A couple of days ago, Walt Disney Animation Studios released a Double Tower' parody of the universal sensation Giant Double Rainbow' video by Paul Bear' Vasquez which to date has seen nearly 14.5 million views since its debut just 8 months ago. Today there are countless numbers of videos and songs that have been inspired by the video, but perhaps none (or very few anyway) have disappointed Bear as much as Disney's promotion did. What affected Bear isn't so much that it was done however, but how it was done. A huge fan of Disney (or Disneyland as he points out to me below), Bear is none too pleased that Disney's marketing made no attempt to contact him regarding their efforts, taking his words' as he puts it in his emails below. He's hoping Disney will see the error of its ways however and at least treat him to a Disneyland in recognition of the joy he and both the company bring to the world. Personally, I believe Disneyland should go one further and give him and his family nothing short of a ticker-tape parade, but here's hoping he at least gets a trip out of it.

In any case, Bear initially reached out to me on YouTube with the understandable impression that I was connected with Disney in an official capacity, so the initial email is directed towards Disney. I wrote Bear back and explained to him that I had nothing to do with creating the video, that I was just promoting it because I, a Disney fan like himself, operate Stitch Kingdom and it's what I do. I asked Bear permission to share his message on here and he happily agreed and provided a little more to his message. Without further ado, Bear's message to Disney:

Wow you guys took my words and used them all the way. Did you think to ask me or offer me anything. Maybe you are within your legal rights to do this but the nice thing would have been to honor me personally and not just take my words and use them for your personal gain. I would love it if you would offer me something, anything for using what came to me. I love Disneyland, I haven't been there in years because I haven't been able to fit on the rides but now I can, how about having me as a guest, it would be so awesome? Please read my blog I am not just somebody who made a viral video I am so much more than that. I have an army of devoted followers, the Rainbow Warriors as well as lawyers, managers, and agents. I don't want your work to go away I only want to be acknowledged and thanked for my inspiration. Please read my bio, I am a peace loving man who was brave enough to cry in front of the world but I am also a professional Cagefighter, I can be your best friend or your worst enemy, please lets be friends. Bear.

And Bear's follow-up response to my request to reprint his email:

Thanks for the reply and for your offer to help. I understand now that you didn't create the parody. I'm pleased to have you present what I said and you can have that email, I only sent it to you, just as long as you know that I'll probably write and say something similar (but never exact, I'm not capable of that), in the future. I'm not upset I just want them to recognize me, how rude for them to do this just because they can. They will suffer because of it, I'm becoming more and more popular and when it gets out that a rich giant company like this has stolen the words of a man who was visited by God, a man who is very poor dollar wise and now that things are coming to him only wants to give it away to help heal people they will regret it if they don't jump on board like Microsoft did. Please feel free to use that and go to my web site and see what I am about you will be amazed!

With regards to the mention of Microsoft, Bear is referring to a commercial he recently starred in for Microsoft for its Windows Live Photo gallery.

I would love nothing more for The Walt Disney Company to recognize Bear for his efforts by rewarding him with all he asks for, a trip to the park he loves. On his behalf, I have created an online petition for Bear which can be found here. Please take a moment to sign it as a show of unity of support for Bear and his efforts. After signing the petition, please visit his website at YosemiteBear.net to read more about his efforts and journeys.

I also ask that you help spread the message by re-tweeting this article, sharing it on Facebook and other social media services, send to friends and more. This is something I never ask anyone to do, but this will be my attempt to create some Double Magic' and think of the joy you'll feel being part of Bear's dream should it become real.

PLEASE SIGN THE PETITION

Shared by M3wThr33
This is actually REALLY COOL.

Microsoft Hotmail, calendar and contacts can now be automatically pushed to your phone using Exchange ActiveSync technology (EAS). That means that whatever you do on your phone, from reading an email, creating a new calendar appointment, updating a contact, etc. with be automatically and instantly synced with the web service at www.hotmail.com. It also means that emails get sent to your phone as soon as they arrive. And if you access your Hotmail in Outlook with the Outlook Connector or in the free program Windows Live Mail, whatever you do within the software program also immediately shows up on the web, too.

To set up support for ActiveSync on your phone, you'll need the following info:

• Server / URL: m.hotmail.com
• Username: Enter full email address, for example: someone@example.com
• Domain : Leave this blank
• SSL: Enable this
• Certificate: Accept the SSL certificate when prompted
• Mail, Contacts, Calendar, Tasks: All can be enabled (see the Solution Center article for exceptions on some phones)

Currently EAS is officially supported on Windows Mobile 6.x phones, Windows Phone 7, the iPhone (iPad, iPod Touch, too), Nokia E-Series, S-Series and N-Series. Other devices may work, but support will be limited. Android support is currently not available but testing is underway. For details on your particular device, go here.

(via Windows Live team blog)

You might've heard that Microsoft recently decided to rebrand Windows Live Sync to Windows Live Mesh. But what was the story behind this great file synchronisation tool? We'll give you a brief summary of the history behind Windows Live Mesh, right from the very beginning.

It all started in 2005, three days after Microsoft introduced the Windows Live brand on November 1st, 2005, when they announced an acquisition to purchase FolderShare from ByteTaxi Inc, a software which allowed PC-to-PC sync of files and folders over the internet, and also enabled users to remotely access their files from the PCs under the sync relationship. But things didn't change for almost three years, and for those users who were already using FolderShare, life went on. During these three years, Microsoft had been busy rewriting the entire FolderShare backend sync platform, moving it from LAMP to Windows Server. It wasn't until March 2008 when Microsoft finally came out of the limelight to release Windows Live FolderShare, the first version under the Windows Live branding which was completely rewritten to make it run on the new Windows Server platform.

In the same year in April 2008, Microsoft also announced an incubation project called Live Mesh, headed by Ray Ozzie. Live Mesh was a new vision for Microsoft, based on FeedSync technology, and was even once envisioned to be the cloud OS from Microsoft. Indeed, besides PC-to-PC sync plus PC-to-Cloud sync (with 5GB of cloud storage), Live Mesh also had a whole developer API behind it called the Live Framework. The Live Framework enabled developers to create applications to be run on the Live Mesh Platform, which could be synced between the devices as well as on the cloud. This meant that users will be able to use the same application, with the same underlying data, synced across all their devices with Live Mesh installed, as well as Live Desktop using the web browser. In October 2008, with the announcement of Microsoft's cloud strategy, Live Framework also became part of the Azure Service Platform. With Live Mesh, Microsoft was ambitious not only it supported Windows PCs, but it also had clients for Mac OS X and Windows Mobile 6. We've even seen Live Mesh running on Windows Home Server, Xbox, Zune, Ford SYNC, and using it to sync data between printers, digital cameras, and digital photo frames. The potential seems limitless with Live Mesh.

Of course, with Live Mesh, it would seem that Windows Live FolderShare was far more inferior in doing the same job. However, Microsoft continued to support both platforms, and in December 2008, Microsoft released Windows Live Wave 3, and together with that, they decided to rename Windows Live FolderShare to Windows Live Sync, and included it as part of Essentials. Not much changes were made to Windows Live Sync, except that it became the syncing agent behind Windows Live Toolbar and Photo Gallery in the Wave 3 era.

Live Mesh actually never made it out of beta (it began as a technical preview), and in January 2009, just one month after the final release of Windows Live Wave 3, Microsoft decided to move the entire Live Mesh team into Windows Live. Of course, what that meant was that the focus has now turned into how to best merge the Live Mesh technologies with Windows Live Sync. Being the superior product, the technologies behind Live Mesh was chosen to be the one to carry on. However, to get it from a limited beta software to a v1 product that is to be released to millions of Windows Live users, certain things had to give way to make it work. Indeed, the first to go was the Live Framework, officially discontinued in September 2009, with Microsoft promising to integrate the APIs into what is now called Messenger Connect.

Microsoft released the first beta of Windows Live Sync Wave 4 in June 2010. Despite being called Window Live Sync, the software was completely based on Live Mesh, and given this, the old Windows Live Sync (Wave 3) was actually allowed to run concurrently with the new one, but working independently with one another, and Live Mesh will be uninstalled upon upgrade. Strangely, while being based on Live Mesh technologies, Microsoft actually wanted to start out fresh, and existing users of Live Mesh had no automatic upgrade path to the new Windows Live Sync (even the cloud storage was different with Windows Live Devices instead of Live Desktop). In addition, to the disappointment of many, the new Windows Live Sync only offered 2GB of cloud storage (compared to Live Mesh's 5GB), and worst of all, the storage was not merged with SkyDrive's 25GB (despite calling it the SkyDrive synced storage). Given it is a v1 product, and scalability issues of starting out as a limited beta, this was excusable.

Great news came in August 2010, when Microsoft decided to up the cloud storage limit back to 5GB, but also announcing the rebrand of Windows Live Sync to Windows Live Mesh. The new branding, according to Dharmesh Mehta, was because the Sync name created some confusion for people because of other Microsoft products with the Sync name, and customers had really grown to like the Mesh brand." (Credits to Paul Thurrott) In fact, to add to the confusion, while it was never announced, Wikikou.fr actually got hold of an interim beta screenshot showing that Microsoft did consider naming it Windows Live Devices at some stage (the same name as the web-based counterpart which allows users to manage their devices in the synced relationship and remotely access their computers via the browser). We're quite glad that this name never made the cut!

So looking into the future, it would appear that one of the highest priority would be for Microsoft to look into the possibilities of merging the Windows Live Mesh storage with SkyDrive's 25GB, and as such letting users take advantage of SkyDrive's other features like Office Web Apps. Microsoft also mentioned that they may consider a paid option which allow users to purchase additional storage space in future releases. And what about Mesh for Windows Phone 7? What are your thoughts about the future of Windows Live Mesh? Let us know by leaving a comment below!

Over the past year there have been some significant changes concerning online maps. Some are totally new or significantly updated, others are totally old and some keep their maps as-is for the time being.

Totally Old: MapBlast

MapBlast, a.k.a. MSN Maps & Directions, is a fossil in the online mapping world. It looks like something straight out of 1997, has no anti-aliased fonts, the map is offered in three sizes and you cannot click-and-drag the map at all.

And yes, that is a Microsoft Streets & Trips 2006 ad you see in the lower right corner. This thing is positively ancient.

Microsoft, seriously, you need to dump this. Now.

Totally New but better the way it was before: Bing Maps

Bing Maps is actually quite good. It loads very quickly, the feature set is decent as long as you can get used to the icons at the bottom left (they would be better as text links or icons on the map itself at top right), the map itself is up-to-date and modern, but there's one problem.

The maps looked much better the way they were before.

If you use the Windows Live Writer software, you can still see how the map used to look using the Insert Map feature:

Same map from the same company except this one is much better. Why? Colors and fonts. The new Bing Maps uses a muted color scheme that makes everything look washed out no matter how tightly you zoom in, and the font used now is thinner and more difficult to read.

If there were a way to switch back to the old look using the Bing Maps web site, I'd do it in a second and not think twice about it.

Staying the course: Yahoo! Maps

Y! Maps hasn't changed that much in the past few years. Out of all the online mapping services, Y! easily wins the easiest-to-read and easiest-to-understand awards. The color scheme used is spot-on perfect and you can easily see the differences between interstates, highways and major roadways including actually showing the word Toll for toll roads.

Y! Maps also has a few other things that are very convenient: Big airport icons (seen in the map above), easily visible county names when zooming in and very fast click-and-drag ability.

Where Y! falls short however is with GPS. There is no option I could find to send locations to your GPS device of choice. This is sorta/kinda made up for by the ability to send locations to Delicious or Y! Bookmarks (handy for smartphone users), but the ability to send to GPS would be a welcome addition.

Incrementally getting better: Google Maps

There are a lot of things Google gets right when it comes to maps, with the first being you can type basically anything in the search field and Goog will probably find it. Punch in a town/state, or ZIP, or coordinates, or county, or major attraction, etc. and Goog will find it.

As far as the overall look goes, the font is thick and readable, but the color scheme needs a major overhaul. All major roads on Google Maps are the same color (orange-tangerine..ish?), be it an interstate, county route or highway. Yes, you do see the shield labels, but compared to Y! or Bing it all looks the same.

My favorite feature of Google Maps is the one nobody ever mentions: The ability to zoom out using a double-right-click. None of the other guys do this. If you try, you'll be treated to a menu but no zoom-out where you're forced to use the slider menu on the left with your mouse pointer.

Also totally new: New MapQuest

This is a huge, huge improvement over the old MapQuest. It has big easy-read fonts, the green toolbar icons above the map make it stupidly easy to find common places such as airports, and dare I say it has the best Hybrid view. When you click the Satellite button at top right of the map, the road overlay over the sat images is by far the easiest on the eyes. Normally it's the situation where a sat-overview with road overlay looks like a jumbled mess, but MapQuest found a way to make it work where it not only looks good but is more informative at the same time.

My favorite part however is this:

This may not look like much, but oh how convenient it is. Map anything out and you see Link. It's already shortened, easily copied and ready to be sent in email, IM or social network. No need to have an account, meaning you don't have to be logged in to use it. NICE.

The map site you probably never heard of: Ovi Maps

Ovi Maps is a bit underwhelming in that it's fairly basic, but has one huge thing going for it:

Change the colors? Really? Yes! With the installation of a plugin, Night Mode changes the color scheme to make the map more easily readable.

I do know for a fact there are a ton of people out there who prefer dark color schemes. It's not so much for readability, it's because it's easier on the eyes.

Ovi's major drawback is that it needs a plugin to be fully featured. You can't even map a route using the Routing button without that plugin. Not cool.

For the map geek who thinks they can program a better map: OpenStreetmap

To note up front: You can't route with OpenStreetMap, meaning there is no driving directions ability. Be that as it may, OSM is still cool in the respect it's the ultimate map geek's online toy. It can accept things like GPX files (see GPS Traces button for examples), the Diaries function allows for a little mini mapping blog of sorts, and the best part is that you can edit the map. See something wrong or out-of-date? Fix it yourself. How do you fix it? Use the Export function, grab the XML/Mapnik/Osmarender data and off you go. Very geeky stuff, obviously, but when editing map data there's really no way to make it non-geeky.

Rich's personal picks?

I bounce around when it comes to online maps, but in order I usually use Yahoo! Maps first (has the best visuals to my eye), followed by Google Maps and then Bing Maps. Bing used to be #2 until they went with that muted color scheme and changed around the format where counties barely show up now. In the State of Florida where I live, knowing where you are on a county level is a big deal.

Even though I use GPS a lot, I still use online map web sites to double-check locations for fine tuning, because after all, the online versions are more up-to-date than the GPS is.

Post from: PCMech. Helping Normal People Get Their Geek On And Live The Digital Lifestyle.

Battle Of The Online Maps

Microsoft has renamed Windows Live Sync to Windows Live Mesh. Redmond often rebrands its Windows Live products, but there's more than a simple name change to today's announcement.

Windows Live Mesh will support syncing hidden files and will show a list of files that might be missing in a synced folder. Complaints that 2GB is an insufficient amount of storage have resulted in 5GB becoming the cloud storage limit again. Microsoft has also been working on cutting the application load time in half, speeding up syncing large numbers of folders or adding multiple devices to a sync folder, and optimizing memory and CPU usage during sync activity as well as when idle.

Windows Live Mesh has had two previous names. Microsoft bought FolderShare from ByteTaxi in November 2005 and released it in March 2008, renaming it to Windows Live Sync in December 2008. The "Windows" moniker isn't the best, since Sync (as well as Microsoft's other online services) is available for the Mac.

These name changes remind us that Microsoft's syncing/storage strategy is a mess. When the Windows Live Wave 4 beta arrived two months ago, we were happy that Windows Live Sync and Live Mesh were being merged. Microsoft would finally be offering just one product (Sync/Mesh) and just one service (SkyDrive, for uploading photos, files, and documents for sharing) that would happily work together, right? Wrong.

Although SkyDrive is integrated better than it was previously, users still don't have access to its entire 25GB for sync (remember, Microsoft just went from 5GB, to 2GB, and back to 5GB).

"While we merged Sync and Live Mesh in this release, we did not merge the online storage system used for Live Mesh with the one used for Office or Photos on SkyDrive," explains Microsoft. "This means that each system has different storage limits and is optimized for different scenarios." Maybe the merge will be complete by Wave 5?

Microsoft should have its syncing/storage strategy ready for this year's Windows Phone 7 release, but it won't. Windows Live Mesh will not support mobile phones when it's released. This would be tolerable if the original Live Mesh didn't support syncing between PCs and devices, but it did. With Wave 4, though, Microsoft eliminated mobile support and won't say when it's coming back.

Currently we have 25GB of space for SkyDrive, an infinite amount for Hotmail, 200MB for MyPhone, and so on. Why not offer 100GB on SkyDrive and make it accessible via all of Microsoft's products and services? That's so simple it just might work.

Read the comments on this post

An article was written here on this a long time ago. This is the updated version.

Windows Live Writer is arguably the best blogging app on the planet, so much so that even Mac users consider it the best over any similar app available for the OS X platform. Yes, it's that good.

One of the annoyances with WLW however is that the default template, in a word, sucks. Hyperlinks are an annoying green and the default font used (Trebuchet MS or Calibri) is annoying to many.

The way to change this is to manually edit the CSS file for the default template.

Location of the default template CSS file

Whether on Windows XP, Vista or 7, the location currently is always the same even if the new 2011 version:

[Host Drive]:\Program Files\Windows Live\Writer\Template

The file defaultstyle.css is the one you want to edit.

Editing the default template

I find the easiest way to go about this is to simply rename the file to defaultstyle.css-old, create a new defaultstyle.css and have it contain the following:

body,blockquote,table,td,tr,ul,li,ol,p {
font-family: sans-serif;
font-size: 10pt;
}

h3 {
font-size: 12pt;
}

.title {
font-family: sans-serif;
font-size: 14pt;
}

This will give you a basic editing template using Arial, the default sans-serif font in Windows. You can obviously specify any font you wish, so if you wanted to change to Georgia or Verdana, go ahead.

To switch to the default template at any time, use the keystroke CTRL+F11. You may have to do it twice for it to take effect.

If you want an exact copy of your blog's template within WLW, copy over your CSS rules from your blog to defaultstyle.css however be aware you must use full URLs for any image links or linked CSS files.

It's also important to note that you should backup the defaultstyle.css you make, because upon any upgrade to Windows Live Writer the installer will overwrite with the default ugly default template again.

Post from: PCMech. Helping Normal People Get Their Geek On And Live The Digital Lifestyle.

How To Edit The Windows Live Writer Default Template

Earlier today, Erick wrote about Windows Live Sync becoming Windows Live Mesh. Basically, it's a service that allows people to sync files between PCs and with the cloud. As a product, it sounds great as Erick says, there's definitely a huge need for someone to do this right. But as usual with Microsoft, I have to ask: what on Earth is up with the branding?

Yes Microsoft needed to combine Live Sync and Live Mesh as they were similar products. But doesn't Sync make a lot more sense than Mesh? What the hell is a mesh? I had to Google it.

I'm going to assume it's in reference to mesh networking from Wikipedia:

Mesh networking is a type of networking wherein each node in the network may act as an independent router, regardless of whether it is connected to another network or not.

Okay, fine. But this is a product Microsoft hopes consumers will use. Don't we think sync makes a lot more sense than mesh? I simply can't envision a future where a parent reminds a child to mesh something before leaving the house. But I can certainly see a parent reminding a child to sync something.

Okay, sure, it's still fine if they use sync as a verb. But if Microsoft really hopes to drive usage among consumers they seriously need to rethink just about all of their branding.

Just recently, we've narrowly avoided a new mobile phone platform that was almost called Windows Phone 7 Series. To be honest, I'm still not sure if that was supposed to be the name of the OS or the phones themselves. I'm not sure Microsoft was clear on that either. Here's what David Webster, the chief strategy officer of Microsoft's central marketing group told TechFlash in April:

Windows Phone is an OS, it's not a phone. The idea was that we needed a handle to refer to the devices that ran Windows Phone 7 the family, in essence. Now, in a lot of the coverage and a lot of the usage cases, that context, I think, got lost. People got to thinking that the software was Windows Phone 7 Series, when really that was just an effort to refer to the devices that would be running Windows Phone 7.

Um, what? I mean, I get it. Sort of. Maybe.

Thankfully, Microsoft dropped the Series nonsense and now the whole thing is just Windows Phone 7. And that's the name of the OS, I think. But it seems like the old moniker, Windows Mobile, was better suited for software. I understand that Microsoft wanted to break away from the swan-diving Windows Mobile platform, but then why keep the numerical reference? Windows Phone 7 follows Windows Mobile 6.

Again, the hope is that consumers will use these things. But Microsoft sure isn't going to make it easy.

Anyway, let's go back to Windows Live services for a second. I understand that with the majority of Microsoft business wrapped around Windows, they want to keep that branding intact. But increasingly, these services have nothing to do with actual windows as in, desktop windows. I suppose it's fine to tie it to the name of their OS even though many feel the OS as we know it will begin to decline over the next decade but wrapping in the whole Live element with Windows just makes the branding unseemly in a lot of cases.

Just check out this list. There are like 20-something of these various Windows Live services. My favorite is Windows Live SkyDrive. It sounds like a synth band from the 80s.

Then there are secondary services for feature phones like Windows Live Calendar Mobile, Windows Live Home Mobile, and Windows Live SkyDrive Mobile. You get the idea. Or do you?

Windows Live itself came about as Microsoft wanted to rebrand from MSN as the age of the Internet was in full swing. But arguably the key component of that, search, has already morphed a couple times away from being Windows Live Search. The artist formerly known as MSN Search became Live Search for a bit, before eventually giving way to Bing.

I don't think it's a complete coincidence that as soon as Microsoft dropped the whole Windows Live aspect of the name for search, the product started to take off. Sure, a lot (and maybe most) of that was marketing spend. But that's kind of the point it's easier to market something called Bing rather than Windows Live Search. Or worse, just imagine if Microsoft had gone with Windows Live Bing I'm sure it was discussed.

So if Microsoft really wanted to go with the whole Mesh branding, maybe it should just be Mesh and not Windows Live Mesh. Or at least just make it Windows Mesh or Live Mesh why do we need all these words?

And why do we need Live at all? Live.com, which Microsoft owns, currently points to Hotmail. As the world's most popular email service, Hotmail seems to work as a name. Of course, Microsoft has tried to rebrand it as Windows Live Hotmail for no apparent reason. And they also have Windows Live Mail, apparently.

I could go on and on and on but my head is spinning trying to make sure I'm getting these names right. There's Microsoft Office Live and there's Office Web Apps. Office Web Apps work on SkyDrive, I think but I don't know what that means. Microsoft Office Live contains both Office Live Workspace and Office Live Small Business. Don't ask me what either does.

All I want to know is if I can hook up Microsoft Office Live with Office Web Apps using Windows Live Mesh, and then port everything to my Windows Phone 7 Series phone using my Windows Live SkyDrive account or just my Windows Live ID?

In other words, will it sync?

When Microsoft launched Windows Live Sync in beta at the end of June, it merged it with its long-awaited Windows Live Mesh, but both still kept separate branding. The product will take on the Windows Live Mesh branding in the next couple of months. There are a few other changes coming too.

Right now Windows Live Sync, which is already being used by 240,000 people in beta, syncs files between PCs or between PCs and the cloud (mobile will be added later, but that is the ultimate vision). Syncing between PCs is unlimited, but syncing to the cloud up till now has been capped at 2 gigabytes per account. That will soon be increased to 5 gigabytes.

The average person in the beta is syncing only 240 megabytes of data to the cloud, but you can never have too much storage. Between PCs, however, they are syncing 675 files, or 1.2 gigabytes of data, on average. As soon as Microosft adds mobile into the equation, the amount of storage in the cloud will jump considerably, because nobody wants to keep big files on their phone if they can help it.

Windows Live Sync will also be upgraded to sync hidden files and do a better job showing which files are synced and which are syncing at any given time. And on Monday, in a related announcement, Microsoft will be making Hotmail emails, contacts, and calendars available to most mobile phones via Exchange Active Sync, which is a push technology (think IMAP, plus contacts and calendars).

Syncing files and media between devices is a big problem that has yet to be solved completely. Getting all your data on your mobile phone from the cloud will become especially important. But I am not sure the model of picking folders to sync really works. Sometimes you don't know ahead of time what you will want to access, and you just want to be able to grab anything that is on your computer. Startups like Libox are taking this approach, and already offer a mobile solution, but not yet a cloud backup. Someone will get this right.

In June, we announced that as part of Windows Live Essentials beta, we brought together two programs, Windows Live Sync and the Live Mesh beta, into one: Windows Live Sync beta. We focused on four things with our beta release:

• Making it easy to access the PCs you use from anywhere
• Getting your files and folders on the PCs you use regularly
• Giving you enough space to sync your most important files and folders to the cloud
• Providing simple document collaboration over the web using SkyDrive

Since the release of the Windows Live Sync beta in June, over 240,000 people have tried Windows Live Sync on hundreds of thousands of devices, and have provided a lot of feedback. The average customer syncs over 675 files with an average file size of 1.8 MB, and uses 240 MB of cloud storage. We received an incredible amount of forum posts and comments as well as informal communication through our feedback site. We have been listening and have made updates based on your feedback.

Renaming Windows Live Sync to Windows Live Mesh

In our beta release, we brought the best of Windows Live Sync and Live Mesh together. With the addition of remote access and cloud storage, we understand that the new program does more than sync files. So following the beta period, we'll be using the name Windows Live Mesh going forward, which we feel best reflects our broader goal of allowing you to access your stuff across your devices.

Giving you more information

A number of our customers noted the inability to sync hidden files, so we added this support. Another point of feedback was that customers wanted a list of which files were missing in a synced folder. Now when Windows Live Mesh detects missing files, you can easily see the file name and when and where it was last modified.

More cloud storage

We continue to see that the primary way customers are syncing files is between their different PCs (or Macs). And we will continue to make it easy to sync virtually unlimited amounts of data between your PCs. When syncing files to the cloud, beta participants get 2 GB of synced cloud storage. Only 2% of these participants are using more than 1.5 GB. However, Live Mesh offers 5 GB, and while only a small number of Live Mesh customers use all their space, we want to ease migration and increase the online storage limit from 2 GB to 5 GB.

A number of customers have asked why we don't allow you to sync up to 25 GB, given that 25 GB is the SkyDrive limit. While we merged Sync and Live Mesh in this release, we did not merge the online storage system used for Live Mesh with the one used for Office or Photos on SkyDrive. This means that each system has different storage limits and is optimized for different scenarios.

SkyDrive offers enough storage for you to share documents and photos with friends, family, and co-workers. Hotmail offers enough storage for you to store your email, calendar, and contacts. Windows Live Mesh lets you sync all your files and folders across your PCs and devices, and provides enough cloud storage for your most important files. Over time, we'll be considering ways to do even more to share information across these systems.

Performance and quality improvements

We've made several performance updates to Windows Live Mesh in response to your requests that will provide noticeable improvements to your experience. We worked on cutting the application load time in half and made syncing large numbers of folders and adding multiple devices to a sync folder faster. We've optimized both memory and CPU usage during sync activity as well as decreased CPU consumption by as much as 30% when Windows Live Mesh is idle.

We hope you enjoy these changes and take the time to install the new Windows Live Mesh along with the rest of Windows Live Essentials 2011 once it is released from the beta. In the meantime, please keep using the beta programs and keep the comments coming. Thank you for using Windows Live!

Allison O'Mahony
Principal Program Manager Lead, Devices & Roaming

In June, we announced that as part of Windows Live Essentials beta, we brought together two programs, Windows Live Sync and the Live Mesh beta, into one: Windows Live Sync beta. We focused on four things with our beta release:

• Making it easy to access the PCs you use from anywhere
• Getting your files and folders on the PCs you use regularly
• Giving you enough space to sync your most important files and folders to the cloud
• Providing simple document collaboration over the web using SkyDrive

Since the release of the Windows Live Sync beta in June, over 240,000 people have tried Windows Live Sync on hundreds of thousands of devices, and have provided a lot of feedback. The average customer syncs over 675 files with an average file size of 1.8 MB, and uses 240 MB of cloud storage. We received an incredible amount of forum posts and comments as well as informal communication through our feedback site. We have been listening and have made updates based on your feedback.

Renaming Windows Live Sync to Windows Live Mesh

In our beta release, we brought the best of Windows Live Sync and Live Mesh together. With the addition of remote access and cloud storage, we understand that the new program does more than sync files. So following the beta period, we'll be using the name Windows Live Mesh going forward, which we feel best reflects our broader goal of allowing you to access your stuff across your devices.

Giving you more information

A number of our customers noted the inability to sync hidden files, so we added this support. Another point of feedback was that customers wanted a list of which files were missing in a synced folder. Now when Windows Live Mesh detects missing files, you can easily see the file name and when and where it was last modified.

More cloud storage

We continue to see that the primary way customers are syncing files is between their different PCs (or Macs). And we will continue to make it easy to sync virtually unlimited amounts of data between your PCs. When syncing files to the cloud, beta participants get 2 GB of synced cloud storage. Only 2% of these participants are using more than 1.5 GB. However, Live Mesh offers 5 GB, and while only a small number of Live Mesh customers use all their space, we want to ease migration and increase the online storage limit from 2 GB to 5 GB.

A number of customers have asked why we don't allow you to sync up to 25 GB, given that 25 GB is the SkyDrive limit. While we merged Sync and Live Mesh in this release, we did not merge the online storage system used for Live Mesh with the one used for Office or Photos on SkyDrive. This means that each system has different storage limits and is optimized for different scenarios.

SkyDrive offers enough storage for you to share documents and photos with friends, family, and co-workers. Hotmail offers enough storage for you to store your email, calendar, and contacts. Windows Live Mesh lets you sync all your files and folders across your PCs and devices, and provides enough cloud storage for your most important files. Over time, we'll be considering ways to do even more to share information across these systems.

Performance and quality improvements

We've made several performance updates to Windows Live Mesh in response to your requests that will provide noticeable improvements to your experience. We worked on cutting the application load time in half and made syncing large numbers of folders and adding multiple devices to a sync folder faster. We've optimized both memory and CPU usage during sync activity as well as decreased CPU consumption by as much as 30% when Windows Live Mesh is idle.

We hope you enjoy these changes and take the time to install the new Windows Live Mesh along with the rest of Windows Live Essentials 2011 once it is released from the beta. In the meantime, please keep using the beta programs and keep the comments coming. Thank you for using Windows Live!

Allison O'Mahony
Principal Program Manager Lead, Devices & Roaming

Facebook has announced that it will soon end Internet Explorer 6 support for Facebook Chat. The kill date is September 15the same day Microsoft plans to release the first IE9 beta. Today's announcement comes just a week after Microsoft launched a beta version of Windows Live Messenger that integrates with Facebook Chat.

Facebook explains its decision by saying that many users have complained about unstable chat sessions, or ones that stop completely. In order to improve the way connections are established and messages are sent, however, the social networking giant must make changes that aren't supported by older browsers.

Microsoft plans to support IE6 along with Windows XP until April 2014; the software giant insists that "dropping support for IE6 is not an option." Instead, the company has resorted to marketing and promoting IE8 while criticizing IE6.

Meanwhile, a growing number of technology firms have taken the problem into their own hands. The IE6 hater is Google: the company has killed off support for the obsolete browser in Google Docs and Google Sites, Gmail and Google Calendar, as well as YouTube. Even Microsoft has taken some baby steps in this direction; the new Office Web Apps don't support the browser either.

Facebook's decision is reason for IE6 haters to celebrate, but unfortunately it's not going to spell doom for the ancient browser. The majority of IE6 users come from the corporate world, and as we've discussed before, one of the reasons that world keeps IE6 around is exactly because it doesn't work well with social networking sites like Facebook. Facebook's changes may mean fewer IE6 users using the chat feature, but this won't be because the change will spur people into upgradingthey can't upgrade their office machines. It will be because they won't be able to chat at all.

Last month, IE6 had a usage share of just under 17 percent; at the start of the year it had just over 20 percent. Major sites putting an end to IE6 support for popular features is not enough to kill the browser, but the rapid growth of Windows 7 should make slow but steady progress in eradicating it from the Internet.

Read the comments on this post

Did you know that Microsoft's Windows Live has been actively embracing the emerging Activity Streams open standard?

About a month ago, I traveled to Portland, Oregon, USA to participate in a Federated Social Web Summit organized the day before OSCON by Evan Prodromou and the team from Status.net. We spent the morning with each participant demo'ing their project or protocol for about five minutes. Below is my attempt to re-format my presentation as a blog entry.

---

My name is Rob Dolin and I'm a Program Manager on the Windows Live Social team. I'm also a co-author of the Activity Streams in Atom spec. You can find me on identi.ca as @RobDolin (and a few other places.) In the next few minutes, I'll try to briefly explain:

1. What is Windows Live (from the perspective of federated social activities)
2. Where activity streams show-up
3. How can your project or service read activities from Windows Live
4. How can your project or service write activities to Windows Live
5. How can Windows Live direct users to your project or service

Windows Live as an activities generator, store, and display

Windows Live includes a set of web services, PC apps, and mobile apps:

• Web services: Hotmail, SkyDrive, Profile, Groups, Spaces,
• PC apps: Messenger, Writer, Photo Gallery, Movie Maker, Mail, ; together Windows Live Essentials (WLE) Download the WLE Beta
• Mobile apps: Messenger for iPhone, Messenger for Windows Phone, http://m.live.com/, SMS Messenger

If you only do one thing to get a sense of how Windows Live integrates activities, I recommend downloading the WLE Beta and running Messenger.

Activity streams integrated throughout Windows Live and other Microsoft services

The activity stream from Windows Live (sometimes referred to as Messenger social updates) is integrated throughout Windows Live services and apps.

Windows Live Messenger

Windows Live Messenger has a new (default) full window view that dedicates more than 2/3 of the screen to the Windows Live activity stream:

Windows Live Hotmail

The new Hotmail homepage also includes a large area dedicated to the Windows Live activity stream:

The Windows Live activity steam is not just displayed in Windows Live branded properties, but it's integrated into Outlook, MSN, and the forthcoming Windows Phone 7:

Outlook Social Connector

If you install the Outlook Social Connector for Windows Live Messenger, you'll be able to see recent social activities of your contacts when you email with them:

As you can see above, the Windows Live activities stream doesn't just include activities from Windows Live, in Douglas's case above, it includes photos he shared on Flickr. Users can bring activities they have done from across the web into the Windows Live activities stream. I'll explain more below about how you can enable your users to share activities from your service or app into Windows Live.

MSN

There's also a new social module on the MSN homepage. On the USA homepage of MSN, this is in the right column:

Windows Phone

The upcoming Windows Phone 7 has a new People view that is powered by Windows Live Activity Streams:

How to Read Activities

On every one of the hundreds of millions of Windows Live users's profile pages, there is a link to an Activity Streams (Atom) feed of that user's publicly shared activities. You can easily get to this from your web browser by clicking the orange RSS/Atom icon:

This will take you to a feed of the user's publicly shared activities on Windows Live. Try it on your own Windows Live profile: http://profile.live.com/.

You can view this in a web browser or your favorite RSS reader. And if you view the source of this feed, you'll notice that it includes the <activity:verb> and <activity:object> elements of Activity Streams in Atom:

In addition to this link on profile pages to public Windows Live activities, developers can also read non-public activities (if a user gives permission) through the new Messenger Connect API's. I'll talk more about these below and you can learn more about these at http://dev.live.com/.

Activities in Windows Live / Messenger Social from 75+ partners and growing

Since December 2008, users have been able to bring their social activities from dozens of services across the web into Windows Live. This has included services you likely know well like Facebook, YouTube, MySpace, Pandora, Hulu, and WordPress:

And this includes services from all around the world like AlloCine, Arto, Azbuz, Biip.no, Bilddagboken, Blingee, and more:

All of these integrations are powered by open standards including RSS 2.0, Atom 1.0, MediaRSS, Activity Streams in Atom, and at base, XML. In the next few paragraphs, I'll briefly explain how you can add your project or service to write activities to the Windows Live activity stream so that they show-up in Messenger, Hotmail, MSN, Outlook, and Windows Phone.

How to Write Activities

There are three ways to enable your users to bring their activities from your project or service into Windows Live:

1. Badge
2. Feed
3. API

Writing Activities to Windows Live via Badge

The easiest way to write an activity to Windows Live is to have a user click a badge link. For example, try clicking this link: http://profile.live.com/badge/?url=http://status.net/2010/06/28/federated-social-web-summit-2010-announced. This takes you to a page (below) where you can add your own user message and confirm that you want to share that particular URL. As a developer, you can replace the url QueryString parameter with whatever URL your user has indicated he or she wants to share.

The http://profile.live.com/badge/ page will pre-populate a page title, description, and screenshot image for you from the page, OR you can pass these in as QueryString params to specifically populate them. You can also pass a return URL as a QueryString param so the user gets redirected back to your site after they share the link.

More details on the badge are at: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windowslive/ff796213.aspx including sample code you can quickly cut and paste into your own website:

Writing Activities to Windows Live via Feed

If your service has RSS, Atom, MediaRSS, or Activity Streams (in Atom) feeds, you can enable your users to tell Windows Live to poll their activity stream feed from your service. To set-up your service, you get an Application ID and fill-out a relatively simple form at: http://manage.dev.live.com/

As shown below, this will ask you for some basic info like your Home page URL, Sign-up URL, Support URL, and of course, Feed type:

You'll also tell Windows Live how to compose a URL to retrieve your feed. For example below, Windows Live asks users to enter a User name and then uses the replacement patterns you specify:

Windows Live gives you a variety of choices for User input label and has these values translated into over 40 languages so you don't need to know how to ask a Hungarian user for their email address.

After you've set-up Windows Live to know how to poll your service's feed, you can direct users to the page where they can add your service: http://profile.live.com/services/add.aspx?AppID={YourAppID}&ru=http://www.YourService.com/return. You can even pass a ru QueryString parameter to specify the return URL for Windows Live to direct users to after they have connected Windows Live to your service. To get started, go to http://manage.dev.live.com/.

For each user who connects your service, Windows Live will start polling relatively frequently (every 30-60 minutes) and then start polling less frequently for less active users on your service.

If your service already has RSS, Atom, or Activity Streams feeds, this is likely the easiest way to help your users bring their content into Windows Live. To get the nicest looking results (i.e. photos treated as photos, etc.) you might just need to add a few <activity:> elements as described in the Choosing your Activity Type(s) section below.

Writing Activities to Windows Live via API

Finally, your service can also write activities to Windows Live via our Messenger Connect set of API's. You'll set-up your connection to Windows Live and similarly point your user to an add.aspx page passing-in your AppID. The user will consent to have you write activities on their behalf (and possibly do other things like read and write SkyDrive photos or Messenger contacts ) and the user will be returned to your site (or client application) along with a token you can use to make calls on the user's behalf.

To push write activities to Windows Live, you'll make HTTP POST's where the body of your request is in the Activity Streams in Atom format. The below screenshot from the online documentation describes how this gets rendered:

While there are potentially hundreds of <activity:verb> + <activity:object> combinations from Activity Streams, Windows Live supports a large portion of the most common combinations:

More details on publishing activities to Windows Live via API can be found at: http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/ff748785.aspx.

Choosing your Activity Type(s)

(This section was added at the suggestion of my colleague, @AngusLogan)

Whether you're writing via feed or writing via API, if you choose a specific pairing of <activity:verb> and <activity:object-type>, users will potentially see your activity looking differently. For example:

A Post of a Status Update is displayed in Messenger as:

A Post of a Photo or a Post of multiple Photo objects in a target Album looks like:

A Post of a Bookmark looks like:

And a Post of a Blog-entry:

There are about a dozen more variations and you can see examples of what all of these look like on the web and what the XML for these looks like at: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff748785.aspx.

Thank you, more?

I hope that you found this blog entry both useful and informative. To learn more:

• Download Windows Live Essentials for PC and/or Messenger for iPhone
• Connect some of the services you use: http://profile.live.com/services/
• Check-out Messenger Connect and all of the great information at http://dev.live.com/

Leveraging Activity Streams, you can read activities from Windows Live into your app or service; and write activities from your app or service to Windows Live so your users and their friends will see them in Messenger, Hotmail, MSN, Outlook, Windows Phone, and more.

Thanks very much for reading and for your interest in Messenger Connect

--Rob Dolin
Program Manager, Windows Live team

P.S. If you enjoyed this blog entry and would like to see more blog entries along similar topics, please leave a comment explaining what you'd like to learn more about.

Did you know that Microsoft's Windows Live has been actively embracing the emerging Activity Streams open standard?

About a month ago, I traveled to Portland, Oregon, USA to participate in a Federated Social Web Summit organized the day before OSCON by Evan Prodromou and the team from Status.net. We spent the morning with each participant demo'ing their project or protocol for about five minutes. Below is my attempt to re-format my presentation as a blog entry.

---

My name is Rob Dolin and I'm a Program Manager on the Windows Live Social team. I'm also a co-author of the Activity Streams in Atom spec. You can find me on identi.ca as @RobDolin (and a few other places.) In the next few minutes, I'll try to briefly explain:

1. What is Windows Live (from the perspective of federated social activities)
2. Where activity streams show-up
3. How can your project or service read activities from Windows Live
4. How can your project or service write activities to Windows Live
5. How can Windows Live direct users to your project or service

Windows Live as an activities generator, store, and display

Windows Live includes a set of web services, PC apps, and mobile apps:

• Web services: Hotmail, SkyDrive, Profile, Groups, Spaces,
• PC apps: Messenger, Writer, Photo Gallery, Movie Maker, Mail, ; together Windows Live Essentials (WLE) Download the WLE Beta
• Mobile apps: Messenger for iPhone, Messenger for Windows Phone, http://m.live.com/, SMS Messenger

If you only do one thing to get a sense of how Windows Live integrates activities, I recommend downloading the WLE Beta and running Messenger.

Activity streams integrated throughout Windows Live and other Microsoft services

The activity stream from Windows Live (sometimes referred to as Messenger social updates) is integrated throughout Windows Live services and apps.

Windows Live Messenger

Windows Live Messenger has a new (default) full window view that dedicates more than 2/3 of the screen to the Windows Live activity stream:

Windows Live Hotmail

The new Hotmail homepage also includes a large area dedicated to the Windows Live activity stream:

The Windows Live activity steam is not just displayed in Windows Live branded properties, but it's integrated into Outlook, MSN, and the forthcoming Windows Phone 7:

Outlook Social Connector

If you install the Outlook Social Connector for Windows Live Messenger, you'll be able to see recent social activities of your contacts when you email with them:

As you can see above, the Windows Live activities stream doesn't just include activities from Windows Live, in Douglas's case above, it includes photos he shared on Flickr. Users can bring activities they have done from across the web into the Windows Live activities stream. I'll explain more below about how you can enable your users to share activities from your service or app into Windows Live.

MSN

There's also a new social module on the MSN homepage. On the USA homepage of MSN, this is in the right column:

Windows Phone

The upcoming Windows Phone 7 has a new People view that is powered by Windows Live Activity Streams:

How to Read Activities

On every one of the hundreds of millions of Windows Live users's profile pages, there is a link to an Activity Streams (Atom) feed of that user's publicly shared activities. You can easily get to this from your web browser by clicking the orange RSS/Atom icon:

This will take you to a feed of the user's publicly shared activities on Windows Live. Try it on your own Windows Live profile: http://profile.live.com/.

You can view this in a web browser or your favorite RSS reader. And if you view the source of this feed, you'll notice that it includes the <activity:verb> and <activity:object> elements of Activity Streams in Atom:

In addition to this link on profile pages to public Windows Live activities, developers can also read non-public activities (if a user gives permission) through the new Messenger Connect API's. I'll talk more about these below and you can learn more about these at http://dev.live.com/.

Activities in Windows Live from 75+ partners and growing

Since December 2008, users have been able to bring their social activities from dozens of services across the web into Windows Live. This has included services you likely know well like Facebook, YouTube, MySpace, Pandora, Hulu, and WordPress:

And this includes services from all around the world like AlloCine, Arto, Azbuz, Biip.no, Bilddagboken, Blingee, and more:

All of these integrations are powered by open standards including RSS 2.0, Atom 1.0, MediaRSS, Activity Streams in Atom, and at base, XML. In the next few paragraphs, I'll briefly explain how you can add your project or service to write activities to the Windows Live activity stream so that they show-up in Messenger, Hotmail, MSN, Outlook, and Windows Phone.

How to Write Activities

There are three ways to enable your users to bring their activities from your project or service into Windows Live:

1. Badge
2. Feed
3. API

Writing Activities to Windows Live via Badge

The easiest way to write an activity to Windows Live is to have a user click a badge link. For example, try clicking this link: http://profile.live.com/badge/?url=http://status.net/2010/06/28/federated-social-web-summit-2010-announced. This takes you to a page (below) where you can add your own user message and confirm that you want to share that particular URL. As a developer, you can replace the url QueryString parameter with whatever URL your user has indicated he or she wants to share.

The http://profile.live.com/badge/ page will pre-populate a page title, description, and screenshot image for you from the page, OR you can pass these in as QueryString params to specifically populate them. You can also pass a return URL as a QueryString param so the user gets redirected back to your site after they share the link.

More details on the badge are at: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windowslive/ff796213.aspx including sample code you can quickly cut and paste into your own website:

Writing Activities to Windows Live via Feed

If your service has RSS, Atom, MediaRSS, or Activity Streams (in Atom) feeds, you can enable your users to tell Windows Live to poll their activity stream feed from your service. To set-up your service, you get an Application ID and fill-out a relatively simple form at: http://manage.dev.live.com/

As shown below, this will ask you for some basic info like your Home page URL, Sign-up URL, Support URL, and of course, Feed type:

You'll also tell Windows Live how to compose a URL to retrieve your feed. For example below, Windows Live asks users to enter a User name and then uses the replacement patterns you specify:

Windows Live gives you a variety of choices for User input label and has these values translated into over 40 languages so you don't need to know how to ask a Hungarian user for their email address.

After you've set-up Windows Live to know how to poll your service's feed, you can direct users to the page where they can add your service: http://profile.live.com/services/add.aspx?AppID={YourAppID}&ru=http://www.YourService.com/return. You can even pass a ru QueryString parameter to specify the return URL for Windows Live to direct users to after they have connected Windows Live to your service. To get started, go to http://manage.dev.live.com/.

For each user who connects your service, Windows Live will start polling relatively frequently (every 30-60 minutes) and then start polling less frequently for less active users on your service.

If your service already has RSS, Atom, or Activity Streams feeds, this is likely the easiest way to help your users bring their content into Windows Live. To get the nicest looking results (i.e. photos treated as photos, etc.) you might just need to add a few <activity:> elements as described in the Choosing your Activity Type(s) section below.

Writing Activities to Windows Live via API

Finally, your service can also write activities to Windows Live via our Messenger Connect set of API's. You'll set-up your connection to Windows Live and similarly point your user to an add.aspx page passing-in your AppID. The user will consent to have you write activities on their behalf (and possibly do other things like read and write SkyDrive photos or Messenger contacts ) and the user will be returned to your site (or client application) along with a token you can use to make calls on the user's behalf.

To push write activities to Windows Live, you'll make HTTP POST's where the body of your request is in the Activity Streams in Atom format. The below screenshot from the online documentation describes how this gets rendered:

While there are potentially hundreds of <activity:verb> + <activity:object> combinations from Activity Streams, Windows Live supports a large portion of the most common combinations:

More details on publishing activities to Windows Live via API can be found at: http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/ff748785.aspx.

Choosing your Activity Type(s)

(This section was added at the suggestion of my colleague, @AngusLogan)

Whether you're writing via feed or writing via API, if you choose a specific pairing of <activity:verb> and <activity:object-type>, users will potentially see your activity looking differently. For example:

A Post of a Status Update is displayed in Messenger as:

A Post of a Photo or a Post of multiple Photo objects in a target Album looks like:

A Post of a Bookmark looks like:

And a Post of a Blog-entry:

There are about a dozen more variations and you can see examples of what all of these look like on the web and what the XML for these looks like at: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff748785.aspx.

Thank you, more?

I hope that you found this blog entry both useful and informative. To learn more:

• Download Windows Live Essentials for PC and/or Messenger for iPhone
• Connect some of the services you use: http://profile.live.com/services/
• Check-out Messenger Connect and all of the great information at http://dev.live.com/

Leveraging Activity Streams, you can read activities from Windows Live into your app or service; and write activities from your app or service to Windows Live so your users and their friends will see them in Messenger, Hotmail, MSN, Outlook, Windows Phone, and more.

Thanks very much for reading and for your interest in Messenger Connect

--Rob Dolin
Program Manager, Windows Live team

P.S. If you enjoyed this blog entry and would like to see more blog entries along similar topics, please leave a comment explaining what you'd like to learn more about.