Futurecat - Michael Karek

Today we’re releasing an update to Windows Live Essentials 2011 beta. One of the main reasons we release betas is to allow early adopters to enjoy our products and provide feedback on their experience. First, we want to say thank you for your help. For Messenger alone, we had over 3 million unique users, 3.5 million updates to display pictures, 6.2 million video calls, and 7.6 million updates to status messages.

Your beta feedback and usage has helped shape the many improvements we’ve made and continue to make across Messenger, Photo Gallery, Movie Maker, Writer, Mail, and Family Safety. Today I’d like to summarize some of the more visible changes you’ll see in today’s update, and we’ll follow up with more details in later posts.

Performance and quality of service improvements

We’re always working to improve the performance and quality of our services and we’ve made significant progress in this area in today’s beta update. This includes things like decreasing the time it takes to start each program or render each webpage, and improving the quality of your experiences. It often takes hundreds of small improvements and optimizations to better the final experience. Here are some of the many improvements you’ll see in this area:

• A quicker Messenger – The time it takes to sign in, and to refresh contacts and social feeds, as well as animation speed, are all faster than in previous versions of Messenger.
• More efficient video chat – Messenger video chat uses 30% fewer CPU resources by offloading work to the GPU.
• Better facial recognition – Photo Gallery facial recognition is improved significantly and works more quickly.
• Larger movie uploads – Movie Maker will upload higher resolution movies to SkyDrive (480×640 vs. the previous 320×480).
• Higher bit-rate movies – Movie Maker now supports higher quality (bit-rate) content.
• Better spell-checking – Writer has significantly improved the quality of its spell-checking.
• Better integration with Office – Writer is much better at retaining all formatting when you copy and paste from Word and other Microsoft Office programs.
• Better handling of Gmail – Mail now automatically handles Gmail’s spam and trash folders properly.
• Faster web filtering – Family Safety web filtering is 35% faster than in the previous version.

In addition, we’ve been able to improve the quality of the software and have fixed over 75% of reported crashes. We’re not always able to reproduce all of the reported crashes internally, but we do look at this on an ongoing basis.

Facebook chat in Messenger

Many of you have been asking for Facebook chat, and it’s finally here. More than half of all Messenger customers also use Facebook. With the previous beta, you got a rich social view that brought together all your updates (including those from Facebook) and gave you one place to see and comment on them. With the new Facebook chat integration, you now also have one place to chat with all your friends. And if you use Facebook but don’t use Messenger today, you now have an always-on “people app” on your PC that gives you instant access and notifications as people come online in Facebook or Messenger.

From a technical perspective, this is a significant task. We’re connecting Messenger’s ~300 million customers (who are already connected to Yahoo! Messenger and Office Communicator) to Facebook’s ~500 million customers. To make sure this happens smoothly while Windows Live and Facebook both build up the needed back-end infrastructure, we’ll start by releasing this chat capability in the US, UK, France, Brazil, Germany, and Russia today. We’ll continue to expand this offering to additional regions over time.

We know some of you want to connect Facebook to Windows Live, while others prefer to keep things separate. This is a major part of our design and you get to decide when to connect Facebook, and if you do what types of activities you want to allow, including chat. You can change your preferences at any time from your profile page.

Quick previews and improved tree view in Photo Gallery

One of the benefits of the new ribbon user interface in Windows Live Essentials is the ability it gives you to preview a change before you apply it simply by hovering over the option. With the beta update today, we’ve also added preview capabilities to the “Find” tab in the ribbon. So before you apply a filter (date, rating, people tags), you can hover over one of those filters and see the results instantly.

We’ve also added back date and keyword to the tree on the left hand side. While we know many customers will use the Find ribbon to sort through their pictures, we heard loud and clear that others found the tree more useful.

Flickr video publishing and Snapshot in Movie Maker

With the new Snapshot feature in Movie Maker, you can select a single frame from a video as it appears in the preview window and add it to your movie. This allows you to quickly grab an image that you want to keep or perhaps use for your movie’s intro or closing.

In addition, because we know many of you use Flickr for photo sharing and have enjoyed publishing to Flickr right from Photo Gallery, we’ve extended support to Movie Maker, so that you can now publish videos directly from Movie Maker or Photo Gallery to Flickr too.

We hope you’ll download today’s update of the Windows Live Essentials 2011 beta and try out the changes.  And today, in addition to English, Spanish, French, Dutch, Portuguese, Japanese, and Simplified Chinese, you can also now get the beta in Russian or German.  In this post I covered just a few of the things you’ll notice when you use the new beta update. In subsequent posts we’ll go into more detail on other improvements we’ve made, as well as feedback we’ve received on the new Hotmail.

- Chris Jones

Vice President, Windows Live Engineering

In this release of Windows Live, you can now see your friends’ activity in all the social networks you use. Last week, for example, Douglas Pearce blogged about what this means for the new Messenger. He discussed how Messenger Highlights is designed to be the most complete view of what your friends are doing across the web. Messenger Companion is an exciting extension of that effort. Messenger Companion is a browser plugin which lets you quickly share and discover what your friends have shared online. It lets you view the links your friends are sharing, comment on them, and even share something fun you’ve come across. And if you’ve connected your social networks to Windows Live, Messenger Companion works across all of them.

Discovering what your friends have shared

We want to make it easy for you to discover what your friends are sharing online, so if you have your Windows Live ID connected to your social networks, it doesn’t matter where a friend shares information. When you visit a website, Messenger Companion will let you know if your friends have shared any new links on that site by subtly flashing in the top right corner of your browser window. Here’s how it works. Let’s say one of your friends shares a link on YouTube (this share could have happened on any social network connected to Messenger, such as Facebook, MySpace or LinkedIn). When you go to youtube.com, you’ll see a notification from Messenger Companion that lets you know what your friends have shared on the site since the last time you were on YouTube.

If you want to check out all the recent links shared on a site, all you need to do is use the Messenger Companion button in Internet Explorer.

This will open up Messenger Companion and show you all the links recently shared by your friends in any of your connected social networks.

Joining in the conversation

Shared links can spark an interesting conversation where friends join in to comment and give their two cents. Messenger Companion shows you the conversation about a shared link, while letting you view the link and comment back.

We don’t want you to worry about where the activity is happening, so sharing is seamlessly integrated into your Windows Live experience. When you join in a conversation, your comment gets posted back to the social network your friend used to share the link. You can see how this works in the two screenshots below. First, you’re on youtube.com and you comment on your friend’s link in Messenger Companion.

When you finish typing your comment and click Add, your comment publishes to Facebook because that’s the social network your friend used to share the link.

Sharing with your friends

The story wouldn’t be complete if there was no way for you to share interesting things you come across online. Not only can you use Messenger Companion to share with your friends, but Messenger Companion provides one-click sharing!

When you a share a link through Messenger Companion, it will update your status in Messenger, and all your friends in Messenger will get an update from you about the link you shared.

If you’ve connected your social networks to Windows Live, this shared link will also get posted to your profile on your social networks, so that friends on those networks can also see your link and comment back.

Messenger Companion is available to anyone using Internet Explorer 7 or Internet Explorer 8. You can get it now by installing the Windows Live Essentials beta. We hope you enjoy sharing with your friends using Messenger Companion. We would love to hear your thoughts and feedback.

Over the past few weeks, we’ve announced many new features coming in Windows Live Messenger. By now you’ve probably played with the Beta, and if you haven’t, you can get it now at http://explore.live.com. You can also see how Messenger goes with you wherever you are — on the new Hotmail or even using Messenger for iPhone.

One of the first things you’ll see in each of these experiences is a feed of social updates from your friends, labeled Highlights. On your PC Highlights appears in the expanded window when you are running the new Messenger in full view. Today we want to share the thinking behind the Highlights feed and how we bring together the most interesting view of all of the things that your contacts are up to across the web while keeping clutter away to make sure that you don’t miss any of what your friends are doing… wherever they’re doing it.

What you’ll see in Highlights

We know most people use at least one social network and that many people participate in multiple content sharing sites. And, of course, everyone still get tons of social content like photos and social notifications in email. Our approach with Messenger wasn’t to build yet another social network or sharing site, but rather to connect you to the sites you and your friends already use. Highlights is designed to be the most complete view of what your friends are doing across the web. We do this by bringing together everything your friends are sharing like status on IM, updates on social networks, updates from content sharing sites, email updates from your friends, and documents on SkyDrive. If you haven’t already, you can connect your services to Messenger now at http://profile.live.com/services/.

Now let’s look at a few examples of what these updates look like:

Updates from Social Networks you use

Here’s an update from a Facebook friend. The photos look great in Messenger, and clicking them opens a full-screen slideshow. Of course, you can also see recent comments from Facebook friends, and your comments go back to Facebook, too. You can also connect to MySpace, and LinkedIn is coming soon.

Highlights from social emails like photos and Facebook updates

Today, more than ever, people share a lot of content in email, especially photos. One of the things you’ll see in Highlights is large previews of ordinary photo attachments from your friends. This isn’t limited to emails from other Hotmail users. If you get an email with photos from a friend who uses Gmail or Yahoo! Mail, that will look great in Messenger, too.

Web Activities like YouTube and Flickr

When you or your friends connect services like Flickr and YouTube, you can see each other’s updates in Highlights. The list of services you can connect is available at http://profile.live.com/services/. Here are two examples, a YouTube video and a Flickr photo.

Office Documents on SkyDrive

SkyDrive hosts your Office Documents and is great for easily sharing and collaborating on documents with your friends. You’ll see new and updated documents in Highlights, too.

Richer connections with the people you care most about

Until now we’ve been talking about what goes into Highlights to make the experience complete, and that’s important because it puts people—and not just the services they use—first. Instead of navigating to several websites and having to dig through your email to know what’s happening with your friends, you can just look at one place where people are at the center.

But if all we did was aggregate all this activity, we’d make information overload worse, not better. Instead, we do two more important things: we prioritize updates from the people who matter most to you, and we favor the most interesting things your friends are doing, so things like photos, videos, and the updates people are talking about rise to the top.

Let’s break it down. First and foremost, we optimize for the people who matter most, and we do that with Favorites. It just takes a click to add a Favorite, and once you do, your Favorites get special treatment throughout Messenger — you get quick access to them in the Windows 7 task bar, their presence is shown at the top of your Friends list, and of course, we keep their updates in Highlights longer and show them higher in the feed so you don’t miss what these friends are doing.

Next, we take your friends’ activities and rank them across several factors:

1. How many comments does the update have?
2. What type of update is it?
3. How recent is the update?

Then we take the results and show the updates in Highlights in two columns – one for updates like status messages and links and the other for media like photos and videos. You can see the media column outlined in this picture – this design lets the photos and videos stand out while saving plenty of room for text and links on the left.

If you want to pull back the curtain just a bit more, here’s a diagram of how you can expect your Highlights view to look:

The end result is a Highlights feed that shows you:

• More updates from your Favorites for longer
• Other interesting stuff that your friends are talking about
• Less of what you probably aren’t interested in

Bringing it all together

Thanks for taking the time to explore how Highlights brings together the most interesting updates from all your friends across the web while making sure you don’t miss updates from the people who matter most. Try it out for yourself and let us know what you think – we hope you find us a great companion to the social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, and (soon) LinkedIn that you’re already using.

Doug Pearce – Lead Program Manager, Windows Live

As Piero mentioned in his blog post, we had two main goals when building the newest version of Windows Live: making everyday tasks simpler, and connecting Windows 7 to the cloud. In the new Windows Live Mail beta, we did a lot of work to make these goals a reality, and today I’d like to give you a quick tour of some of the high points.

Making it easy to share photos via the cloud

Given all of the talk about sharing on the web, you might be surprised to hear that fully half of all content sharing is done through email. Attaching photos to an email message is convenient, but it actually isn’t a great way to share because of limits on the number and size of email attachments. A lot of people try to deal with these limits by shrinking photos before mailing them out, or sending them in small, separate batches instead of all at the same time, but these are compromises that you shouldn’t have to make.

The new Windows Live Mail gives you a better option. Now, by simply dragging your photos into a message that you’re composing, you can create beautiful photo email messages like these:

There are a bunch of different album styles to choose from, so you can show your photos in a way that best reflects your style and personality.

But the Windows Live Mail beta doesn’t just give you beautiful albums; now, limits on photo size and attachments are yesterday’s news. When you send photos, a SkyDrive album is automatically created for you, and your photos are uploaded to the cloud. The people who receive your mail will then see the photos in the email, of course, but they’ll also see them in Messenger, in the social highlights feed:

…and in Hotmail:

…and of course, when they click the images in any of these places, they can view your SkyDrive album from any computer or mobile phone that has Internet access. Your albums are privacy-protected, so only your friends who receive your mail can see your photos. All of this happens without any extra effort on your part – just drag your photos into your email, and Windows Live Mail takes care of the rest.

Windows Live Mail makes it simple to organize your mailbox

We also made big changes to make it quicker and more efficient to read your mail. The most obvious change is sitting at the top of the window. To make it quicker and easier to perform your everyday tasks, we identified the most frequently used commands, and put them front and center in the ribbon:

Next, we turned our attention to the inbox itself. Those of you who get a lot of email know it can be confusing to follow email conversations that extend over several days. In the traditional, sorted-by-date view of the inbox, it’s tough to quickly find and skim any but the most recent replies in an email conversation. In Windows Live Mail’s new conversation view, related messages are grouped together, which allows you to see all of the replies on a subject in one place:

I find that this makes reading and responding to my email much quicker and easier, but since some of you prefer the traditional inbox view, we made it easy to turn the conversation view on or off using the ribbon:

Simplifying your schedule too

Last but not least on our tour of the new Windows Live Mail: the calendar. I live my life by my calendar – if something’s not in there, it’s not happening, or at least I’m not going to be there. Our user data shows that this is true for a lot of you as well: 25% of Windows Live Mail users use the calendar to schedule events.

To help those of you who are addicted to your calendar, we added a calendar pane to the side of the inbox. The calendar pane shows you upcoming events, and provides a quick way for you to create new events without ever leaving your inbox:

Together, these changes help you to manage your email and calendar more quickly and efficiently, all in one place.

So, that’s the short tour of the new Windows Live Mail beta. We hope you enjoy using it as much as we enjoyed building it!

Stephen Hui
Lead Program Manager, Windows Live Mail

In just 5 days, over one million people downloaded the Windows Live Messenger app for iPhone that launched last week!  This early momentum is fantastic, and we really appreciate the feedback we’ve been getting from many of you.  We look forward to updating the iPhone app shortly to address a few issues that users have pointed out, and continuing to improve the experience.  

While Messenger for iPhone is relatively new, for many connecting with Messenger friends on your mobile phone is not new.  In addition to the more than one million iPhone Messenger users, there are over 24 million people who connect with Messenger friends from other mobile phones through a client application, their phone’s browser, or SMS.  Along with Messenger Connect, Messenger IM in Hotmail, and the coming integration with Xbox LIVE, the new iPhone app is just one more way that we are bringing Messenger to you across the web and on your phone.  We’re very excited about the new Messenger beta available now and thank you for being part of the Windows Live family.

Michael Chang
Group Product Manager, Windows Live Messenger

Today we are announcing availability of Messenger Connect () beta. Messenger Connect allows users to communicate, share, and connect with their Messenger friends on other websites. It is a flexible, yet prescriptive set of APIs to help create intuitive experiences that can be tightly integrated into a website or another app. Windows Live users Messenger, Hotmail, and SkyDrive users can opt in to provide access to their identity (sign-in, profile, relationships, and additional user data), share updates about the things they’ve done via Messenger social, and chat with their friends, all from within the experience of another website or app.

The unique value of ”connect like” products for web sites and apps isn’t in the technology (read all about the glue), but rather in the audience that can be reached and user connections that can be made. Hundreds of millions of people will be able to connect what they do on their favorite websites with the new Windows Live user experiences – the new Windows Live Hotmail, Messenger (+iPhone), SkyDrive for your photos and Office docs, and the new Essentials beta – all great new experiences that Messenger Connect now enables partner websites to connect to.

What you can use Messenger Connect for

Messenger Connect enables three core scenarios for websites and app developers:

• Identity – makes it easy for users to sign in and sign up to your web site using their Windows Live ID
• Social distribution – lets users share the things they do on your website with their friends. Activities appear in Messenger, Hotmail, and across Windows Live properties, and other places Messenger social is displayed (including Windows Phone 7 and the very popular Windows Live Messenger iPhone app)
• Realtime shared experiences – lets users share an experience in real time with their friends

What’s new in Messenger Connect

Many of the components that have evolved into Messenger Connect have been around for several years (Messenger Web Toolkit, Live ID Web Authentication, Delegated Authentication, and the Windows Live Contacts API), but this is the first time we’ve delivered a suite of standards-based, self-service APIs as a package. To understand how Messenger Connect works, from authorization, to the different interfaces and controls, to the emerging standards/specifications we use (OAuth WRAP, Portable Contacts, ActivityStrea.ms, and OData), check out this post.

Below are some screenshots from a website that is using Messenger Connect through a Gigya integration:

Working with the industry

Over the past few months we’ve worked closely with industry leaders from a technology, policy and scenario perspective. The feedback we received from these partners has been critical in the development of Messenger Connect – it has directly helped shape our development so far, and your feedback can help shape our development in the future.

Over the next couple of months, as we expand the beta, you will see many more partner sites go live.

Getting access and the future

Messenger Connect is now open in beta form to any developer or website for the core scenarios outlined above (more info). We’re working hard to deliver additional scenarios, and will ship a final release later on this year. You can get more info here and if you have feedback, check out this forum post. Also – be sure to subscribe to the Windows Live for Developers Blog – that is where we’ll be posting lots of developer and user experience related details about Messenger Connect.

Communication and sharing has emerged over the past few years as a critical element making experiences more personalized and compelling across the web. Lots of sharing is done asynchronously (via activity feed or email), but for some things you want real time sharing (it is tough to view photos or watch a TV show together asynchronously ). The challenge is: how do you know when your friends are available to engage in a real-time sharing experience, knowing the “presence” of your friends is important because it can shape how you engage with them. Having an always-on real time client is essential, because the likelihood of both users being on the same website at the same time is low except for very special circumstances. Connecting to a persistent chat client via a third party website is necessary to deliver on these scenarios.

People want to be able to share experiences like inviting a friend to a site in realtime, chatting with their friends without context switching, and see who else is on the web site. By integrating Messenger, the #1 most used free instant messaging service in the world (see some staggering stats) into your site you will be able to:

• Let users connect with their friends in a differentiated, more personal mode of communication
• Reach their friends no matter where they are, on your web site, on their phone, in one of the many Messenger clients (Windows, Mac, iPhone, etc.)

By adding real time experiences to your site, you are in essence making the site do something it didn’t do before, and conversations are “sticky”, therefore user engagement will go up.

Some shared experiences you can add to your site are:

• Targeted (to one person or a few people), real time sharing of content. An example of where this is useful is sharing a picture that you want to discuss, or collaborating on travel plans – things that require realtime action by the other party.
• Creating immersive experiences and reducing context switching – if someone is watching your glorious full screen video or playing an immersive game, they may be worried they’ll miss conversations or not be able to chat with their friends, embedding chat in your media consumption or game play experience will reduce context switching.
• Rendezvous (are my friends on this site?) – for high traffic properties such as live streaming events or video play back, being able to tell if your friends are on the site (after opt-in of course) can drive more time on the site and shared experiences.

Implementation Options

There are a range of implementation options ranging from simplest (least amount of time to code) to most flexible:

Sharing Badge – the sharing badge can be added to a site with just a few lines of HTML and can allow users to publish/broadcast to Messenger Social or IM content to one of their friends

Chat control for real time events – to allow users on the same page to leave real time messages for each other. Users will be able to see the messages from their friends and others on the site.

UI Controls – a set of JavaScript building blocks which can be combined to speed up development. These controls can be easily skinned using CSS and extended using JavaScript. Try the Controls Playground.

JavaScript Library – the most advanced and most powerful way to integrate real time experiences into your site.

To get started adding real-time shared experiences so your site, check out this documentation.

Angus Logan (@anguslogan)
Senior Technical Product Manager
Windows Live

Messenger social is the “newsfeed” which is associated with a Windows Live user and shown to their Messenger contacts across Windows Live, including Messenger and Hotmail. The new Messenger full view is optimized for showing users their friend’s activity across a range of sites. For a limited set of partners (Facebook and MySpace today, LinkedIn coming soon) it allows users to comment inline back to these sites. For others, it allows users to share activities with their friends in Windows Live and enables users to click through to partner sites.

The simplest and most unique is the Messenger Connect sharing badge. This badge operates like other sharing badges, resulting in a social update. If the user chooses to; they can send an instant message to one of their Messenger contacts and have a conversation in real time about the content.

An individual entry in the newsfeed (aka activity) is known as a social update in Messenger. There are many different types (~ 20) of activities (e.g. pictures, comments, ratings), and when clicked they drive traffic back to the partner’s website.

The supported templates will be evolved on a quarterly basis as new activities become popular. Messenger Connect uses the ActivityStrea.ms format which is an emerging specification for making user activities portable.

A screenshot of the new Windows Live Messenger in full mode, activities appear on the left hand side

Screenshot of Messenger social in the Windows Live Messenger for iPhone

For a website to publish to Messenger social, push (via JavaScript and REST) and pull interfaces exist. The pull interface can be done with existing RSS or Atom feeds with minimal modifications. Below is an example of a comment and the corresponding Atom feed:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<feed xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"
 xmlns:activity="http://activitystrea.ms/spec/1.0/"
 xmlns:thr="http://purl.org/syndication/thread/1.0"
 xmlns:media="http://purl.org/syndication/atommedia">
  <title>Title of the feed</title>
  <id>http://www.contoso.com/profileid</id>
  <link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="http://www.contoso.com/profile"/>
  <updated>Mon, 10 May 2010 14:12:21 GMT</updated>
  <entry>
    <id>http://www.contoso.com/profileid</id>
    <title>Cool Stuff</title>
    <published>Mon, 10 May 2010 14:12:21 GMT</published>
    <updated>Mon, 10 May 2010 14:12:21 GMT</updated>
    <link rel="alternate" type="text/html"      href="http://www.contoso.com/link_to_content"/>
    <content type="html">I think this is cool</content>
    <activity:verb>http://activitystrea.ms/schema/1.0/post</activity:verb>
    <activity:object>
    <activity:object-type>http://activitystrea.ms/schema/1.0/comment    </activity:object-type>
      <title>Cool Stuff</title>
      <link rel="alternate" type="text/html"        href="http://www.contoso.com/link_to_content" />
      <link rel="preview" type="image/jpeg"        href="http://www.contoso/thumbnail.jpg"/>
      <summary>I think this is cool</summary>
    </activity:object>
  </entry>
</feed>

To let your users share activities from your site with their friends in Messenger social, visit this page. Additionally, if you know what the next big social activity type will be, leave us a note in the forum.

Angus Logan (@anguslogan)

Senior Technical Product Manager

Windows Live

Just like I did with the new Hotmail, I thought in spirit of us releasing the new Windows Live Essentials Beta today that I would offer some thoughts on how I’m using the new Windows Live Essentials.

Let me first talk about Windows Live Photo Gallery. I take a lot of photos. I love taking photos. And I use Photo Gallery to manage all my photos – dating back all the way to when I first starting taking digital photos in 2001. A lot of those photos contain friends and family. The previous version of Photo Gallery introduced the People Tagging feature. However, going through almost 10 years of photos to tag people looked to be a tedious process. One I’ve actually avoided until recently. The new Photo Gallery introduces facial recognition technology where Photo Gallery will now go through your photos, detect photos with people in them (their faces) and then based on people you have already tagged in photos; try to figure out who is in your photos automatically. You can see in the below screenshot that Photo Gallery was able to detect the face off a photo of a Beetlejuice action-figure I recently purchased. Of course, I hadn’t tagged anyone previously that looked like Beetlejuice so Photo Gallery couldn’t determine who it was that was in this photo. But in moving my mouse over the photo, it asked me “Who is this?” and I was able to quickly tag Beetlejuice in this photo.

Ok I admit – I’m a huge geek. But I’m really not in the habit of people-tagging my collectibles. Honest. I felt that without the permission of the many friends and family that are in my photos, it wouldn’t be appropriate to use those photos as examples for this blog post. I figured Beetlejuice wouldn’t have a problem with it. As you can see, he’s all smiles. In going through my photos and tagging people assisted by the new Photo Gallery’s facial recognition technology, the new Photo Gallery also comes with a new “Batch people tag” feature where you can add people tags to large groups of photos all at once. This feature has also saved me quite a bit of time going through my photos and adding people tags. After adding people tags to my photos, I found that the new Photo Gallery’s “Quick find” feature in the new ribbon UI incredibly useful for going through photos of specific people.

I’m also getting into taking photos that support “geotags” where photos you take are tagged with GPS coordinates. The new Windows Live Photo Gallery now supports geotagging so when I import photos from my camera that have geotags, Photo Gallery will show the location based on the GPS coordinates. This should work with most devices that add GPS coordinates to photos.

And lastly, one feature I think will come out as a feature as hot as Panoramic Stitch is Photo Fuse. The Photo Fuse feature lets you take a group of photos and combine them into one photo – literally “fusing” together the best parts of each of the photos you’re combining.

Windows Live Photo Gallery is a must-have for folks wanting to efficiently manage their photos as well as easily share them with friends and family (Photo Gallery lets you upload photos to SkyDrive, Facebook, or Flickr).

Next up is Windows Live Movie Maker. Windows Live Movie Maker introduces new things like AutoMovie themes and more precise video and audio editing as well as several new publishing options including. This makes it easier for consumers to edit their videos to their liking and quickly share those videos with friends and family. Movie Maker also supports a wider variety of settings allowing you to save a video as 720p or 1080p HD video or video formatting specifically for a mobile device like a Zune HD or Windows Phone. But for me, my favorite new feature of Movie Maker is the ability to create custom settings.

Custom settings allow me to choose the width and height for the video, the bitrate, and frame rate, and the audio format. I heavily rely on this feature to properly format videos for publishing to Microsoft Showcase to embed videos into blog posts here on The Windows Blog. For those of you out there want to format videos specific to a certain format for online – this feature is great.

Another great new feature in the new Movie Maker that’s a favorite of mine is the ability to record video from a webcam. This works great with the Microsoft LifeCam Cinema which does 720p HD video. You can quickly record and edit video from your webcam and share it or publish it out to a desired video format. Absolutely fantastic for shooting quick video podcasts!

Back in May, I posted about how the new Hotmail “makes me happy” and that I traditionally am an email client guy but that the new Hotmail was luring me more and more to the Web. I still rely on the client quite a bit still and Windows Live Mail is my one and only email client on my home PC (at work and on my work laptop I use Outlook 2010 for Exchange – but also have Windows Live Mail running too). The new Windows Live Mail brings some pretty sweet enhancements that make it an excellent email client for people at home.

Windows Live Mail supports multiple email accounts (Hotmail, or others like Gmail) and also brings calendar and RSS feed reading through the Windows RSS Platform. I currently have 2 Hotmail accounts and a Gmail account I use for Junk mail configured in Windows Live Mail. The new Windows Live Mail supports setting “account colors” for each account – my main Hotmail account is red, my second Hotmail is violet (or purple) and my Gmail account is orange. And like the new Hotmail, the new Windows Live Mail also brings conversations to email to capture conversations I might have back in forth via email with people. There is also a new “SlimCal” view where I can check the latest events coming up without leaving my inbox. And of Windows Live Mail has the Photo Mail feature where I can create personalized albums within an email which stores the photos privately in SkyDrive so whomever I send the email to can view the photos but without taking up space in their email account or taking a long time to download. I actually use this quite a bit when sharing photos with my family.

Of course Windows Live Mail is integrated with the new Messenger too where you can start IM conversations with your friends directly from Windows Live Mail.

Speaking of the new Windows Live Messenger – there is so much in the new Messenger I think it deserves its own post at a later time. But my one of my favorite things about Messenger is the ability to update my status for both Windows Live and Facebook all through Messenger and to view and comment my friend’s Facebook activities right through Messenger. Oh and tabbed IM in Messenger is simply awesome. Oh and with my LifeCam Cinema – HD video chatting is crazy cool.

As you know, I’m a heavy blogger. Every post for at least the last 2 years has been published using Windows Live Writer. Matter a fact, I recommend all bloggers that are publishing blog posts here on The Windows Blog use and become very acquainted with Windows Live Writer. The new Writer, just like with Photo Gallery and Movie Maker, the ribbon making direct access to many of its features much easier – at least to me. And in the ribbon, Writer now displays HTML styles that I can use in my blog posts that match our new blog theme.

Other than the ribbon, there are a few other new things in Writer worth noting that I absolutely love. One of those is Autorecovery (or crash recovery). If you are writing a post and Writer somehow crashes for some reason, the new Writer will now automatically recover the blog post you were writing – very much like what Word does if Word crashes. Honestly, I’ve not had Writer crash on me in a long time. But the one time it did when using the Writer beta – it recovered the blog post as expected which was great.

Another of my favorite features in Writer (seen first in the last version or Wave 3) is the ability to embed albums from Windows Live. The new Writer introduces a new album template called “Squares”.

And finally – we get to the new Windows Live Sync. For me – the new Sync is a mission-critical app that I need to have running on any and all of my PCs. It is what I use to sync together all my important Word documents and other files I use daily for work and for personal stuff.

I currently have 5 PCs connected and syncing together with Sync. I have 2 folders I am syncing – one for work documents and another for personal stuff. I keep them separate. I am able to choose to have each of these folders sync with “SkyDrive synced storage” which is 2GB of free online cloud storage for my files. Everyone gets this today with Sync. For work, I sync between all my PCs and the cloud but for my personal stuff, I am only doing PC-to-PC sync as I am syncing a couple gigabytes (yes, gigabytes) of data between my PCs for personal stuff like videos and photos.

So what happens if I am at work or on the road traveling and I forgot a file at home that isn’t in one of the folders I’m syncing to my PC? The new Sync enables remote access to any of your PCs you allow and enable remote access for. For me, I have this enabled on several of my PCs here at home and whenever I forget something at home not in any of my folders I am syncing with – I just remotely login and grab the files I need. Oh – this works great if you happen to be traveling and you forget to have Windows Media Center record a show. I did this a few weekends ago and used Sync to login remotely and configure Windows Media Center to record an episode of Family Guy.

The new Sync also syncs your Internet Explorer favorites and your Office settings too!

One last thing…

The new Windows Live Essentials comes with a little add-on for Internet Explorer called Messenger Companion.

Messenger Companion is something I’ve come really love as I like to share links to websites I read throughout the day. What Messenger Companion does is let you quickly share a link of a website to Windows Live and your Messenger Social. If you have your Messenger Social connected to Facebook, your links will also be shared to Facebook for your friends to see there as well!. I really love this and find myself sharing more links now than ever before thanks to Messenger Companion.

So there you have it – that’s how I’m using the new Windows Live Essentials and as you can see, it’s making things a whole lot easier for me and productive on many levels. The new Windows Live Essentials is an absolute must-have for any Windows 7 PC. I recommend giving the beta a try. And I also recommend reading the Inside Windows Live Blog. The Windows Live Team has been doing an impressive amount of blogging on the new Windows Live stuff – from Hotmail to Messenger and the rest of Windows Live Essentials like Photo Gallery. Everything I talked about above you can do today with the new Windows Live Essentials.

I have a couple of things to tell you about today. First off, we are excited to announce that Windows 7 has sold 150 million licenses to-date. As I’ve said before, Windows 7 is the fastest selling operating system in history with 7 copies of Windows 7 sold every second. Earlier this month, I published a post about Tami Reller’s keynote at the Bank of America Merrill Lynch U.S. Technology Conference. One of the points that stood out for me was her comment that between companies actively deploying and evaluating it, approximately 75% of enterprises are looking at Windows 7 for their organization. That’s amazing! And of course people continue to be excited about the features and benefits of Windows 7, and the PCs that our partners are delivering for Windows 7. You can read about many of the awesome Windows 7 PCs from my colleague Ben Rudolph (Ben the PC Guy) over on the Windows Experience Blog.

One of the things that people love about Windows 7 is how seamlessly it works with Windows Live, our free apps for sharing, photos, movies and communication. Starting tomorrow June 24th, we are releasing the beta versions of the new Messenger, Photo Gallery, Movie Maker and Sync. You can read more about this from the Windows Live Team on Inside Windows Live. Together, the new Windows Live Essentials combine the power of the PC and the reach of the cloud to enhance the Windows 7 experience. The way people connect and share with each other continues to shift toward the cloud and we recognize that. The PC continues to be the hub for important activities such as managing email, organizing photos, watching movies and listening to music. What the new Windows Live Essentials does is blends together the best of the PC with the best of the cloud. I’ll be posting my thoughts about Windows Live Essentials tomorrow.