Another interesting announcement is that Windows Live will be offering a new serivce which reportedly offers 4GB of storage to Silverlight developers to host applications and media (videos, etc).  Joshua Allen’s post seems to suggest that this is a Windows Live Platform initiative.  That could be big, and I can’t wait to see how it comes together.

More:

WebWare keynote coverage
Channel 9 video on the cross-platform CLR
Silverlight.net

Dane’s “official” farewell party was on Thursday, and included the presentation of a custom-embroidered T-shirt that dozens who’d had the pleasure to work with Dane signed beforehand.   Of course, a few stragglers had a bit more of a challenge scribbling their autographs…

It was great working with you Dane.  Best of luck “out there.”

I just downloaded their beta and I’m posting this entry from it now.  Pretty sweet app!

Screenshots, info, and download at their blog.

Check it out!

Second, I’m about to head off to Gnomedex 6.0.  I’m running on less sleep than planned, so caffiene will have to get me through the day.  Hopefully I’ll get online during the event, but no promises.

Alright, here’s the real scoop:  That site redirects to www.msreadr.com – a site (plus RSS feed) that aggregates a whole bunch of Windows Live blogs!

And we have a blog!  – It’s pretty basic right now.  Expect to see a lot more about our team and what we’re doing very soon.

The announcement came this morning as Dane Glasgow demoed the application during Bill Gates’ keynote presentation at the annual CEO Summit. 

Many on our team spent long hours working to get ready for the demo and we’re happy that it went very well.  We have gotten a lot of bad press about the name (or lack thereof), and a lot of people not understanding our goals.  But hopefully that will change with time.  I think when our beta release gets out to the public things will start to make a lot more sense!

I’ve already made a couple:

Brandon.MSDN      – searches just MSDN and MSDN2
Brandon.WinDev    – searches MSDN, CodeProject, GotDotNet, OdeToCode, and some others.

By clicking on one of those and installing the macro, you’ll get them added to your search bar on Live.com – then you can refine you search to just those sites with the click of a button!

New Live Search!   – Infinite scrolling (no paging!), adjustable detail level, Search-within-site, and the best image search ever.

Onfolio acquisition and beta of the Windows Live Toolbar!  (available tomorrow)

 The new Live.com site is in the process of coming online, and might be slower than usual as they ramp up the servers.  By morning it should be snappier than ever. 

This is just the beginning… There’s a lot more to come from Windows Live!

I’ll be posting more tomorrow.  Right now, I need sleep!

Check them out at www.liveside.net

 http://preview.local.live.com/

Interesting preview of what mapping sites could do in the future.

Here’s the jist of it.  I’m especially fond of #2 which I believe is really a huge step forward – allowing Microsoft to obey regional laws while still maintaining the user’s right to publish content in the free world.

Speaking before a conference of government officials and community leaders in Lisbon, Portugal, Microsoft Senior Vice President and General Counsel Brad Smith reaffirmed the company’s commitment to blogging as an important vehicle for sharing of information and ideas, and outlined the policy framework that would guide Microsoft in dealing with government orders related to blog content:

•	Explicit standards for protecting content access: Microsoft will remove access to blog content only when it receives a legally binding notice from the government indicating that the material violates local laws, or if the content violates MSN’s terms of use.
•	Maintaining global access: Microsoft will remove access to content only in the country issuing the order. When blog content is blocked due to restrictions based on local laws, the rest of the world will continue to have access. This is a new capability Microsoft is implementing in the MSN Spaces infrastructure.
•	Transparent user notification: When local laws require the company to block access to certain content, Microsoft will ensure that users know why that content was blocked, by notifying them that access has been limited due to a government restriction.

You can read the rest at the source.

Whoa, just saw there’s even a way to make money from your Space!

Read about it here on Mike’s Space.

Here’s the relevant excerpt from Ken’s entry:

Let me start with this core principle statement: privacy of our customers is non-negotiable and something worth fighting to protect.

Now, on to the specifics.   

Over the summer we were subpoenaed by the DOJ regarding a lawsuit.  The subpoena requested that we produce data from our search service. We worked hard to scope the request to something that would be consistent with this principle.  The applicable parties to the case received this data, and  the parties agreed that the information specific to this case would remain confidential.  Specifically, we produced a random sample of pages from our index and some aggregated query logs that listed queries and how often they occurred.  Absolutely no personal data was involved.

It seems to me that two types of information were revealed.  The first being a selection of pages from the index – which as far as I can tell is available publicly to anyone by going here.  The second is a collection of statistics.  My understanding is that aggregated query logs that listed queries and how often they occurred actually means something like - In December of 2005 - 400,000 people queried for the word “porn.”  (That number is a fictional example and nothing more)

Still, the comments to Ken’s post give the distinct impression that some readers are not satisfied.  I’ve boiled down the complaints to 3 issues:

1)  What queries did the DOJ receive statistics for?  Could some of those queries have contained personal data (like a query for “John Doe 123 Evergreen Lane”)?

2)  What happens if the DOJ comes back and subpoenas for personal information – such as a list of IP addresses that conducted certain queries?  Or a list of how many times certain combinations of queries originated from the same user?

3)  Why did MSN not inform users about the DOJ request and what information was being handed over at the time that it happened?

I wish I could say I had answers for you, but at this time I don’t.  However, it is my hope that Ken or someone else from MSN will address these issues to the satisfaction of MSN’s users.

Robert wrote today about that and about why Microsoft should buy Newsgator.

I wrote a post over a year ago called “How to make MSN cool” before I worked here (and before I knew that such efforts were already underway!). The focus of that post was a suggestion that Microsoft/MSN should buy Newsgator.

I still think that’s a great idea, though now there are some additional reasons.

Among them is proper support for back/forward navigation in the browser. This is what makes searching there actually useable for me.

So what’s so great about searching on Live.com versus, say, search.msn.com? Well for one thing, the results come back FAST. Like, lightning fast. Second, the whole layout and the ads are much cleaner.

In fact, I’d say it’s the best search UI of the top engines right now (previously it was Google) – except for one thing that I hope is fixed soon. The first page of results is still missing the page number and “Next page” links at the top right. Every page except the first one has them in the right spot.

It’s a small gripe, but it keeps it from feeling really “complete” to me. If they fix that, I’d say it’s a great 1.0 – anything they add after that is just gravy.