The second session was held in London Tuesday night and all the big blogs were present including LiveSide.net, mess.be, Coolz0r.com and I was there representing and reporting for MSBLOG. Other techy’s include Phil Holden, the director of Windows Live; Koji Kato, group program manager for the Windows Live Platform; Adrian Simons, the head of marketing in the UK, some other Microsoft folk including Tom, David and Cristiano from the MSN UK lot stuck around for sometime as well. Thanks to the guys at Heaven, the French based PR company who organised it all; Romain and Nicholas - as usual did a great job.

Phil started off by talking about mobile applications and also they’d expand developing opportunities for the Windows Live services. There are 17 Live services either available in beta or preview mode, as well as a whole load more to come in the coming weeks - boosting the number to around 25. Windows Live Mail was updated on Monday night to the Milestone 6 stage, and now has around 4-5 million uses using it, whilst Hotmail features have been added for old style users so now they can have a search mailbox feature. Live Mail M6 offers a cleaner interface (as reported here earlier this week) and performance has been tweaked to offer the services there much faster.

Windows Live Messenger now has 8 million users using it whilst MSN Messenger 7.5 and below stands at about 210 million, so a big difference but now that anyone can download the new software and sign in, the Windows Live Messenger user numbers are expected to shoot up over the next couple of weeks. With the latest build available externally, 8.0.0689 sees the fourth user interface revision and is expected to stay that way until final release.

In regards to Live.com, the teams are aware that it needs a lot of work doing on it and is the primary focus at the moment, is getting the performance optimised for the end user. They are planning this by using idle bandwidth to load other branched pages in the background so they are instantly available; in about 2 months from now will we see much faster loading times for the Live.com search and Live Academic. They will also be rolling out a first time user ‘’setup” so that it guides first time uses into collecting what they want on their Live.com homepage such as gadgets and RSS feeds. Also what we will be able to do is share our customised setup with other people like friends and family to also ease first time usage. Continue At Source

Send via e-mail | Submit to Digg | Add to Live Favorites