Windows Live News & Articles

Microsoft, the Redmond, Washington software giant, will soon be combining two of its online services: Windows Live and Office Live. Microsoft intends to simplify the customer experience and give customers one destination to interact with these cloud-based web service offerings.

Social Media moves so fast, it's hard to keep up. Here's the week's top stories, in scan-friendly format.

This Week:

• Windows Live Becomes Social Media Hub
• Mince Your Facebook Friends for a Free Whopper
• New Twitter Services to chew on: Tweetbacks and TwtApps
• Digg Persists in Making No Money
• MySpace and Yahoo on your TV
• Twitter still can't handle MacWorld 

Windows Live Becomes Social Media Hub

The walls between the social platforms continue to fall away. Steve Ballmer has just announced a new Windows Live feature which will give you status reports and allow you to interact with your various Social accounts through your Live email. ElectricPig reports on the new Microsoft initiative:

"The announcement... means that you’ll be able to log in to the new Windows Live Essential suite with one password and have all your updates from everything from Twitter to Flickr, and more than 50 other social networks now including Facebook amalgamated on one page. Think of it as an RSS feed to see what your friends are up to."

Windows Live has decided to get a little more social — in more ways than one. They have introduced a number of new updates to the Live platform and welcomed into the fold some third party applications that make the experience that much richer.

OpenID has gotten a big lift this week with two big announcements coming from two very different camps. First, Microsoft has announced that Windows Live will officially support OpenID for login and that users will be able to log into any OpenID site with their LiveID account. Second, Google has announced that it will also be a provider of OpenIDs.

Kentico Software, a Web CMS vendor, announced at Microsoft Professional Developer Conference 2008 (PDC2008) that they have integrated Silverlight 2.0 and Windows Live ID support into Kentico CMS.

Kentico CMS, a Web CMS developed for ASP.NET, now enables Web site developers to easily integrate Microsoft Silverlight 2.0 content into their sites, which ultimately results in more interactive Web sites. Granted, Silverlight lacks the adoption rate to have that much of an impact, but its support is likely very welcomed amongst developers who utilize this technology.

Also new for Kentico CMS is the support for Windows Live ID user authentication — Visitors to Kentico CMS-based Web sites can sign in with an existing Windows Live ID account, without requiring to create a new account.

While Silverlight 2.0 lacks adoption, plenty of users likely have Windows Live IDs, and this might end up being far more useful to the Kentico CMS, at least in a short-term outlook.

The Kentico team is currently showing off both technologies integrated into Kentico CMS at PDC2008. Visit Kentico’s Web site for more information about their products and services.