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Microsoft to Discontinue Silverlight Streaming Service

Bart Salisbury — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 15:20:26 -0500

Microsoft has announced that it is ending it’s Silverlight Streaming beta. Silverlight Streaming is a free-hosting service for Silverlight applications and videos that is part of Windows Live. Microsoft will replace the service with a new, fee-based service using Windows Azure, which is expected to appear by the end of 2009

Microsoft says that Silverlight Streaming beta sign-ups have been halted, and the service “will eventually be taken down,” along with all existing content. Microsoft assures users there content is safe and they’ll be given plenty of warning before it goes away. Instructions for retrieving Silverlight Streaming content for PC and Mac users are available at the Live Services Blog.

Image Credit: Dawn Endico/flickr

Windows Live Wave 4 Beta May Wash Up on Shore This Week

Mark Edward Soper — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 16:31:40 -0500

ArsTechnica passes along a rumor that the next release of Microsoft's Windows Live, Wave 4, may reach beta status this week. Details are scarce, but Softpedia points out that Windows Live Hotmail Wave 4 Milestone 1, which offers a number of new features, has been live since mid-September.

When will Windows Live Wave 4 Beta shed the beta tag? ArsTechnica has run a Japanese blog entry about Wave 4 through a couple of online translators, with the rather fractured results pointing to a spring to summer 2010 target. Stay clicked to MaximumPC.com for more information.

Redmond Preps Spending Binge to Roll Out 'Bing' Search Engine

Mark Edward Soper — Tue, 26 May 2009 15:45:23 -0500

Ready, aim, SPEND! That's the approach Microsoft is planning for Bing, its new search engine, Advertising Age reports. How much coin is Redmond prepared to spend to market Bing (previously code-named Kumo)? Somewhere is the $80-100 million range, Ad Age says, compared to Google's non-recruitment ad spending in 2008 of around $13 million. But, can spending 6-8 times as much as Google give Bing the jump it needs?

Microsoft's ad push (helmed by ad-agency powerhouse JWT) will not, unlike the recent anti-Apple campaign, mention Microsoft's search rivals - instead, the planned ads will ask consumers if search works as well as they'd like.

How about the product itself?

People who've seen the Microsoft product suggest it's useful and has some nifty filtering tools, even though it's not a markedly different-looking interface, at least for text search (some of the multimedia search results, however, do look quite different from how Google currently displays them).

When will Bing shove aside Live Search? The Register says "June," and also suggests keeping an eye on the D: All Things Digital conference this week for more details.

Windows Live Gets More Social with Facebook, Digg, and Other Connections

Mark Edward Soper — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 17:34:13 -0500

Trying to describe Microsoft's Windows Live family of web-enabled tools for Windows has been a bit like the parable of the blind men describing the elephant.

Is Windows Live a photo sharing service? A file sharing service? An email service? An IM service? With the news that Windows Live is adding connections next week to many other popular Web 2.0 social networks, it's easier now to say, as ArsTechnica puts it, that Microsoft wants to:

[T]urn Windows Live into the average netcitizen's main hub for his or her social life, or at the very least to turn Windows Live into a social network.

Microsoft's teaming up with lots of social-networking partners around the world. US-based companies becoming BFFs with Windows Live include MSN, Digg, Facebook, SmugMug, and MySpace (see the full list of 31 current and new partners here).

Don't Like Windows Live Search? Remove Your Content From Their Index!

Josh Kampschmidt — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 13:15:31 -0600

If you are a website developer, you know how frustrating it is to get the appropriate content indexed on your website. You want your website indexed, but you do not want a certain page indexed. As a site owner, you want to control the content that is indexed on search engines. For example, you do not want your boss to find a description of what you do during the day in the office. On the other hand, you could have made a devastating mistake on the creation of your website and do not want people to see the mistake page.

Windows Live search is now giving everyone the opportunity to remove content from their index. Removing the page you want is relatively easy, in your robots.txt file, just make an exclusion in your robots.txt file by putting the following line or adding meta tags to the top of the page you don’t want to index:

<meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow">

The above line will remove content, but not the URL. Sometimes removing the entire URL is necessary. For example, if the wrong URL is indexed or a test page is shown as the top hit before your main website. Luckily, this is easy to fix. Fill out this form requesting a content removal and within 48 hours it should give a 404 not found error instead of your page.

Microsoft's Windows Guides Help You Help Your Friends

Mark Edward Soper — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 14:17:34 -0600

The economy might be down, but Microsoft's betting a lot of your technology-challenged friends and relatives still bought or received new PCs this Christmas. Want to give them a helping hand - and give yourself more free time to get back to your favorite deathmatch or chat session? Tell them to surf over to Microsoft's new Windows Guides website and download - or email - some help.

Redmond has put together a nice assortment of simple guides for various chunks of the Windows Vista computing universe. Whether your family and friends have questions about Windows Media Center, gaming, working on the go, PC and family security, photo editing and sharing, or just getting started with the Windows desktop, adding new hardware, networking, printing, or getting remote assistance, there's a guide for them.

You can download guides in industry-standard PDF or send them via email. The guides provide easy step-by-step instructions and good illustrations, and, with most guides weighing in at less than 2MB each, they won't put undue strain on low-end DSL or cable broadband connections. The first page of each guide lists the contents of the guide and the versions of Windows and any additional software or hardware needed for the tasks covered. The site offers a feedback form, so if your or your uncle aren't satisfied, you can sound off.

You may still get panicked calls from your aunt or your brother-in-law about some of the more esoteric things that Windows can do, but these guides should help get your not-so-nerdy friends and relatives off to a good start with their new PCs.

Windows Rolls out Live Essentials

Alex Castle — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 01:29:51 -0600

At tonight's CES Microsoft keynote speech, Steve Ballmer talked a lot about the shape of things to come in the Windows community. Fortunately, he also made a couple announcements that are about the here and now. One such announcement was that Windows Live Essentials, a suite of free, fundamental communications software for Windows is out of beta.

The suite includes Messenger, an email utility, photo management software, and Writer, a blogging program. Movie Maker is also available for free, though it is technically still a beta release. The programs can be downloaded for free here (although something tells us most of our Maximum PC readers already have favorite programs that accomplish the Essential tasks), and will come pre-installed on most Dell PCs.

Additionally, Windows Live Essentials can integrate with certain "web activities" such as Facebook, allowing you to synchronize data on those services with data on your home computer.

So, what does everyone think of Windows Live Essentials? Is this the start of a iLife-esque unified Windows experience, or is it not enough? Hit the break and leave us a comment.

Rumor: Windows Live Search to Be Rebranded?

Mark Edward Soper — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 16:50:49 -0600

Ask three people what "Windows Live" is - and you might get more than three answers: "It's a social network" (Windows Live Spaces); "a photo organizing service" (Windows Live Photo Gallery); "an email client" (Windows Live Hotmail)...but no matter how many answers you get, you probably won't hear "a major search provider". Yes, despite Microsoft's lavishing of money, time, attention, and even offering cash back for searches, Windows Live Search is not a major contender in the search space currently dominated by Google and Yahoo.

Would a name change help? TechCrunch claims that a rebranding of Live Search as Kumo (Japanese for "cloud" or "spider") may be on tap for early 2009.

Will breaking Live Search away from the rest of the diverse Windows Live family with a new name help it prosper, or are you looking for better features? Hit Comment and tell us what Live Search needs to do to succeed.