gadget Enhancements - In addition to making this gadget more accessible for users using assistive technologies, we've added some nice new features as well. First, you can now add mutual fund symbols as easily as stock symbols - this was a frequent user request, so thanks for the feedback! Additionally, the stock gadget now offers selectable period charts from within the gadget. Expand a quote, and use the arrows under the chart to cycle between 30 day, 90 day, 1 year and intra-day charts!

New Gadgets - Just in time for the holiday season, the Windows Live Shopping team has released some fun new gadgets to help with your gift buying (even if you're buying for yourself). Click "Add Stuff", select "Gadgets" and then "Shopping" to discover the Gift Buying Guide, Shopping Price Watcher, Window Shopping, Shopping Search Gadget, and more! Have fun with these new gadgets, and keep watching Windows Live Gallery for new user-created gadgets to add to your page!

As always, we love hearing your feedback and want to hear your thoughts! You can email the entire team at livefb-at-microsoft-dot-com. Enjoy the new release!

Live.com Beta for Mobile is available now!

Fri, 27 Oct 2006 01:35:02 GMT

Our colleagues on the mobile team just finished work on the Live.com Beta for mobile, and we've been very impressed with the results. If you've ever wanted to use Live.com from anywhere, this is the product you've been waiting for!

The gadgets (weather, stock and horoscope) and RSS feeds you set up on your first personalized Live.com page will travel with you, which means you can get the same news and blogs that you read on Live.com wherever you are. Simply point the browser on your mobile device to http://mobile.live.com/ and follow the links to the “Live.com Beta.”

The Live.com Beta for mobile also provides super easy access to other mobile Windows Live services such as your Windows Live Mail inbox, or Windows Live Spaces simply by using the Service bar, which features the product icons and can be found right below the search bar.

Since it's in beta, the team really needs your feedback to help create a better product. Give it a whirl the next time you are out and about with a little down time – on a bus, in a waiting room, at a flight’s departure gate, virtually anywhere... and let the mobile team know your thoughts by using this form: http://feedback.live.com/eform.aspx?productkey=wlcommobile&mkt=en-us

You can learn more about the beta at ideas.live.com and check out the team's blog at itsallmobile.spaces.live.com to find out more about what they're up to.

Live.com officially out of Beta

Thu, 14 Sep 2006 02:00:15 GMT

As a few of you have noticed (here, here, here and others) live.com is officially out of Beta!

We officially released our V1 a couple of days ago. We've been catching up on sleep the past few days and forgot to hit the publish button for our blog entry :) As of a few minutes ago our last piece of rollout is underway and http://search.msn.com has begun to redirect to Live Search.

We have come a long way together, since our release on 11/1/05. We owe our many revisions and improvements to your feedback... check out the pictures to see how far we've come (11/1, 3/7, 3/30, 6/15 and 9/12).

So what's next? some more sleep, a ship party... oh and a ton of cool features we have planned!

live.com update

Fri, 08 Sep 2006 22:01:03 GMT

Last night we released an update. The key focus of this release has been quality and addressing our top customer pain points, not new features... we've fixed hundreds of bugs, so it's not reasonable to enumerate all of them :) Here are some of the most significant improvements:

Responsiveness

We have done a lot of work around responsiveness; interacting with the app, clicking on different pages, rss rendering, navigating away from live.com and memory leaks have all been significantly improved.

User flow changes

Let's start with some definitions:

Anonymous - users that have never signed in

Identified - users that have signed in at least once, but are currently not signed in

Anonymous users are now prompted to sign in after a certain number of changes enabling them to roam their settings.

For identified users, we now better protect user data from unauthorized changes. Users can view their data without signing in, but will need to sign in to make changes.

Search page changes

First, the page is much faster. The search box is wider and we're including messaging for key new features. You'll also notice that the Jewel (the drop down in the upper left hand corner) is now available on this page.

New gadgets

Our partner teams have built some very cool new gadgets that are now included in our directory. Some include:

- Windows Live Expo: look for listings on Expo using this gadget (click here to add it)

- Team scores & news by FOX: keep track of your favorite team scores and news (click here to add it)

- Auto listings: looking for car? find it using the MSN Auto listings gadget (click here to add it)

Direct URLs to personalized page and search

This has been a popular request by many users. Now you can type beta.search.live.com (soon search.live.com) and go directly to the search page. Similiarly you can type my.live.com and home.live.com and go directly to the personalized page.

Accessibility

live.com is now accessible including screen reader mode which can be enabled via the 'Options' dialog.

Other

many many other bug fixes and under hood changes to improve robustness and reliability.

Enjoy! let us know what you think.

Brand new search experience

Fri, 01 Sep 2006 19:47:12 GMT

As some of you may have noticed, we switched over to a brand new faster search results experience yesterday... All the improvements were driven by your feedback!

Read more details on the search experience here. Search away and let us know what you think!

Under The Hood

Mon, 14 Aug 2006 19:51:27 GMT

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?

Better memory management - As many of you have noticed, we're doing a much better job keeping our memory use in check. You can now leave live.com open overnight without worrying about too much memory consumption.

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).

More on the 8/9 update

Sat, 12 Aug 2006 02:36:47 GMT

We hope you're enjoying the latest release. Are you still trying to figure out everything that is new? Here are some pointers.

Have you tried...

- pointing your mouse to the Windows Live logo (on any Windows Live site)?
- refreshing the mail gadget?
- changing your language?
- clicking "read all" in an RSS feed?

Be sure to keep sending us your feedback!

Live.com's 8/9 update

Thu, 10 Aug 2006 17:42:30 GMT

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.

update: We rolled out a fix last night... all RSS feeds and gadgets should be working now! Please let us know if you're still seeing issues. Thanks for your patience.

Add to Live.com button now available

Mon, 10 Jul 2006 22:43:30 GMT

Quite a few of you have asked for a way to let users easily add feeds from your blog or site to their Live.com homepage. So we’re happy to release today an “Add to Live” button! With just one click, users can now add RSS feeds or Gadgets from participating sites to their Live.com homepage.

To implement the “Add to Live” button on your site, simply add this code and image to the appropriate page(s) on your site:

<a href="http://www.live.com/?add=http://sampleurl.com/"><img src="wl.gif" border="0"/></a>

When you insert this code:

1) Replace sampleurl.com with the Web address of your RSS feed, including any subdirectories.
2) Copy the wl.gif image (just right click the one below and save it to your local machine) to the same directory as the page containing the link or put the full path to its location in the <img src> string.

Let us know if you have any feedback!

search/personalized toggle

Fri, 07 Jul 2006 23:32:15 GMT

Ever since we released live.com on 11/1, we've released a lot of feedback from our users wanting a simpler, cleaner, faster search experience.

We made a lot of improvements in that space with our new first run released on 6/15, we're very happy to announce some further improvements in this space. You can now toggle between a 'search only' and 'personalized home' experience and your last state will be remembered. This replaces our old 'hide' option, with a much improved experience in 'search only' mode that is faster and includes search filters.

enjoy! let us know what you think.

Now in 34 new markets

Fri, 07 Jul 2006 22:02:09 GMT

The team’s been working hard and we’ve just released in 34 new markets! Our goals were to provide new markets with a first run experience and market-specific feeds and gadgets. With this release live.com is now available in the following markets:

§ China – Simplified Chinese

§ Netherlands – Dutch

§ Belgium – French

§ Belgium – Dutch

§ Brazil – Brazilian Portuguese

§ Denmark – Danish

§ India – English

§ Russia – Russian

§ Sweden – Swedish

§ Taiwan – Traditional Chinese

§ Arabia – English

§ Argentina – Spanish

§ Austria – German

§ Chile – Spanish

§ Finland – Finnish

§ Greece – Greek

§ Hong Kong SAR – Traditional Chinese

§ Hungary – Hungarian

§ Indonesia – English

§ Ireland – English

§ Malaysia – English

§ New Zealand – English

§ Philippines – English

§ Poland – Polish

§ Portugal – Brazilian Portuguese

§ Singapore – English

§ South Africa – English

§ Switzerland – German

§ Switzerland – French

§ Turkey – Turkish

§ Czech Republic – Czech

§ Slovakia – Slovak

§ Slovenia – Slovenian

§ Latin America – Spanish

Let us know what you think!

live.com UI refresh

Fri, 16 Jun 2006 01:47:06 GMT

Based on user feedback and a lot of hard work from team, we have launched some improvements to the Live.com beta tonight.

Our goals are to deliver a product that provides users with a great search experience, a personalized homepage that puts the user in control of their experience, and a central place to access Windows Live services.

With tonight’s release, we have made some improvements driving towards each of the above goals:

- We have simplified our first run experience to provide a fast and straight-forward experience for users that are interested in a search-focused page, as well as the option for users to personalize their homepage or learn more about Windows Live services. (note: existing live.com users can’t see this page unless you click ‘start over’ while signed in or if you sign out – we’re working on making this more accessible to everyone)

- We have heard that users want a personalized homepage that is easier to set up, so we are also introducing a new customization step to help users personalize their Live.com homepage. Users can now choose from 5 templates to quickly get started with a few interesting pages right away (including a world cup template!)

Exsiting users, go to http://www.live.com/getstarted to add template to your page.

- You’ll also note some look and feel improvements with a new logo, improved themes, header and page treatments that make the page more visually appealing.

Let us know what you think!

Perf updates, SDK and more

Fri, 26 May 2006 07:37:43 GMT

we've just released some updates on live.com for both our end-users and developers. yes we just relased some updates 3 weeks ago but hey we love shipping :)

first, dear developers - we know we haven't had the best gadget documentation. We're extremely excited to announce our new gadget SDK, now available here. We'll be improving our SDK continuously and look forward to hearing from you on things that you need us to improve on. we want to help you build the coolest gadgets!

now, dear daily live.com users... we're listening to your feedback as well.

Customer feedback: I have a bunch of gadgets on my live.com page, but I’m having a hard time making this my homepage as it locks up the page until all the gadgets load disabling me from searching and using the browser.

Live.com pages are now more responsive (we’ve made significant perf improvements for loading of rss feeds) and you’re able to search prior to all the gadgets loading. Performance is our top priority and we’ll be making improvements continuously.

Customer feedback: why can’t I just drag a gadget from one page or add stuff/my stuff to another page, much like windows. Right now I can only add a gadget to a page, by selecting that page and then dragging it from add stuff/my stuff.

You can now drag and drop your gadgets to any page by dragging it from a page or add stuff/my stuff to the target page name.

Customer feedback: can I create folders in ‘my stuff’ to better organize all my gadgets and feeds?

We’ve added the functionality for creating folders within ‘my stuff’ (click on ‘my stuff’ and then click on ‘new folder’ in the upper right hand corner). You can simply drag and drop content to the folders.

Customer feedback: can I rename my feeds and gadgets? For example I have two weather gadgets and I would like rename each one to distinguish them more easily.

You can rename your gadgets within ‘my stuff’. Click on ‘my stuff’ then select the ‘rename’ option within the drop down menu for the particular feed/gadget.

Other

· Since our 5/14 release live.com would frequently freeze IE 6 indefinitely due to a rendering issues with alpha-blended images. This issue has now been resolved.

· We’ve also applied some look and feel updates to our gadget chrome, by reducing the number of images and increasing the size of the headline titles.

enjoy! we just might have another set of updates in a few weeks :)

we just released some cool updates

Fri, 05 May 2006 02:49:46 GMT

We just released some significant updates to live.com that were driven by our top customer complaints/requests.

Some of the highlights include:

- Per page settings

Request: I want different number of columns and themes for each page.

Now you can have a page with one column and the granite theme, another page with 3 columns and the green theme, etc.

Just click on settings the upper right hand corner to change things around. We will be improving the settings UI soon, as well.

- No more gigantic weather gadget! J

Request: why does this gadget take up half of my page!?!

The icons are now a much more reasonable size J we also did some re-factoring to improve the gadget’s performance.

- Search experience improvements

Request: can you please just show me the search results first when I search from IE 7/toolbar, instead of rendering the page first?

Yes. Now you can search from IE 7’s search box and WL toolbar and search results will get rendered first.

- Always visible gadget controls:

Request: how do I add a new city to the weather gadget? How do I add a new stock? How do I delete a gadget?

Gadget controls are now always visible all the time instead of on hover only to improve discoverability and accessibility.

- Per gadget refresh

Request: can I refresh an individual gadget without refreshing the whole page?

Yes, now you can by clicking on the refresh icon.

- Improved RSS settings

Request: I don’t want to see images within the rss gadget. I want an easier way change the number of headlines within an rss gadget.

We agree, now you can turn off images and simply specify the number of headlines you’d like to view for feeds. Click on the settings icon to bring up this dialog.

- OPML

Request: can I export my rss feeds that I’ve subscribed to on live.com in OPML format?

You can now do this: click on add stuff -> ‘advanced options’

- Other

o Middle-clicking to open new tabs

o Some code-refactoring to improve performance

Enjoy!