Mozilla just launched a special customized edition of Firefox for fans of Microsoft’s MSN portal. Firefox with MSN comes with MSN as the default home page and automatically opens msnNOW, the memetracker-like version of MSN as a Firefox app tab. And of course, this edition offers an MSN theme and uses Bing as the default search engine instead of Google, which is the standard for regular Firefox… → Read More
Microsoft this morning announced several new efforts to gain some ground in the booming social/casual gaming market. The company will be debuting an all-new version of MSN Games (see preview here), bring new social games to instant messaging client Windows Live Messenger and expand Bing Games internationally.
Last but not least, Microsoft has struck a partnership with social games publisher … → Read More
Audience measurement firm comScore has released its May 2010 U.S. Search Data report, and it shows continued market share gains for Yahoo and Microsoft.
Yahoo and Bing/MSN each added approximately 60 bps and 30 bps to 18.3% and 12.1%, respectively. Google is down, claims comScore, declining approximately 70 bps for the second consecutive month to 63.7%.
But that’s not the whole story, and… → Read More
Well, July came and went and we saw no sign of Microsoft‘s much-anticipated new streaming music service. So I did a little digging around, and over the weekend word reached me through a friend in the music industry that the delay has nothing to do with technical problems, as some have suggested. According to my source, Microsoft “has no label deals”. And a streaming music service… → Read More
Microsoft has a post today on its Bing Community blog alerting website owners that they may start seeing a lot of pings from the user agent “msnbot/2.0b (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)”. Not to worry, they say, despite the scary MSN Web 1.0-name, this is just the BingBot, crawling sites, doing its indexing job.
While Microsoft has updated the bot’s version number (from 1.1), it isn’t changing… → Read More
Web analytics firm Compete has released its data for the month of May, and as Justin Smith over at InsideFacebook has already pointed out, US traffic to Facebook.com has increased by nearly 8% to 82.9 million unique visitors last month, with Facebook Connect sites generating an additional 65 million uniques. That means that, according to Compete, a total of 113 million people in the U.S. → Read More
In honor of the latest Star Trek release, MSN Video has rolled out a Klingon version of its Star Trek video page. Klingon, of course, is the tongue spoken by the race of the same name in the fictional Star Trek universe. For those of you who aren’t Trekkies, Klingons are the warrior race and usually are portrayed as the enemy in the Star Trek series and movies.
One notably hilarious (or sad… → Read More
MSN had a bit of a problem. It had the popular entertainment area of its service, where movies, musical acts, and other things in pop culture have pages filled with content for fans. But the problem was that paying people to populate these sites with content was expensive. And since it’s the fans that want to see it, why not let them help out to build the site? That’s why MSN is now partnering… → Read More
The University of Michigan’s quarterly customer satisfaction index came out today, and in the Website category Google came out on top with a score of 86 out of 100 (up 10 percent from last year). Yahoo slipped 3 percent to a score of 77. MSN’s score was flat at 75, and tied with NYTimes.com and ABCNews.com. AOL came in at 69, and that is 3 percent better than last year. Here are some… → Read More
Last Friday and Saturday, MSN Messenger users found themselves unable to send YouTube links to each other. Microsoft acknowledged and fixed the problem, pointing the finger at “a 3rd party that is a Microsoft partner” responsible for managing potentially harmful URLs that are sent through the Messenger program. A company blog post says: “Microsoft did not request to block any of… → Read More
This has to be the most cockamamie way to score a deal I’ve ever encountered. For Mother’s Day, T-Mobile will waive the activation fee if you’re lucky enough to come across the banner ad on MSN’s home page. I’ve tried looking for it to get a screen grab, but I have a life and I refuse to sit here any longer. Simply follow these instructions put forth by TmoNews and you’re well on your… → Read More
If you’ve bought your music from MSN’s music store, you have until August 31st to enjoy it before Microsoft turns off its DRM servers. You’ll have to make sure you have license files for all your songs on the computer and devices you want to play them on, because without the servers, you can’t authorize your content. What really sucks is that you’re only allowed up to… → Read More
People with landline phones take notice for VTech has announced something pretty cool. Their latest cordless phone, the IS6110, does IM between phones and comes with a QWERTY keyboard. When the base unit is plugged into your PC via USB you can chat over MSN, Windows Live and AIM. The IS6110 retails for $100 and is available at Best Buy. → Read More
In part 5,000 of our ongoing investigation of all things spammy, here is my interaction with what appears to be an MSN Chat robot designed to lure drunken frat boys into a chatroom where they have to offer up credit card numbers in order to get to see nakedness. Strangely enough, the robot actually took time to respond so there must be some wait loop in there to make it more realistic. → Read More
If you pay $9.95 a month for Microsoft Premium then Microsoft is royally screwing you. It seems that the service, which comes free from some ISPs, offers bunch of web-based services including “Virtual Earth,” Encarta, and spam and phishing filters. These same features are available through Windows Live and Hotmail and, incidentally, available in Windows itself. As a result, folks are… → Read More
If you’ve ever worked in IT you’ll know there are two disparate and potentially competing technologies in the server room. First, there are all the IP servers — web, mail, porn, terabytes of video storage hidden by the sysadmins at 4am — and the “phone closet,” a dusty corner of a creepy closet somewhere near the guy who smells where the voice mailboxes and… → Read More
Some would argue that coming after Google’s online advertising crown might be an exercise in futility. Yet that’s what Microsoft’s gunning for, according to mild-mannered Steve Ballmer. And don’t think that Microsoft is trying to simply slice itself the tiniest sliver of the pie like your typical type-A friend that eats vicariously through everyone else, no sir. Microsoft… → Read More
. On Monday, Microsoft filed a mystery application with the FCC for an enigmatic wireless device that could be used to talk over the Internet. Sounds like a VoiP device, right? Not really. The device is described as being used for “consumer broadband access and networking,” which doesn’t sound like vanilla VoIP to me. Microsoft goes on to say that the device would use OFDM as its… → Read More
that Microsoft had begun working on a phone that would be released under the Zune name. Details were, and are, sparse, but since our story broke, an additional rumor has emerged that may or may not bring some more clarity to the situation—how’s that for ambiguity? The current rumor stems from this announcement from Phillipine-based call center Global Sky: Microsoft recently awarded… → Read More
According to a Microsoft employee’s blog, Microsoft’s YouTube competitor, Soapbox, may just be launching today. The service, added to Microsoft’s Live initiative, is an internet video offering that lets users upload 100MB files in various formats. One difference between this and YouTube is that Soapbox will autodetect your browser, and if you’re using IE, it will stream… → Read More
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