I finally found an use for Microsoft's Windows Live Mail, a mail client that replaces Outlook Express as the light version of Outlook. Windows Live Mail has a unique characteristic: it's free and it allows you to access Hotmail accounts. Microsoft also provides a plug-in for Outlook with an exuberant description:

"With Microsoft Office Outlook Connector, you can use Microsoft Office Outlook 2003 or Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 to access and manage your Microsoft Windows Live Hotmail or Microsoft Office Live Mail accounts, including e-mail messages and contacts for free!"

Microsoft probably thinks it makes you a favor by providing ways to access your mail from a desktop client, so it uses a proprietary mechanism that can only be interpreted by Microsoft's software.

But I digress: Windows Live Mail is a good way to migrate the messages from your old Hotmail accounts to Gmail.

1. Enable IMAP for Gmail.

2. Download Windows Live Mail. Microsoft no longer links to the standalone version of the product and it forces you to install a package, but you can choose the software you want to install.

3. Add the Hotmail accounts from Windows Live Mail's interface.

4. Add your Gmail account and make sure you manually configure the IMAP settings.

5. To prevent some new Gmail labels from being created, right-click on your Gmail account from Windows Live Mail's sidebar, select Properties, go to the IMAP tab and uncheck "Store special folders on IMAP server".

6. Then go to the inbox of each Hotmail account, select all the messages (Ctrl+A), right-click, choose "Move to folder..." (or "Copy to folder..." if you want to keep them in Hotmail) and select the Inbox of your Gmail account (or create a new folder). You should repeat this for each folder created in Hotmail.


If you don't expect to receive other message in your Hotmail accounts, uninstall Windows Live Mail. Otherwise, check your Hotmail accounts from time to time and manually move the messages to Gmail. Microsoft doesn't allow you to create rules for IMAP and HTTP mail accounts, so you can't forward new messages to Gmail. If you try to use the forwarding option from Hotmail, you'll notice that Microsoft still tries to keep your mail hostage.

Microsoft finally allows people to create @live.com email accounts, now that most of the Windows Live applications are out of beta. Because there aren't too many registered accounts and you can create accounts at many international domains, it's likely you'll find a good email address.


An interesting new features lets you link a main Windows Live account with other secondary accounts and use a single login to access all your accounts. At the top of the page, next to your email address, there's an arrow that hides a list of your linked accounts.


Windows Live IDs are the key that unlocks many web applications from Microsoft and you can get one when you install the Windows Live suite, a Google Pack without third-party software. As we could see in the previous article about Windows Live, Microsoft's strategy is to deliver a unified package that combines its best software with its online extensions. Microsoft pitches it as a Windows upgrade and a simple link from Vista or from Windows Update is enough to capture a big audience. "With Windows Live, you'll get software and services that make what you can do on your PC and the Web just that much more amazing. Think of it as the power of Windows combined with the limitless possibility of the Internet." (my emphasis) That's probably the reason why some web apps from Microsoft work better in Internet Explorer: they're not supposed to work optimally on any platform and any browser, their purpose is to enhance the default Windows experience.

Nobody remembers exactly how many times Microsoft updated its search engine hoping to attract more users. But this time Live Search (formerly known as MSN Search and Windows Live Search) received a major update, "our biggest update since our debut in January 2005", according to its corporate blog.

Even though the update isn't yet... live, you can't still see the new version if you click on the URLs from this post. They contain a parameter that triggers the updated interface and set a cookie. To compare them with the results from the old Live Search, open a different browser and perform the same searches directly from live.com.

Old version:


New version:


The new design moves the search box to the left, transform the tabs for other search engines into links, changes the text colors and the fonts (from Verdana to Arial) and the page is easier to read. The page also loads faster because Microsoft optimized the code (7.23 KB vs 15.9KB when you search for [Google]).

Microsoft says the new index is four times bigger than the previous one, but that's not a measure for quality. As you can see in the screenshot above, Live Search 2.0 shows two spammy web pages at #3 and #4 when you search for [Google Pack]. The same pages have lower ranks in the previous version.


Microsoft updated the instant answers to show more information about celebrities, including a Celebrity XRank, which is similar to Google Hot Trends. You'll also find rich information about products from MSN Shopping.


The new video search engine shows video previews while you hover over the thumbnails. This is useful to decide if a video is right for you, but it's also very easy to accidentally trigger a video while moving your mouse on the page. Unfortunately, if you click on the thumbnail of a YouTube/MySpace/Metacafe video, Microsoft will only show the embedded player, without any description, comments, ratings. Other videos, like those from MSN Video, are played at their original page.

Live Search detecting more subtle misspellings and includes related terms by expanding your query. "The new Live Search does a much better job in predicting the intent of the query to return the best results possible. New investments improve the search service's ability to read and understand queries in a way that more accurately determines intent despite common problems such as spelling errors, stop words, punctuation and synonyms," says Microsoft in a press release.

The new ranking algorithm is closer to Google, although it seems to not be influenced too much by the number of links or their importance. A search for [Google OS] returns as the fourth result a page that was linked from this blog and very few other sites.

Live Search is still far behind Google in terms of quality, but this is the first time when Microsoft focuses on the important things: relevance, speed and user interface.

Update: Read this very cool live blogging from Microsoft's Searchification event where they launched these updates. The post was written by Vanessa Fox, a former Google employee.

Microsoft launched a service for automatic translation called Windows Live Translator. The site lets you translate a text limited to 500 words or a web page from English to German, Dutch, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Korean, Chinese, Japanese, Russian.

Microsoft uses Systran to produce most of the translations, but also offers an option to translate computer-related texts using a machine translation system developed in-house. Microsoft's translation technology has been used to translate technical materials, including MSDN Library.

"Recent research in Machine Translation (MT) has focused on data-driven systems. Such systems are self-customizing in the sense that they can learn the translations of terminology and even stylistic phrasing from already translated materials. Microsoft Research MT (MSR-MT) system is such a data-driven system, and it has been customized to translate Microsoft technical materials through the automatic processing of hundreds of thousands of sentences from Microsoft product documentation and support articles, together with their corresponding translations."

Microsoft intends to integrate this service into Live Search and provide a feature already available in other search engines for a long time. Windows Live Translator's presentation is extremely interesting: the default view shows the original page and the translation side by side in two vertical frames. If you hover over a sentence in one of the pages, the sentence is highlighted in both pages. If you scroll in one of the pages, the other page performs the same action. This is an interesting approach especially for those who speak both languages fairly well or want to learn a new language. Unfortunately, it's difficult to read a page that requires to scroll horizontally.


Google also has a translation service powered by Systran. The translations are identical to the ones returned by Babel Fish, but they're different from Windows Live's translations, so Microsoft might use an updated version of Systran's software.

Google developed a machine translation system that's available to the public for only three languages: Arabic, Chinese and Russian. To expand these systems to other languages, it's important to have a lot of parallel texts. "Rather than argue about whether this algorithm is better than that algorithm, all you have to do is get ten times more training data. And now all of a sudden, the worst algorithm is performing better than the best algorithm on less training data," explained Peter Norvig, Director of Research at Google.

While machine translation is not yet a replacement for human translation in most cases, it's a great way to get the approximate gist of a text in a foreign language. One of the most important problems is that machine translation doesn't always produce coherent phrases and doesn't understand the subtleties of language, so don't use it to translate poetry or to send important emails.

Microsoft plans to offer more services that let you manage and store data online. While most of them are still in early stages or they've been released without too much success, Microsoft promises to open them to developers and to create APIs that can be accessed from any device.

Brian Hall, general manager of Windows Live, made an interesting comparison between the early days of Windows and this new online "operating system". "A lot of what Windows was doing early on was memory management, storage, all of the things today we take for granted. The vast majority of developers (today), they are not thinking, 'how am I going to store this particular piece of data in memory?' It just happens. The same thing is going to happen in the mesh model."

While developers can contribute to the success of a service (like in the case of Google Maps), it's hard to believe that companies will create truly open apps. A service that stores your data online could let you edit a document using Zoho or upload a video to YouTube, the same you can add actions to a context menu in Windows. Your Gmail contacts could be available when you want to share a Flickr photo and Gmail could integrate with Meebo to be able to chat with people that use other IM networks. But companies want to drive traffic to their own products or to their partners.



In a Wired interview, Eric Schmidt (Google's CEO) said this new "operating system" has the advantage of being based on open protocols. "People call this an Internet operating system. And by this I don't mean Google, I mean the sum of this vision. And if you think about it as an Internet operating system, the Internet operating system will have to have all of the normal features of the older versions of operating systems. It will have to have security, it will have to have caching, it will have to have replication, and it will have to have performance." But how about working with other "operating systems"?

Windows Live's tagline is "your online world gets better when everything works simply and effortlessly together". But that "everything" is still limited to the services created by Microsoft.

LiveSide found a new service from Microsoft called Windows Live Folders, Redmond's version of the long-awaited GDrive.

Windows Live Folders, which was briefly available at http://folders.live.com, will offer 500 MB of storage and 50 MB as the maximum file size. There are three built-in folders for documents, music and pictures. The permissions are at the folder level, as each folder can be private, shared or public.

Personal

* Use personal folders to back up important files that are only for you.
* Get to your files from any computer with Internet access by signing in with your Windows Live ID.

Shared

* Shared folders make it easy to collaborate with coworkers or classmates.
* You decide how much control each person has over each shared folder. Some can just read what's there: others can add and delete files.
* Everyone who is sharing uses their own Windows Live ID.

Public

* With public folders, anyone on the Internet can view your files, but they can't change them.
* Want to show your public files to others? Just send them a link! Each folder and file has its own web address.

After more than a year of testing, Microsoft launches a new version of its free webmail application Hotmail. While initially the name was Windows Live Mail and the intention was to bring Outlook's interface online, Microsoft couldn't make this radical change compelling for its user base and had to make a lot of compromises.

First, the name was changed to Windows Live Hotmail. Then the Outlook-ish interface, similar to the one from Yahoo Mail Beta, is only an option. By default, Windows Live Hotmail has a classic interface that doesn't uses AJAX. "The full version has drag-and-drop functionality, right-click menus, and a reading pane to help you view e-mail quickly. The classic version uses check boxes and doesn't have a reading pane."

CNet reports that the change was necessary because "the program was too slow to load, too different and, well, just not like the old Hotmail it was intended to replace. It was a painful realization for the more than 100 managers and developers on the project. In banking on a snazzy Web 2.0 application to try to catch up to rivals Yahoo and Google, Microsoft had dramatically overshot its audience."

The classic interface is closer to Gmail, although it still uses folders, doesn't have threads and there are a lot of annoying usability issues like the weird position of the "Send" button.

Another bad choice is the "Today" panel that greets you when you open Windows Live Mail. Instead of seeing your inbox, you get the chance to read popular news and articles from MSN. CNet offers a possible explanation for this:

"If you open Windows Live Hotmail and notice that your first message doesn't automatically open in the preview pane, you can blame Match.com. Initially, Microsoft figured people would like to see their first message. But, it turns out that many people don't necessarily want their co-workers or anyone else to see that Victoria's Secret special offer or the update from their online-dating service."

Microsoft continues to show little respect for its users by not adding support for POP3 or IMAP. Instead, they want to push Windows Live Mail Desktop that displays text ads in a Gmail fashion and an "Outlook connector software that will enable anyone with a copy of Outlook 2003 or Outlook 2007 to use the software to access Windows Live Hotmail messages and contacts".

Reminder. Live.com is a site where you can create a start page, by adding feeds, gadgets and customizing the settings. Live.com is also the domain that hosts all the Windows Live services, Microsoft's response to Google's ever increasing online presence. The Windows Live brand partially replaced MSN, creating a lot of confusion, and failed to deliver too many innovative or successful products. End of reminder.

Live.com has always been a step ahead of Google's Personalized Homepage and a step below Netvibes. Launched at the end of 2005, a few months after Google IG, live.com added tabs and ways to read the full content of a feed much earlier than Google. The site is also much more customizable: you can choose the number of columns and a color theme. Even if live.com has big usability problems (for example, it's hard to add gadgets, the feed search is terrible) and there aren't too many gadgets to choose from, it's nice to see that Microsoft continues to improve the product.

The new feature I wanted to talk you about is page sharing (or collections, as Windows Live likes to call it). You can now go to a tab, click on "Share" / "Send a link", to get a link to your tab. If someone clicks on that link, he can add the tab to his own live.com page. Here's a link to a tab about Google.


What's cool is that live.com actually saves the settings for the feeds and gadgets, so you'll see that I've chosen to show 10 headlines from Google Operating System's feed. Live.com also saves the query for the image search gadget, so you'll see images about Google in that gadget.

A personalized homepage gathers what's important to you, but a subset from that could become public. Google could also add this feature and add by default: your shared items from Google Reader, your public albums from Picasa Web, the public events from your calendar, the public notebooks and documents, your favorite Google Groups, your blogs or a map with your location.

Microsoft released its own book search service, that includes only out-of-copyright books and books for each Microsoft received permission. The approach is different from Google's initiative, where publishers can only opt-out from Google Book Search.

But the most interesting thing about this release is a statement from Danielle Tiedt, general manager at Microsoft: "As we move out of beta, what you will see is that book content integrated with the Web content (search results on Windows Live Search). What we are focusing more of our efforts on for live searching is integrating all of those content types together to give you the most relevant results. Sometimes the most relevant will be from books. If, for example, it's a search on historical content, chances are the most authoritative content may be found in books."

It will be very interesting to see books as search results, and mixing various content sources is something that Google intends to do with Google Universal Search or SearchMash.

Related:
The new Google Book Search
Digitizing books without permission

The new Windows Live Local shows the Earth in 3D. Although it requires to download a 5MB application and it needs a lot of resources, the result is an attempt to emulate Google Earth in a browser. Unfortunately, that browser is Internet Explorer.

You'll be able to see 3D maps only for major cities in the US. But they won't look very nice unless you have a broadband connection and a graphics card that supports Microsoft DirectX 9, with 3D hardware acceleration enabled.

Microsoft did an interesting thing by adding 3D maps into a browser, but they need to improve the performance of their app and the imagery.

Note: to try this, set your regional options in Control Panel to United States and open this site in Internet Explorer. But only if you have Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 2, Microsoft Windows Server 2003, or Windows Vista.

More about Virtual Earth 3D, in NewsWeek.

Live Search Blog announces that Windows Live Search (formerly known as MSN Search) is now out of beta. It's interesting to see that they don't talk too much about the improvements in the relevancy of results, although their results seem better than last time I've tried MSN Search.

"Our goal was to give you search the way you want it, with more features you can customize, better relevance in your search results, and better vertical search experiences."

Most of the changes are in the interface: web search shows related queries like Ask.com, image search shows more results and you can change the size of the thumbnails in real-time. There's also an interesting scratchpad in the right side of the results where you can save your favorite images; the idea is similar to Google Notebook, but you don't need a plug-in for that. Microsoft says that "Local Search is getting more robust every day and this release provides new or updated imagery for 25 U.S. cities, meaning we are covering about 30% of the U.S. population now".

An interesting idea that could be implemented by Google is their navigation bar, where you can select other search services, like: video search, product search and your selection is saved.

My biggest problem with Windows Live Search is that it's terribly slow, most of the times the results are displayed 3-4 times slower than in Google Search or Yahoo Search and that means they have problems with scalability. There are still a lot of spam / irrelevant results, but I think Microsoft is on the right track.

Windows Live Writer is a new tool from Microsoft that allows you to publish to your blog using a desktop client. While the software is integrated with Windows Live Spaces, you can also use it with Blogger, LiveJournal, TypePad, WordPress.

What's nice about Windows Live Writer is that it reads your blog's template and it lets you preview your content while creating it. It's like seeing your blog post growing.

The rich-text editor is not impressing, as it contains the usual elements and doesn't produce clean code (you'll notice many unneeded tags). When you insert pictures, you've got more options: you can resize the picture, add a nice shadow, adjust brightness and even use some simple effects like sepia. Unfortunately, Blogger doesn't allow you to publish images for the hosted blogs.

Windows Live Writer also lets you insert maps using Windows Live Local and the maps can be customized to show the aerial view or bird's eye detail.

When you select the preview mode, you'll see how your blog would look if you published the post, so it takes the idea of preview one step further.

Windows Live Writer is available to download here [4.74 MB, Windows] and it's still beta. The simple interface and the innovative additions make this tool a good replacement for the standard blogging interfaces and it's a good alternative to Performancing for Firefox, Qumana, but it's still far from a commercial application like ecto.

Microsoft and Yahoo have started testing the interoperability between their IM clients: Windows Live Messenger and Yahoo Messenger 8. That means you can add MSN contacts to Yahoo Messenger and the reverse, send messages, view personal status messages, share emoticons, view offline messages.

You can join the beta by going to http://messenger.yahoo.com for Yahoo Messenger and here for Windows Live Messenger (use Internet Explorer).

There are other instant messengers that allow you to login on multiple IM networks simultaneously (for example, Gaim as a desktop client and Meebo from your browser), but this is the first real step in the interoperability of IM networks. The resulting IM network will have 350 million accounts. The next step will be the interoperability between Google Talk and AIM.

Related:
Windows Live Messenger review
Yahoo Messenger 8 review
Remove ads from Yahoo Messenger

Windows Live Mail Desktop, currently in beta, is a replacement for Outlook Express, although you won't find it in Vista. The program looks so similar to the Live Mail site that it's hard to notice you're actually using a software. This is probably the first program built from the interface of a web application.

The first thing that strikes you after installing the program is that you have to sign in with your Windows Live (MSN) account. You can ad more accounts later (and even your Gmail account, that is just a regular POP3 account).

WLMD has a 3-columns interface: the navigation, mails and contextual web results and ads. If you click on a mail, the programs scans the text of the mail, finds the most relevant keywords and shows the first web results for each one of them along with some ads from Microsoft adCenter.

The program has a feed reader, but it doesn't work unless you have Internet Explorer 7. That means it just reads the feeds from IE7.

I imported all mails from Gmail to test the speed of WLMD and I must say it's fast. But fast doesn't necessarily mean smart. The program sent a lot of random mail to the Junk folder, mostly short mails.

The attachments are very easy to miss. The icon is very far away from the mail and should have been replaced with the name of the files.


The search function works fast, but it doesn't highlight the results in the mail body.

You can compose more mails at once, attach files using drag-and-drop, forward more than one mail, insert photos directly into the message.

You don't have advanced options like "see the raw mail", filters are created as non-intuitive as in Outlook Express, while contacts are added through Live Messenger.

While WLMD is an improvement to Outlook Express, it lacks a powerful spam filter, a contact management feature, mail threading and a real desktop look-and-feel. Plus it needs a lot of RAM (on average, 70 MB, which is too much for a mail client).

Here's the direct link for Live Mail Desktop (13.5 MB).

More Windows Live:
Live Messenger review
Live Mail review
Live Toolbar is impressive

The same day when Yahoo Messenger 8 Beta launched, Windows Live Messenger came out of beta. Is this a coincidence?

Let's install the software. If you do that, you'll see there are a lot of opt-out options and bundles.



You'll also notice that Live Messenger cloned Yahoo Messenger interface. If Yahoo has Launchcast, Microsoft has Rhapsody Radio (but you have to pay for it). Both have an ad and a search bar at the bottom of the window.


So what's new in Windows Live Messenger?

* Live folders - share files with your contacts and synchronize the updates.

* Live contacts - update your contact card and it updates for everyone you want it to.

* PC-to-PC calling.

* PC-to-phone calls: sign up for service with Verizon.

* Video calling: 640x480 videos.

* Live Messenger will offer users a sneak-peak at the upcoming Walt Disney movie release "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dean Man's Chest," as well as an online video game based on the movie.

Live Messenger will replace MSN Messenger, that will still be available for users that have older versions of Windows.

Yahoo Messenger - Live Messenger interoperability is not yet available.

You can see a video that shows the new features of the Live Messenger and they are described by a member of Live Messenger team.

Download Windows Live Messenger (15.3 MB, requires Windows XP).

It's not a product that tries to compete with Google Reader. Windows Live Reader, codenamed MSReadr, aggregates news about Windows Live products (mainly Live Search, Live Mail, OneCare) from the growing list of their blogs.

Nial Kennedy says "this project was created on a Sunday evening without the approval or blessing of Microsoft" using Planet feed aggregator.

Windows Live is Microsoft's response to Google's web applications and tries to be an online extension for Windows Vista.

Related:
Live Mail Desktop wants to be Gmail
Live.com is Vista's default homepage
Windows Live Mail review
Windows Live Toolbar shines
Windows Live is a big bet

Microsoft will replace Outlook Express with Live Mail Desktop in Windows Vista and will let you access POP3 and IMAP accounts, as well as your Windows Live Mail account, the Hotmail upgrade that includes 2GB of storage. Live Mail Desktop, currently in beta, will include contextual ads next to emails through a technology called Active Search. "Active Search bridges the gap between your inbox and the broader Web using the power of search," says Oji Udezue, program manager for Live Mail Desktop.

What's interesting is that this gap will be filled with ads from Microsoft adCenter. I think a desktop application is not the best way to include ads, even if they are contextual. Opera browser has included ads delivered by Google until version 8.5, and the users weren't very happy about that. Another interesting thing to note is that Google doesn't include ads in any desktop application, although it was the first to put contextual ads next to email in Gmail. At that time, many people were concerned that Google read emails in order to deliver the ads.

"Active Search displays key search terms found in a message along with a search box at the bottom of the screen. Search results and sponsored links are displayed alongside, without having to open a new browser window. If the content of a message does not trigger any relevant results, no ads or search results are shown," reports Clickz.

Although Live Mail Desktop team wants to make us think this is a feature, many user will not like the cumbersome interface. Maybe this way Mozilla Thunderbird will increase its user base.

Niall Kennedy, that will join Microsoft's Windows Live division, found out what will be Internet Explorer 7's homepage.

Live.com is the new default home page for users of the Internet Explorer 7 and the Windows Vista operating system. Live.com will be the first feed syndication experience for hundreds of millions of users who would love to add more content to their page, connect with friends, and take control of the flow of information in ways geeks have for years.

So the new major competitor for google.com will be live.com. Microsoft will try to boost its search market share, bring RSS feeds to mainstream and market everything as Windows Live. Including desktop software.

Related:
Windows Live is a big bet
Windows Live Toolbar Review
Windows Live Messenger Review

Ok, this is not a joke. No more April Fool's Day pranks. This a serious review for Windows Live Mail Beta, an innovative webmail system from Microsoft, that wants to replace the good old Hotmail.

But how can you be serious when you get this? Look closely, click on the image to enlarge it. This is Microsoft's Gmail-killer.



Ok, so the interface is messed up, the navigation system is not built with text links, or images, there's just some text that has onclick events, so when you go to the mouse over the text, the cursor doesn't change.

You can barely see your mail, the advertising is very close to the scrollbar (like the new Yahoo Mail) and sometimes comes on top of your content, the mail search doesn't work, the rich-text editor has flaws (you can't change the font size).

Of course, you have 2 GB mail space and a Ajax-based interface. But who cares when you actually can't work with this pre-alpha mail client. Fortunately, you have the option to switch to the classic interface and keep the 2 GB.

I tested Windows Live Mail on Windows XP with Internet Explorer SP2. If you try to open it with Firefox, you'll get an unfriendly message and then you'll have to select the classic view, because, as you know, Firefox is not powerful enough to render Windows Live Mail correctly.




To see for yourself, get an invitation from ideas.live.com.

Let's see my ratings:
Yahoo Mail Beta: 7/10
Gmail rating: 8.5/10
Windows Live Mail Beta: 4/10

Related:
Yahoo Mail Beta Review
The new Yahoo Mail will have obtrusive ads
5 fast ways to check your Gmail account

Update: I refreshed IE a couple of times and the interface seemed better, but what if I resize the page?

I think this blog will become Google Operating System vs Windows Live. This year is crucial for Microsoft, they'll launch a new operating system, a new office suite, they'll finish Windows Live project, they'll try to improve their search engine and they'll launch MSN adCenter. Maybe they try too much.

Windows Live Toolbar (if you want to visit the page, you should first sign in) is, of course, a replacement for MSN Search Toolbar.



What features does it have:
• Search using Windows Live Search
• Phishing Filter (will be built-in in IE 7)
• Collect, organize and share the info you find online
• Auto-detect a site's RSS feeds, and have them automatically sent to your personalized Live.com home page
• Access your favorites from any PC
• Tabbed browsing (will be built-in in IE 7)

It's nice that the installer is just 800 KB and includes only the basic features. If you want more (desktop search, RSS feeds detector) you can select them from a list.

The cool thing about this toolbar is that it includes Onfolio, a technology recently acquired by Microsoft, that lets you capture sites (recursively, with advanced restrictions), manage collections of sites, read RSS news feeds, and share content in emails, blogs and documents. It's useful for research, blogging and it looks pretty impressive. You can create a collection of sites, pages, snippets and organize them in folders, search them or include in your blog.

Windows Live Search is slow, but nice - it uses Ajax to create an "infinte" stream of results so you never click Next. Feed Search lets you preview RSS feeds and add them to Live homepage, while Image Search enlargers images when hovering them. Just cosmetic changes.

Live Favorites didn't seem to work for me: I couldn't add any site to the list.

Except for the custom buttons and the spell-checking that are very nice implemented in Google Toolbar, Windows Live Toolbar has almost everything and will definitely be a success.