Windows Live Services Launched

With a whole lot happening on the web , Microsoft has started to get things  aggressively forward in the aim to further build their empire on the web.

All that was branded "MSN" has been changed to "LIVE" , in fact , just about everything is now labelled with the 'live' prefix. NO, windows live services is just not another online service but is a tool that can be downloaded (Beta version.) to your desktop and integrates with most of your online activity.The improved web 2.0 interface and integration goes inline without much of a hindrance.

Well, among the the included tools I like the Windows Live Mail and the Windows Live Messenger along with Windows Live Writer. But there are others that really did not do much to get my attention. The live mail client gets back my Hotmail and Live emails back to my desktop though it has left me with two email clients running but ,yes! I love the much improved version of the Live mail client.The live messenger unlike its predecessor MSN Messenger, adds social networking and contact-sharing features and integrates well with Yahoo contacts.

The most endearing of the tool included is the "Live Writer" that runs on your Windows PC and allows you to write blog posts (Don’t bother clicking the link if you have a Mac, this is Windows PC software only.)

Since most blogging tools are web based and not all allow WYSIWYG editing [What You See Is What You Get], Windows Live Writer will be useful for some writers looking for a faster, easier way to post to blogs.Windows Live Writer has a lot of bells and whistles - preview in WYSIWYG or HTML mode, support for most blogging platforms (Windows Live Spaces, Blogger, Live Journal, TypePad, WordPress and others), easy insertion of photos and things like Live.com Maps, and tagging. Good stuff, but none of it differentiates it from existing year old products.

What does differentiate Live Writer is that they’ve released an API that allows developers to extend the capabilities of the software to publish additional content types.Bear in mind, Windows Live Writer is not a substitute for a standard word processor, but is intended for creating blog posts. It will post to blogs other than Live Spaces, and had no problem identifying this very blog login (in fact this post is my first using Live Writer). It will attempt to create a temporary test post to suck down the formatting from your blog, which makes post creation remarkably WYSIWYG more so than is available in the blog's own updating page. It even lets you resize pictures by dragging on their corners in the editing area

The current  list offered in the beta version is likely to change; many of these are beta previews of products that will be altered over time, and new tools and products are added almost weekly.

Yet, Windows Live faces stiff competition from Google.

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