If you have a crappy hotmail email address, and would like to change that, now it’s your chance. Microsoft is opening a registration to their @live.com email addresses now. Go and grab yours now. I’ve registered mine. Now, if you’re in my Messenger contact list, you should be getting a notification already that I’ve changed my Messenger address to
. If you live in Singapore, you’ll only get @live.com.sg choice. To get @live.com, you need to be in US, reside in US, get a friend in US to help, or any other idea you can think of. In short, only those in US gets @live.com. Any other parts of the world, you’ll only get @live.com.sg, @live.com.au, @live.co.uk, and @live.co.nz, and so on.
Besides a new @live.com, they have also released quite a number of services. Hotmail has been renamed to Windows Live Hotmail, and it’s much better now I find, though I don’t use it anymore. Windows Live Search still can’t beat Google Search. Windows Live Calendar is now in Beta coupled with Windows Live Events, to rival Google Calendar I’m sure. Windows Live Spaces for blogging, I’m not using it as well. However, one new service that you may find useful is their Windows Live SkyDrive, a free 1GB online storage for you, correctly partitioned into three sections, a private one for yourself, a shared one, and one for public. If you are the kind of person who store lots of bookmarks in your PC, and find it hard to keep bookmarks in multiple PC in sync, or had your bookmarks wiped out when you format you PC, it’s time to move your bookmarks online. There’s Windows Live Favorites for that. On desktop side, for Windows PC, they launched the usual suspects Windows Live Messenger v8.5, now added with Windows Live Writer (which I use for blogging, to write this blog post), and Windows Live Mail, Windows Live Photo Gallery (which supports uploading to Flickr), and many other more services. It’s clear Microsoft wants to ensure that with all these services, you’ll find a LOT of applications and services around you that you can and will use, and thus minimizing any chance you use services from rival Google or Yahoo.
Overwhelmed? Yeah, me too. But if you want to find any online services that match whatever you need, be it email, maps, blogging, storage, anti-virus, instant messaging, bookmarks, calendar, search, anything, a good chance you’ll probably find one that suits you in Windows Live offering.
Microsoft have been busy! I am going to check this out becuase theres lots of stuff you listed i could use. Thanks for the post its very useful.
Comment by wizardcreations — November 8, 2007 @ 10:40 pm
hi wizard, glad it could help
Comment by hendrikch — November 10, 2007 @ 12:14 am