Perhaps taking advantage of the growing popularity of social networking sites, Microsoft is almost short of turning its Windows Live Service into a full-blown social network. Microsoft has just rolled the new version of its windows Live service integrating various online services and tools for communicating and sharing. Among the new services being rolled out today are a photo-sharing site, new email interface, instant messaging and integration with third party site, including Windows Live Essentials.
The party sites which will be working with Microsoft Windows Live Service includes Flickr, LinkedIn, Photobucket, Pandora, Twitter, WordPress and Yelp. This third-party services will integrate with the new Windows Live Profile.Hence giving Windows Live users a central place where they can organize and manage information.
The new Microsoft Live Services Portal’s major changes include:
New social features which will be available to all customers which include newly updated profiles, what’s new feed activities, photo sharing and on-the-go access using any device with Windows Live Skydrive. Likewise, Windows Live’s online storage capacity will be increased to 25GB from the previous 5GB capacity.
Part of the changes will be more personalization features for Windows Live Messenger, a what’s new feed of updates from users’ contacts across the web, drag-and-drop photo sharing, favorites list, group IM and chat with multiple contacts at the same time.
Likewise, Windows Live Hotmail will become much faster and more effective with spam filtering, multiple email accounts integration, multiple e-mail addresses onto any device, increased storage and a calendar revamped.
And the Windows Live Group will also include shared calendaring feature, shared storage, share e-mail address and shared instant messaging.
Now, once the new Windows Live Service is fully rolled which will happen for US-based users today, they will be integrated with Windows Live Essentials which is both a web and desktop suite of applications that would work well with various email, blogging and photo sharings services.
Like we said, this new Windows Live Service will be rolled out today for US users, while the rest of us non-US citizens will have to wait until 2009 to fully use this new service.
