Futurecat - Michael Karek

In part one and part two of this series, I talked about the principles that guided our design for the new Hotmail and showed you how we’re helping you navigate your email and manage your inbox more quickly and easily. Today, in this last part, I wanted to show you a few features that we designed to help you share and collaborate more effectively and have more fun doing it. Let’s jump right in.

Improving the Quick Add experience

If you’ve been using Hotmail for a while, you may have noticed the Quick Add column when you’re writing a message.

Or maybe not. We think this is a great way to add info to your messages, but we found that a lot of people just didn’t discover it. We wanted to get this feature a little more attention and give you better ways to share photos and Office docs. We decided that we should design around the concept of one place to add content to your email, whether that’s a photo album, a home movie, or content from Bing.

Sending photos and Office docs

We also wanted to improve the experience of sharing photos and documents by increasing the number you can share and making the experience a lot more collaborative. To accomplish this, instead of sending these files as regular attachments, we added the ability to share via SkyDrive.

We knew we had a great new way of sharing photos and docs, but we found that people didn’t realize they were sending via SkyDrive rather than using regular attachments. Our design needed to provide a natural and simple way to add content, and it needed to provide a clear entry point for sharing with SkyDrive.

We started with this…

When we spoke with customers about the new approach, it became clear that they didn’t understand our intent. They thought they were simply doing what they’ve always done: attaching files to email. They thought of the documents and photos as literally “attached” to the email. This wasn’t actually the case. Instead, these items were being stored on the customer’s SkyDrive. Having people understand that nuance became our mission.

With that in mind, we tried this…

This approach sort of helped, but it wouldn’t really scale to accommodate all the Quick Add stuff (movies, maps, restaurants, etc.). So we developed the Insert bar:

We didn’t just stop there. We needed to make sure all the language in our design clearly communicated the important concepts. We spent time evaluating a series of language options for the items in the insert bar as well as the menus under each item. We had the approach we had been looking for with Office docs and items from Bing, but the more we talked with customers about these options, the more we realized that people really wanted to know where their files—particularly their photos— would be stored, and who would have access to them.

In essence, privacy and “where the photos live” were the critical concepts that needed to be addressed.

Ultimately, we landed on this…

We found that customers began to understand our intent. They would stop and ask “what does ‘Create album on SkyDrive’ mean?” If they weren’t comfortable with moving forward, they would find the thing that they were most comfortable with: Attachments, with the trusty paper clip.

If customers do use the trusty and familiar Attachments entry point and they upload a bunch of large images, we prompt them to “convert” the attachments to an album on SkyDrive.

Again, we wanted to make sure they understood where the photos would live.

What we ended up with is an intuitive and rich way to share the things you want to without filling up your inbox.

Active Views

Active Views were a bit tricky for us. If you’re not familiar with the feature, it’s essentially the way we make email a richer, more interactive experience. You can preview photos shared with you from a service like Flickr, play videos shared with you from YouTube, or see the status of a package in transit to you without having to go to the shipper’s site. When we first started exploring the concept, every execution we did was perceived by usability test participants as an ad.

In order to wrap our heads around the right way to present this new concept, we conducted concept testing in three countries: France, Brazil, and Japan. Our goal was to help frame the approach to Active Views.

Here’s one of the concepts we showed during that early testing.

At the close of these tests, we were scratching our heads—pretty much everyone who saw the concepts perceived these rich views of content from their email as advertisements. But we wanted users to understand that this was personalized info to make their lives easier—not us trying to sell them something. Overall, we knew that for this feature to be successful, we needed to overcome “ad blindness” and make the experience feel more personalized.

Ultimately, we decided the preview box should just feel like a part of the “normal” read experience. Once we made that decision and validated it through usability testing, we arrived at something more like this:

Through conversations with even more customers, we saw that the little signal “zzzz” and the dark background were in fact too distracting (again, our principles include reducing distractions), so we went to this:

And where we finally landed:

The Journey through the design process – keeping customers in focus

I’ve mentioned our longitudinal study a couple of times in this series of posts. It’s time I told you more about that effort. When going into Windows Live Wave 4, we wanted to make sure we kept our customers in the center of our process. We don’t have a formal “beta” set up for Windows Live, so what we decided to do was use our internal servers as a mini-beta. We recruited customers across the globe (the US, Brazil, Singapore, and Germany) to participate in a longitudinal research program—that means it was long term, not a one-day exercise like most user studies. Our goal was to have real life Hotmail customers give us feedback through every important design decision we were making.

This study was instrumental for our big bets, from which treatment of conversation threading made the most sense, to the “where are the photos” issue, to the most critical and fundamental aspects of reading/sending mail. We like to be part of a living and spirited dialog with our customers, and this study really helped us see what sort of long-term consequences our choices would have.

Thanks for reading

We care a great deal about how our customers use our products and what they’d like them to become. Our goal is to ensure that we make the right decisions. What you’ve seen here is the journey that we travelled for getting ideas, validating decisions, and bringing you change you will like. We hope enjoy using the new Hotmail.

Michael Kopcsak – Senior User Experience Lead, Windows Live

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

When you want to get in touch with someone, where do you look? There are lots of places that people store their contact data – the address book for their email account, their Instant Message buddy list, Facebook, LinkedIn, their phone…. When you find that person you want to reach out to, is their information up to date? What about their email address? If they have more than one email address, which do you use? Are they online? Maybe you should send them an SMS or Facebook message.

My oh my, there are lots of ways to keep in touch!

Managing contacts just isn’t something people want to spend their time doing. Well, maybe some people… but I gather most of you would like an address book that is:

• Up to date
• Reflective of all the people you know on all the services you use
• Available on all the devices you use (phone, PC, web)

In this release of Windows Live, we paid special attention to giving you exactly that.

Your one contact list is up to date

Across Windows Live and many Microsoft services, we all share a common address book. This information is stored centrally on our servers and available to a number of Windows Live products like Hotmail and Messenger as well as other Microsoft products like the upcoming Windows Phone, Outlook via the Hotmail Connector, Windows Live Mail, and now any phone that supports the Exchange Active Sync protocol like iPhone, Windows Mobile, and some Android and Nokia devices.

You can access your contact list by visiting http://contacts.live.com (note some of you will not see the new experience until the Hotmail rollout is complete).

Additionally, you have access to all these same contacts on Messenger.

For all your Messenger friends, we also make sure that any of the changes they make to their contact information automatically go into your address book so that your friends’ latest phone numbers, mailing addresses, and other contact info is available to you anywhere.

All your contacts across the services you use

Not all of the people you know are going to be in your address book, though. For example, I know a lot of people on Facebook and LinkedIn, but I don’t have contact info for every one of them available in Windows Live. For this release, we built a set of features that connects Windows Live to the social networks that you use and keeps track of your entire list of contacts. When you connect a service like Facebook, MySpace, and soon LinkedIn to Windows Live, all of your contacts from those services will be available in Windows Live automatically.

This means, for example, that you can easily send a message to a Facebook user directly from Windows Live.

Soon you’ll even be able to send your Facebook friends an instant message from the Messenger program and on the web.

In planning this work, one problem we immediately recognized was that a lot of you have multiple connections with some of your contacts on Windows Live. For example, I have my wife on Messenger, Facebook, and LinkedIn. What I don’t want to see are three copies of my wife’s contact information in my address book.

To solve this problem, we automatically identify and recognize who all these same people are across different networks and build a virtual Person view of their data. We combine all the information we have about that person into a single view and make it really easy to communicate with them on the different networks they belong to.

Additionally, we keep this information fresh by continuing to sync data from your networks into Windows Live, ensuring that when information changes, you’ll always have the latest info. Finally, we let you annotate any contact data that comes in from a social network with your own information. For example, if you want to get a birthday reminder for a Facebook friend’s birthday but they haven’t included that information in their Facebook profile, you can add it in Windows Live, and we’ll remind you of their birthday.

Your contacts on the go

Many of us now carry a smartphone like the iPhone, a Nokia device, or a Windows Mobile phone (and hopefully soon, Windows Phones). All these devices can soon synchronize your email, calendar, and contacts with Windows Live so that you can take all your contacts on the go and access people’s phone numbers and email addresses (requires the new version of Hotmail). Combined with a smart address book, you never have to worry about having stale information for your contacts.

As I mentioned earlier, you can also get your contacts as well as mail and calendar in Outlook via the Outlook Hotmail Connector. This will get even better today since we are announcing a new plug-in for Outlook that will let you also see social updates from your Messenger friends (and your friends on other services connected to Windows Live) right in your Outlook inbox.

If you don’t have Outlook, you can use our free Windows Live Mail program for Windows to get contacts, mail, and calendar on your desktop.

Importing your contacts from numerous services

Windows Live lets you import or invite your contacts from numerous services. It’s our desire and hope that if you want to move your contacts to our service, it’s easy to do that. We support a number of popular services in different markets.

All the people you know, in one place

We worked hard on this release to make sure you had one easy place to view and communicate with all your contacts on all your devices. We hope you find these features useful and look forward to your feedback.

Omar Shahine
Principal Lead Program Manager, Windows Live

I wanted to talk about a new user safety feature we just introduced in Wave 4:

SmartScreen for URLs

This safety feature is another step Windows Live is taking to protect you from socially engineered attacks and account abuse. This abuse is an industry-wide problem, and we’ve seen a significant uptick in these types of attacks within the context of social networks over the past couple years (details in Microsoft SIR V8, p.119). Social networking targeted scams now account for over half of the phishing attacks that SmartScreen filter blocks in Internet Explorer 8. This trend makes sense; internet users are particularly vulnerable within their social networks because messages appear to come from their friends and contacts. There is an implicit trust boundary being exploited. With Windows Live’s deep social connectivity and increased social feed integration in Wave4, we felt it essential to introduce a new protection mechanism for URLs posted in the Live network.

We’ve been working on this problem for a while. The SmartScreen team has worked with several large social networking partners over the past couple years to combat this abuse and has seen success with both our browser filter and simple features within the social network that help users regain context in the midst of a scam. These features disrupt the social engineering attempt.

With these successes in mind, we’re happy to announce the use of SmartScreen on the new Messenger and Windows Live websites, such as profile and photos. When you click a link on one of these sites, the web request is first examined by our SmartScreen service. The service checks the reputation of the link prior to navigation with three potential outcomes:

1. Direct Navigation (Redirection)

If the website has a positive reputation (e.g., has high traffic and no history of hosting any phishing scams or malware) – the user is directly navigated to the destination website. This is the case most of the time – you go directly to the website you chose, with no interruption from SmartScreen at all.

2. Block

If the link points to a known bad website— for example, one that hosts a malware or a phishing scam—the redirection server navigates the user to a red block page.

3. Informational

If the website has very low traffic or has had a history of abuse, you’ll be taken to an informational interstitial page. This page helps establish context and lets you decide how to proceed.

How do these attacks work?

Attackers can breach social networks by compromising a user’s account and subsequently preying on their friends/contacts or by directly tricking users into accepting them into their social circle. A common attack from a compromised friend’s account might say:

"Hey, check out my new video http://somesite“

When you click on the link, you might get a fake login page that looks just like your regular login page, or a site that looks like a video player but that requires a download (which is malware).

This is a common example, but if you live on the internet and use social networking sites regularly, you’ll probably face many variants of these types of attacks. For the typical user, these attacks are very difficult to discern from a normal interaction with their friends and contacts – we click on links all the time, we log in often, and we download files regularly. Leveraging these common behaviors as elements of an attack is social engineering at work. We understand that some users are able to recognize the characteristics of an attack scenario before falling prey, but for the majority of internet users, these subtle and technical cues are impossible to distinguish from their everyday activity. This is why social networks providers, communication software providers, browser makers, and other software providers must put multiple levels of safety in place to keep their users informed and safe.

Given our past experience in the space, we’re convinced that this feature will help protect you from socially engineered attacks and give us a new tool in the fight to keep you safe online. As with all safety mechanisms, this feature is a learning system, and we’re actively studying the data to continue to improve both the experience and the intelligence.

John Scarrow
General Manager – Safety Services

Now that the new generation of Windows Live web services has been released, some of you have asked me why we didn’t make any changes to Spaces. Although we did not make many noticeable changes to the service, I wanted to do a blog post about Spaces within the broader context of Windows Live and show how Spaces has had, and continues to have, a big influence on our overall direction.

Our fight against spam

Like many sites, Spaces, too, struggles with the never-ending battle against spam. Improving in this area was a big priority for us, in both Spaces and Hotmail. Our efforts here are already showing signs of success. For example, during the heaviest period of attacks on Spaces, a spam-tracking website called Uribl attributed 1500 spam campaigns to web pages hosted on Spaces, each of these actively generating hundreds of thousands of Spaces spam attacks. As of this writing, we have blocked 99% of these spam campaigns, so now Uribl lists only 15 active spam campaigns on Spaces, all of which are fresh attacks that we are actively working to disable. Very shortly, we will put even more safeguards in place to ensure that fewer spam spaces get created, which will bring this number down even more.

No more comment spam!

Comment spam has also been a persistent problem on Spaces. We are attacking this problem through heightened investment in account validation, limiting the number of comments you can add in a session, and improving permission settings so that by default, only friends can comment. All of these efforts combined make it harder for machine-generated comment spam to get through.

Setting comment permissions

Of course, you can still allow public comments on your space, but by default we limit who can comment on your space to just "friends." For most people, this default setting is going to make it easier to manage their spaces, but if you write a popular blog and still want public comments, be sure to go to your Profile page and then click Privacy settings. Click Advanced, (direct link here), and then you can change the permission slider for “Comments and notes” in the “Who can contact me” section near the bottom:

Now that’s out of the way, we can continue with the fun stuff.

How Spaces has influenced Windows Live

Let’s start with a bit of history. The year was 2004. Blogging was just going mainstream, and users were beginning to explore creating their own personal websites and sharing digital photos on the web. We first launched “MSN Spaces” in Japan in late 2004 as a blogging service, and quickly built a small but loyal following. About 6 months later, we added photo sharing and launched Spaces in the US.

The “gleam”

By the end of 2005, we’d connected Spaces to Messenger and introduced the “gleam,” a little orange asterisk in your Messenger contact list that let you know when your contacts had updated their space. This was the first time you could use Messenger to follow the online activities of your friends, an early ancestor to the new Messenger Social feed.

Blogging, sharing photos, and keeping up with your friends

Over the next few years, Spaces moved toward three important goals: Giving you an outlet for personal expression, giving you a place to share photos with friends and family, and giving you a way to keep up with what was going on with your closest friends. So now let’s fast forward to 2010 and take a look at today’s Windows Live, when these goals are still just as important, but are evolving to meet the demands of the new online world.

Serious bloggers

Spaces continues to be a popular blogging service, but we also recognize that bloggers use a broad range of blog hosts. So we made sure that if you are a serious blogger on Spaces, WordPress.com, or other blogging services, Windows Live is a great companion to your blog.

Try the new Writer

Windows Live Writer is a fantastic blogging tool that lets you publish to almost any blogging service. You can preview your posts and get your photos and videos looking just the way you want them before you publish. With our plug-ins you can quickly embed video clips from YouTube or photos you already uploaded to Facebook. Try the new Writer beta today as part of the Windows Live Essentials beta.

Connect your blog to Windows Live

Connecting your blog to Windows Live is like giving all your Messenger friends a subscription to your blog’s RSS feed. Every time you publish a new post, they will see a nice summary with a link to the post, right in Messenger. And connecting is easy to do. On the left side of the Profile page is a list of the services you have connected to Windows Live, and a link to connect new services. No matter where you host your blog, connecting it to Windows Live makes it better.

Personal expression for the rest of us

We saw that lots of people who had once used Spaces stopped using it, or used it only for photo albums. They liked the ability to show their family and their friends what they were up to, but didn’t want to have to keep updating it all the time. We needed a simpler way to share.

The move from blogging to just sharing

Although Spaces continues to be a popular blogging platform, fewer people are blogging in the traditional sense, and more people are just sharing. What do I mean? Most people don’t want to take time to configure a blog or don’t think they have enough to say to spend time writing and editing long posts (like this one!) but they do want to share short updates, photos, and cool links they come across on the web.

Your status message – now with photos and links!

We decided the best way to support sharing in our new release would be to deepen the ability to share via your Messenger status message. By adding the ability to share photos, Office documents, and links, we made it easier to share anything that’s on your mind. It gets even better when you connect Windows Live to Facebook since the things you share from Messenger show up there for all your friends to see and add their comments, even if they don’t use Windows Live. This works from Messenger, your phone (even from an iPhone), or Hotmail to give you simple, powerful sharing wherever your friends are. We also give you a very blog-like historical view of your status messages and other activities on the “Me” tab of the social feed in Windows Live Messenger beta (or by going to your Profile page on the web). For most users this is as much “blog” as they need.

Customization and personalization

The flexible nature of Spaces gave people a powerful way to express themselves through the use of themes, modules, and layouts. While some of you spent a great deal of time getting your space “just right,” many of you just wanted a simpler way to express yourselves. The Windows Live Profile service lets you pick a dynamic theme to express their personality and has become the central place on Windows Live to see information about someone, including their recent activity and the services they’re connected to.

Photo sharing

Spaces provided the first photo sharing experience in Windows Live. Over half of all Spaces are used exclusively for photo sharing. Most of the people using Spaces this way wanted the ability to show photos to their family and friends but weren’t interested in other Spaces features.

Photos.live.com

So, a couple of years ago, based on the high demand for photo sharing, we began to evolve the Spaces photo sharing feature into a first class Windows Live experience built on Windows Live SkyDrive. We launched photos.live.com in December 2008 and since then, customers have shared over 2.5 billion photos with each other on SkyDrive.

Photos everywhere

In our most recent release, we continued the momentum with more investment in photo sharing features: in Messenger (check out the photos tab!), and in Hotmail with Active View (the ability to view photo attachments right from your inbox – see Dick Craddock’s post), and a beautiful new immersive slide show in Skydrive with commenting, people tagging, and web Messenger (but that’s a blog post for another day). When you connect Windows Live to Facebook, you’ll see all the photos shared with you, from Facebook or Windows Live, right in Messenger.

Keeping up with the people you care about

While the original Messenger “gleam” made it easy to see when someone had changed their space (the first Messenger Social integration), the newest version of Windows Live makes it easy to aggregate all of your activities across the web automatically. You connect Windows Live with the services where your closest friends do their sharing, whether it is photos on SmugMug or a blog on WordPress.com, and then use Messenger to keep up with what is going on with them. So now, instead of hinting at updates with “gleams,” we have brought all the information right into Messenger with the Messenger Social feed. Piero Sierra has written a great post on this.

Looking ahead

Spaces continues to impact the direction of Windows Live. We will continue to look at how you use Spaces, as well as how you share online in general and on Windows Live, so that we can keep improving your core experiences on Windows Live.

Tony East, Senior Lead Program 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.

For over ten years now, instant messaging applications have shared a common user interface pattern – a slim window with your contact list in it that you can keep docked on the side of your screen. This makes it easy to keep the window open without taking up too much screen space. Because really, all you’ve ever needed from instant messaging is a list of friends, which allows you to launch popup conversation windows.

With the new Windows Live Messenger, we are expanding that paradigm and introducing what we call “full view” – an expanded mode of Messenger that allows you to access rich media and updates from your social networks, MSN, and more. This view doesn’t replace the more traditional “compact view” of your contacts. Rather, it is available in addition to that view, and you can switch between views at any time using the view switch control:

Switch views with this button

Full view – designed for social networking users

Introduction of the new "full view" acknowledges the growing importance of social networking for many users. We believe people want an always-available “social dashboard” at their fingertips, to help them stay in touch with the people they care about most. This is a window that we expect you’ll want to come back to several times a day. In fact, for those of you who choose to automatically start Messenger when you log into Windows, this may become the first window you see each day.

Messenger in full view

As you can see, we’ve also incorporated the latest headlines and news from MSN (see “MSN” next to “Social” at upper-left), so you can start your day with the news or weather if you like. And soon we’ll be adding social games from Xbox LIVE here as well.

Compact view – designed for IM purists

We’re very proud of the new Messenger full view, and we hope many of you will find a place for it in your lives. However, we know that this new view will not work for everyone. Some of us don’t care about social networking, don’t feel the need for a social networking “reader”, or simply don’t want any window to take up too much room unless summoned to do so.

So, we designed the new “compact view” with IM purists in mind. Our goal with this view was to remove distractions and focus purely on IM (and no, we could not afford to remove the ad, thanks for asking ). As you can see, this new design is very clean, and focuses on your list of contacts:

Messenger in compact view

Compact view shows more friends than in the previous Messenger design, even when you choose to show user tiles. This is because we removed the Wave 3 “social ticker” that used to sit below the contact list, in order to focus this view on what it is really good at – seeing your friends.

As a bonus feature, we’ve made it so that if you drag the edge of the compact view window horizontally, you can make the compact view wider, so you see multiple columns of contacts. This is super handy for those of us with very large contact lists. If you maximize the window on a large monitor you can see five or more columns of friends!*

Compact view, scaled up to 2 columns

Combined with tabbed conversation windows, compact view is designed to ensure that the new Messenger meets the needs of hard-core IM users, even if they are not interested in the new full view.

You are always in control

Of course, you have complete control over which view you use, and can switch views at any time.

Messenger will not only remember which view you prefer, but also whether you were looking at the Social, MSN, or Xbox LIVE page in full view, and where you like each view to sit on your screen. So for example, you might want to start your day by catching up on the latest from MSN in full view, with the window centered on your screen, but then you might want to collapse it down to compact view and move it to the corner of your screen as you work on other things throughout your day. Messenger will remember these positions independently, so you can arrange your setup just the way you like it.

We’ve designed the new Messenger to be flexible enough to fit your daily routine, and we’re excited to hear what you think as you try it out in the coming weeks.

- Piero Sierra
Group Program Manager, Windows Live Messenger & Mail

* Did you know? Our data shows that 30% of current Messenger users run it with the Messenger window maximized! Wave 3 Messenger doesn’t look very good when maximized, which is why we decided to add multi-column support for these users.

Today we are previewing the soon-to-be-released new version of Windows Live Hotmail and it’s packed with a ton of great new features to make managing your email easier and faster. To get the lowdown on the new Hotmail, I suggest reading this blog post from Inside Windows Live or visiting the Hotmail Preview website. Now that we are lifting the curtain on the new Hotmail today, I thought I would take an opportunity to try something a little bit different here on The Windows Blog: offer my thoughts on what I like about this update.

I have traditionally been a “client guy” for email – I prefer a desktop client for reading email instead of reading email through the Web. In the case of Hotmail, up until recently I generally read my Hotmail email through Windows Live Mail which is part of Windows Live Essentials. But that was before I started dogfooding the new Hotmail. “Dogfooding” is what we use to describe early internal testing of products before release. In these last few months, I’ve noticed that I’ve been going to Hotmail on the Web on a more regular basis and I like the way it works.

Here is why I think use of Hotmail is increasing, and for those of you who prefer the client over the Web experience, why it might change for you as well:

1-Click Filters: I absolutely love filters. And the new Hotmail brings filters front and center. Previously, I had Hotmail automatically sorting emails into specific folders – such as emails from social networking services like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. However, I’ve since turned off automatic sorting and am now relying solely on the new Hotmail’s Social updates filter. This filter automatically sorts email alerts or notifications I receive from social networking services I belong to and filters everything into a single view. This helps me stay on top of comments people make to my stuff on Facebook, Direct Messages from Twitter, and more. Other filters the new Hotmail provides are unread emails, emails from contacts, and emails from Groups.

Quick Views: The new Hotmail provides “quick views” to emails sent with certain types of content in them. I find that Quick Views in the new Hotmail is a bit like filters. And remember, I love filters. My most favorite Quick View option is “Office docs”. This view shows all emails I sent or sent to me that have Office documents as an attachment. For example, I keep a budget spreadsheet I share with my girlfriend through email. I can browse to the last email she sent with the latest version of our budget spreadsheet attached and open it right through Hotmail and use the Excel Office Web App to edit and make changes – and THEN send back to her with those changes. I also do a bunch of online purchasing (through Amazon, Best Buy, etc.) and there is a Quick View for shipping updates too! Other Quick View options are one for emails with Photos and another for emails that are flagged. For emails I want to read or respond to later, I usually flag it which makes the Quick View option for flagged emails especially useful.

Sweep: I like keeping my inbox clean. Before the new Hotmail, I would spend a great deal of time sorting through emails. With the new Hotmail and a feature called Sweep, this process is enormously easier and faster. Sweep helps me quickly clean out my Hotmail inbox by “sweeping” emails into folders or just getting rid of them all together.

Conversation View: The new Hotmail provides a conversation view allowing me to view email exchanges as a conversation. This is particularly useful to me as my dad and I have pretty regular email “conversations” about technology trends. I can see an entire email conversation in a single view in the new Hotmail. Admittedly, Conversation View is something that took me some time to get used to as I was pretty head strong on the “old” way of managing email one email at a time.

Of course, the new Hotmail has a lot more I’m not mentioning here too like a improvements to security and managing junk mail which is absolutely great too!

All-in-all, the new Hotmail makes it so much easier to manage my inbox and to collaborate with friends and family much more efficiently than ever before. I feel like the new Hotmail has helped me take back control of my inbox.

I’m not totally giving up on the client though. In Wave 4, there have been some absolutely wonderful updates to Windows Live Mail, and all of Windows Live Essentials, that are pretty slick. But I can’t talk about that stuff just yet…

We’ve spent the last few months posting about how we look at the industry, the key customer problems that are top-of-mind for us, and where we think we can improve the lives of our customers. Today in a speech at the Universidade de São Paulo in Brazil, Steve Ballmer is sharing a preview of the new Windows Live Messenger. In this post we want to talk more about our philosophy and approach for this new version. In subsequent posts we’ll go into more depth on different aspects of the experience.

As Chris laid out in his blog post last week, the world of instant messaging has evolved in the last 14 years. In the early days of IM, most of your close friends were on one IM network, connected using their PCs, and sent text-only instant messages back and forth. Today, people still want to stay in touch with their friends, but three things have changed:

• IM has evolved. It has gone beyond text to video chat – people want to share photos, videos, and links, too. People still love IM – they just want it to do even more.
• Social networks have changed how people communicate. Our second observation is that while people still primarily communicate with close friends, their communication has shifted from one IM network to a richer but more complex social landscape. Now, almost all of us communicate with close (and not so close) friends using social networks, other sharing sites, email, SMS, and IM – and we do so from our phones as often as from our PCs. Most people already have a primary social network they love, and they just don’t need another one. And although nearly everyone uses multiple services now, very few people we talk to want just “aggregation,” either. If all you do is copy and paste all the social feeds into one place, it can easily lead to a messy, combined list, half of which you’re not really interested in anyway. Getting 50 random updates is less interesting than getting 5 from your family and close friends, and 1 cool video that 20 of your friends are commenting on.
• People are spending more time away from their PCs. More and more, people are staying connected on their phones, and they’re spending time browsing the web and in web-based email, rather than connected to a client program on their PCs. Any connection with friends needs to be able to follow you across the devices that you use throughout the day, and should integrate into the experiences you’re having on each of those devices.

With this context in mind, we set out to do three things with this version of Messenger.

• Improving the IM experience. Hundreds of millions of people use Messenger every day, and we heard loud and clear that they wanted to do more in their conversations. We focused on improving the personal interactions with your close friends, so that you can continue to connect in even richer ways with the people you care about most.
• Staying in touch with close friends. This begins with bringing together the most complete picture of what your friends are doing across your social networks and other sharing sites, and then helping you see at a glance what your favorite people are doing, wherever they’re doing it. This includes comprehensive integration with Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, and a wide range of other sharing sites.
• Bringing Messenger with you to Hotmail, the web, and your phone. While the Windows PC is the best way to experience Messenger, we know that you spend a lot of time in web-based email, on your mobile phone, and browsing other websites. So we’ve built Messenger right into Hotmail, increased our support for SMS, and created Messenger apps for popular mobile phones.

Improving the IM experience

We know that hundreds of millions of people use Messenger every day and love it for what it provides – instant connection to their friends on Messenger. So we focused on making Messenger better for folks who love IM.

It can be difficult to have a meaningful online conversation about photos, videos, or website content when you’re not looking at the same stuff at the same time. The new version of Messenger brings you richer photo and video sharing, high-definition video chat, video messages, games, and one-click access to files on your PC, search results from Bing, and photos and videos shared on SkyDrive, Facebook, and other sharing sites. And we’ve made it easier than ever to do these together – so you can have a high-definition video chat with your friend while clicking through a set of photos, letting you see and hear each other’s reactions while you share. We’ve also made it easier to manage multiple simultaneous conversations by putting each one in its own tab.

And of course, as part of our deeper integration with Facebook, later this year Messenger will support Facebook Chat, so you’ll be able to IM all your Facebook friends from within Messenger.

Staying in touch with close friends

Most people today visit at least one social network and dozens of content sharing sites, get email with photos and social notifications, and of course, maintain accounts in numerous places with different sets of friends and content. So we focused on connecting Messenger to the social networks you already use, and prioritizing the most important updates so you can quickly see what your favorite people are doing, wherever they’re doing it.

We know your close friends share using email, IM, and social networks. So we brought all of those together into a single view. The status from your Facebook friends who don’t use Messenger? Check. The photos your mom sent you as plain old e-mail attachments? Check. The Office docs you’re collaborating on with friends in SkyDrive? Check. And the stuff your favorite Messenger friends are doing on hundreds of sites they choose to share from? Check.

And since simple “aggregation” can make things worse instead of better, we focused on prioritizing the people that matter most to you, so you don’t miss the handful of important updates from your closest friends and family just because your college and work “friends” are broadcasting their whole life every minute of the day. Just tag your favorite people, and we optimize your feed for the stuff those people are doing. Of course, it’s not 100% exclusive to your favorites – the most interesting things from your other friends like photos, videos, and links (especially the ones being commented on a lot) are there too. This makes us a great companion to the services you already love like Facebook, Flickr, MySpace, LinkedIn and more – and when you have time to go beyond those most important updates, diving deeper into those sites is just a click away.

Lastly, we recognized that we could connect your social updates to the power of the Windows PC and really bring it to life. So we took advantage of the latest advances in hardware and graphics to give you a modern social experience. This means that Messenger brings beautiful high-resolution views of the photos, videos, and links that your friends are sharing, right to your desktop. View their Facebook albums, gorgeously presented so that they’re fun to browse through and easy to comment on. Messenger is also the simplest way to update your status and instantly post it to other sharing sites you use. You can even bring your photo albums right into high-definition video chats with your friends.

Here’s a picture of the new social view for Messenger:

Bringing Messenger with you to Hotmail, the web, and your phone

People are increasingly needing to stay in touch while away from their primary PC, so we are bringing Messenger to the places you communicate from. Our upcoming release will include not just Messenger itself, but also an update to Hotmail that puts Messenger front and center there, too (we’ll talk more about that soon). And we’ll bring Messenger to breadth broad range of mobile experiences, from SMS and simple browsing, to new Messenger apps for popular smartphones. The new Messenger Companion add-on for Internet Explorer will let you share links and comments from whatever website you’re on. And we’ll deliver an updated version of the the Messenger Web Toolkit (now called Messenger Connect), so websites can embed Messenger friends, conversations, and social updates directly into their experiences.

The new Windows Live Messenger

The way people socialize and connect with their friends is changing. We designed the new Messenger with these changes in mind so you can continue to use it to connect to your closest friends, wherever they are, and wherever you are. As Chris announced earlier, we’ll be releasing this to a limited number of individuals externally in the very near future, before expanding to a broader public beta, and finally to the full public release.

Here’s a video to show you a little bit of what is in store:

You can also learn more about the upcoming Messenger release at www.messengerpreview.com.

We look forward to sharing this with all of you soon, and getting your feedback!

Piero Sierra and Jeff Kunins
Group Program Managers for Windows Live Messenger and Social