SkyDrive, Microsoft’s online storage service, is one of the core elements of the company’s cloud strategy. Today, Microsoft is taking the wraps off a number of new SkyDrive services, including a Dropbox-like desktop integration for Windows and Mac (OS X Lion only). With this, SkyDrive will function like any other folder on your machine and any file you save to it will be automatically uploaded to the cloud and synced to your other computers. For current Dropbox users, this is obviously nothing new and it’s taken Microsoft quite a while to finally offer this feature. With this update, though, Microsoft is also reducing the amount of free storage it is offering new users from 25GB to just 7GB. → Read More
Earlier today, Erick wrote about Windows Live Sync becoming Windows Live Mesh. Basically, it’s a service that allows people to sync files between PCs and with the cloud. As a product, it sounds great — as Erick says, there’s definitely a huge need for someone to do this right. But as usual with Microsoft, I have to ask: what on Earth is up with the branding?
Yes Microsoft needed to combine Live Sync and Live Mesh as they were similar products. But doesn’t “Sync” make a lot more sense than “Mesh”? What the hell is a mesh? I had to Google it. → Read More
Oh, what could have been. Rahul Sood, of Voodoo PC fame (now at HP), says he’s heard from people in the know that Microsoft was working on a project that would have integrated Xbox Live with a sort of Windows Live. The end goal was to have been console gamers and PC gamers playing against each other on a combined Xbox Live+Windows Live service. The reason why this project never saw the light of day? Because console gamers are rubbish. → Read More
Microsoft will soon be upgrading Office Live Workspace accounts to Windows Live SkyDrive accounts, the company has announced in a blog post and an email (screenshot below).
Office Live Workspace users will get many of the same capabilities they’re used to, plus a number of new features (e.g. the Office Web Apps, Web-based ‘companions’ to the software giant’s most popular business software products, expected to roll out on June 15th in conjunction with Office 2010) and up to 25 GB of storage space. → Read More
With Bing stealing the online spotlight at Microsoft recently, Windows Live has been collecting dust in a corner. But Microsoft is preparing to update the core services that make up Windows Live over the next few months, and is refocusing what used to be a hodgepodge of different online services into three main products: Hotmail, Messenger, and Windows Essentials (which includes photo-organizing and movie-making apps). Microsoft’s VP of Windows Live Chris Jones explains: “Anything about information discovery, retrieval, and the public web is Bing. Anything about personal information is Windows Live.”
The focus will not be to recreate people’s social networks or where they share photos, videos, or status updates, but rather simply to connect Windows IM and email products to the rest of the social Web. Although Hotmail boasts 350 million active users worldwide and Messenger has 320 million, both products are a bit long in the tooth. → Read More
MySpaceID, the social network’s login platform that’s comparable to Facebook Connect, is coming to Windows Live and its sister properties, including Windows Live’s main portal, Windows Live Messenger, and Hotmail. In short, the new functionality will allow users to import their recent MySpace notifications into these Microsoft properties, which rank among the web’s most popular services.
Beginning today, you’ll be able to automatically view blog posts, recent photo uploads, your friends’ status updates, and shared music without having to head back to the main MySpace portal. The feature uses activitystrea.ms, the protocol that’s also used by Facebook and Opera. → Read More
Mike Torres, Lead Program Manager on Microsoft’s Movie Maker team, has kicked off a series of blog posts about the upcoming release of Windows Live Movie Maker, which is supposed to replace the eponymous desktop video editing software that has come pre-installed on Windows machines ever since Windows ME hit the market.
So far, the application has been in public beta, but many have criticized the inclusion of the program in Live Essentials in such a rudimentary state, claiming it should have been left out until it was ready. → Read More
We’ll say it right off the bat: what the hell took Microsoft so long? Years after Yahoo and Google integrated web IM features into their free webmail services (Yahoo Messenger in Yahoo Mail and Gtalk in Gmail, respectively), Redmond is finally enabling users to log into their Hotmail accounts and converse with their contacts over instant messaging directly without the need to log on to Windows Live Messenger separately, or to even have the program installed altogether.
The new feature will be gradually rolled out, starting from today enabling subsets of users in Brazil, Canada, China, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, and USA to send instant messages from the Windows Live Hotmail and People pages. The feature earlier rolled out to some users users in France, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Spain, and the UK. → Read More
Windows Live Hotmail (former Hotmail) is one of – if not the most – popular free webmail applications on the planet, so naturally there’s a bit of an uproar (warning: highly emotional teenager grunts here) since apparently users have been unable to access their mail account for hours on end. We’ve been getting a lot of tips about this in our inboxes, and we ended up taking a look at the official Windows Live Help website, where this message appears:
Hotmail and Windows Live ID experienced a service disruption starting at 8:44 PM (PST), which ended at 10:15 PM (PST), and during this disruption you may have been told your inbox did not exist. This was incorrect messaging. Your inbox, contacts and Live ID are all intact. We’re all Hotmail customers, so we appreciate how frustrating this experience was. Thanks for your understanding. If you’re still getting errors, please close out all browsers and sign in again.
Windows Live may seem like a failure in the eyes of many a TechCrunch reader, but there are a number of services that continue to thrive within the scope of a vast, mainstream audience. Hence it’s worth noting that Microsoft has released a new application for Windows Mobile devices that encompasses a slew of Live services used by dozens of millions of people every day.
The new version (v10.06.0046.0800) of the Windows Live For Windows Mobile client, which is evidently free of charge, includes mobile versions of Windows Live Hotmail (works with both both pull and push sync), Windows Live Messenger (finally!), Windows Live Contacts, Windows Live Spaces, Microsoft Live Search and enhanced photo upload capabilities. The app comes in a Pro version for touch-enabled devices and a Standard version for non-touch phones, and is available in 25 languages. → Read More
Windows Live Profile, the service that essentially turns Windows Live into a non-isolated social network centered around your Windows Live ID, currently pulls in a good deal of updates from third-party services Flickr, Pandora, Twitter, Yelp, and a couple more. You can also insert any RSS feed into the streams, for instance the one for your own blog, and add it to the mix. In case you don’t remember, Windows Live Profiles was part of the big social roll-out Microsoft launched in December last year.
Microsoft refers to these streams as ‘Web Activities’ and displays update messages from contacts under the header “What’s new” on a variety of Live Services, like at the bottom of the new Windows Live Messenger interface for example, provided these users have given permission to share them either publicly or within their trusted network. I’m not 100% sure that includes the just released embedded Windows Live Messenger chat you can add to other websites, but I’m trying to figure that out.
Notably missing from the list of supported third-party service providers, particularly considering its ongoing business relationship, is Facebook. → Read More
Today, Microsoft is rolling out some of the sweeping changes to Windows Live it announced two weeks ago. Windows Live seems to be gradually replacing MSN as Microsoft’s central hub for everything you do on the Web.
The new home page shows both your email and an activity stream of what your contacts are doing across the Web. It’s more FriendFeed than Facebook, with a little MyYahoo thrown in. You can also customize it to show the local weather, your calendar, and news headlines. A handful of recent your photos are displayed at the top, along with a search box and links to other Live services (Profile, People, Mail, Photos, Events, Spaces, Groups, SkyDrive, and even MSN). → Read More
Login standard OpenID has gotten a huge boost today from Microsoft, as the company has announced that users will soon be able to login to any OpenID site using their Windows Live IDs. With over 400 million Windows Live accounts (many of which see frequent use on the Live’s Mail and Messenger services), the announcement is a massive win for OpenID. And Microsoft isn’t just supporting OpenID – the announcement goes as far as to call it the de facto login standard.
The news parallels Yahoo’s announcement in January that users would be able to use their Yahoo IDs on any OpenID site – a move that instantly tripled the protocol’s potential user base. But it also comes with the same caveat that we had with the Yahoo news: while Windows Live accounts will work for logging into other sites, it’s unclear if Live will become a “relying party” that would allow users to login with third party OpenIDs.
Bill Gates initially pledged support for OpenID in early 2007, but the company has been slow to actually implement it (unfortunately this has been a trend in the industry). For now Live’s role as an OpenID provider is in testing, with widespread support planned for “sometime in 2009″. If you’d like to try it out now, check out the instructions on the blog post here. → Read More
I’m not sure how many BlackBerry users also use Hotmail, but the three or four of them will be happy to know that BlackBerry devices will soon support push Hotmail. Oh, and Windows Live Messenger, too. → Read More
We’re getting messages from users of Windows Live that the service has been down for about 11 hours — an eternity in Internet time. It appears that Windows Live is down. Been unable to log into email, windows live messenger or any other windows live service since about 8am GMT. Their service status says that “All systems go. There are no issues at this time”. However a Microsoft spokesman has told TheRegister that there is a problem. About 11 hours without access to things now – not good for Microsoft. Are you able to connect? → Read More
Email remains one of the most popular of online services. Companies such as Yahoo, AOL and Microsoft have offered free online email since the earliest days of the internet. Google was late the party, launching Gmail in April 2004. Where as Google has come to dominate many of the verticals it enters, email hasn’t been one of them. This Christmas many more people will be using Yahoo! Mail to send Christmas well wishes than will be using Gmail. Statistically this is where tracking online email popularity becomes difficult. This year Microsoft has launched Windows Live Hotmail with users logging in via its various “Live” properties, making it difficult to place exactly how many users were logging in and using Live and Hotmail email addresses. In April comScore placed Hotmail at 47 million unique visitors. No figures were available from comScore on Live.com traffic (which includes search and related traffic as well) or Windows Live Mail, although sites such as Live.fr hit 154,000 uniques in November and Live.de did 1.39 million. AOL remains a fairly popular choice for email as well, with comScore reporting 42.3 million uniques in April. There are still no shortage of Gmail fans out there, but at its current growth rate Google wont be catching Yahoo! Mail until 2010. Yahoo showed 3.21% growth for the 12 months to November 2007 compared with Gmail’s 53.60% → Read More
I know someone who’s running a flavor of Skype on his Treo, talking to friends and family without using minutes that eat away at his plan. It’s a great idea, if your phone supports it. For the rest of you, have a look at Nimbuzz. Nimbuzz is a Java-based program you load to your handset that allows you to initiate instant message conversations with others via Windows Live, bypassing your phone’s built-in IM client. But what’s great is that it also has built-in support for the network’s Voice features, meaning you can make voice calls to other Windows Live users (mobile or not), or even to other phones, using the way-low prices Windows Live affords you. This means that any data-connected cell running Java has a fairly decent chance of running this specialized version of VoiP, bypassing the cellular voice network altogether. It’s tricky, and we haven’t seen it in action yet, but it’s definitely a fantastic idea and something worth trying. Nimbuzz Talk Goes Live! [Mobile Crunch] → Read More
Mobility Today has a video demoing the beta functions of Windows Live Search for Mobile. The video showcases many of the cool features the service will offer. Features like directions and traffic information. It’s still in beta, of course, but it looks promising. Be sure to head over to Mobility Today to read the rest of their comments on it. → Read More
Zoho, the online Office suite company, will launch a Microsoft Office plugin today that will allow users to save documents directly to their Zoho account from Microsoft Office and Excel. The company is also announcing open APIs and a partnership with Desktopize to create virtual folders that allow users to save files to their Zoho account directly from their desktop. Raju Vegesna, who calls himself the evangelist of Zoho, discussed the news with us last night and said that the company is essentially beating Microsoft to what it should have already done with Office Live, which is bridge the gap between offline and online office applications. “Office Live has no web-based spreadsheet or word processor,” Vegesna said. “So I can send you the plugin so you can just put in your Zoho account details and you can use it as if you’re using the Office itself.” The new plugin will enable users to save and collaborate from Word or Excel (but not PowerPoint yet – that is in the works), as well as open existing Zoho documents in Word or Excel. Vegesna said that Zoho did not have to work closely with Microsoft to build the plugin because Microsoft “documentation is fairly open.” It is compatible with Office 2000, 2003, and 2007. Saving documents to two places is a hassle so the plugin, as well as the “desktop icons” will allow users to avoid visiting the Zoho site quite as often. “People are asking for this,” Vegesna said. “Currently they have to go to Zoho.com, login, and upload documents. We have them doing this an average of five times per day. This will let them go straight to Zoho without having to go to Zoho.com, upload, etc.” Zoho’s decision to open APIs was so that other developers could integrate Zoho into their applications, such as storage Web sites like Omnidrive or Box.net. When Zoho last spoke with TechCrunch, the company had approximately 100,000 users. Vegesna estimates that the number is closer to 150,000 now. → Read More
Microsoft’s just launched their mobile version of their Live site, allowing Pocket PC and WM5 users to access Mail, Spaces, Local, Live beta, MSN beta, and Weather directly from their pocketIE or Opera Mobile browsers. The site has been redesigned for mobile devices – slimmed down the width and reduced the amount of images – so it’s easier to use. This Microsoft Live initiative is actually turning out to be pretty interesting. It shows that if Microsoft really wants to do something, they can pull out a full featured Internet App suite in less than a year. Mobile Live [Live Pocket PC Thoughts → Read More
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