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Photos are one of the most used parts of Facebook, yet you'll never find shots that show perspective, or that let you zoom in to see fine details.

That's where SpeakTech has stepped in, with a Facebook application called MySynths. It lets you take any Microsoft Photosynth and share it on Facebook, just as if you were viewing it on the Photosynth site. You and your viewers will, of course, need Microsoft's Silverlight rich-media technology installed, but for them, there is nothing else to install.

MySynths lets your friends know you just published a new synth, and they can view it without any special software, as long as they have Silverlight installed.

(Credit: CNET)

Photosynth is Microsoft's 3Dish photo experience that takes several photos and stitches them together into a landscape that can show an extraordinary amount of detail, as users zoom in and out of high-resolution photos. Late last year, Photosynth became a commercialized part of Microsoft Virtual Earth, after originally existing as a technology preview.

In the case of this app, it simply embeds a synth for you, and lets your friends both view it and leave you comments as if it were another first-party piece of content on the site.

One small hurdle to using the app is that you're required to manually dig up all the information about the synth, including source URLs, an image thumbnail, and short and long descriptions. These things cannot be automatically sucked in from the Photosynth site, which means that you need to enter them one by one. Luckily, this takes only about a minute per synth, but if you're a heavy Photosynth user, it can be a real process to insert all your synths.

(via Bing community blog)

Here's what's embedded on the Facebook page:

Microsoft has decided to close down Windows Live Events and will be focusing its development efforts on building event planning and management tools for Windows Live Calendar instead. Beginning next month, users of Windows Live Events will be unable to create new events. And sometime next year, the site will simply redirect to Live Calendar instead.

In the meantime, Microsoft is encouraging users to download any photos or documents they have stored in their events, either to their hard drives or to Windows Live SkyDrive. The service has also long had a way to export events to other services including Outlook, Google, and Yahoo calendar, as well as Apple's iCal.

Windows Live Events was launched as part of the Windows Live rebranding back in late 2007. Designed as an Evite competitor of sorts, it let users create events that could be shared publicly. It also made use of other Microsoft services like Live Spaces and Live Messenger to let party goers and planners alike communicate.

Microsoft is bringing out the big guns to combat instant message spam and phishing attacks done to users of its Live Messenger network. The Redmond, Wash.-based software giant filed a civil lawsuit Thursday in King County Superior Court in Seattle against Funmobile, Mobilefunster, and several individuals, who Microsoft says is responsible for the intentional misuse of the service to gain the personal information of its users.

In the suit (which is embedded below), Microsoft cites a multitude of attacks including IMs that appear to be coming from users they know, as well as phishing attacks that mimic the look and feel of an outside service, or an official Microsoft support page.

Microsoft says that the successful use of these tactics has let third parties obtain these users' personal account information, then exploit it by sending mass spam and phishing messages to the contacts of users whose accounts have been breached.

In a post on Microsoft's security blog Microsoft on the Issues, Tim Cranton who is Microsoft's associate general counsel of Internet safety enforcement, said the company hopes the suit will accomplish three things. One is to stop companies and individuals from continuing the attacks through injunction. Microsoft also intends to "recover monetary damages," as well as send a message to other parties who would try similar tactics.

Microsoft counts the number of its Windows Live Messenger users at more than 320 million, although the suit makes no mention of how many of those users have been affected by the privacy attacks. However, it does say that the attacks have put a strain on the servers that run the service, as well as its security teams, which have to monitor and combat incoming attacks. In the meantime, the company is urging users of its Live Messenger service and other Live services not to give other people their log-in information.