Since October 1st that has all changed. Since then I’ve started working in a new role as Digital Media Communications Manager for all Windows Consumer brands – PC, mobile and online – as well as MSN and Live Search in EMEA. I got to say, it’s like getting paid to do your hobby just like Steve seems to think about his job as well. And it’s also the reason why this blog has gone silent for a bit, as I’m still transitioning stuff from my old job to other people. Also our fiscal year started on July 1st so I got to get my new plans ready asap, expect more about that here soon.

Anyway, I’ve been waiting for the moment I could tell you all this, wish me luck and if ever you have ideas on how you think I should run this… let me know in the comments.

Windows Live Messenger

Let’s start with the most popular of all Windows Live applications, used by 300 million people worldwide. I have +400 contacts in my Messenger and it’s fair to say that I use this every single day. Being able to add contacts to a favorites list will help me find people faster (although the search bar on top is always pretty handy for that as well). And also the groups feature is useful for me to start instant conversations between a bunch of people working on the same project, both from inside as outside the company. Lastly the “What’s new” update is also a nice feature and like Joe Wilcox notices, one with tremendous potential:

“What’s New is nascent, but it has great potential unifying some of Microsoft’s disparate social networking services. The venue is appropriate. While IMing with your buddies, you see a stream of updates about what your other friends, family or coworkers are doing. I can just imagine the teen exchange when Tracey sees that Wendy and Frank are now an item while chatting with Janie. Oh the gossip. The broader potential is tremendous, if Microsoft chooses to capitalize on it. What’s New, or something like it, could inform what game Jack is playing on Xbox 360 right now, what song Mary is listening to in Zune 3.0 software or what TV shows Manny has scheduled to record today in Windows Media Center….”

Oh and one interesting new feature I’d almost forgotten: the ability to log in on more than one PC.

Windows Live Mail

Next to my Microsoft.com company email address which I read using Outlook, I have about 10 other email addresses. I know I could do with less, but they are my old Hotmail some new Live.com addresses I could snatch at the launch :), my Gmail… etc and since I use a separate email address for each blog, that adds up to 10.

Although you could add your Hotmail accounts also into Outlook by using the Outlook Connector, and you can obviously also add POP3 email to Outlook, I still prefer Windows Live Mail for all that. First of all it keeps my work email separated from all the other email, second it’s just hand to click on ‘Unread email’ and get all new email from across all accounts in one single view. I like that more than using email forwarding from one email to the other as using it like this I will still reply on email using the right account and not give up any other email account. Might sound silly to you, but that’s important to me.

Most important addition to the new version (apart from that new look of course) is the Calendar. I think that will make quite a few people happy and therefore it’s good that is finally in there. My life sits in my Outlook calendar so I won’t use that part of Windows Live Mail that much. Still, especially when you have one or more Hotmail, but also when you just have more than one email account, you should check this out.

Windows Live Photo Gallery

I’m not a Pro photographer (although I wish I was) but that doesn’t mean I don’t take photos of course. There are over 6000 photos on my hard drive and I use this program to sort them all out. I think Windows Live Photo Gallery became part of Windows Live with Wave 2 and it was just what I needed to sort all this out. Unlike real professional photographers I don’t do much of retouching on my photos. Maybe a bit of contrast, cropping maybe but that’s mainly it. And that’s all in here, plus upload to Flickr so that was pretty much all I needed. I missed one Fix – and lucky for me that’s one of the only new things they added to this release: the ability to straighten a photo. I tend to take pictures that are slightly tilted to one side… it’s probably something to do with the camera :)

Most interesting new feature is probably the people tagging which uses some kind of facial recognition. Still playing with that one but I like how you can now use ‘descriptive tags’ and ‘people tags’ and especially that the program does some kind of face detection in your photos.

Hopefully developers will start creating the plug-ins needed to publish to other services (also new in this release) but Flickr is already in there and that’s why I use so again less important for me. A last nice addition (and probably as expected) is that you can start creating your Photosynths now right from Windows Live Photo Gallery as well.

Windows Live Writer

What can I say, it’s the best desktop blogging app out there and it’s improved a bit – like for adding Youtube video to your posts – but main differences with the older version here are that new, fresher, whiter look that comes with Wave 3. Nothing else, but who cares, it was pretty darn good already :)

Note 1: I haven’t used Windows Live Moviemaker nor Windows Live Family Safety yet (my kids aren’t allowed to use my pc basically) so can’t say much about these services for now.

Note 2: I wanted to use some home made screenshots instead of the official ones but believe it or not, I couldn’t find how to mask the names etc in a nice way. Somebody teach me how to use Paint.net please :)

Yesterday the Zune team released the 3rd generation of the Zune and I updated both my 1ste generation 30G Zune as well as the 2nd edition 8G Zune, which is the one I use most. And I got to say, seriously. I think the Zune software is worth installing even if you don’t have a Zune. The visualization is very nice, and especially (which is new in this release) how you can go into the MixView which shows similar artists (similar music or influenced by, …) and other Zune users that listened to this music. A nice mixture between recommendations from the music engine underneath as well as the social… hence the ‘Welcome to the social’ slogan for the Zune. Here’s what Wired had to say about MixView’s recommendation engine:

“Microsoft showed us a sneak preview of the Zune 3.0 software it plans to release on Sept. 16 with the latest generation of Zune devices, and what we saw made iTunes’ simple Genius feature look like a blast from digital music’s past. While iTunes serves up a text list of recommended songs within your library and from the iTunes store, adding to the more basic recommendations its MiniStore feature used to make, Zune reinvented the recommendation concept by collapsing artists, albums and fans into the same recommendation engine, more accurately mirroring the way people think about music.”

There’s just one thing missing though and that is  access to the Zune Marketplace. Since I live in Europe the only way for me to benefit from the all-you-can-eat monthly charge of $14.99 is to get a US credit card unfortunately. The new MixView makes me want that even more, since you obviously want to buy the music you’re discovering right away. So bring the Zune to Europe guys!

I can’t count the number of times I’ve written about Photosynth anymore, but trust me when I say the number of times I wanted to say even more is even bigger. I remember how the first reactions (the oohs and aahs) were quickly followed by questions about the computing power that would be needed to create synths your own. Well, we’ve been having access (I work for Microsoft) to the tool that allows you to create your own Synths for a while and yes your personal computer will do just fine. And since yesterday, you can all give it a try for yourself (only on Windows for the moment though).

Explore the nicest Synths right here or start creating your own right away. Here’s how to do it. Read more about this fascinating technology on the Photosynth blog, or read some of the reviews that are popping up: Mossberg, Scoble, Webware, O’Reilly Radar, …

Together with most of the European invites of Microsoft to MIX, we arrived in Vegas on Monday night as we had a pre-conference scheduled in on Tuesday, the day before the official start of MIX. The pre-conference is a unique opportunity to get up close with some people that will present at MIX later as well but given we’re with about 200 people it makes it more accessible to get into a conversation. In the afternoon we had the choice between some activities, for which we chose to go for the “High Rollers” – a training basically on gambling, to get you started ;) This training took place in the Stratosphere Tower, a nice enough opportunity to take some pictures and stitch them all together in this panorama.

Today MIX officially started. We had the keynote in the morning with Ray Ozzie and Scott Guthrie which got covered pretty good live by Duncan Riley at Techrunch. I’d say check out their post to get an idea of the keynote, or watch the video. There’s one thing that struck me the most and that was the Hard Rock Memorabilia demo, using the Seadragon technology within Silverlight. You can see it right here, make sure you check it out. Really cool, trust me.

After the keynote (and the following lunch) I went out to see Lou Carbone again. I saw him at MIX07 already and found it a fascinating speech, reason enough to go see him again. Unfortunately, his MIX08 speech was the same as last year. Still very good, but been there done that.  Too late to go anywhere else so and my next session was in the same room anyway. Next up, David Armano with the Fuzzy Tail. David and I have been in touch occasionally through the AoC and on Twitter but here in Vegas we finally met in person which was good. The Fuzzy Tail wasn’t new to me as I followed the development of the presentation on his blog a couple of months ago, still good to see it presented by the man himself.

Other than that we saw some cool stuff related to the new IE8, we had again some demo on the Surface – always fascinating – and finally we joined the other MIX attendees for the official MIX party in TAO.

More images from MIX can be found on my Flickr account, and for more news and videos you should check out the MIX website.

Tafiti, which means ‘do research’ in Swahili apparently, allows you to search the web like any other engine when it comes to the results themselves. But the way these results get presented and the way you can drag into ‘shelves’ where you can collect them is quite interesting.

I did a search on ‘silverlight’ and the view on top is where you see the news results of it, nicely presented in ‘newspaper’ style. In the carrousel on the left you can choose other verticals (web, images, …) and on the right you have the ‘shelves’ I mentioned earlier with some results stored on the first ‘shelve’. You can actually open up the results on a ‘shelve’ which shows all of them in one view and which has a blog it & email it buttons so you can send them through right away.

I’m going to play around with this a bit more myself, but make sure you do as well. I think it’s an interesting exercise. You can see a video of Tafiti in action at On10.

Technorati Tags: bebo, microsoft, windows live, messenger, liveid, partnership, uk, us, integration, announcement, pr

Folders comes in 3 ways:

1. Storage for yourself which you can use when you want to access files from multiple computers
2. Sharing files with friends is where you can store files that you want to share with one or more friends on your Messenger buddy list. In addition to that you can add ‘reader’ or ‘contributor’ permission to each folder you set up this way
3. Sharing files publicly

Now I’ve just set up my Live Folders and I’ll share my experiences with it later. If you want to give this a try as well, make sure you sign up for it quickly as the team is only expanding the beta for a limited time now.

Here’s what you see once you’re logged on, I didn’t have any files up there when I took the screenshot hence the 500MB is still available which isn’t the case anymore now :)

Technorati Tags: windows live, folders, online, storage, secure, protected, sharing, filesharing, messenger

Finally it’s here. Congrats to Drew and Gavin for setting this all up! I’ve written about the project before on a few occasions so I’m not going to bring that all up again, the book is here, so just get it now ;)

My fellow countryman Luc ‘Mindblob’ Debaisieux has a good wrap up on the project so far with some key links:

• Drew McLellan’s latest words on the ebook.
• Gavin Heaton’s latest post.
• Arun Rajagopal’s description of all the authors.
• Matt Dickman’s Google Map locating all the authors.
• The Age of Conversation site.
• Age of Conversation alphabetic list and info.

The book was also featured on AdAge, with a preview and an interview with Drew and Gavin. Don’t forget to take a look at my special Age of Conversation page where you can find all the authors again.

Technorati Tags: aoc, ageofconversation, book, blogging, bloggers, marketing, adage