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We’re very excited to be working with WordPress.com to let customers connect the fantastic blogging capabilities of WordPress.com with the leading communications and sharing services of Windows Live.
As part of this partnership, we’re helping customers to migrate their existing Windows Live Spaces blogs over to WordPress.com, and we’re using the power of Messenger Connect to help customers share their blog posts with their Messenger friends.
We thought it was worth taking a moment to highlight that, as of today, just over half a million Spaces blogs have now migrated to WordPress.com. On top of that, nearly half a million additional Windows Live customers have decided to create entirely new blogs on WordPress.com. And for each of those nearly 1 million new people now blogging on WordPress.com, there are, of course, many more new blog visitors also now going to WordPress.com.
People are continuing to migrate their Spaces blogs over to WordPress.com, and to those of you who haven’t gotten around to it yet, we want to remind you that you’ll need to do so before March 2011.
Thanks again to WordPress.com for being a great partner, and to our customers, we hope you’re enjoying the new WordPress.com blogging experience, and Messenger Connect sharing capabilities.
Dharmesh Mehta Director, Windows Live Product Management
At Hotmail, we’re excited about the incredible reception that our customers have given the Office Web Apps. Since rolling out our Office Web Apps integration this summer, we’ve seen millions of people view, share, and edit Office docs right from their Hotmail inbox – over a quarter of a billion docs viewed so far! This same power is coming soon to Office 365 – which delivers the power of cloud productivity to businesses of all sizes.
With more than 350 million documents being shared in Hotmail each month, Hotmail customers have shown us that there is strong demand for managing Office docs online. And with today’s announcement, people will soon be able to view and share Office docs on Facebook. So now, whether you’re in Hotmail, Office 365, or Facebook, you’ve got access to all your Office docs.
Dick Craddock Group Program Manager, Windows Live Hotmail
Just in time for the holidays, we are pleased to introduce a new gaming experience for Windows Live Messenger 2011. We’re excited about our new release for two reasons:
Before going deeper into this new release, it’s important to explain some nuances between social and casual gaming. Social gaming enables players to interact with many people, many of whom they don’t know (such as Farmville, Frontierville, etc.). Casual gaming tends to be a more solitary experience (such as Bejeweled, Solitaire, etc.). We’re bridging this gap by adding more social experiences to casual games, as well as providing a richer interactive experience, including the ability to video chat while playing games with your close friends and family.
Social gaming has been exploding in popularity since 2008. The percentage of online users in the US who play online games has increased from 40 to 50 percent over the last two years, according to a 2010 Nielsen study. And the number of game-playing sessions has increased nearly 50 percent since 2008, from just under 11 sessions per month to nearly 15 sessions per month. Today over 200 million people use Facebook to play social games – that’s 40% of the total population on Facebook. In this same timeframe, casual gaming has also gone mainstream, with nearly 85 million people in the US playing casual games at least once a week. Social gaming startups are popping up everywhere, with considerable venture capital investments and acquisitions happening in this space - just read last week’s roundup from Inside Social Games.
When you use full view in Messenger, you’ll see a new “GAMES” tab. The games tab centralizes all your gaming activity on Messenger in one view, where you can connect to your Facebook and Messenger friends and add to your casual gaming with social elements like leaderboards, friend feeds, and game updates. Of course, your privacy is important to us, so we made sure that you can control what and how you share from within the gaming experience. You can invite friends to play with you side-by-side within the conversation window, or you can play solo, and then challenge your friends afterwards when you post your high score.
Another new social element on the games tab is the ability to quickly see which friends are online playing, and what their favorite games are, so you can join them in a game. You can even video chat while playing with a friend and see their reactions in real-time.
Customers love new games, and game developers are lining up to build them, so we’re taking important steps to improve their distribution and discovery. We’re working with publishing partners around the world to bring world-class games to our multiple platforms, and engaging with them to make the chat experience deeper and richer. Crowdstar is a great example of how we’re partnering with the people who are innovating in the social and casual games space to deliver these experiences to our customers.
Because the new Messenger games tab is built with the expertise of the Xbox LIVE Services team at Microsoft, it makes casual online gaming more relevant to today’s connected world. The launch of games in Messenger marks an important collaboration between Windows Live and Xbox LIVE that we will continue to expand upon. Along with the new Messenger games tab, today you’ll find a new MSN Games preview, an updated Bing gaming experience, and a new online Games for Windows Marketplace. These new game experiences will be rolling out throughout the day today, and thus may not appear for all Messenger customers until late this afternoon (PST).
We’ve connected our online gaming properties in important ways to give game developers the flexibility to reach their target customers wherever they play the most. Whether you play online games on MSN, on Bing, or in Messenger, you will find a familiar gaming experience, where you can track your friends and high scores for your favorite games, regardless of which site you are on.
The new games tab in Messenger will be available later today in the US, UK, France, Canada, Spain, Mexico, Brazil, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, and Turkey. More markets will be added later this year. The games tab UI will be localized in all of these markets, but the games themselves will only be in English.
Games vary slightly by market, but we’re making available a selection of more than 35 new free-to-play games, in addition to the tried-and-true favorites you could play in Messenger already. We’ve lined up some great partnerships to bring you a diverse mix of puzzle games, hidden object games, card and board games, and some fun physics games that are almost too unique to classify. And there will be more to come – as our partners release new games, we plan to roll them out to you weekly. So, check your Messenger games tab often for the latest and greatest games to play while video chatting with your friends and family.
Piero Sierra Group Program Manager, Windows Live Messenger
A particularly malicious worm (a self-replicating computer virus) is currently trying to spread itself through many of the world's largest instant messaging and social networks, including Windows Live Messenger 2009. We’re very serious about protecting our customers, and are pursuing multiple avenues to help stop its progress. The worm spreads by inserting a link into an IM conversation with a person whose computer is already infected. When someone clicks the link, it opens in a browser, downloads the worm on the recipient’s computer, and then repeats this process.
Normally, when Messenger sees a web address in a conversation it is turned into a hyperlink which, when clicked, automatically opens in a web browser. This feature makes it very easy for the malicious worm to be unknowingly installed on your computer by clicking on the link and being sent to a web site containing the malicious software. We’re pursuing a number of activities to help protect you, working actively with industry experts and law enforcement to help stop this criminal activity.
Most notably, we’ve temporarily turned off active hyperlinks for web addresses sent in IM conversations using Windows Live Messenger 2009. You will still be able to copy a web address and paste it into a browser window if you know it to be safe, but by removing active hyperlinks from Messenger 2009, we’re taking a significant step towards stopping the unintentional spreading of this worm.
Because we’ve now blocked active links in Messenger 2009, starting today, some customers may also see a notification in the main Messenger window warning them that some features might not be available.
Messenger 2011 is not impacted in the same way, thanks to its Link Safety feature. However, we are actively monitoring the situation and investigating different approaches to help protect customers using the latest version of Messenger, should the situation change.
As always, we encourage customers to exercise caution with links to web pages that you receive in IMs, especially if the links are to a web page that you are not familiar with, unsure of the destination of, or suspicious of. Malicious software may be installed in your computer simply by visiting a web page with harmful conteaqnt.
If you think your computer may have already been infected by a malicious worm, check the , please visit the Security TechCenter on Microsoft TechNet, and then download and use the malicious software removal tool. For additional help with Messenger, check out the Messenger Solution Center.
John Scarrow General Manager - Safety Services
Frederic from ReadWriteWeb recently noted the large number of people who have connected Facebook and Messenger. As it’s now been about one month since we released Windows Live Essentials 2011, we wanted to take a moment to talk more about our progress in building partnerships with Messenger that help customers connect to their friends and networks from across their devices.
In the last few updates, we made a number of changes across Windows Live that made it both more valuable to connect Facebook to Windows Live, and easier for you to do this. We’re still early in the release, but to date, over 10 million people have connected their Facebook accounts with Windows Live. One thing that excites us about this is not only the scale of this adoption but the fact that it is already 6 times more than we saw in all of Wave 3 (our previous set of releases).
When Windows Live customers connect to Facebook, they have a number of options to select from, in terms of how their data moves across the two networks.
One of these options is the ability to chat with your Facebook friends from within Messenger. Because there are a number of complexities involved in integrating two huge, real-time communication systems, this chat option is only available in 13 countries around the world. That said, there have already been over 250 million chat conversations between Messenger and Facebook customers, and these conversations have lasted more than 1.5 billion minutes. We’re excited to see how this is continuing to grow as more people connect their Windows Live accounts to Facebook and as we begin to offer chat integration in more countries.
While Facebook is clearly one of our largest Messenger partners, there are more than 75 other great companies that are similarly being connected deeply with Windows Live. And from these, over 1.6 million people have connected YouTube to Windows Live, and over 700 thousand people have connected MySpace to Windows Live.
Partnerships are not only important for connecting Messenger customers with their networks, but they’re also critical to making sure customers can stay connected across their devices. On the PC side, many device manufacturers and retailers are choosing to pre-install Windows Live Essentials on their new Windows 7 PCs – helping bring together a complete Windows experience. We’re continuing to work with these partners to make this possible, and we expect over 100 million new consumer PCs to ship with Windows Live Essentials next year.
On the mobile phone side, Windows Live is deeply integrated into the newly released Windows Phones and we’re looking forward to seeing the adoption and hearing your feedback on that experience. But many of you are currently using other smart phones, and we think it’s important that you can also use Messenger from those devices. So we work with our partners to ensure that we have great experiences for their devices, and we’re seeing some good adoption and usage of the latest mobile experiences for Messenger. There are over 10 million active Messenger customers on BlackBerry devices, over 5.2 million active Messenger customers on iPhones and over 1.2 million active Messenger customers on Nokia smart phones. And through our mobile service provider program, app developers are able to bring Messenger to tens of millions more customers on other phones.
Helping customers connect to the networks and people that matter to them is very important to us, and so we appreciate the opportunity to be able to work with all the great companies that are connecting to Windows Live and those that are making Messenger available on their devices. And most importantly, we’re glad to see our shared customers making these connections to improve their communication and sharing experiences across more of their devices.