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Microsoft Live Labs has released an early version of a free tool for easy sharing of high-resolution Web- images. Enter a URL at http://zoom.it and it will spit out a short link and embed code for a basic but sleek image viewer that lets you zoom around an image or image of a website.

The tool is usable and it looks great, reminding us of the fun and zoomy Street Slide feature Microsoft recently introduced in Bing Maps.

Users of Microsoft Office on the Mac may be a little dubious of trying any other applications that Microsoft releases for Apple platforms. But the first Microsoft app released for the iPhone may be a different story. Meet Seadragon, an app that allows users to quickly zoom into extremely high resolution - "giga-pixel" - images.

Get your "pinch" technique ready. With Seadragon, you're going to have the opportunity to zoom into art, historical images, maps, NASA images, and more.