Over the last few months we have rolled-out many new features and improvements to your Hotmail account (and we will continue to do so). It is now faster, with better Spam and Virus protection and ever-growing storage. You also have access to Windows Live Messenger directly from your Hotmail page and can access it from any computer connected to the Internet. In the next few days you will now have the ability to send and receive your messages from other email accounts in one place. Hotmail gives you one place to login and check ALL your messages.

You can learn more about these new features from Julie and Hal:

We are working hard to keep our users satisfied, and with close to 19 million users* we are the proud leader of Webmail services in Canada.

Your Canadian Windows Live team

* Source ComScore Canada – May 2009

Free your photos from their prisons! Stop the senseless deletions! Only you can help us:

http://www.freeyourphotos.ca/

-

On behalf of the Windows Live team, I want to introduce you to the latest update in the Windows Live social networking portfolio – starting today, you can keep your friends up to date in Windows Live from Facebook!  Now if you upload new pictures to facebook, share news, videos, status updates, … all of these will show up in your what’s new feed in Messenger, Hotmail, and your Windows Live Homepage!

All you need to do is to click on the following link then follow 3 easy steps: add, authenticate, allow, and you are set! 

Not a facebooker?  With this release we also launched many other partner integrations as well, such as  Digg, Last.fm, Photobucket, and more.  Click here to look at all the latest partners we have available!

Old news to many, hopefully still new to some!

To all you facebookers and messenger lovers, I know you love updating facebook status message all the times and I also you love messenger and you are keeping it on 24x7, now here’s one tip that helps you update your facebook status messenger even more often!!

Now you can update your facebook status via messenger!

Here’s what it will look like

To do it, it’s actually simpler than you think:

1st - add the messenger app to your facebook,  http://apps.facebook.com/windowslivemessenger/.  [P.S. this app is created by Microsoft]

2nd go to the settings page, and check the second box

QED!

And I’d love to end this post with a quote from my friend Dharmesh..

It’s a mistake! Please just ignore it – you won’t have any problem signing into Messenger using your existing Messenger ID.  Our core team has also made a blog post here.  We are really sorry for the confusion that this might have caused, but trust me, I also feel your pain: even though I didn’t see the error myself (was having dinner), I received quite a number of emails asking me about the legitimacy of such error :)

I guess on a brighter note, treat it as a belated April fool’s joke. :)

.

With the recent launch of Messenger 2009, I’m sure you guys are burning, burning with feedbacks, suggestions, and any other questions you may have.  I just want to quickly put up a post so you can get all Canadian specific contact information so you can direct any of your concerns / feedbacks to the right channel. 

* A rep would get back to you within a few days.  Please make sure that email doesn’t go into your junk mail folder.  Please don’t put feature suggestion here.  It will go into the wrong pipeline and your feedback may not be passed to the right person.

** Please don’t expect a direct email reply.  For questions about the product please use the technical support channel.  But I can guarantee you we take your feedback very, very seriously. I personally review Canadian specific feedbacks on a monthly basis.  So yes, someone’s reading your feedback :) Your verbatims will help me understand what you like/dislike about messenger so I can submit feature request for the next wave of messenger.

This is hilarios :)  It’s a campaign running in the US, basically it’s a face off between two generations and see how fast they can master a feature in a certain product, worth a watch. 

  VS

8 vs 80: Slide show

9 vs 90: Photo Sharing

More videos

Let’s stay I want to share a picture of my 3 month old son with my mom who loves to print her favorite photos of her grandson. Santa brought her a nice photo printer last Christmas. To make the photo look great when printed, it is strongly recommended to print from the highest resolution file. Thankfully Windows Live can help and here is how to do it in just 6 easy steps.

First, let me remind you that Windows Live Photos (http://photos.live.com/) gives you plenty of online space to store and share your pictures. On average, based on a quick calculation, 25GB should hold from 10,000 to 15,000 pictures, depending on the resolution. The best part is that it’s completely free.

Step one:
If you haven’t already done so, download and install the latest Windows Live Photo Gallery at http://download.live.com

Step two:
Launch Windows Live Photo Gallery from your Programs menu in Windows. On the left side of your screen, you will see all of your pictures organized by Folder, Date and Tags.

Step three:
Select the pictures you want to share online.

Step four:
From the menu at the top, click on Publish and then Online album from the toolbar.

Step five:
You now have the option to choose a name for your album or you can choose an existing album. In order to store and share the original size picture, make sure you choose the Upload Size option to Original. See screenshot below.

When choosing the album, you can set your sharing permissions. You will find additional options including: selecting categories and individuals in your online album (http://photos.live.com/).

Make sure you organize your categories to share with just the people you want with a couple of clicks. This could be the subject of another blog article…

Step six:
After the upload, your pictures are ready to be shared at http://photos.live.com/. Your friends and family  now have two great ways to download your pictures.

1) If they have the new Windows Live Photo Gallery installed (who doesn’t? ;-)) when opening the album, they can choose to download all the pictures from the album. From the More menu, they will find Download with Photo Gallery. See below.

2) They can also choose to download individual pictures by clicking on it and then selecting Download. See below.

Et voila! Your original pictures can now be printed in full resolution.

Hopefully, this quick guide will help you. Don’t hesitate to send us your feedback.

Your Canadian Windows Live team

More to come!

	Christmas Emoticon Pack 2008
	Athlete Theme Pack Aug 2008
	GTA IV Theme Pack
	Love Family Emoticon Pack
	Halo 3 Theme Pack
	Messenger Emoticon Pack

http://www.youup.com/site/page-download-demo.html

This is actually pretty amazing stuff!  Check out the demo video on the site and you’ll know what I mean (hopefully :)).  Warning though, the site is written in French.  I’m going to download the private beta and try it out tonight. 

Real time flight status is now available in Canada!

In an effort to continue offering consumers instant access to information through Live Search, the Answers team has built out the flight status answer for 5 English markets.  This is a huge feature for Canada.

It’s simple to use – just type in the flight number (AC 540) and you’ll receive real-time flight information for both domestic and international flights.

Try it for yourself today on Live.ca!

Examples:

- Air Canada

- West Jet

- Porter

- American

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…

Over the past year, many of you told us that you wanted a cleaner, faster Hotmail. We released the new Hotmail to meet those needs, and while many of our customers are happy with the changes, others – particularly folks with smaller screen resolutions – are having difficulty using the new Hotmail.

We’ve been listening to all the feedback, and we want to make Hotmail great for everybody. So, we’ve been working hard on more changes based on your feedback:

· We’re modifying the way that scrolling works for those of you who have the reading pane turned off. This will make it easier to see more of your messages and folders, especially if you have a smaller screen. It will work a lot more like Classic Hotmail for anyone who has the reading pane turned off.

· While we work on this change, we’re removing the promotional module in the lower left corner so you have more room to see your folders.

· We’re working on a number of smaller fixes that will reduce errors and the time it takes to load each page. This includes addressing concerns from those of you who use Firefox on Linux, and making it easier to close the contact picker when you’re composing a message.

These changes will roll out over the next month, so you should be seeing them shortly.

Hotmail has even more upcoming changes that will come out a bit later – moving the advertisement from the top of page to the side, adding more themes and other ways to customize,  increasing the number of messages on each page, and embedding instant messaging with Messenger right into Hotmail.

Thank you for your patience and feedback. Keep up the suggestions and we’ll keep working to make Hotmail even better.

- The Windows Live Hotmail Team

P.S. Some of you using Firefox, especially Firefox version 2.0.0.18, are reporting problems opening your mail. We are not yet sure why this is happening, but we are investigating. In the meantime, the problem usually goes away if you upgrade to Firefox 3.

To upgrade to Firefox 3, go to http://www.mozilla.com and click the link to download Firefox 3.

You can find answers to many other Hotmail questions in the FAQ in Hotmail’s Help area (click the (?) question mark in the upper-right corner of Hotmail).

Or, send details about your specific problem to our support team using this e-form, and they will get back to you.

You have been doing tons of search a day, may it be work related, personal interest, or simply because you are bored!  So now imagine if these searches actually give you chances to win BIG Prizes???  All you need to do is simple, go to our promotion site bigticketsearch.com, and do your search like usual.  no pop ups, no no spywares, no mailing list sign up… just.. your search results :)  And you will then be given 2 tickets, if they match, you win! :)

yup, that’s it.

I didn’t win, why don’t you try it?

And a few words from our search team.

---------

Microsoft Live Search 'Big Ticket' promotion

Big Ticket Search will run from October 31st through December 31st. Every time our users search at bigticketsearch.com, they have a chance to win awesome prizes every hour, 24 hours a day. We'll be giving away tons of  prizes including 2 new Mitsubishi Lancers, Raptors VIP package, Home Entertainment Systems, Laptops, $10,000 cash, Ticketmaster Gift Cards, Zunes, Xboxes, Raptors Season Tickets and Raptors Memorabilia.

Ever thought that your static display picture is not good enough and want some real action (literally) in the dp? With the latest messenger v9.0 beta you can create your own personal dynamic display picture for free, with just a webcam.

Below is a quick demo on how I created mine.

Enjoy!

I’m in Redmond, Seattle attending a meeting.   It’s 6:30am now and I’m on a call with some Toronto folks and my meeting is going to run till like 7pm tonight.  I’m foreseeing today is one of those hellish days. 

Before I start rushing into the fire and absorbing information like a sponge, just wanna share a light hearted moment last night before/after we went into the bar :)  A colleague of mine (no it’s not me, I swear!) got dressed up in a messenger buddy suit.  Now don’t you get scared 2am at night when you see a green dude walking around with no eyes and nose, it’s probably just my colleague.

Guest post from Maggie, PM for Live Maps in Canada.

Our major release this Fall – “Helios” was released last night!  Check it out – we now have multi-way point (where you can add multiple stops for your driving directions – a popular feature that our users ask for), route based on traffic information, 3D weather, localized FR-CA map labels and an improved 3D installer!

Multi-way point:

User Clearflow to route based on traffic:

Localized FR-CA map label:

3D weather:

This feature shows up in 3D mode when you’re close to the ground. (There is a setting in the 3D options to switch it on and off.)

Check it out today at http://maps.live.ca

As some of you already know, our US friends are running a pretty interesting ad campaign.  I’m sure different people will have different opinions towards the campaign, but as a MS employee myself, I’ll call it ‘inspirational’ :)

The official site is here: http://www.windows.com.  If you want to join this campaign with a video of yourself, go ahead!

Oh and by the way, I wear glasses :)

Actually, I should broaden up my scope and say, a new set of Windows Live clients has arrived in Canada! I’m super excited myself, not only because the products are so hot and sexy right now, but also because I worked so hard on it for the past few months :) :)

I’m excited to announce that the latest client betas have just arrived in Canada.   The beta release aim to test new functionality and technology from Windows Live as part of our ongoing development to help complete the Windows experience for consumers and provide communication services that help people stay in touch, share their experiences and keep their lives in sync.  In this beta, not only you will find many new and exciting feature upgrades in all products, you will also find our UX is drastically improved which provides a consistent look and feel across all our client programs.  Please feel help to spread the word to your family and friends so all of them can help us make improvements to our Windows Live experience.

The beta includes Windows Live Messenger beta, Windows Live Mail beta, Windows Live Photo Gallery beta, Windows Live Movie Maker beta, Windows Live Writer beta, Windows Live Toolbar beta, Windows Live Family Safety beta, Microsoft Office Outlook® Connector beta .

To download all in one shot –>

If you prefer to install them individually, scroll down!