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Now that the new generation of Windows Live web services has been released, some of you have asked me why we didn’t make any changes to Spaces. Although we did not make many noticeable changes to the service, I wanted to do a blog post about Spaces within the broader context of Windows Live and show how Spaces has had, and continues to have, a big influence on our overall direction.
Like many sites, Spaces, too, struggles with the never-ending battle against spam. Improving in this area was a big priority for us, in both Spaces and Hotmail. Our efforts here are already showing signs of success. For example, during the heaviest period of attacks on Spaces, a spam-tracking website called Uribl attributed 1500 spam campaigns to web pages hosted on Spaces, each of these actively generating hundreds of thousands of Spaces spam attacks. As of this writing, we have blocked 99% of these spam campaigns, so now Uribl lists only 15 active spam campaigns on Spaces, all of which are fresh attacks that we are actively working to disable. Very shortly, we will put even more safeguards in place to ensure that fewer spam spaces get created, which will bring this number down even more.
Comment spam has also been a persistent problem on Spaces. We are attacking this problem through heightened investment in account validation, limiting the number of comments you can add in a session, and improving permission settings so that by default, only friends can comment. All of these efforts combined make it harder for machine-generated comment spam to get through.
Of course, you can still allow public comments on your space, but by default we limit who can comment on your space to just "friends." For most people, this default setting is going to make it easier to manage their spaces, but if you write a popular blog and still want public comments, be sure to go to your Profile page and then click Privacy settings. Click Advanced, (direct link here), and then you can change the permission slider for “Comments and notes” in the “Who can contact me” section near the bottom:
Now that’s out of the way, we can continue with the fun stuff.
Let’s start with a bit of history. The year was 2004. Blogging was just going mainstream, and users were beginning to explore creating their own personal websites and sharing digital photos on the web. We first launched “MSN Spaces” in Japan in late 2004 as a blogging service, and quickly built a small but loyal following. About 6 months later, we added photo sharing and launched Spaces in the US.
By the end of 2005, we'd connected Spaces to Messenger and introduced the “gleam,” a little orange asterisk in your Messenger contact list that let you know when your contacts had updated their space. This was the first time you could use Messenger to follow the online activities of your friends, an early ancestor to the new Messenger Social feed.
Over the next few years, Spaces moved toward three important goals: Giving you an outlet for personal expression, giving you a place to share photos with friends and family, and giving you a way to keep up with what was going on with your closest friends. So now let’s fast forward to 2010 and take a look at today’s Windows Live, when these goals are still just as important, but are evolving to meet the demands of the new online world.
Spaces continues to be a popular blogging service, but we also recognize that bloggers use a broad range of blog hosts. So we made sure that if you are a serious blogger on Spaces, WordPress.com, or other blogging services, Windows Live is a great companion to your blog.
Windows Live Writer is a fantastic blogging tool that lets you publish to almost any blogging service. You can preview your posts and get your photos and videos looking just the way you want them before you publish. With our plug-ins you can quickly embed video clips from YouTube or photos you already uploaded to Facebook. Try the new Writer beta today as part of the Windows Live Essentials beta.
Connecting your blog to Windows Live is like giving all your Messenger friends a subscription to your blog’s RSS feed. Every time you publish a new post, they will see a nice summary with a link to the post, right in Messenger. And connecting is easy to do. On the left side of the Profile page is a list of the services you have connected to Windows Live, and a link to connect new services. No matter where you host your blog, connecting it to Windows Live makes it better.
We saw that lots of people who had once used Spaces stopped using it, or used it only for photo albums. They liked the ability to show their family and their friends what they were up to, but didn’t want to have to keep updating it all the time. We needed a simpler way to share.
Although Spaces continues to be a popular blogging platform, fewer people are blogging in the traditional sense, and more people are just sharing. What do I mean? Most people don’t want to take time to configure a blog or don’t think they have enough to say to spend time writing and editing long posts (like this one!) but they do want to share short updates, photos, and cool links they come across on the web.
We decided the best way to support sharing in our new release would be to deepen the ability to share via your Messenger status message. By adding the ability to share photos, Office documents, and links, we made it easier to share anything that’s on your mind. It gets even better when you connect Windows Live to Facebook since the things you share from Messenger show up there for all your friends to see and add their comments, even if they don’t use Windows Live. This works from Messenger, your phone (even from an iPhone), or Hotmail to give you simple, powerful sharing wherever your friends are. We also give you a very blog-like historical view of your status messages and other activities on the “Me” tab of the social feed in Windows Live Messenger beta (or by going to your Profile page on the web). For most users this is as much “blog” as they need.
The flexible nature of Spaces gave people a powerful way to express themselves through the use of themes, modules, and layouts. While some of you spent a great deal of time getting your space “just right,” many of you just wanted a simpler way to express yourselves. The Windows Live Profile service lets you pick a dynamic theme to express their personality and has become the central place on Windows Live to see information about someone, including their recent activity and the services they're connected to.
Spaces provided the first photo sharing experience in Windows Live. Over half of all Spaces are used exclusively for photo sharing. Most of the people using Spaces this way wanted the ability to show photos to their family and friends but weren’t interested in other Spaces features.
So, a couple of years ago, based on the high demand for photo sharing, we began to evolve the Spaces photo sharing feature into a first class Windows Live experience built on Windows Live SkyDrive. We launched photos.live.com in December 2008 and since then, customers have shared over 2.5 billion photos with each other on SkyDrive.
In our most recent release, we continued the momentum with more investment in photo sharing features: in Messenger (check out the photos tab!), and in Hotmail with Active View (the ability to view photo attachments right from your inbox – see Dick Craddock’s post), and a beautiful new immersive slide show in Skydrive with commenting, people tagging, and web Messenger (but that’s a blog post for another day). When you connect Windows Live to Facebook, you'll see all the photos shared with you, from Facebook or Windows Live, right in Messenger.
While the original Messenger “gleam” made it easy to see when someone had changed their space (the first Messenger Social integration), the newest version of Windows Live makes it easy to aggregate all of your activities across the web automatically. You connect Windows Live with the services where your closest friends do their sharing, whether it is photos on SmugMug or a blog on WordPress.com, and then use Messenger to keep up with what is going on with them. So now, instead of hinting at updates with “gleams,” we have brought all the information right into Messenger with the Messenger Social feed. Piero Sierra has written a great post on this.
Spaces continues to impact the direction of Windows Live. We will continue to look at how you use Spaces, as well as how you share online in general and on Windows Live, so that we can keep improving your core experiences on Windows Live.
Tony East, Senior Lead Program Manager, Windows Live
There is a lot of excitement about the new Hotmail, and we are certainly eager to get the latest release into the hands of all our customers. Several of you have asked, “When will the new Hotmail come to my country?” As we mentioned in our earlier announcement, we don’t roll out by country (or by language, or anything else like that). We have a mix of customers from around the world in each cluster, and we roll out all languages simultaneously. So, unfortunately, there is no way of predicting exactly when your account will get the new Hotmail.
Two weeks ago, we started the Hotmail rollout with a single cluster. Right now, a few million customers have the new Hotmail – less than 1% of our customer base. We roll out new software slowly at first in order to give our engineers a chance to study the new software running at scale with real customers.
When we roll out new software, we typically find a few things that we want to tweak before going out more broadly. Most of these things are actually invisible to our customers – they usually have to do with our ability to monitor the site or make the rollout itself go more smoothly.
This time was no exception, and we have made a few minor changes to the way Hotmail works “under the hood” in order to make the rollout go even more smoothly for the remaining 99% of our customers.
This week, we will put the new Hotmail onto a few additional clusters that have slightly different characteristics (different hardware, different mix of customers), which will help us learn even more. We expect that we’ll make a few other tweaks as we learn.
After that, the release will really pick up speed, and we’ll start to put the new software on more and more clusters. Of course, we have hundreds of clusters and we want to make sure everything goes smoothly, so it will still take a few weeks to finish.
This is a very exciting time for the Hotmail team. We appreciate your patience as we do the job of rolling out as quickly as possible. For those of you who already have the new Hotmail, we hope you like it, and we want your feedback. For those of you who don’t have it yet, fear not! It’s coming soon, and we think it will be worth the wait!
Mike Schackwitz
In just 5 days, over one million people downloaded the Windows Live Messenger app for iPhone that launched last week! This early momentum is fantastic, and we really appreciate the feedback we’ve been getting from many of you. We look forward to updating the iPhone app shortly to address a few issues that users have pointed out, and continuing to improve the experience.
While Messenger for iPhone is relatively new, for many connecting with Messenger friends on your mobile phone is not new. In addition to the more than one million iPhone Messenger users, there are over 24 million people who connect with Messenger friends from other mobile phones through a client application, their phone’s browser, or SMS. Along with Messenger Connect, Messenger IM in Hotmail, and the coming integration with Xbox LIVE, the new iPhone app is just one more way that we are bringing Messenger to you across the web and on your phone. We’re very excited about the new Messenger beta available now and thank you for being part of the Windows Live family.
Michael Chang Group Product Manager, Windows Live Messenger
Today we are announcing availability of Messenger Connect () beta. Messenger Connect allows users to communicate, share, and connect with their Messenger friends on other websites. It is a flexible, yet prescriptive set of APIs to help create intuitive experiences that can be tightly integrated into a website or another app. Windows Live users Messenger, Hotmail, and SkyDrive users can opt in to provide access to their identity (sign-in, profile, relationships, and additional user data), share updates about the things they’ve done via Messenger social, and chat with their friends, all from within the experience of another website or app.
The unique value of ”connect like” products for web sites and apps isn’t in the technology (read all about the glue), but rather in the audience that can be reached and user connections that can be made. Hundreds of millions of people will be able to connect what they do on their favorite websites with the new Windows Live user experiences – the new Windows Live Hotmail, Messenger (+iPhone), SkyDrive for your photos and Office docs, and the new Essentials beta - all great new experiences that Messenger Connect now enables partner websites to connect to.
Messenger Connect enables three core scenarios for websites and app developers:
Many of the components that have evolved into Messenger Connect have been around for several years (Messenger Web Toolkit, Live ID Web Authentication, Delegated Authentication, and the Windows Live Contacts API), but this is the first time we’ve delivered a suite of standards-based, self-service APIs as a package. To understand how Messenger Connect works, from authorization, to the different interfaces and controls, to the emerging standards/specifications we use (OAuth WRAP, Portable Contacts, ActivityStrea.ms, and OData), check out this post.
Below are some screenshots from a website that is using Messenger Connect through a Gigya integration:
Over the past few months we've worked closely with industry leaders from a technology, policy and scenario perspective. The feedback we received from these partners has been critical in the development of Messenger Connect – it has directly helped shape our development so far, and your feedback can help shape our development in the future.
Over the next couple of months, as we expand the beta, you will see many more partner sites go live.
Messenger Connect is now open in beta form to any developer or website for the core scenarios outlined above (more info). We're working hard to deliver additional scenarios, and will ship a final release later on this year. You can get more info here and if you have feedback, check out this forum post. Also – be sure to subscribe to the Windows Live for Developers Blog – that is where we’ll be posting lots of developer and user experience related details about Messenger Connect.
It's here! Hot on the heels of the Hotmail roll-out, the new Windows Live Essentials is now available for public beta testing. Windows Live Essentials beta requires Windows Vista or Windows 7, and is available in English, French, Dutch, Japanese, Portuguese, Simplified Chinese, or Spanish. Get it here!
As previously announced, this release of Essentials is focused on two things: connecting Windows 7 to the cloud services you already use, and making everyday tasks simpler, so that you can do more on your PC.
We’ve designed Essentials to connect your Windows experience to the web services you already use – not just the ones from Microsoft. The new betas of Windows Live Photo Gallery, Movie Maker, Mail, Writer, and Messenger connect to photo and video sharing (SkyDrive, Flickr, YouTube, Facebook, SmugMug), social networking (Facebook, MySpace, Linkedin), email (Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo! Mail), blogging (Spaces, WordPress, Blogger), and document productivity (Office Web Apps) services. And the new Windows Live Sync keeps your files synchronized across multiple PCs and in the cloud. You can even directly access your PC over the web with Sync's new remote desktop feature.
People like to get creative on their PCs as much as they like seeing what everyone else has been up to. Whether it’s Retouch, Panoramic Stitch, or Photo Fuse in Photo Gallery, Auto Movie in Movie Maker, or photo email in the new Windows Live Mail, we think you’ll be excited by the new additions to Essentials that make advanced tasks, well, easy. If you haven’t yet tried Photo Fuse to merge together the best of several photos, it’s a lot of fun.
You can also view this video on YouTube
We hope you’ll enjoy the new Essentials beta. Leave us a comment and let us know what you think!
- Piero Sierra Group Program Manager, Windows Live Essentials
P.S. We’re loving all the comments here, but for feedback and bug reporting, here are some links you might want to try.
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