I have been using Windows Live for a little over a year now, and it’s clear that Windows Live offers a phenomenal and underrated suite of services and applications. Here are the services I use the most on a daily basis.
Windows Live Spaces has the potential to be the social networking service. Unlike other social networking services, it really is a space on the web in that it can easily be tailored to personal interests. MySpace and Facebook allow commenting and blogging, but if you’re really into photography, for example, it’s really not possible to focus your profile around it. Spaces offers templates that allow you to showcase exactly what you’re interested in, whether it’s blogging, photography or gaming and provides modules around these. At the same time, Spaces also allows a fantastic amount of customization of colors while maintaining the overall Windows Live feel.
At 5 GB of storage, Windows Live SkyDrive offers an incredible amount of storage while others charge money for over 1 GB.
Unfortunately, Windows Live Favorites is probably going to be discontinued, but it was a fantastic way to store and access favorite webpages from multiple computers. The Windows Live Toolbar made it perfect since favorites were instantly stored online instead of on the local drive.
Windows Live Office is basically it’s like SkyDrive with an emphasis on storing Microsoft Office documents. You can create task lists, notes, workspaces, etc. and upload all your Office documents to the web. The best part of this feature is the fantastic integration with Microsoft Office, as it allows you to save directly to Office Live. By installing an addon, you can have the option of saving all your documents to Office Live. I’ve used this for several school projects and it really simplified everything. Before I used this, our group was sending different versions of a PowerPoint file back and forth. The workspace feature was perfect, and it simplified the process greatly because we were able collaborate on just one file.
The best part of all of these services is that you only one account. Plus Windows Live allows linked accounts. This is so useful for managing separate accounts for personal or school/business use. A single click allows you to switch between accounts and manage all related services. Plus with Live Wave 3 just around the corner, I can only expect that all of these services will get even better.
I’d say Spaces is nice for those of us who really want to make a personal space on the web, but it’s definitely not a strong social network, not too many differential features, and sometimes you wonder if Microsoft could make it even more easier to customize. It’s great for general blogging though, and I guess photo sharing is a bit better than most social networks.
SkyDrive is awesome. I bought a SanDisk Cruzer, and though it’s a really nice USB flash drive, I had to pay $20-something for 2GB. It’s amazing how Microsoft is able to give users 5GB for FREE. People really need to know about this.
Favorites – It was nice and simple, but I just don’t understand why MS couldn’t update it.
Office Live Workspaces – I guess it is useful for sharing Office files and collaborating with friends, but I really wished they’d release a simple web-based Office suite. It doesn’t have to be fancy, but it’d be nice. I’d like it to be similar to Buzzword or Google Docs.
More customization options would be good, but I don’t see how they could improve the social networking. It has all the features of MySpace but with worse search.