In the previous post I started with Office Live, since the point was to investigate how people's lives are moving from the PC to the web. Today's post will deal more with things that have always been online, or have been online for a while.
Apart from Office live (a recent addition), live.com offers:
- A Home screen called the "Today" screen.
- Calendar
- Document and Photo storage and sharing
- A public profile you can share with friends
- Connect to your friends profiles and receive updates
- Synchronisation between your Computers (if you install Live Essentials on your PC)
- A web page service where you can create and customise your very own piece of the web
First, the Today screen and general notes:
Notable things:
- The whole service looks like it was meant to be seen and used as a unit. The various pages for mail, calendar etc don't feel like they are separate from the rest. However you can link directly to the individual pages if you wish.
- You have an impressive 25GB of storage for your profile, including docs, images, mail and so on.
- As with most MS online stuff, it all works better with Silverlight installed, although working without it is not that hard.
- The Today screen allows you to add "services", panels displaying Facebook, games, info, and so on.
- A small slide show can be created in the top right corner.
- A menu appears on top, taking you to the individual services. Hovering over a link produces a dropdown showing quick-links to features of that service.
- You can apply themes for that personal touch.
- A mobile app is available for most smartphone platforms, allowing you to access all of this on the move.
Let's start with Hotmail:
Standard stuff really. Your ordinary modern webmail service that does exactly what it says on the box. The calendar and contacts screens are part of Hotmail and are therefore reachable from the side menu.
You can do pretty much all the usual things here, like create extra folders, set up mail rules, block spam, and tie in your other webmail accounts (if any) so that all your mail appears in one place.
Contacts can be imported, and the contacts screen allows for grouping and categorisation of contacts. Of course your mail contacts also tie in with the Messenger service.
The Calendar works well also, with day, week, and month views, as well as the Agenda view which professionals will like. You can create more than one calendar and share them. you can also subscribe to the shared calendars of others.
Notable things:
- The whole thing looks very friendly and shiny.
- Easy to use.
- No real surprises. Everything just works really well.
Photos:
The Photos service is just a basic photo storage and sharing service. You can upload photos and display them in albums. You can individually set the public visibility of each photo, and those who view them can leave comments.
I's a nice Facebook-y way of sharing those holiday snaps with your friends. There is also a nice online slideshow player for when you want to page through your friend's collection.
Like Facebook, you can tag yourself in a photo, but you cannot tag your friends. Presumably they can tag themselves in your pics.
Lastly, a link on the photos landing page takes you to your SkyDrive status. Skydrive is just a simple page allowing you to manage your storage, and it will show you how much you are using and how much you have left.
Public Profile:
If the Public Profile screen doesn't remind you of Facebook, it should. MS is definitely going after the social media space with this one.
You can post your thoughts in the "Share something new" box. Your photos can be shared in the Photos page mentioned above. You can list things in your profile like your favourite things, your star sign and all those other things people mention online that they would never mention in Meatspace.
Oh, and although this page features a test account, there is one true thing about me on here. Can you spot it?
It doesn't look as compelling as Facebook, but then again I haven't used it long. Someone with lots of friends using live.com might be a better judge here.
Sync:
I cannot comment about this one really, since I have no real use for such a system at the moment. The idea is simple enough though.
You install Live Essentials on all your computers. Then you choose files that must be synced, and the service will ensure that file changes are synced between PCs.
Sounds real handy, but I doubt if a home user will use it. Corporate Road warriors will love it to bits though.
Spaces:
Here I ran into a brick wall.
I went to the Spaces page. I was greeted with a simple page that prompted me to create my first web space.
Then it asked for my mobile number (for confirmation purposes).
Then it complained because my number is not American.
It then asks me to choose my country and operator.
Then I realised my country was not listed.
At this point I had to stop. If my country is not there, I cannot choose my Operator.
No alternate way of proving who I am, so "NO Web Space For You!". No idea therefore how good the service is. It is clear that MS does not want people outside of their list of nations to use this just yet. Hopefully mine falls under "Coming Soon!".
Conclusions:
Microsoft, as usual, were a bit late in the game with these types of services. Hotmail is of course the exception as it is one of the oldest web services in existence.
Everything about these services falls under "No surprises here, everything just works really well".
If you want a web service that simply works well and doesn't let you down, I suppose live.com is not a bad choice at all. The only real complaints I have are:
Service is a tad slow, but not unbearable.
Web spaces does not want me.
Some of the more unusual options (like viewing mail offline, or syncing files) are not possible without a Windows-only client side program.
Next post, we will deal with Bing.
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