Live.com, Live Search, and Windows Live Local drop the "beta" tag

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Three of the new Windows Live services officially shed their "beta" tag today.

Live.com is a personalized portal/RSS aggregator that allows you to customize your feeds and news as you like.  Plus, you can add various Gadgets to the page, or build your own.  Check out the Live.com blog for more info here.

Windows Live Local is the mapping/local search site based on Virtual Earth.  Along with their official 1.0 release are a slew of newer features and an updated UI.  You can read about those here at the WLL blog.

Finally, Live Search is the next evolution of the MSN Search engine.  The Live search team has made numerous improvements and discusses them here.  I've been using Live Search as my default search for a while now, and I haven't experienced much of the head banging of old days.  That's a good thing, as I usually find what I'm looking for quickly with Live!  Check out the Live Search blog here for more info.

One more thing...  Back in June I posted how most of the new Live services are developer friendly!  Don't forget to check out Windows Live Dev for more information on how you can build applications using the Live services.