We haven’t mentioned MSN for a while, mainly due to all the Microsoft-Yahoo talk that’s been going on. However a few days ago the My MSN customised homepage launched a new beta version, available at http://next.my.msn.com.

So what’s new? Well the most striking thing you’ll notice when comparing it to the old site is that it now features the new-style header UI. This includes the drop down menu linking users to all the other MSN sites, as well as offering access to the main Live Search verticals straight from the page.

Other new pieces include an embedded MSN Video player, showing the most popular videos right now, tooltips to improve the first-run experience, and the standard modules such as Hotmail inbox, most popular searches and front page news. The menu system for each module needs a UI update, but other than that it makes a good first impression.

While the main page is already pre-populated, users can create their own custom pages. Just click the Add a Page -  Blank Page option, and then pop a keyword into the search box to find content. The search results are somewhat messy, with various RSS feeds from Live Search (?) and a whole bunch of subfeeds showing up, even on a search for LiveSide. Luckily you can hit the preview button to make sure you’re importing the feed you really want. Alternatively you can just drop an RSS feed right in there. Once added, you’ll suddenly realise how similar this page is to the personalised My.Live.com. That’s not surprising given some of their features have made it across into My MSN; check out the mouse over previews for example

All in all its a nice page for the mainstream user, bringing them both the current “popular” content to consume, as well as letting them tailor it to their own liking. Now lets see what Windows Live can do.

This year’s Imagine Cup, a Microsoft sponsored student competition featuring student teams from around the world, is kicking off its finals in Paris, France.  Of course we’re rooting for our friend (and arch-rival) Long Zheng and his SOAK team from Australia, but want to wish all of the competitors good luck, and congratulations on getting this far.  This year’s Imagine Cup focuses on the environment, and calls on young programmers, artists and technologists around the world to "Imagine a world where technology enables a sustainable environment."

The Imagine Cup encourages young people to apply their imagination, their passion and their creativity to technology innovations that can make a difference in the world – today. Now in its sixth year, the Imagine Cup has grown to be a truly global competition focused on finding solutions to real world issues.

Of course we’re also pulling for the three finalists in the Software Design Windows Live Award, from China, Spain, and Turkey.  Again, good luck to everyone!

More news on Live Search and Virtual Earth. Live Search Maps China has expanded and improved it’s site with:

• Real-time Traffic in Beijing
• Send-to-Mobile for free for local search and transit routing result
• Transit data refresh for existing 11 cities including 3 new subway in Beijing (No.10, Airport and Olympic).
• Expanded coverage from 11 to 31 cities. 
• Geocoding and Local Search
• Data refresh for existing 114 cities including Olympic Venues.
• Support city and county name geocoding for areas outside of 114-city coverage.
• Olympic query relevance improvement
• Local search category refinement
• Map refresh for 10 existing major cities including Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou etc.
• Expanded tile coverage for 30 more cities, totally 289 cities now.

Very nice, if you want to keep up with traffic etc. during the upcoming Olympics. But that’s not all! Live Search Maps Australia just got launched and includes data from Virtual Earth, NineMSN and Yellow (Pages). Australia must have liked the Bird's Eye Imagery that was added in April's Update.

Tip from Chris Pendleton:

If you get redirected to Live Search Maps (US) you can access the Australian site via Ninemsn.com.au, click "maps" above the search box and search for an Australian city or place.

Source: Virtual Earth, An Evangelist's Blog : Live Search Maps Improves Internationally

OneCare version 2.5, which went into public beta in early April, has just been released into production, and is available now by download at www.onecare.live.com.  While the newest build (2.5.2900.3) won’t show much if anything in the way of new features or UI, version 2.5 is expected to be included in Microsoft Equipt, as well as OneCare for Server (for SBS), which is expected to be released later in the year.  If previous upgrades are any indication, the new version should be rolling out to existing users in the coming days and weeks, but you can download the final bits now, either as a trial, or to upgrade your current subscription.

Remember Albany Beta? Well, it has been renamed to Equipt and is released today!

REDMOND, Wash. — July 2, 2008 — Microsoft Corp. today unveiled Microsoft Equipt, an all-in-one security and productivity software subscription service for consumers. In one easy installation, the service delivers award-winning anti-malware protection technology and features to simplify PC management and help improve performance, the productivity tools people use to organize their lives, and online services that help make it easy to keep in touch with friends and family.

Initially code-named “Albany,” Microsoft Equipt offers consumers Microsoft Office Home and Student 2007, giving them the latest versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote for their personal and school projects; Windows Live OneCare, the all-in-one security and PC management service; Windows Live tools, such as Windows Live Mail, Windows Live Messenger and Windows Live Photo Gallery so they can connect and share with people they care about most; and Office Live Workspace, a new service from Microsoft that makes it easy to save documents to a dedicated online Workspace and share them with friends and classmates. Anytime a new version of Office or Windows Live OneCare is released, Microsoft Equipt customers will get the version upgrades as part of their subscriptions.

Microsoft Equipt will be sold in nearly 700 Circuit City Stores in the US starting mid-July. Retail price is estimated at $69.99 for a one-year renewable subscription and can be installed on up to three home PCs.

From the factsheet:

Included Products and Services:

Windows Live OneCare
All-in-one security and performance includes antivirus, antispyware, firewall, file and photo backup, performance tune-ups, and home network management to help keep your PC running at its peak.

Microsoft Office Home and Student 2007
· Word 2007. Create great-looking documents with ease.
· Excel 2007. Intuitive spreadsheet tools let you create budgets and more.
· PowerPoint 2007. Design stunning presentations for family, school or volunteer activities.
· OneNote 2007. Organize different kinds of information — text, images, audio and video, Web clippings, and more — in one digital notebook.

Microsoft Office Live Workspace
This new service from Office makes it easy for you to save documents to a dedicated online Workspace and share these with friends and classmates.

Windows Live tools
· Windows Live Mail. Get all your e-mail in one place.
· Windows Live Messenger. Send instant messages to your friends or have a video chat.
· Windows Live Photo Gallery. Organize and share photos.
· And more. Including Windows Live Writer and Windows Live Toolbar.

Automatic updates and upgrades. Office Home and Student version upgrades plus automatic security updates and OneCare upgrades.

More information:
Q&A: PressPass Interview with Bryson Gordon
Factsheet Equipt
http://www.circuitcity.com

Chris Pendleton,Virtual Earth Evangelist, lets us know that Ask.com is now using Virtual Earth as their mapping platform. In this they are following portal sites as YellowPages.com, Superpages.com, and WhitePages.com.

Ask.com has integrated it into Ask Maps, Ask City (search for Businesses, Events and Movies per US City) and their Web Search including Bird’s Eye view.

Ask.com has sites in the UK,  US, Japan, Spain, France, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands. I’ve only seen Virtual Earth integration on the US one, but many of the others are still in Beta. I’m sure they’ll follow suit. Something else I’ve noticed is that all of their beta sites link to a page with all Ask.com sites (International) and those that are final do not, what’s up with that?

Like the soap opera it has become, the workings behind a deal between Microsoft and Yahoo! just don’t ever seem to end.  This week we’ve seen a Yahoo! PowerPoint presentation that tries to place all the blame on the failed deal on Microsoft, Microsoft’s purchase agreement with Powerset, the apparent launch of a formal US Justice Department investigation into the Google-Yahoo! search deal, and now a new Wall Street Journal article reporting new talks between Microsoft and Yahoo!, only now possibly including either Time Warner, Inc (AOL), or News Corp. (MySpace).

According to the Washington Post, the ad deal that Yahoo! struck with Google after Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer backed out (which Yahoo! desperately tried to talk them out of, it turns out – more below) is under formal scrutiny by the Justice Department:

Investigators are planning to demand documents not only from Google and Yahoo, but also from other large companies in the Internet and media industries, said the sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigation is ongoing.

Google and Yahoo officials have said since the deal's announcement that they would delay its implementation for a voluntary Justice Department review. But a formal investigation signals that the department may have found some cause for concern.
…
But lawyers familiar with similar investigations said that the kind of legal requests being issued by the Justice Department in this case -- "civil investigative demands" -- are not used for routine matters.

"They don't do it without having identified significant issues," said M.J. Moltenbrey, a Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer lawyer who was director of civil non-merger enforcement in the Justice Department's antitrust division in the 1990s. "It involves approval at higher levels within the antitrust division."

And then tonight, the Wall Street Journal reports that “Microsoft Corp., positioning itself for a new run for Yahoo Inc.’s search business, has approached other media companies in recent days about joining in a deal that would effectively lead to Yahoo’s breakup…”.

Microsoft has held discussions with Time Warner Inc. and News Corp., among others, say people involved in the talks. In the past, Microsoft has floated an arrangement under which it would acquire Yahoo's search business and another partner, such as News Corp.'s MySpace or Time Warner's AOL, would combine forces with what remained of Yahoo.

The Journal article goes on to provide a detailed timeline of Yahoo!s attempts to get Microsoft back to the table after Ballmer pulled out, up to and including the color of Ballmer’s shirt (I don’t want the WSJ to go all AP on me - it’s a very good read, but behind a paid firewall).

With Yahoo! stock about to dip below $20 per share, and the Board of Directors elections coming up in a month, things aren’t looking good for Yahoo! right now, even with the Google deal.  Will Microsoft be able to put together a deal with either AOL or MySpace in play?  Will the Justice Department begin to chip away at the seemingly impregnable Google?  Will Powerset, cashback, an HP deal, and a new Search Technology Center be enough to begin to turn the tide?

As The World Turns, indeed.

+++
* “Swung on and lined down the left field line for a base hit…Here comes Joey… Here comes Junior to third base… THERE GONNA WAVE HIM IN!! THE THROW TO THE PLATE WILL BEEEEEEE LATE!! THE MARINERS ARE GOING TO PLAY FOR THE AMERICAN LEAGUE CHAMPIONSIP!! I DON’T BELIEVE IT! IT JUST CONTINUES! MY, OH MY!!”

After much ho-humming around whether Microsoft would or would-not acquire Powerset, the deal is now done and announced over on the Live Search blog. Though the price has not been announced, ReadWriteWeb were running with a rumour a few days back saying it was at the $100m range.

For those who’ve missed all the recent coverage about Powerset, its a natural language search engine, allowing users to phrase their query how they would naturally write. Stop and think for a second about how you use Google or Live Search.

Are you using sentences, or carefully chosen keywords?

There’s a video demo of Powerset, which gives a great introduction to the company’s technology.

Powerset Demo Video from officialpowerset on Vimeo.

So what does this acquisition do for Microsoft’s search ambitions? Well it gives them a leg-up on Google, who were rumoured to be trying to acquire Powerset for themselves, but as we’ve seen for several months now, Microsoft’s technology and relevance is already on-par with Google’s. The key aspect again comes back to marketing and conversion of users, something that no amount of technology acquisitions will solve quickly. Then again, Microsoft looks like its in it for the long-term, and is now starting to get out of 1st gear. Disrupting search indeed.

Catherine Heller has recently done an interview with Charles Teague, Lead Developer on the Windows Live Writer team. In the interview (which you can see after the jump) Charles talks about what Live Writer is, what blog engines it supports, a couple of his favourite plugins, and then moves on to a quick example of how easy it is to write a Live Writer plugin.

Of course, readers to this blog will already know how to write a cool plugin for Windows Live Writer, even having access to a template to get you going. But this is still a cool video, and it’s always nice to hear from the product team.

Anyway, enjoy the video, and thanks Angus for the tip.

When we talked to Bill Gates last November at Mix n Mash, he described Windows Live:

All those consumer services are basically big, big volume. They're tiny businesses in a sense, but they're very important for the population of users that you connect up to and the opportunities you get out of that.

Some of the things like state in the sky, obviously we want to do a lot more innovation so that everybody just understands that they should use that. Today, no matter whose thing it is, .Mac or the various eDrive cloud store type things, they actually are all pretty small share, they're kind of messy to use. We think that by the way that we'll connect up to Windows in a rich way we'll be able to do something pretty dramatic there, but that awaits the next big wave that comes along.

So what is “the cloud”, and why is it so important?  Specifically, the cloud is a network of data centers, a system that will soon dwarf what exists today, a system that Microsoft is furiously building out.  In addition to data centers online now or soon to be in Quincy, WA, Chicago, San Antonio, Ireland, Irkutsk, and a just announced (in this video?) a new center in Iowa, if you listen to Debra Chrapaty talk to Om Malik at Structure 08, Microsoft is just getting started:

Debra Chrapaty talks to Om Malik at Structure 08 in San Francisco

It is clear that Microsoft plans to be a big player in “cloud infrastructure”, and they’re working hard on efficiencies in power and scale, not only to power Microsoft’s online services, but to offer those services to other customers.  When Bill Gates talks about the opportunities that Windows Live provides, he’s not interested in “tiny businesses”.  The scale and speed at which Microsoft is planning to build out their services, cutting the start to finish time for a data center from 1.5 years to “months”, pre-provisioning with containers to “knock the socks off anything anyone in the industry is doing” is going to drive Windows Live, Office Online, Exchange Online, and more.  From what Chrapaty is hinting at, a lot more.