Today Messenger for Mac 8 came out of beta! It will be available (soon) as part of the Office for Mac 2011 suite, and is also available as a free standalone download.

Messenger for Mac 8 provides real-time collaboration between Mac users and their Messenger friends, whether those friends are using Messenger on a PC, phone, through Hotmail, or on another Mac. You can use instant messaging, audio, and video calls to communicate with your Messenger contacts by signing in with your Windows Live ID.

On September 24th, our Mac team blogged about how their focus will continue to be on features that extend the productivity of Windows Live customers who use Office applications. For this reason, features that fall outside of that mission, such as games or the new social views available in the Windows version of Messenger 2011, won’t be available for the Mac.

We hope you’ll continue to enjoy staying in touch through IM and video chatting with your closest friends on Messenger, across all the devices you and your friends use.

Piero Sierra
Group Program Manager, Windows Live

It’s been three weeks since we released Windows Live Essentials 2011 and over 16 million people have downloaded the latest version. We’re very excited about what Windows Live Essentials 2011 brings to Windows 7. Some of the key features we’d call out:

• Make the perfect group picture with Photo Fuse in Windows Live Photo Gallery.
• Windows Live Mail lets you automatically upload & share photos on SkyDrive in a photo email that looks beautiful and doesn’t clog your inbox (or the recipients’ inboxes) with attachments.
• AutoMovie automatically pulls in metadata from your photos for captions and credits in Movie Maker.
• Make a video call to Xbox Kinect from Messenger.
• Sync a virtually unlimited number of files to another PC (or Mac) using Windows Live Mesh.
• Windows Live has a large set of social partners that includes Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Flickr, LinkedIn, and 75 other websites globally.

You can download the new Windows Live Essentials 2011 here to get started today.

And it’s still free …

Dharmesh Mehta
Director, Windows Live Product Management

October 22 marks one year since the release of Windows 7. This is a huge milestone for Windows and for Microsoft. Windows 7 has already sold 240 million copies, more than any other operating system in the same timeframe and helping bring us to 1.2 billion people using Windows worldwide. This is something we’re both honored and humbled by, and we wanted to share some of the other highlights for Windows during the past year.

As you know, your Windows experience is more than the Windows 7 operating system. It’s about how you connect to the sites and services you love with Internet Explorer, how you connect with your people and your stuff through Windows Live, and how you do all of this across your devices – whether that’s your PC running Windows 7, a new mobile phone using Windows Phone 7, or another device.

The complete Windows experience

To enable websites to provide a better web on Windows, we released a number of platform previews of Internet Explorer 9 over the last few months, leading up to the first public beta of Internet Explorer 9 in mid-September. Since then, we’ve already seen 6 million downloads of IE9, far outstripping the adoption rate for Internet Explorer 8. We believe this is driven by the way that sites are now at the center of your browsing experience in IE9, and the way that Internet Explorer’s faster web browsing platform lets you take better advantage of everything the PC has to offer.

This week, Windows Phone 7 started to become available around the world, starting first in New Zealand, and then releasing in other countries in Asia and Europe. Windows Phone 7 availability will continue to spread around the world in the coming weeks and months, with 60 mobile operators already planning to provide new Windows Phone devices. Windows Phone 7 is a huge reinvention of the modern smart phone, including a fundamentally different design paradigm, with unique new concepts like dynamically updated “live tiles” and easy-to-navigate hubs that make your phone a pleasure to use (according to Gizmodo). And through Internet Explorer and Windows Live, Windows Phone also makes it easy to connect to your sites, your people, and your stuff.

And that brings us to Windows Live. This past year has been a huge one for us too, with a ton of new product releases, a lot of valuable feedback from our customers, and some great early momentum on the latest Windows Live release. Let’s take a quick look back on the last year.

Completing the Windows 7 experience with Windows Live Essentials

Windows Live Essentials is a suite of applications designed to complete your Windows PC experience. In June, we released a beta of the new Windows Live Essentials, and got very valuable feedback from millions of you, which led to a refresh of the beta in August, and the final Windows Live Essentials 2011 in September.

The new Windows Live Essentials 2011 includes:

• Windows Live Messenger lets you stay in touch with your friends by chatting with them on Messenger, Facebook, Yahoo! Messenger, Lync, and Xbox, and by viewing and commenting on their social updates from Messenger, Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace and over 75 other websites that you can connect to in Messenger.
  
• Windows Live Mail helps you keep track of your email, calendar, and contacts from Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo! Mail Plus, and other email services.
• Windows Live Writer makes it easy to update your blog on Wordpress.com, Blogger, TypePad, and many more blogging services.
• Window Live Photo Gallery helps you organize and share photos with your friends on SkyDrive, Flickr, SmugMug, Facebook, and other photo sharing services.
  
• Windows Live Movie Maker makes it easy to create a high-quality video and instantly share it with friends on SkyDrive, YouTube, and other video sharing sites.
• Windows Live Mesh helps you sync your files, folders, and settings across your PCs (or even your Mac!) and to connect back to your PC from virtually any computer.
• Windows Live Family Safety gives you the tools to help keep your kids safer on the Internet.

It’s only been a few weeks since we released Windows Live Essentials 2011. That said, we’re excited about some of the early data. PC manufacturers are already choosing to pre-install Windows Live Essentials on over 75% of all consumer PCs. Windows Live Messenger has over 300 million active users and with our new Facebook integration in Messenger 2011, we’re currently the #3 app for connecting to Facebook (in terms of daily active users). And in just this short time, Windows Live Mesh is syncing over 500 terabytes of data between PCs, demonstrating the importance of ensuring you can connect to your stuff. And as CNET said, this update creates a “wide pipeline to the cloud.”

Delivering the next generation of personal email with Hotmail

Whether it’s on your PC or on the phone, Windows Live Hotmail has made enormous strides in the last year. We released a series of updates that have changed personal email for hundreds of millions of people, and we’re proud to hear how Hotmail is making your lives more efficient. We now have over 360 million active Hotmail users who are receiving 8 billion email messages daily and storing over 150 petabytes of photos, documents, and other data on our servers.

Here are some Hotmail highlights from the past year.

• In June, we delivered the first set of Hotmail updates that made possible a whole new level of personal productivity from your inbox. With new features like Sweep and automatic filtering, Hotmail helps you keep your inbox clutter free, and saves you time on common tasks like sending photos.
  
• Hotmail also became integrated with the new Office Web Apps, so that you can view, edit, and share Word docs, Excel workbooks, PowerPoint presentations, and OneNote notebooks, all from within Hotmail. In the first 100 days after Office Web Apps launched in the US, UK, Canada, and Ireland, we had over 20 million customers for these apps, a number that is pretty phenomenal for a first generation service that’s had virtually no advertising.
  
• At the end of August, we added Exchange Active Sync to Hotmail, so you could access your email, contacts, and calendar from your smart phone.
• In September, Office Web Apps became even more robust, with the ability to embed your Office docs in websites and blogs, and mobile access to your Excel spreadsheets.
• That update was quickly followed by several new security updates to help keep hijackers out of your Hotmail account.

In the words of Katie Boehret from the Wall Street Journal, we’re “Making Hotmail Hot Again.”

Connecting the services you use with Windows Live

As I discussed in my blog about our approach to partnerships, partnering with the sites and services you already know and love is an integral part of the Windows Live strategy. As I’ve already mentioned, we’ve brought great services like Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, and over 75 other websites into Messenger. Similarly, we’ve deeply integrated great services like Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, and TypePad into Photo Gallery, Movie Maker, and Writer. With Hotmail, we’ve made email from other companies more interactive through Active Views that let you track packages and view attachments, right from your inbox. And in September, we announced a huge new partnership with WordPress.com as the premier blogging experience for Windows Live customers.

We also released the beta version of Messenger Connect in June of this year, allowing developers from all over the web to quickly and easily connect their apps and their users to Messenger and Hotmail. This enables hundreds of millions of customers to more easily share stuff they’re doing across the web with their Messenger friends, and enables our partners to embed the world’s largest instant messaging network directly into their sites. After collecting feedback from over 2500 developers using the beta, last week we released a much improved final version of Messenger Connect.

Through Messenger Connect and our partnerships with leading websites and social aggregators, over 2 million sites now allow people to share content with their friends via Messenger.

As we talked about in our discussion on partnering, this is a new approach for Windows Live over the last few years and is now fundamental to how we deliver great consumer experiences. And in the words of Frederic Lardinois of ReadWriteWeb, “The Microsoft Tanker Has Turned and You Ignore it at Your Own Peril.”

Lighting up your phone with Windows Live

Last but not least, this year has been a big one for mobile phone integration. With the new Windows Phone, you’ll get direct integration with Hotmail, Messenger, and SkyDrive. It’s never been easier to share photos from your mobile phone than with the new Windows Phone 7. Once you connect your phone to Windows Live, every photo you take is automatically uploaded for you to SkyDrive, so you can access it from anywhere, and share it with anyone you want.

We also released our first Messenger app for iPhone and subsequently made several updates to this app. Beyond letting you chat with your friends and see their updates, improvements over the last few months have included adding Facebook chat, and translating our app into 31 languages.

It's been an exciting year

We’re very excited about all that Windows Live has been able to release in the last 12 months, and how this connects with Internet Explorer, Windows Phone, and Windows 7 to bring together the full Windows promise.

Of course, the thing that really makes this worthwhile is our customers, and seeing how you adopt and use our products. So, on behalf of the entire Windows Live team, we want to thank you all for the last year, and I hope you’ll join us in wishing Windows 7 a very happy first birthday!

Dharmesh Mehta
Director, Windows Live Product Management

In the past, we’ve discussed our commitment to building unique experiences and integrating with great services from across the web. With the release of Windows Live Essentials 2011, we’ve made it easier to create and share across your sites.

With the amount of photos and videos we capture and store on our PCs (the average person adds nearly 1GB of photos to their computer every six months*), we wanted to ensure that Windows Live Photo Gallery can easily connect to your sites so you can conveniently share your photos to your friends and family online.

Some of those great sites include major photo and video services and social networks like Facebook, Flickr, and YouTube. We’ve also made it possible for any site to build a plug-in so you can directly share photos from Windows Live Photo Gallery to that website. And we’ve partnered with other popular sites to build some of these plug-ins – for example, you can upload to Picasa Web, Multiply, Vimeo, and SmugMug.

Today, we’re excited to announce we’re adding a unique partner plug-in from Inkubook, a high-quality photo book manufacturer. The Inkubook plug-in lets you easily create a professional-quality photo book from your photos in Windows Live Photo Gallery. And using Inkubook’s Photo Book Uploader, you can easily preview what your book will look like before you upload your photos to Inkubook’s customized experience.

For more detailed instructions on how to use Inkubook, check out Brandon’s post on the Windows Experience blog.

We hope you enjoy creating some great photo books using the Inkubook plug-in. We’re excited to keep connecting Windows Live to the services that matter to you.

Brad Weed
Group Program Manager, Windows Live Photo Gallery & Movie Maker

* InfoTrends US Photo and Video Survey 2009

Continuing with our ongoing partnering strategy, Messenger Connect enables our 500 million users to easily share what they’re doing across the web with their friends in Messenger & Hotmail. It also makes it easy for our partners to embed the world’s largest instant messaging network right into their sites and apps.

Today, we are pleased to announce that Messenger Connect is out of beta and available worldwide. We’ve gotten a great response so far: leading sharing syndicators ShareThis, AddThis, Gigya, and AddToAny have already made the Windows Live sharing badge available on more than 1 million websites (check it out now on Bing).

Over 2500 developers gave us great feedback during the beta, helping us to refine and improve this release of Messenger Connect. Below is a quick summary, but for all the details check out this post from Angus on the Windows Live for Developers blog. Our focus with the release of Messenger Connect was to make it easier for partners to adopt, without compromising user privacy.

• Easier to check out –We made it faster and simpler for partners to try out Messenger Connect and determine if it would be useful for their sites. For example: you can try out the real time chat control without needing to write any code.
• Easier to adopt and integrate– We reduced the effort needed for sites to implement Messenger Connect usefully and powerfully by providing new tools and sample code for ActivityStrea.ms template selectors and more.

• More complete, and consistent with our data portability and privacy principles – Many partner sites want to allow their users to send invitations and other email messages to their Messenger friends to help them discover and start using their sites. Historically, they could do this using the Contacts API. However, as previously announced, we no longer allow open access to that API, due to conflicts with our data portability and privacy principles. In its place, we’re now offering a brokered invitation API that gives users most of these same capabilities without revealing the email addresses of their contacts to the partner site.

We will continue to evolve Messenger Connect to provide a great experience for consumers and great value to partners. If you’d like to join the discussion about Messenger Connect, check out dev.live.com/forums.

Jeff Kunins
Group Program Manager, Windows Live