Pros & Cons
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- Aggregates e-mail, social network updates, online photos, news feeds, and Web storage.
- Adding favorite movies, music, and books is slickly assisted by Web services.
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- Duplicates some functions of hugely popular social networks.
- Not as rich in social-network capabilities as Facebook.
Windows Live Home (Wave 3) Specs
| OS Compatibility: | Linux |
| OS Compatibility: | Mac OS |
| OS Compatibility: | Windows Vista |
| OS Compatibility: | Windows XP |
| Type: | Personal |
| Type: | Professional |
Microsoft's Live Home page strategy has been a mess for years. Early on, it was a page that simply displayed a search bar, with buttons for your Hotmail, calendar, Spaces blog, SkyDrive storage, and other Microsoft online services. Then it gained more of a personal portal feel, similar to that of
The new Windows Live Home not only lets you access your Live webmail, storage, and the rest, but also pulls in social-networking feeds from external sources such as Yelp, iLike, and Twitter. The site offers a pleasant customizable design, but the emphasis is on connecting people, through groups, contact info from Hotmail and Windows Live Messenger, shared calendars, photos, events, and rich profiles. It also ties in with your Office Live services.
Sign-Up
If you already have a Passport, Hotmail, MSN, or Windows Live Messenger account, that's all you need to sign in to Windows Live. You don't need to have one of these accounts, however. You can simply go to signup.live.com, use an existing non-Microsoft e-mail account, and enter a new password and some basic biographical info. You can even have multiple Windows Live IDs linked to the same start page; for example, maybe you use one e-mail for one set of contacts (say, fellow cello players), another for your softball friends, and another for your coworkers at the salt mine.—
Home
When you first launch Windows Live Home, you see a graphical header with a top menu linking to your Profile, People, Mail, and Photos. You get a choice of 17 colorful themes for the header, some of which change as day proceeds to night. A More link accesses the rest of the Live services—Calendar,
In your header, the current date and local weather are displayed, along with notifications for private messages or invitations, and your next Calendar appointment. It's a well-designed dashboard for your digital day. But it's below all this, in the page's main window, that you find the really new part: "What's new in your network." This is where you see Facebook-like updates of the activities of your "network."
Not only is this feed of your contacts' activities new to Windows Live, but so is the very concept of a network of contacts. Whenever a network member updates his status—either from the Live home page itself or from Live Messenger—it appears here. Ditto if he adds photos or blogs entries, makes profile changes, or uploads a file. But the biggest difference from other social networks is that Live lets you include your feeds from third-party sites, such as
One note: You may want to tweak the way that various services cross-link to each other, or face some annoyances. Add your Twitter feed to Live and your network will occasionally see two entries from you about the same update: For example, if you tweet about a Spaces blog post you just made, your network members will see two updates about it—both the Twitter feed and the Live blog activity update.
The new service isn't yet as full-featured as Facebook—you can't add formatted links and videos, for example. Though Windows Live Home includes a feed of your buddies' activities and comments, there's no equivalent to Facebook's Wall. Nor could I attach a comment to my network members' public posts. Choosing "Post a note" brought me instead to a private message page. Nor are there yet any third-party applications similar to all those that delight (and annoy) Facebook users.
Live Home does offer a couple of things not found in Facebook. One is that it lets you share files via your included SkyDrive Web storage. Another is that you can completely turn off notifications about network members you'd prefer not to hear about. In Facebook, you can reduce, but not completely eliminate, updates from users you've friended but whose activities you don't really want to follow.
To the right of your "What's new" section is the news feed area. Here you can add up to ten feeds from a large list in categories like Food, Entertainment, Fun, Money, News, Sports, and Technology. Each feed can display up to five headlines. Naturally, choices include plenty of feeds from the likes of MSNBC, but there are many non-Microsoft sources as well, including the BBC, CNET, and The New York Times. The selection is pretty robust, but I think that you should be able to add any darn RSS or Atom feed you like.—
The Live Profile
The Live Profile is strikingly similar to a Facebook profile, though with a softer look and less clutter. The main page shows your profile image, repeats your feed of activities and updates, and gathers your network members' icons on the right. A Details page lets you add relationship status, interests, work, and school info, just as Facebook's Info page does.
On your profile, you can include favorite things—music, books, and movies. One thing I like here is that you can just type a name in the title and the service searches for the details and images for you. Zune's database finds these for musicians you add. For favorite books, a search button brings up the ISBN and a cover image. Favorite movies appear as links to the Amazon page where you can buy them on DVD. Facebook's profile page just lets you add text on your favorite stuff. Live Home wins, here.—
People
The new People page lists all of your contacts with their Profile images, group membership, and a star to let you "favorite" them. Windows Live designers have thought long and hard about how to handle contacts. Evidence of this is that your "network" doesn't automatically include everyone on your contact list, just those you've specifically invited, as mentioned above. Also, contacts are separated into sensible groups: Favorites (such as speed-dial entries), Coworkers, Family, and Friends. You can even add contacts from your Facebook Friends by logging into that service via Live.
One problem the Live team wanted to tackle with this revision is the confusion that ensues when contacts change e-mail addresses. In the past, you'd have to rely on your contacts to send you an e-mail and make the changes yourself, manually. With Live, when a contact gets a new e-mail address, it is automatically updated in your address book, unless he or she has changed privacy settings not to share this info.
For cluttered contact lists with multiple entries for the same person, Live offers Merge and "Clean up contacts" options. You can also import or export contacts using CSV, which is useful. But I'd really like to see a more automated contact import from popular services such as Yahoo! Mail, without the need to figure out how to download a CSV file of your contacts from that service.
The People page also carries a new Web version of Live Messenger. This doesn't include its own buddy list, but you can start chatting with a contact directly from his entry on the People page. I'll be posting a of Live Messenger Wave 3 soon, but overall it's nice to see Live getting up to date with Web-based IM, which Yahoo! has had for over a year, and which
Live Groups
Groups, new in the latest Windows Live Home, let you create the sorts of discussion groups long available to Yahoo! and Google users. Microsoft's own MSN Groups are going bye-bye next February, with this new Live feature taking up the slack. Groups can be public or private, and the "owner," or person who created the group, has to approve members before they can participate. Starting a group is extremely simple: Just give it a name, and Live creates a Web address for it. Each group gets resources for discussions, photos, calendar, and SkyDrive Web storage. Any new activity in the group appears in the "What's new…" feed on each member's Live Home page.
Groups with fewer than 20 members can participate in Live Messenger group chats. This integration with chat and with the Live Home page for notices is convenient, but Yahoo! Groups also enables chatting from the group page. Yahoo! Groups is also way ahead of this service if you're looking for a public group on a topic of interest. For small groups, such as the local soccer team, Live's group feature is simpler to set up than Yahoo! Groups and is good at keeping everyone in touch. So for ad hoc personal groups, I'd recommend Live's Groups, but for broad interest groups, the more complex setup in Yahoo! is worth your while.—
Privacy and Advertising
Live gives you fairly good control over what each contact can see, but setting permissions takes some digging. For example, if I didn't want to share my personal contact info with a given person in my network, I'd have to click into his contact entry, choose the Permissions tab, choose Edit for the personal contact info, then choose Custom on the next page, and finally add the contact categories that I want to share the info with, or add all the individual contacts that I want to allow. This could really use some simplification: Just let me turn on and off permissions on each contact's page.
Like Google, Windows Live generates income by displaying relevant ads on your pages, but you can turn the ads off. For a single machine, privacy settings can create a cookie telling the service not to scan and collect your entered text (such as your search queries and page views) for relevant ad opportunities. Alternatively, you can turn off scanning for any computer on which you sign in with your Live ID. Google's opt-out option requires going through the process for each computer. Note that with Live, the information is still being gathered but won't be used for ad customization. Personally, I'd like an option to turn off the information collecting altogether, but barring that, Live's approach is preferable to Google's.—
Does Microsoft Get Social Networking?
The appeal of following friends' activities and thoughts has been proven by the big social networks, and Microsoft wants a piece of the action. The large numbers of users—in the hundreds of millions—already signed up for Hotmail and Messenger gives Microsoft an enormous foot in the door when it comes to potential critical mass. And that's crucially important. In social networking, numbers are at least as important as quality of service, as proven by MySpace.
But I still have doubts about Microsoft's ability to lure users from Facebook and MySpace (though it's a good home for users of Twitter, whose site doesn't offer all the goodies found on Facebook). Though Live Home can integrate updates from other services, I'd also like to see the ability to update your Facebook status from your Live status. The lack of a robust equivalent to Facebook's Wall, too, is a drawback. Speaking of drawbacks, in my testing of the private beta, pages occasionally wouldn't render correctly, looking like text links on very deep pages, but these beta issues will likely be ironed out before the service is available to the public in early December.
I applaud Live's philosophy of cutting down on Internet service overload by bringing third-party Web services into the fold. Positioning Live Home as a portal to all your mail, social updates, blog activity, and more could help simplify lives. Start pages like My Yahoo! and iGoogle aggregate e-mail, newsfeeds, and other Web services, but they don't include your social-network acquaintances' updates the way Live Home does, and that's become an essential part of people's Internet day. Whether or not the hundreds of millions of Hotmail and Live Messenger users will make Live their home on the Web remains to be seen. But because it both simplifies the Live experience and opens it up to sources outside the Windows brand, it's a step in the right direction for Microsoft.
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Final Thoughts
Windows Live Home (Wave 3)
The new start page for Windows Live services brings Microsoft into social-networking territory. Its customizability, contact organization, and ability to combine your various Web inputs and services are commendable, but it probably won't cure your addiction to Facebook or Twitter.