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Live in EuropeFrom the European MSN / Windows Live crew
May 11 URL Blocking ProblemsOver the last couple of days you may have noticed a few URLs being blocked during your text-chats on Windows Live Messenger. This was the result of something a partner of Microsoft's did and has now been corrected. Please see the "Inside Windows Live Messenger" blog for more details. Please keep in mind that we block URLs for everyone's safety (viruses, spam, and so on), and we do that via this partner. Apparently something went wrong and we will try to keep it from happening again. I know Dharmesh, who posted the blog entry on "Inside Windows Live Messenger", and I am confident that he will help resolve and improve this. - Brian Groth (Windows Live product manager) April 30 Wanna be a superhero?...and impress your friends? That will be piece of cake - thanks to the "Messenger Heroes". This new emoticon pack has more guts than Superman and Schwarzenegger together - all in a very cartoon-like style. If you're a fan of "The Incredibles", you'll love the Messenger Heroes too!
You can download the "Messenger Heroes" straight into your Windows Live Messenger - there are 30 of them and all for free! The Messenger Heroes are live in Belgium (NL & FR), Denmark, Germany, UK, Norway & Sweden. Click on of these countries to get these free emoticons! If you're brave enough... - Carole Vincke (Marketing Executive) April 28 Check your StarFactor on Facebook!Always wanted to know how popular you are on the Internet? With StarFactor you'll be able to find out with one click. StarFactor is a Facebook application that calculates your StarFactor by using Live Search results. The more results Live Search finds on the web about you, the higher your StarFactor. Once you know your own StarFactor, you can check out your friends’ StarFactor by inviting them. And try to beat them! In case someone else with the same name shows up in your StarFactor results, you can easily refine them so that only relevant search results are showing up linked to your profile. Not satisfied with your StarFactor? Try to boost it by sharing stories, pictures or videos on the world wide web.
This is my StarFactor for the moment...I bet it won't be difficult to beat this? Just add StarFactor now if you're curious... - Carole Vincke (Marketing Executive) March 25 Add your online friends to Messenger
The Windows Live team in The Netherlands created the first version (thanks to LiveSide for acknowledging that) and now it is available everywhere as explained in a blog entry on the Windows Live Dev blog by John Richards. John was also at Mix08 on a panel discussion related to this that you can watch called "Social Networks: Where Are They Taking Us?" As you can see, our efforts around social networking aim to put you (our customers) at the centre of your online experience by making it easy for you to take your ID, your contacts, and your data with you as you move around the web. - Brian Groth (Windows Live product manager) March 13 Asus & Windows Live at CebitAt Cebit last week to do a press launch with the ASUS EPC team and T-Mobile. The ASUS EPC is a great little laptop that will now come with Windows Live services pre-installed – I did a demo of Windows Live Mail, Messenger and Photo Gallery to the assembled media. In Germany, the machine will come with a bundle of wireless Internet access. To prepare my demo, I borrowed an ASUS EPC for a couple of weeks. It was running Windows XP with the Live Suite and worked extremely well. My three kids were entranced by this “mini PC”. I got Windows Live Family Safety settings up and running and left them with it for a couple of hours – they decided to play with the machine rather than watch the Simpsons, so I think ASUS are on the right track here. These photos are of the booth that Windows Live and ASUS had set up to allow visitors to use Windows Live applications on the new machines. There was a great deal of consumer and press buzz about this stand (Cebit is a really a monster of an event – like a large prairie farm in middle America but with technology instead of tractors in the grain barns). - Alex Dale (Marketing Director) March 06 Zoom in on rock & roll memorabilia
- Brian Groth (Windows Live product manager) February 28 NEW Birds Eye for Europe!Last night (our time) our colleagues from the Virtual Earth / Live Maps team announced an update to the service including a lot of new cities in Europe that now have Birds Eye view and also some that have 3D view. The new and updated Birds Eye Cities include London, Mulhouse, Parma, Nancy, San Marino, Porto, Lisbon, ... see below for the full list. For the 3D view the cities are Vannes (France) and Southampton (UK). Here's a Birds Eye view from our office in London for instance. If you don't know what Birds Eye or 3D looks like, then take a look around London for instance on http://maps.live.com and you'll see notifications on the map when Birds Eye or 3D are available for the map you're looking at. Enjoy! Here's the full list of New/Updated Birds Eye Cities in Europe:
- Kris Hoet (Marketing Manager) February 25 If you fancy a kickabout on Windows Live Messenger, try out the Messenger League!The Messenger League is a football game played in Windows Live Messenger. The game was initially developed by the Italian marketing team during the World Cup in 2006. Due to its phenomenal success, the game then was made available in another 10 countries in Europe. The League aspect exists in the fact that top scorers per country are posted in a league table with a national and international ranking. Currently the top of the league is being dominated by 2 French players. Overall the Messenger League has been played more than 7M times in all these countries since its launch in September last year. If you want to join the fun, go to the Messenger League micro site and hit the “Play now” button in the left corner of the page. You can then select a friend against who you want to play, pick your own shirt design and team name before you start playing.
Why don’t you give it a try right away and who knows you’re the one to beat the French? ;-) - Carole Vincke (Marketing Executive) SkyDrive launched in 38 countriesFour days ago, we made the announcement that SkyDrive - our online storage service - was coming out of beta and launched in another 36 additional countries! Not only that, the storage is now five times bigger - that's 5GB of free online storage for you. Here is the full list of countries. In addition to Great Britain, India, and the U.S., we’re live in Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Denmark, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Finland, France, Guatemala, Honduras, Italy, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Norway, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Puerto Rico, Portugal, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, and Turkey.
Check it out right here: http://skydrive.live.com/ - Kris Hoet (Marketing Manager) February 19 "Scott is a fool"When I wrote about my experience at the LIFT08 conference in Geneva I used a plugin developed by Scøtt Lovegrove to add the picture to the post. More specifically a plugin that enables easy embedding of a picture from your own Spaces photo album. When Scøtt got in touch we me shortly after that on Messenger I thought it would be a nice idea to interview Scøtt and tell you a a little bit more about his interest in Windows Live. Oh and as for the title of this post, Scøtt's nickname is scottisafool, but I'll let him tell you where that is coming from. Hello Scott, tell us a bit more about yourself? Who is Scott Lovegrove? And how do I get to write the that O in your name as it's supposed to be? ;)
As for the ø, it's alt+0248 on the number pad ;) First things first, we've taken this title for a reason as you know. You're nickname is scottisafool, where does that come from? When I first wanted to create my email address, I wanted something that people would remember, something they wouldn't have to write down to remember, so that combined with my own random sense of humour gave me scottisafool, and you know what, no-one ever had to write it down ;) So Scott, you're a Windows Live Platform MVP. I can imagine not everybody is familiar with that term, can you tell us what that means? Sure, Windows Live Platform is the renamed competency that used to be Windows Live Developer. The MVPs in this category are those who have helped people out when it comes to developing using Windows Live services, whether it's Search, Contacts, Virtual Earth, or any of the many other services that can be developed against; I myself am very prominent when it comes to writing Windows Live Writer plugins. MVP stands for Microsoft Valuable Professional. How do you get to become an MVP? To become an MVP you have to have been helping out within the technical community. What do I mean by this? Helping out in forums, newsgroups, writing articles, help guides, giving talks/presentations, organizing user groups. Things like that. Now doing those doesn't guarantee you an MVP status, and Sean O'Driscoll who headed up the MVP program until recently once said you can't work towards being an MVP, it's just something you are in terms of mentality. But you won't get anyway if you're not helping out in the community in some way :) So far you have developed quite a few things on the Windows Live Platform already. I count 15 Windows Live Writer plugins and a Windows Live Toolbar button. How do you get to develop these? Where are the ideas coming from? The ideas for some of my plugins come from the most random of places at times. Sometimes I will see a new technology that I want to learn, and so I have found the easiest way for me to learn it is to build a plugin around them, an example of that is the Feed Reader plugin, where I wanted to learn about using XML in C#. Some plugins come as requests (like the IMMe Plugin that Angus Logan requested), and some come from me reading someone's blog and thinking, "they do <something> quite often," and then I'll think if that could be made into a plugin. The toolbar button actually came from me just wanting to have a look at what you have to do to create your own button so that I could write a blog post about it for LiveSide, and at the time, like most people, I was using Facebook a lot, so decided that would be the best way to combine the two things. What's your most popular plugin so far? Without a doubt it's the video plugin, which currently has had over 11,000 downloads off Live Gallery alone, let alone the downloads of it I had before I put them on Gallery. What I'm proud of with my video plugin, is not only that it was the first video plugin to really use some of the Live Writer APIs, but since beta 3 of Live Writer, the program actually comes with its own Video plugin yet the downloads of my own plugin are still very much in the ascendancy. The plugin that has been more popular than I thought it would is my Google Translate plugin, which seems to get quite a few downloads every month. Since you're an MVP and you have this experience with the platform, does that mean you get to feedback to the development teams in Redmond as well? I don't give my feedback directly to the developer teams in Redmond (well, I do with Live Writer, but then anyone who posts a suggestion on the Live Writer Forum will do, as Joe Cheng is one of the developers who frequents that forum). Most of the feedback I give back to the Platform guys goes through Angus Logan and he usually does an excellent job of passing across any suggestions or problems I encounter with any of the Platform services. The annual MVP summit in Redmond is soon, will you be going? Have you been there already in the past? What is exciting about the summit? Aye, I will most certainly be there. I have only been to the one summit thus far, which was last year, my first year of being an MVP. Back then I was a Windows Live Messenger MVP, so will be interesting this year seeing some of the more developer orientated things. The most exciting part of the summit is being able to meet up with some of the people you speak to on a near daily basis on email/IM and actually speak face to face. Of course, the trip to the company store isn't a bad thing either ;) Do you have any projects with the Windows Live Platform that you're working on now? That you can share with us? I am one of the developers working on a project called LiveNet, which I'm writing with Luke Smith, which is basically a .NET wrapper for Windows Live APIs. Currently LiveNet supports Windows Live Spaces Photos API and Silverlight Streaming API, but we will be adding more along the way, currently we're working on the Live Contacts API. I have also recently finished writing an article for Code Magazine about developing plugins for Live Writer which will be published in a special Windows Live edition of the magazine that is being done for Mix08. - Well thanks a lot Scøtt, great to talk to you! I'm hoping to see a lot more of your development on Windows Live and in the meantime enjoy the summit in Redmond. You can all find Scøtt's blog here on Spaces, or check out one of his plugins in the Windows Live Gallery. More information on the Windows Live APIs can be found at http://dev.live.com/ As a final question, we asked Scøtt to pass on this interview to someone else and he mentioned 'dwergs' from (http://www.mess.be) and Stephan Welcher (http://www.live-writer.de/) - both also MVPs - so expect to hear something from these 2 soon ;) - Kris Hoet (Marketing Manager)
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