by Larry Richman
January 7, 2007 AM
Windows Vista RTM Lab Session 7 --
Previous Windows Vista Labs featured sessions on Live and the many services under it. For some of us, other than Vista itself, these were some of the most interesting and exciting parts of our time spent with MS. Based on our feedback, these sessions have been extended longer and longer. So many of us have been anticipating this session highly. Bruce Kasrel introduced it.
Scott Swanson led a discussion on Windows Live as a platform. Over 465 million people use Windows Live Services every month. 260 million use Windows Live Mail and 255 use million Windows Live Messnger.
He proceeded to launch into a presentation which is more developer-oriented. We had a look at some of the analytics available for AdCenter. You can look up a URL and see the demographics breakdown for the populations who go to those sites. We then discussed Windows Live Contacts control.
Mary Jo Foley has posted some great information about this session.
The next part of the Live session was presented by Alex Daley and covered Virtual Earth. One goal is to present more detailed information about each location you search. They've also wanted to do more than just an image of a map plus a photo on top of it. Other online mapping sites and apps may show a flat photo, and even turn the image on an angle, but the Live team has added a 3-D element to it. The image can be likened to that in a video game, but these are real locations and on a real world scale over the web.
The control which powers this is available, and is being used, by developers and businesses in their own work. For example, an environmental firm could use it to map landscapes. We also got a quick look at a Windows Live Search Mobile application which is available now and integrates maps.
Chris Butler ended the Live session with a presentation on Windows Live Gallery. We need to keep it under wraps.
