Those of you familiar with http://home.live.com will notice a change when you visit there today. Microsoft have updated the web properties of Live Wave 4.
Home page
This includes your Home screen which contains social updates from your contacts and their social network activities. A great feature of the update is the ability to leave comments directly from this page that will post back to Facebook and the like. To configure your site connections click on Add web activities in the top right. YouTube videos can be played in-line.
Web Messenger
The new web messenger is a big upgrade to the previous version. Instead of being relegated to a popout session, web messenger now integrated into your Windows Live experience. Those who work between multiple machines will appreciate that you can now be signed into web messenger in multiple places, including the desktop Live Messenger.
Office Web
This is a game changer. Office Web makes creating and editing Word, Excel, Powerpoint and OneNote documents a great, free experience. This really does make Google docs look like a joke. I had previously used Google docs for podcast show notes, that ends today. Office web allows anyone with a LiveID to edit Office documents, so for a lot of people this will mean they won’t even need Office desktop applications. Obviously some more advanced functionality still requires apps, but the good news is opening a document in the Web App won’t strip anything out, so when you get back to the desktop, your document is preserved.
Office web is ideal if your on the road and come across a computer that doesn’t have Office installed. I can’t speak highly enough of what Microsoft has achieved here, a rich, free, multi-browser office suite in the cloud. Try it out for yourself at http://office.live.com/
Mobile / iPad
You should also be aware that the mobile experience has also been refined and works awesomely on the iPad. All items are presented in lovely finger-sized friendlyness. There are a couple of exceptions.. Hotmail seems to still be on the to-do-list and there’s no web messenger when using it on the iPad, on the flip side you do get a nice Windows Live icon for a web shortcut.
Windows Live on an iPad
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