Everyone, let’s give a round of applause!

Windows Live, my baby, has just been updated.  This latest round of updates includes the following products:

- Windows Live Homepage - the place for you to get notified of new Windows Live Hotmail email and to track updates on recent online activity by people in their Windows Live network.  It’s connected to the “What’s New Feed,” so customers can follow what their contacts have shared on Windows Live as well as on other 3^rd party services.

- Windows Live Profile Page - quickly and easily broadcast key information about yourself from Windows Live and more than 50 partners’ sites to your Windows Live network. Anything that you do on Windows Live or on select 3rd party services is automatically reflected on your profile as well as throughout most other services in Windows Live.  You can also choose to publish your activity on more than 50 sites into your Windows Live feed, so your network can see all your online activities in a single place on Windows Live.  You no longer have to visit multiple sites to get the latest information from the people you care about most!

- Windows Live People Pages - the central address book that contains all of the people that are in a customer’s Windows Live network including their Hotmail contacts, Messenger buddies, Spaces friends, and Groups.

- Windows Live Photos - the home to your photos on the web at http://photos.live.com. Create Silverlight powered [read: cool] web slide shows, share photos through Windows Live™ Hotmail, Windows Live Groups, Windows Live Events, Windows Live FrameIt, and Windows Live™ Spaces.  You can even see all your photos from Windows Live Photos on most cell phones.

- Windows Live  Groups  - a new service that helps small groups or clubs collaborate online. It is the great tool for communication and collaboration on private group pages, announce upcoming events, share fun photos and files, and instantly chat with the whole gang.

- Windows Live Events - allows you to quickly and easily send free online invitations, add a map and driving directions, easily track guest replies, create a custom homepage with event details, and share photos and comments with all of their guests after it’s over.

- Windows Live Spaces - With this release, we have focused on improving the experience – making the fonts easier to read, removing advertisements and generally improving the user interface.

- Windows Live Skydrive - Now offering 25GB of storage and tighter integration with other Windows Live services - upload your photos, files and other digital content and access them online from anywhere.

A few key highlights that I really like about the new Windows Live:

- I really love this new look and feel.  Very personalized, easy to setup, and pretty visually appealing too.  The new dynamic themes also makes the homepage really lively.

- The new photos page is really well-designed.  Kudos to the design team to pay attention to the tiniest details which make the page look really nice!

- The silverlight photo slide show is just really cool :) call me a geek!

-Whats new feed! What else can I say?  I finally have a centralized location that I can get all the updates from my friends in one single place, instead of having me go to log in to the X SN sites that I belong to.

For a really detailed walk through, check out my buddy Dharmesh’s blog on Live Wire.   

So how can you access it today?

Nothing you need to do, just go to the site and enjoy the new experience! :)

Even if you are not interested in more emoticons, it’s fun to see how each country has a different type of design when coming to emoticons / creatives.

Canada: coming soon!

US: Not ready yet

Australia:  http://promo.meegos.com/xmas2008/

Brazil: http://specials.br.msn.com/ilovemessenger/pacotes.aspx

Italy: http://intrattenimento.it.msn.com/emoticon/natale08

More countries to come…