What is Windows Live?

All you need to stay in touch and keep your life in sync

By Kirsten Ballweg

Windows Live‌ is a collection of programs and services that work together so you can get beyond the computer and focus on what's important: your life. Also, the price is right—free! Let me tell you more about it.

Windows Live, defined

Windows Live‌ helps people stay in touch and keep their online lives organized in one place. But Windows Live is more than just web services. It also includes programs for your PC, and mobile services for your web-enabled mobile device.

Here’s a little summary of all of the Windows Live services.

Whether I'm sharing photos, publishing to my blog, or communicating with friends and family, when I use Windows Live I frequently find myself thinking, "Wow, that was easy!" That's the beauty of Windows Live—all the products and services work together—and with Windows—to help me do what I want to do.

Next, I'll tell you about some of the things I like to do with Windows Live. If you want to try any of this out for yourself, you can get started right now at home.live.com (on the web) and download.live.com (for your PC).

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Always know what's new

I don't know about you, but I find it tough to stay up-to-date on all the people I know. With e-mail, IM, text messages, and social networking sites, it feels like there are just too many places to check to see what my friends and family are up to. I could call them, but by the time I think about calling it's often either too late in their time zone, I'm out of cell phone minutes (whoops), or something else comes up.

But now all I have to do to see what people are up to is sign in to Windows Live. There, on my Windows Live home page, is a summary of what all my friends and family have been up to lately online, under "What's new with your network."

I can see everything new—blog posts, comments, photos, and other things that the people in my network have decided to share with me, and I can click the links to see more or comment about what they're doing. It's all the new stuff, at a glance. If you’ve used Messenger or Spaces before, then you probably already have people in your network on Windows Live. Your network is made up of your Messenger contacts and what used to be called your Spaces friends.

If you've never used Messenger or Spaces, it's easy to grow your network. You can find people already on Windows Live, and you can also invite your friends from other social networking sites, like Facebook. When you add people, you decide if you want to invite them to Messenger (so you can chat online), to appear on your profile (so other people can see who you know), or both. If someone accepts your invitation, they're in your network and you'll start seeing their updates in your “What's new” list. That's all you have to do!

The cool thing about the “What's new” list is that once you add people to your network, they'll see updates about you too. When I add new photos to Windows Live and share them, the people I've shared them with see my photos in the “What's new” list on their own Windows Live home page. So much easier than sending photos to lots of different people!

The other thing I like about the “What's new” list is you can add the things you do on other sites too. So if you already have an account with Flickr, Twitter, or Pandora, you can just add those activities to Windows Live. That way, the people in your network can see all the different things you're doing online.

When people in my network want to see everything I’ve been doing lately in one place, they can just go to my Windows Live profile page. There’s a list of what’s new on my profile page too, but this list is all about me. Any time I do something on Windows Live, it's automatically updated with the new things I've done. I can decide what activities to share, and who to share them with. If I want my best friend to see everything, when she visits my profile she sees everything. If I want my mom to only see certain photos I've added (like the cute ones of the cat), then that's all she can see.

So basically, all I have to do is what I already do online—upload and share photos, write in my blog, comment on other people's stuff—and my profile is updated automatically. And as I mentioned, after I add my other web activities, the things I do on those other sites appear on my profile too. So if my friends in New York are wondering what I've been up to lately, I can just point them to my profile on Windows Live.

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Sharing photos

Photos are a big thing for me. I love taking them, and showing them off (at least the good ones, meaning any photo where I don't look like a member of the living dead). Windows Live Photo Gallery is great because it works with my computer to make getting the photos off of my camera fast and easy.

All I do is plug in my camera to my computer using a USB cord. The AutoPlay window opens, and I click Import pictures and videos using Windows Live Photo Gallery.

That's it! The photos are copied over to my computer and into Photo Gallery.

With Photo Gallery, I can add tags (descriptive words) to photos to organize them the way I want to—by date, by event, by keyword (tags), and by person (people tags). I can also edit any not-so-perfect pics, and even order prints of my wall-worthy shots. And I can use Photo Gallery to quickly add photos to my online albums, and decide who can see the album, so my friends and family will see only the pictures I want them to see.

It used to take me weeks to get my vacation photos online to share with people. (Really, it took an hour or so, but it was such a hideous process that I would procrastinate for a few weeks first.) But now it takes just a few minutes. It's pretty slick and one of my personal favorite features in Windows Live.

Of course, once I've uploaded my photos, they automatically appear in the “What's new” list on my profile (for the people I've given permission to see them). The people I've shared the photos with can click to view my photos either in regular mode or as full-screen slide shows.

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Chatting is just the beginning

Messenger, MSN Messenger, IM—whatever you used to call it, it's now called Windows Live Messenger, and it's how I like to stay in contact online with friends, family, and co-workers. I've been using Messenger since the mid-1990s, back when grunge bands were in the Top 10 and Twin Peaks was must-see TV, and I have to say, I'm still pretty amazed by how I can have a conversation from Seattle with someone who's in Austin or Amsterdam without picking up a phone. I can even play games, share photos in real time, or make a video call from my computer.

I like to put the people I chat with the most into the favorites category, which always shows up at the top of Messenger—I just grab their names from the contact list and drag them up there. That way I can quickly start a conversation with my most chatty friends.

I also like the “What's new” area near the bottom of Messenger—it shows me all the new things my Messenger contacts are doing online. If I see something I find interesting, I can click the link and see the details (or, if the person is online at the time, I might just start chatting with them about it).

Another thing I like to do with Messenger is show a little slide show while I chat with friends. It comes in really handy if I have some new pictures that I just want to share with one person, or if I want to get my friend’s opinion on a picture of my new shoes! I'll just start a conversation and click Photos.

I can drag the photos I want to share right into the conversation window. My friend can see what I'm talking about, and we can chat while we scroll through the photos. She can even save the shots to her own computer!

The other cool thing about Messenger and Windows Live is I can chat with people not just with the Messenger program, but also when I'm cruising around the web. If I get an e-mail from someone in Hotmail, or I go to their profile, or see them in the “What's new” list, I can immediately see if they're online, and we can start chatting using Messenger for the web. This means that I can chat with anyone who’s online in Messenger, even if the computer I'm using doesn't have Messenger installed. It's come in really handy when I've been on vacation and need a quick answer. I just sign in to Hotmail, see who's online, and instead of sending an e-mail, I start a Messenger conversation.

Speaking of Hotmail… Like Messenger, Hotmail's been around for a while, and it's just getting better. I love not worrying about my mailbox storage—Hotmail storage grows as I need more. And if you have multiple e-mail accounts like I do and don't want to visit several different websites to check them, you can add them to Hotmail and receive and send e-mail from all those accounts—all from Hotmail! This has been a huge time-saver for me.

I've also downloaded Windows Live Mail (one of seven programs that together make up Windows Live Essentials) to my computer. I love how easy it is to use and see my new unread mail at a glance. Mail lets me move messages into storage folders on my computer—perfect for the messages I want to be sure to save long-term. It also lets me easily send Photo Mail—I just select the photos I want to send, and they're automatically saved to an online photo album. My friends get a great-looking e-mail with previews of my photos, and then they can click through to the online album to see them in a slide show, order prints, or save the hi-res files to their computers. All without having to send huge files in e-mail. I just love it (and my friends do too because I'm not sending them huge files)!

I already mentioned how you can see if someone is online, and send an IM instead of an e-mail if you want. You can actually do this both from Hotmail and from Windows Live Mail. Very handy when you need to verify what time you're meeting your best friend for happy hour!

And if you have a hectic social life or work life, you'll want to check out Windows Live Calendar. You can make several calendars, keep the main one for yourself, and then share other calendars with your family, group, or club. You’ll see events from all of your calendars together on Windows Live Calendar. You can even see your calendars when you're offline by using Microsoft Office Outlook or Windows Live Mail on your PC.

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Always have their latest contact info

There's a somewhat hidden feature in Windows Live that I think deserves more attention: the contact list. You get to your contact list from all the logical places like Hotmail and Mail, and from anywhere else on Windows Live, just click People.

On the People page, you can scroll through all your contacts, or just the people in your network (those folks you've added to your profile or Messenger). You can also create and manage categories of contacts—create a category for your friends, teammates, school buddies, or any group of people. You can even mark certain people as your favorites: just click the star.

But the thing I'm really excited about is (drum roll please)… when someone in your network updates their contact information, it's updated automatically in your contact list, as long as that person has shared their contact info with people in their network (I'll talk more about privacy and permissions in the next section).

OK. So it's not the flashiest feature, but it's pretty mind-freeing for me to not have to worry about updating my contact list.

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Who can see it? It's up to you.

Privacy and protecting yourself online is very important. Windows Live puts you in control of what you want to share, and who you want to share with. Share with everyone (public), just the people you know, a select few, or nobody at all.

To make it even easier, I set up a few categories for different groups of people I know—friends, family, and co-workers—and now I can quickly permission a photo album of our work party to just my co-workers. I can also post my black and white landscape photos up for everyone to see and get some good feedback on my work. It's a comforting feeling knowing that I decide who sees what.

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The rest

I've briefly touched on my favorite features in Windows Live. There’s so much there, it was hard to narrow it down! Here's a quick run-down of some of the things I didn't go into detail on. Remember, everything is free, so if something sounds interesting, try it out! Just go to home.live.com to sign in (or sign up) for the web services, to mhome.live.com on your mobile phone, or to download.live.com to get Windows Live Essentials on your PC.

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Getting started: We'll need to see your ID

To start using Windows Live, you need a Windows Live ID. If you have a Hotmail or MSN e-mail address, if you use Messenger or Xbox LIVE, or if you ever signed up for a Microsoft Passport account, you already have a Windows Live ID (it's your e-mail address and password).

If you don't have a Windows Live ID, it takes about a minute to sign up for one online. Once you have it, you can use it for everything in Windows Live, and a bunch of non-Windows Live services, like Zune, or anywhere you see this icon: . You don't need a Windows Live ID to get Windows Live Essentials, but most of them have added features when you sign in using your Windows Live ID.

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Try Windows Live for yourself

I've shared some of the things I like to do with Windows Live and Windows Vista, but there's even more you can try. To keep up with all the latest Windows Live news, including new features and services, visit the Windows Live team blog. Or better yet, get a Windows Live ID (if you don't have one already), and sign in!

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About the author

Kirsten Ballweg is a writer on the Windows Live team at Microsoft. She enjoys playing vintage Farfisas, consuming perfectly toasted and buttered English muffins, watching squirrels and bunnies frolic, and writing about herself in the third person.

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