Windows Live got a serious social makeover – see https://home.live.com
If you thought that Windows Live was a bit of a yawn then you’ve not seen the latest incarnation, it’s got way more integrated and socialized, added in concepts of social feeds, networks, sharing, update notifications etc, the networking has taken off like wildfire, so be in to win and get connected!! Check out the Windows Live Team Blog for more info and check out the blog item on privacy and permissions.
The Windows Live Beta clients are great, new IM Client, Writer, Photo Gallery, Mail (with integrated Calendar support) available at https://www.windowslive.com/ComingSoon
https://Skydrive.live.com now offers 25 gig free of charge space, max file size is 50mb, but there are plenty of file splitters around for larger files:)
https://Photos.live.com is very cool and the slide view is beautifully implemented with Silverlight, the frame seems to pick up in the dominate colour in the photo, to great effect, upload is drag and drop simple with the uploader addin.
Windows Live Activities off your Windows Live “Profile” page – hooks up you flickr piccies, blogs, twitter feeds etc in to a unified “What’s new” feed – again well implemented!!
Updated mobile support at https://mobile.live.com – see https://windowslivewire.spaces.live.com/Blog/cns!2F7EB29B42641D59!28656.entry?sa=411864678 for more info.
https://office.live.com – two free offerings:-
- Office Live Workspace (SharePoint in the cloud and very cool)
- and Office Live Small Business (but limited to a handful of countries at the moment)
All this have been well integrated in to https://home.live.com .
From a developer perspective check out Live Services SDK - https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb264574.aspx
and the article on wikipedia is not bad – slightly out of date in places – see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Live_Services
Cheers Dave