What is Photosynth?

Photosynth was launched last August and allows users to automatically stitch multiple photos to create an immersive 3D experience. The service made its most prominent appearance in the mainstream media in January, when it was used by CNN to crowdsource a massive 3D view of Barack Obama's inauguration.

Thanks to Silverlight, Photosynth is Now Available for All (even Mac users)

A few weeks ago, Microsoft switched the Photosynth viewer from a browser plugin to a Silverlight application, which removed a major hurdle for the widespread use of Photosynth. This also finally opened up Photosynth for Mac users as well. Sadly, though, the Photosynth desktop client, which is needed to actually create new synths, is not available for OSX yet.

New Features: Highlights and Privacy Controls

In addition to the new player, Microsoft also recently introduced a number of other interesting features. You can now, for example, highlight key images in your synths, and Microsoft also finally introduced privacy controls, so that your synth is not always available to the public by default.

Synths on a Map

While regular end-users won't get the same benefits as Microsoft's commerical partners, Microsoft already allowed users to browse geotagged synths directly on a Virtual Earth map and Microsoft already highlights some synths in its Live Maps application.

According to Hitwise's Heather Hopkings, Google came very close to catching up with MapQuest in December, but somehow, MapQuest managed to gain some ground again in January. Currently, MapQuest holds 39.49% of the market share in the US and Google Maps is at 35.67%.

Update: Hitwise just supplied us with a new graph that includes data for Live Maps and Yahoo Maps.

What is even more interesting, though, is that most of MapQuest's traffic comes from 'brand searches' - that is users who specifically search for 'mapquest.' Eight out of the top ten search terms leading to MapQuest were variations of its brand name and they accounted for 62% of MapQuests' visitors. For Google Maps, only two out of the top ten search terms were branded and they only accounted for 4.2% of Google Maps' traffic.

Old Habits

It is quite amazing how MapQuest manages to hang on to its top position. Google Maps gets over 60% of its traffic from Google itself, yet it seems that using MapQuest, even though it is barely keeping up with the latest technological advancements on the Internet, is still synonymous with online mapping for a majority of Internet users.

In many ways, this means that a service like Microsoft's Live Maps, which is holding on to a very distant third fourth place, is fighting an uphill battle, even though it provides a number of features like its Birds Eye View that even Google Maps doesn't have. For a lot of mainstream users, however, having access to the latest features doesn't necessarily translate into a reason to switch away from an established service.

All of these applications are meant to complement the Windows Live online experience and work closely together. You can, for example, use Windows Live Sync to keep your online and offline photo albums in sync. Live Sync has replaced FolderShare.

We tested the new versions of the Live Essentials for the last few weeks and all of them represent a major update to the older versions.

Even if you don't typically use the Microsoft's Live services, installing the Live Photo Gallery, for example, is well worth a try thanks to its seamless integration with Live Photos and SkyDrive. This new version compares quite well with Google's Picasa 3 and also lets you upload photos to Flickr. Photo Gallery also ties in with other Microsoft tools like Auto Collage or PhotoSynth.

Windows Live Writer, on the other hand, is more of an evolutionary update, but it is the favorite blogging client for a lot of us Windows users here at RWW and the update makes handling media files a lot easier.

Also worth a look are the enhanced Live Toolbar and the Windows Live Messenger, which has received a major facelift. The Live Toolbar (IE only) now displays your updates from the Windows Live online services, including new messages and pictures from friends. You can also use the toolbar to sync your IE7 and 8 bookmarks between different computers.

Software Plus Services

The real selling point for the Live Essentials suite, however, is how well all the apps play together, both online and offline. Live Photos, for example, can use your Live Messenger and Hotmail contact lists for tagging faces, or the Live Messenger connecting to your status updates on your Live Profile page. The one Live Service that has remained behind, though, is Live Mesh, which seems to be on its own development track. We assume, however, that it will be merged into the Live services at some point.

As one would expect, Live Photos integrates directly with Microsoft's Photo Gallery. This integration is similar to Google's combination of Picasa Web Albums and the Picasa desktop application. You can upload photos, manage your galleries, and keep albums in sync. Live Photos will also be directly integrated into the new Live Toolbar, which will display previews of pictures that you and your friends have shared on the service.

Features

The web interface lets you see your photos as thumbnails, thumbnails with additional information, or as very small icons. The overall interface is similar to Flickr's, with a photo-strip for navigating your album at the top right of the screen. Underneath the strip is the general information about the photo you are currently looking at, as well as the individual web address for this photo.

One of the niftier features of Live Photos is the Slideshow function, which changes its background color depending on the dominant color of the current photo. This is a subtle effect, but it shows that Microsoft spent a lot of time on getting the details of this new product right.

You can share your albums with very granular permissions, and also share individual photos. Every photo can be tagged and your visitors can also leave comments.

Very Few Negatives

Overall, the Live Photos team did a great job in developing a product that would appeal to most mainstream users. We did not run into any real problems during our tests, but we came across a few functions that were still missing from the product.

It would, for example, be nice if you could choose the picture to represent your album on the front page. Currently, the first picture in every album is automatically set to represent this album across Windows Live.

Also, it would be nice to see how much space you have left on your SkyDrive account while uploading your pictures.

Verdict

These negatives, however, are indeed minor and the combination of the Windows Live Photo Gallery with the Live Photo service looks like a winner to us, especially in combination with SkyDrive, which now features 25GB of online storage.

In combination with the new Live Profiles and Live Groups, Microsoft has created a very comprehensive suite of social online sharing tools and matching desktop applications.

Windows Live Photos: This is one of the most interesting new applications, and we will publish a more in-depth review of it a little bit later tonight. Basically, this is Microsoft's answer to Yahoo's Flickr and Google's Picasa Web Albums.

Live Photos allows you to share your pictures with granular privacy controls, and thanks to the "What's New" feed, the new Live Photos service will also allow you to monitor the photos of your friends on Windows Live.

Windows Live Profiles: The new Live Profile aggregates and displays your activity on Windows Live and third-party services. Somewhat similar to FriendFeed, users can choose to aggregate their activities on other services like Yelp or Twitter on this profile page as well. In the next few months, Microsoft will also integrate a large number of other third-party services, including LiveJournal, Digg, Last.fm, iLike, Seesmic, and SlideShare.

One of the highlights of the new profile is that it includes extremely granular privacy controls.

These profiles, together with the updated Windows Live Groups, are the hub of Microsoft's social networking strategy around Windows Live.

Windows Live People: This is the central address book for all Windows Live services. It integrates directly with your Hotmail contacts and it will also allow you to invite your contacts from third-party services like LinkedIn (with more to be added later). Here, you can also organize your contacts into categories, and chat with them directly through the Windows Live Messenger for the Web.

Windows Live FrameIt: This is an interesting new service which allows you to to send photos and other content such as news or traffic information to digital picture frames. So far, Microsoft has not announced a lot of details about it, but we know that the hardware partners include Navteq, ViewSonic, and RMI.

Updated Services

Windows Live Groups: As rumored, Microsoft will also update MSN Groups and replace it with the new Windows Live Groups. These groups are tightly integrated with the other Live services, including the revamped Live Calendar, Live Photos, and SkyDrive.

SkyDrive: Microsoft's online storage solution has been upgraded from 5GB to 25GB.

Mobile

Microsoft is also releasing mobile versions of these new and updated services that should work on any mobile web browser.

This is Big

Overall, these new services represent a major upgrade to the online part of the Windows Live suite. Microsoft is clearly trying to challenge both Yahoo and Google with its new photo application, while the new profiles and groups tie all the Live services together into a very sophisticated social network.

According to Microsoft's PR materials about this release, its main mission in designing these new services was to give users a better way to manage their digital lives. Judging from what we have seen so far, Microsoft has definitely succeeded in creating a compelling set of applications that, thanks to its tight integration with Microsoft's desktop applications, will surely drive a lot of new users to Windows Live.

In July, Live Search Cashback represented 3.75% of traffic to live.com, but by September 27, that number had grown to 6.29%. According to Hitwise, visitors to the Cashback site were more likely to be female (55% vs. 45%) and half were between 25 and 45 years old with an average income of under $100,000.

Sign of the Times?

As Hitwise also points out, part of this interest in the Cashback program might have to do with the current economic crisis in the U.S., where shoppers are more likely to start looking for bargains and cash back programs.

New Look

The new look is a lot cleaner than the old Hotmail, with a lot of white space. Microsoft refers to it as being "more like a repainted room than a remodeled house." As with the old version, you can choose between different layouts and themes. According to Microsoft, this new version is also 70% faster for users on broadband connections and 54% faster for those still using dial-up connections. While we did not do any scientific tests, the new design does indeed feel a lot faster than the old Hotmail.

Storage Space Grows as Needed

This new version also now includes significantly more storage space (5GB to start and then 500MB more per month every time you hit the limit). Microsoft is also integrating more Live Messenger functions into this new version. While it is not quite Gmail Chat yet, you can already change your presence in Hotmail. Over time, Microsoft is planning to add more features to this.

Overall, we really liked this new version of Hotmail. It does not (yet?) include a lot of new functionality, but it does give Microsoft a very well designed scaffold to use once it decides to add more functions in the future.

It is encouraging to see that Microsoft has been able to integrate Powerset's technology into its own products this quickly. Live Search, which is far behind Google in terms of market share, needs exactly these kinds of features to make its search more relevant.

After the acquisition was announced, we wondered if a combination of Microsoft and Powerset could indeed beat Google. Judging from these first results of the Powerset integration, we can at least conclude that Microsoft will make a strong effort to beat Google in terms of search relevance. Whether this is enough to challenge Google's dominance remains to be seen.

Yahoo's Open Strategy

Yahoo, of course, would prefer to lock its users into using its services. However, Yahoo has also been a major proponent of OpenID and a lot of the recent announcements around Yahoo Open, SearchMonkey, and allowing more third-party content on Yahoo's sites make us believe that Yahoo might indeed be willing to allow users to bring credentials from other providers to Yahoo. The easier it is to log into a service, the more like you are to use it and to return to it.

Smart Move?

Do you think this would be a smart move by Yahoo? Or should they just throw their weight behind OpenID? Would you be more likely to use Yahoo services if you didn't have to sign up with Yahoo?

The site now features tips and trick by members of the community, as well as Microsoft staff. Users can rate the contributions by other members on a five-point scale. In order to prevent abuse, content needs to be voted on by at least three community members before it is featured on the main community page, which Microsoft has dubbed the "Clubhouse," and which is only accessible by using a Windows Live ID. This content is also featured on the homepages for the individual applications that make up the Windows Live brand, though interestingly, some applications like Live Calendar and OneCare are not featured on the site.

Especially good content will also be pushed to the Windowslive.com front page by the editors. Microsoft assured us that it would allow negative posts to be featured on the site as well and that it would not censor any valid opinions - assuming that the users abide by all the terms of service for WindowsLive.com.

The Clubhouse

As of now, the central hub for creating and sharing most of the content for Windowslive.com is Live Spaces. In order for post from there to appear in the clubhouse, a user has to tag them with 'Clubhouse' and the name of at least one Live application. Indeed, it seems tags are the main glue that hold the Clubhouse together, as Microsoft also uses them to determine a list of possibly related posts. For now, the Clubhouse is only open to a select few member of the Windows community, but Microsoft will open it up for everybody in the coming weeks.

In the next iteration, Microsoft will also allow importing items from other platforms like WordPress and Blogger, Marty Collins told us.

In terms of the overall design, the Clubhouse is quite well done. One nice feature are the user profiles, which are pulled from Live Spaces. These profiles also lists a user's other posts and their ratings. In the Clubhouse, users can see all the latest posts tagged with 'clubhouse,' as well as the most highly rated posts.

It is interesting to see that Microsoft is willing to experiment in this area. On WindowsLive, it allows Microsoft generated content to stand next to user generated content, which could potentially open Microsoft up for some embarrassments. At the same time though, if Microsoft holds true to its promise of not censoring legitimate content, then this represents an important step forward in how Microsoft interacts with its customers.

Also, according to Steve Ballmer, Microsoft will be providing an API to Facebook which will allow them to create a "rich search experience for the Facebook users and that is something that they will launch in the fall working with us. And it will carry both our web results, as well as our page search advertising."

This deal would mirror the one Google did with MySpace last year. In that deal, Google guaranteed MySpace $900 million in shared ad revenue for the next three years. However, it's worth noting that the Google/MySpace deal has not been a huge success for Google. Users do not typically initiate a lot of searches from within social networks and monetizing advertising in social networks has turned out to be even hard.

We are trying to confirm more details of this story and will update this post as we get more information.

So far, none of the larger search engines have been able to capitalize on the promises of semantic search. Most of the innovations in the space so far have come from small start-ups and even those never made any real inroads in terms of market share when compared to the keyword driven search engines of Google, Ask, Yahoo, and Microsoft.

Powerset's technology might just give Microsoft the ability to differentiate its Live Search product from the competition.

Essentially, Live Mesh is a collection of feeds (which can be expressed as ATOM, JSON, FeedSync, RSS, WB-XML, or POX). Every piece of data entered into a user's Mesh -- be it a file, a folder, a message, a user permission, or a new device -- is rendered as a piece of information in a feed. The feeds are then synced with other devices that are part of that Mesh following rules for how to sync each particular piece of information (i.e., File A may sync with Users 1, 2, and 3, while File B may only be told to sync with Users 1 and 2).

Mesh is a combination of web based services that sync files and information across a cloud environment, and client software that allows individual devices to sync with the Mesh. This is a continuation of Microsoft's "software plus services" strategy, in which client software is augmented by (or reliant upon) web services.

The News Feed

While Mesh doesn't have any version control capabilities yet -- a must for a service that syncs data between multiple users -- it does borrow a popular feature from the web for keeping users up-to-date on what's going on across a system: the news feed. The Live Mesh Notifier is a news feed of all the activity on a user's Mesh. Right now that means changes made to files, folders, devices, user permissions, and comments left on files/folders.

However, because Live Mesh is a platform that seeks to interact with third party services (more on that below), it is easy to envision how much more could be pushed through the news feed. We were shown a demo application that synced tweets on Twitter with the Mesh Notifier, for example. As more services use the Live Mesh platform, could it, or a service built on top of it, eat FriendFeed's lunch?

The Platform

What makes Live Mesh potentially very special is that Microsoft has turned synchronization into a platform. Eventually, services as well as devices will be able to hook into Mesh. We were shown some early demos of the type of things Microsoft envisions for the Mesh service that were quite impressive. In one proof-of-concept demo, a photo that was taken via a cell phone camera, was automatically synced to a Mesh that pushed the pictures out to a Facebook photo album.

It was certainly impressive to see data -- in this case a cell phone camera picture -- almost instantly synced across multiple devices and saved to a web service immediately after it was created. Microsoft envisions Mesh as a platform for data synchronization for any service we use and for any type of data. Ideally, for example, if someone were to comment on that photo at Facebook, the comment would sync to anywhere else that photo was hosted (your desktop computer, the desktop computers of anyone sharing the photo, your laptop, other photo sharing sites, etc.).

Taking On Google Gears?

Perhaps the most interesting bit that Microsoft demoed to us was an offline compontent of the Mesh platform. Web apps using the Mesh platform will be able to lean on the client software to take their web applications offline, including all user data, and sync it up when the user gets back online at a later time.

Microsoft is taking an offline approach that is more akin to Google Gears or Mozilla Prism than Adobe AIR -- the web-to-desktop functionality of Mesh is essentially a wrapper for the actual web app. The same HTML and JavaScript, etc. runs in a desktop window in offline mode, data is stored locally, and synced later. The difference is that Microsoft is ting offline access into the Mesh service, so developers don't just get the technology to take their apps offline, but also access to the synchronization and cloud storage services to move their data back and forth.

We've talked about the importance of web apps on the desktop on this blog, so this could be an important component of Mesh.

Will It Work?

It is still very early for Mesh. Microsoft intends to invite key development partners to try out the system in the next few weeks, and will roll out support for other devices (including mobile and Mac) over the next year. One thing that could hinder Mesh, though, is Microsoft's rather confused marketing around its online services. Between Mesh, SkyDrive, Live Spaces, and FolderShare there is so much overlap in Microsoft's services that users are bound to get confused.

Ideally, Mesh will be a platform that will tie all of Microsoft's online storage, synchronization, and sharing services together -- along with other, third party services. But the confusing muddle that is Microsoft Live could stymie mainstream adoption. Microsoft needs to clean up their act and present a more clear marketing message.

Software + services is also a potentially tougher sell than software as a service -- people don't like downloading things. Still, Microsoft has created a compelling product that they hope will standardize synchronization across the universe of devices and web services we each use every day. The prospect of getting easy access to user data on multiple devices could be attractive for developers and prompt them to embrace the platform, but it is probably too early to make any specific predictions.

Ray Ozzie Memo

Accompanying the launch of Live Mesh is a new memo from Microsoft Chief Software Architect, Ray Ozzie. It notes that Microsoft sees the Web as "the Hub of our social mesh and our device mesh." Ozzie calls this "social mesh" and writes that "in scenarios ranging from productivity to media and entertainment, social mesh notions of linking, sharing, ranking and tagging will become as familiar as File, Edit and View."

UPDATE: here is the full text of Ray Ozzie's memo