Microsoft

Microsoft is roaring into CTIA. Redmond's grab bag of assorted announcements take in new Windows Live applications, the Windows Mobile application Marketplace (including word of that elusive Facebook app), and new themes featuring designs from haute fashionista (and Target chum) Isaac Mizrahi. The news gives Microsoft's mobile arm a much-needed jolt of excitement to follow up on its February announcement of the Windows Mobile 6.5 operating system.

(Credit: Microsoft)

Windows Live, Hotmail, Facebook
For more than a year, we've been wondering when Facebook and Microsoft were going to grace Windows Mobile phones with an official and native Facebook app like its free, downloadable applications for BlackBerry, iPhone, and Palm. While we weren't able to get anything out of Facebook back then, on Tuesday, Microsoft made Facebook's presence official. Microsoft's Facebook application is due in April, followed by a native MySpace application set to descend sometime "in summer."

For those who live in the moment, Microsoft has already made Windows Live for Windows Mobile available to download on platforms running version 6 of the operating system or higher. The Windows Live services suite installs mobile versions of Hotmail, Messenger, Live Contacts, Spaces, and Live Search on the phone. Those with older phones can still access Hotmail with a new beta version optimized for the Web, accessible at m.mail.live.com.

Windows Marketplace: Apps and refunds
Not to be outdone by Apple and BlackBerry, Microsoft is readying its own application storefront, dubbed Windows Marketplace for Mobile. The few details released in advance of Microsoft's Thursday keynote showcase application developers whose apps will be featured in the mobile Marketplace. EA Mobile, Gameloft, and Hands-On Mobile are well-known game makers. AP Mobile, Accuweather, and Pandora also stand out in an otherwise obscure lineup.

Also Marketplace related, Microsoft says it will let customers buy applications two ways--through a credit card, or as an add-on to the monthly cellular bill. In addition, Microsoft will let remorseful users return unwanted applications within 24 hours of purchasing, a refund service that neither Apple nor RIM has offered so far for the iTunes App Store or forthcoming BlackBerry App World.

Google has added a patch to its latest beta version and stable version of Chrome to make the browser work better with Microsoft's Hotmail site.

With the patch, Chrome tells Microsoft's site it's actually Apple's Safari browser, sidestepping a compatibility issue that had caused problems using the site.

"While the Hotmail team works on a proper fix, we're deploying a workaround that changes the user agent string that Google Chrome sends when requesting URLs that end with mail.live.com," Chrome Product Manager Mark Larson said in a blog announcement. It also fixes a problem sending mail from Yahoo Mail, he said.

The patch is in Chrome 1.0.154.46, which also fixes a severe security problem.

Matt Cutts, Google's chief Web spam fighter and a high-profile company blogger, was less delicate about the Hotmail issue. "Normally you think of Web pages being faster to update than client-side software downloads. In this case though, Chrome updates near-weekly, much faster than Hotmail did. Another illustration that velocity and speed of iteration matter," he said in an online comment about the matter.

To which Omar Shahine, evidently involved with the Microsoft service, had a rebuttal: "That's a rather naive statement. You think that Hotmail is a Web page and you expect a service with hundreds of millions of users and thousands of servers to stop what it's doing, fix a bug for a browser that the majority of its customers do not use, and spin up an out-of-band release? We've already committed to addressing this issue in our next service release (already started to roll out to the site) which IMHO is an acceptable reaction."

Cutts responded, in effect, that Google knows plenty about running big Web sites, thank you very much. "Google runs Web services with many users and servers too and we launch changes weekly or faster," he said.

(Via Google Blogoscoped)

Microsoft is announcing a series of changes to its Windows Live services aimed to give more of a social-networking flavor to the company's communications services.

With the update, Spaces, Windows Live Hotmail, and Windows Live Messenger will get deeper ties with one another. While stressing that it is not trying to create a new social-networking site, Microsoft is nonetheless adopting concepts like news feeds and profiles that have made such services so popular.

"The general thing people are trying to do in all of these services is keep in touch," said Brian Hall, the general manager for Windows Live.

The software maker is trying to expand the amount of time users spend in Windows Live, which Hall said already gets 11 percent of all Internet minutes, thanks largely to the popularity of Hotmail and Messenger.

On top of those, Microsoft is adding a revamped Windows Live Home page that focuses on a news feed of actions taken by one's contacts as well as new types of views that focus on what a particular person or group is up to.

To populate its news feed, users will have the option to include their activities from a variety of other sites. The company has signed up reviews sites like Amazon and Yelp, blogging sites like WordPress and Twitter, as well as some less well-known social-networking sites.

"Facebook and MySpace are not on there right now," Hall said. "We're announcing a set of partners that are deploying in December."

Photo sharing is a particular area of focus, with Microsoft offering its own storage options, as well as linking to third-party sites such as Photobucket and Yahoo's Flickr. Starting next year, HP will also bundle Microsoft's Windows Live Photo Gallery software with its consumer printers.

As for the changes to Windows Live itself, glimmers of the update are visible now, though most features are only in private testing and won't be visible to the masses until next month, Hall said. For example, the latest public beta version of Windows Live Messenger has a "What's new" feature, but for now it only shows things such as changing a profile picture within Messenger.

As part of the latest changes, Microsoft is also upping the amount of storage provided with its SkyDrive service to 25GB from 5GB.

Part of this wave of changes is also the update to Windows Live Hotmail, in which Microsoft has merged its standard and classic modes--a move that left some users grumbling.

Interestingly, Classic mode was an afterthought in the major Hotmail overhaul Microsoft did several years ago. Throughout the redesign, though, it took on added importance until it became the default mode when the revamped Web mail program ultimately launched.

Yahoo and Google aren't the only ones whose Web site changes incur the wrath of users who'd rather things stay the way they were.

Microsoft is discontinuing an option to use Hotmail's older "classic" interface, merging it with a newer "full" design into a hybrid the company says is faster to use than both the predecessors. "With our new combined platform, we offer great performance in all markets by putting the best features from both versions in one well-designed platform. Because of these performance improvements it is no longer necessary to offer the classic version," the company said in a statement.

Matt Penttila was among those who was unhappy with the change when he lost his old Hotmail interface earlier this week. (More complaints are lodged at My Digital Life site.)

Hotmail users "can't differentiate between tabs and backgrounds because the background is the same color as the tabs, can't change the size of the columns to the left, can't read anything below 10 folders without scrolling down," Penttila said of the newer design. In addition, "read windows don't allow for scrolling side to side, just up and down, anything with graphics is automatically flagged as safe or unsafe and show gray boxes when the day before they were fine and showed with no problem," he said.

What peeved him most, though, was that he said Microsoft foisted the change on him. "They just did it without any warning or consent," he said.

Microsoft said there was indeed warning. "Hotmail customers were notified of these changes beginning in early September," the company said, before the changes started going live on September 22. "The team sent out e-mails and posted ads in advance, which highlighted the upcoming changes to the Windows Live Hotmail."

Also, Microsoft described the Hotmail overhaul rationale in an October blog post by Dick Craddock, Hotmail's group program manager.

It's hard to change heavily used sites. A 2001 Hotmail revamp triggered complaints, then a 2006 Hotmail redesign caused enough problems that Microsoft reverted to classic mode by default.

Yahoo and Google have struggled with objections to redesigns of the Yahoo front page, the Flickr home page, and the iGoogle customizable start page.

Microsoft's downloadable Windows Live tools all got an update last week, but the "Wave 3" enhancements to its online services will take longer to crest.

The online tools, things such as Windows Live Skydrive, Windows Live Spaces, and so forth will all get updates in the coming weeks, though general manager Brian Hall declined to offer a specific timeline in an interview earlier Monday.

The new Windows Live Messenger beta lets you use a short video as your display picture, as well as change your display picture to match the "emoticon" you type.

(Credit: Microsoft)

He did let slip that Windows Live Hotmail will be the first of the services to get an update--sometime this week. Hall said that the main focus of the update is speedier performance on slower machines, some of which could see the Web-based mail service run up to 70 percent faster.

Hall said while the past few years have been about rapidly creating new services, the focus now has shifted toward making those different services work together.

"The next four years is really going to be a race to simplify the Web," Hall said. "The hard part is going to making sure they are accessible and usable by the broad masses."

I didn't get a direct answer on one of my biggest questions--what Microsoft plans to do come Windows 7 with its built-in tools like Movie Maker, Mail, and Photo Gallery. With Vista, Microsoft shipped each of these in non-Internet connected form as part of the operating system and then offered separate, but related, Windows Live versions.

The company would seem to have a few options come Windows 7. One would be to pull out the programs from the OS and offer only Internet-enabled Windows Live versions. A bold move would be to risk antitrust ire and ship the Live versions as part of Windows 7. Another would be to maintain the status quo.

Hall did make a comment about the declining utility of programs that lack the services component, suggesting to me that the first option might be the most likely, perhaps with links to download the programs as Microsoft does today with Windows Live Messenger.

He also conceded that the current approach is more than a little confusing.

"Today it is not a simple as it could be," he said. "The benefit we have to the approach we are taking is we are iterating on a regular basis."

As for last week's update, Hall did show one neat feature I missed in last week's update to Messenger. Although I noticed the ability to stay logged in on multiple devices (say two PCs or a PC and a phone), I didn't notice that you can now have a short video as your display picture. Also, you have the ability to have a different display picture appear when you type certain emoticons. I think I could have some fun with that one.

Microsoft on Wednesday said it is ready with a new update to its Windows Live suite of applications.

The so-called Wave 3 releases include updated versions of Windows Live Mail, Windows Live Messenger, and Windows Live Writer, as well as a new online movie making tool (as it hinted it might). Windows Live Movie Maker brings some, but not all of the features found in the movie-making application built into Windows, adding the ability to post videos to Microsoft's Soapbox video-sharing site, but notably not to Google's much larger rival YouTube. (The update to Windows Live Writer, however, does allow videos to be posted to YouTube, as well as Soapbox.)

"You'll find new features across the products and most notably, Windows Live Messenger has been almost entirely redesigned," Windows Live VP Chris Jones said in a blog posting.

The new look for Windows Live Messenger. Of the Windows Live desktop applications, Messenger got the biggest update.

(Credit: Microsoft)

The new programs are in beta form, so Microsoft is warning that people other than advanced users might want to stick with the old versions for a bit.

"Microsoft encourages interested Windows Live customers and the tech-savvy community to test the new features and functionality," the software maker said in a statement. "It is recommended that consumers wait until the products are final before downloading."

In addition to updating the desktop programs, Microsoft is also expected to make updates to its online services--things like Windows Live Hotmail and Windows Live Spaces.

Microsoft rolled out its first generation of Windows Live products when Ray Ozzie announced its Live push in November 2005 and started issuing a second generation of products in June 2007.