UP/ON Social

Late last night, we began publicly discussing upcoming changes to Windows Live. This is  an exciting time as it represents an enormous effort by product engineering, management and marketing to deliver an exceptionally simple web experience that connects your complex digital life. The Windows Live Spaces team has a great blog, as does Live Wire. Screenshot goodness and details abound.

What I love about the new Windows Live is not just the product itself, but the significance of the customer problem it solves.

“Did you get my message?”
I have a couple different e-mail accounts. I have a Windows Live Profile  and a Twitter account, some photos on Flickr and contacts on various other sites from Facebook to Bebo. Altogether, I count nearly 12 points of presence (including this WordPress blog) that I actively use online. Oh, and I check them on my home PC, my work PC, my cell phone, in my existing software and on the web. I check them on Windows, and on my MacBook. And yet, how many times have you answered “No, not yet,”  to the age-old question of “Did you get my message?”  Too many times.

In other words, keeping pace with my increasingly complex digital life isn’t easy. It should be simple. Communicating and sharing should be seamless. My online conversations should span across services and devices.  Updates and activities that I care about should come to me, not the other way around. We can do better. Enter the new Windows Live. Said simply, this was our goal: to help keep your life in sync.

This starts with a more complete and integrated social experience – and you will see this in the updated Home (above) and Profile (below)  services. Home provides a summary of your digital world – essentially a “What’s New” feed across your entire network. Profile also provides a view into solely your activities, and allows friends to easily keep in touch. Personally, I love “Notes”  for its simplicity (below) where you can leave short-form messages for friends.

There a couple entirely new experience as well, such as Windows Live Groups (below) which allow you to quickly collaborate online with the people you choose – be it family, friends or other associations. Your group will get a shared calendar, shared storage, a shared e-mail address, and shared instant messaging. The group itself is private and updates are exposed in my personal What’s New feed. My homeowners assocation is going to be hearing about this one…

A couple additional things I love about the new Windows Live: the experience is beautiful. The design is user-centric and you can see how this is woven throughout each Windows Live service. In addition, the potential of the “What’s New” feed. It’s powerfully simply  and I think people will be taken back by its practical approach to simplifying the web. The list goes on …. more as we get closer to public launch.

So when is public launch? From the press release: This next generation of Windows Live, available at http://www.windowslive.com, will begin rolling out to customers in the U.S. over the coming weeks and will be made available globally in 54 countries and in 48 languages by early 2009.

Hungry for some digerati speculation? Tech Crunch has a nice summary, and I love the New York Times coverage. Get the full dish at techmeme.com.

Till next time, /jamie