Windows Live Gets More Lively

Microsoft is building on principles first articulated in 2005. In Washington, D.C., I remember meeting several MSN product managers who laid out a simple but profound approach: Connect people to whom they know. Recognizing that most blogs and photo shares wouldn't be seen by most people, Microsoft started building infrastructure that would extend relationships. The vast Internet might not care about your blog, but your friends or family certainly might.

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Microsoft is moving its current Windows Live Wave 3 beta through a rolled-out release. The updated service further extends concepts of connecting you to the people that you know. Execution hasn't been easy for Microsoft because its services aren't centralized. Social networking services Facebook and MySpace are self-contained. I've often described Facebook as being like an operating system in the cloud.

For the last few weeks, I've participated in a Windows Live private beta that has been hugely enlightening. In fact, I don't see how this blog post could have been rightly written without participation in the private beta. Somehow, Microsoft has pulled together disparate services so that they feel more like a closed network like Facebook. The social benefits are there, and many Facebook similarities, without much of the baggage.

Live navigation toolbar with customized theme (left side).

Something shocking: Microsoft has finally created something worthy of the Web 2.0 seal of approval, even as that name falls out of favor. But the concepts remain. I've got more to share on good Web 2.0 citizenry in a few paragraphs. It's because of the surprising Web services experience that this post will focus on Windows Live in the browser rather than from client software. (Please, pardon the screenshots; I didn't want to do full page views that revealed information about other testers. Generic screenshots are available at eWEEK.com.)

From Live to the Living
My experience started from a beta home page, which is Facebook-like in social features but not in layout or presentation. There Microsoft offers a fairly central place for accessing numerous and disparate Live services, including Hotmail and Office Live. The home page is information central. From there, you also connect to your network and to groups.

PLEASE SEE eWEEK SLIDE SHOW: "WINDOW LIVE WAVE 3: MICROSOFT HANGS 10"

The network approach differs from Facebook. The rival social networking service decides the broader networks, to which you can participate within limits. I lived in the Washington, D.C., metro area until October 2007. Facebook will let me be in either the San Diego or Washington network. Not both.

On Windows Live you are the network. Keeping with Microsoft's approach to relationships, everything starts from the user as the center, from which circles of relationships extend outward. Like Facebook, Microsoft provides information about what people in your network are doing—from your home page.

Home page header with customized photos (right side).

New feature Windows Live Groups extends those relationships further. Many of the features available to you as an individual user are available to people in the same group, such as calendars, photos and files (from Windows Live SkyDrive). Of course, content is stuff created within the group context; Microsoft plans for groups to be 20 people or less in size. These Microsoft developers crack me up. The URL for Windows Live Calendar contained "dogfood." The term refers to unreleased software that Microsoft uses.

The home page is customizable, but within reasonably defined limits. I can't say how they'll expand later on. Across the top of the home page, Microsoft extends a navigation motif introduced earlier. Items: Home, Profile, People, Mail and Photos plus More and MSN with submenus.

Microsoft has put Spaces in a submenu, which really is sensible. Two reasons: I'm no fan of Spaces as a blogging service, and most Spaces blogs are photo galleries. The Live Photos page eliminates the need for Spaces photo galleries. Microsoft has by no means given up on Spaces, which is a service for which the company continues development. But Microsoft recognizes how important photos are as part of any social network and online social relationship. The Photos page makes available images in full quality (no downsampling), and they're stored on SkyDrive, whose capacity Microsoft boosts from 5GB to 25GB.

On Monday, Chris Jones, Microsoft's corporate vice president of Windows Live Experience Program Management, and I chatted about the new service. He spent quite awhile talking about photos and how often people share them by e-mail. The company is trying to embrace the behavior with new Hotmail capabilities, while making photo sharing easier and more meaningful from the new Live home and Photos pages. The focus on photos is right on, I say.

Becoming a Web 2.0 Citizen
Now about Windows Live as the good Web 2.0 citizen: remarkable, shocking. Beat me with a stick so I wake up from the dream. No surprise, for Windows Live client software the choices are Windows and Windows. But on the Web, the services break away from their Windows chains. I found the Windows Live experience on a Mac running Safari to be about equal to Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 on a Vista PC. Get this: I used the service from my iPhone, too (some features didn't work, though). Windows Live Spaces still has vestiges of Windows legacy, but there's a freshness everywhere else. Even home page customization features, which I was sure would be Mac incompatible, worked just fine. Please, wake me up!

Live Photos page, with pic of my new bicycle.

The best part of Live's Web 2.0 citizenship: what Microsoft calls "Web Activities," which really is broad feed support. Pick a service. Twitter? WordPress? They're there. Microsoft claims feeds from more than 50 companies. I didn't see that many. The larger list includes Flickr, LinkedIn, Pandora and Photobucket. Tempering my excitement, I noticed that in the private beta Microsoft exposed many more Live services than those from third parties.

I asked Chris how Microsoft views Windows Live in context of people using more walled services like Facebook and MySpace. "We hope that Windows Live will be a real complement for them," he said. That's a surprising answer because my expectation would be more "instead of." Maybe there's something pragmatic here. There's a limit to the number of social networking services that someone can realistically use regularly. Mmm, Chris' sentiment is nice, but I didn't see Facebook support in the private beta.

But Microsoft has observed—and it's my observation, too—that "people use more than one social networking service to connect" to friends and family, Chris said. "We looked at that as a real opportunity for us to bring something [different] to market. We're really not believers in the walled garden approach."

If more Microsoft-centricity is coming—and it might be—bundling would be with Windows 7, I predict. If not there, then nowhere.

Microsoft hopes that the new features will expose people to its services. "Our starting point are people who use one of the services already," Chris told me on Monday. Microsoft is betting that as existing users use the services, they will expose features to friends or family. For example, Microsoft has enhanced e-mail capabilities around photo sharing. Every time someone sends out a photo, it publicizes the tools, he said. "They'll ask, 'How did you do that?'"

My early reaction is surprisingly positive, and I can't say that the two earlier Live Waves impressed me. Microsoft had the right concepts, but marginally executed on them. Wave 3 feels different and may follow the old axiom that Microsoft gets things right on the third version. The private beta was very fast—surprisingly so. Response was quicker than running desktop applications in Windows. That said, the public Windows Live Wave 3 release will be the test. Microsoft will roll out new services over the coming weeks and into early 2009. Can Microsoft data centers handle the load? The answer is probably a topic of another blog post.

[Please send your tips or rumors to watchtips at live.com].