Windows Live Folders is the front end view for what is to become Live Drive (note, there’s no Windows to prefix this, such as Live Search and Live Maps), which is a central storage system for your files and important documents. Using Windows Live ID, you can sign in and upload/download and modify your files, whilst allowing only yourself to view certain files and letting others including the world view others.

Personal folders include files and folders which is only for you and your eyes only. You can access this by signing in and accessing your personal documents, backups and contacts.

Shared folders is there to enable you to share documents with other users, friends and family. You’ll need to sign in to access these if you’re a third-party person and if you’re on the access list then you’ll be able to get access to this folder.

Public folders are for everyone, so you can look in anyones public folders.

It’s far from ready yet - I can’t access my files and folders due to a .NET Framework error message (standard problem) so there are a few things to iron out, but in due time the storage will expand to an expected 5/10GB and rumour of a desktop application and a mobile site coming soon.

Note: US users only - however you can work around this - go to Windows Live Account and change your region to “United States”. Wait around 4 hours for this to take affect and you should be well on your way.

Go to Windows Live Folders
More information

Update: Thanks Chris, you’re a good man, you uncovered the story nicely. Big thanks to Chris at LiveSide for making this known to the world. But I’m not linking back to you

There are two new websites we feel you should know about, which seem to be targeted at British users in the UK. The first is www.newhotmail.co.uk which tells you a bit more about Windows Live Hotmail and some of the history to it. You can also update your Hotmail to the new interface with all the jam packed new features of the Windows Live Hotmail product as well.

The second one is www.emailbritain.co.uk which is a promotional site for Windows Live Hotmail, where as the website states, “is creating the first ever national archive of emails in conjunction with the British Library. The Email Britain book, recording a snapshot of British life by email, will be permanently archived for generations to come.” So submit your emails to them and have them listed in the British Library Email book.

Hotmail has been around for… 6, 7 years… oh for a bloody long time, but the time has come at long last! Windows Live Hotmail has replaced MSN Hotmail for the good of the good of the electronic mail community. But never fear! All the old email addresses being hotmail.com and hotmail.co.** with the two asterisks indicating the country domain, uk for the United Kingdom, jp for Japan, nz for New Zealand and so forth - they stick and you’ll always be able to use them from now on.

Windows Live Hotmail will be rolling out around about now. Those who want to stick with some reference to the old Hotmail style design… you can’t, but you can use the “Light client” which lets you browse through your messages in the old sluggish way that Hotmail users are used to.

“Windows Live Mail” will be the new name of Windows Live Mail desktop, and Windows Mail and Outlook Express are being phased out. Don’t worry, it’ll be alright for you new users - change is good sometimes

One of the leads in the user interface and design of Windows Home Server has a blog. Kynan Antos who works at Microsoft on the Windows Home Server project has posted a few designs he made of what the Home Server Console would look like - very interesting indeed. You can see from the different images how they’ve evolved and how the final view looks. In chronological order - from left to right - all the way through to the current.

Source: antosdesign

These latest figures are from Neilsen NetRatings from March 2007.

Windows Live Hotmail: Unique Users: 32,963,416 - Page Views: 7,051,909,897
Windows Live Messenger: Unique Users: 26,240,676 - Page Views: 34,420,058
Windows Live Spaces: Unique Users: 128,298,007

Update: I can’t quite work out where these figures relate to… I think they might be for the United States, but I’ve lost track of it. Sorry

While news on the “Live Drive” front has been rather non-existant of late, there are some signs that may be about to change. A new service, Windows Live Folders beta, was recently listed on the Windows Live Feedback site, though it was only a matter of days before it was removed. While it doesn’t take a genius to work out this is likely to be a storage service, the question is what will it be? A revamped FolderShare, the “Live Drive” cloud storage service everybody has been waiting for, or a combination of both?

The initial details being discussed at TechEd last year were for a cloud storage service offering 2GB of space for free. Looking at services that have been operating in this market for a while, this figure seems to be lower than what will eventually be offered. Xdrive currently offers 5GB for free and 50GB for $9.95 a month but without the economies of scale that Microsoft can draw upon. (The newest Microsoft datacenter opened in Quincy at the end of last month and more are on the way.) Interestingly enough, the online Apple service .mac is still offering a basic service of just 1GB for $100 a year and a total of 4GB for another $100 a year. With Windows Live Hotmail offering a 2GB inbox (Hotmail Plus 4GB), it definitely makes sense for a Windows Live cloud storage service to offer significantly more than this.

The other key feature that was talked about last year is being able to map your online storage to your PC so you can access it as you would any other drive. The existing Windows Live Messenger feature, Shared Folders, does this already for peer-to-peer sharing, so perhaps this is where the name Windows Live Folders comes in.

To save our intrepid readers from doing this themselves, folders.live.com currently points to the new Windows Live beta site. One question I do have is how would people use a cloud storage service and therefore how much storage space would they need - would you pay for more if the price was right?

Source: LiveSide

Isn’t it time we got a grip and sorted some of this out? Last year, the IWF (Internet Watch Foundation) had more than 31,000 reports of websites which had alleged child abuse images. Around 10% of this actually had indecent images of children, which were under the age of 12.

31,776 reports processed
10,656 pages contained child abuse content
3,077 websites contained all of the images
1,667 were commercial websites
10.5% of all pages were on photo sharing websites
91% of victims appear to be under 12 years old

Peter Robbins, chief executive of the IWF, said that the US was the worst offender, principally because of access to technology and its geography.

Microsoft are trying to play a part in increasing web safety with such safety features being implimented in Windows Live Messenger, Hotmail and Spaces, with a standalone product, Family Safety, being released later in August according to internal sources. Is this enough? Should the software giant be doing more to promote web safety seeing as it’s their products being used to do these things? Comment ahoy.

Parts sourced: BBC News

At the moment, Windows Selfhost is an internal product being tested by a number of Microsoft employees, at the “dogfood” stage (where internal developers and staff trial the products themselves as a method of quality control).

We’re honestly not quite sure what this is yet - a self storage solution, part of Windows Server System, possibly a Windows Live service (could well be from the FolderShare program which was acquired last year), or could be part of Windows Home Server, as guessed as the logos are the same. Whatever it is, it’ll have something to do with Vista no doubt.

Anyone have any more information, ping us at admin@liveandbeyond.com.

Windows Live™ for TV Beta is a rich, graphically-driven interface designed for people who use Windows Live Spaces and Messenger and Live Call on large-screen monitors and TVs. Microsoft is still in the early stages of this beta, and access to this beta is very limited. It works only in Windows Vista Ultimate and Home Premium, so users with these operating systems are ready to go already!

• Browse millions of Spaces in rich 3D graphics with new Gallery views and full keyword search
• Find out what your friends have been doing and saying on Windows Live Spaces
• Have real-time text and voice conversations
• Call your friends’ mobile or landline telephones by signing up with Verizon Web Calling to make affordable domestic and international calls
• Easily navigate with your mouse, keyboard or a TV remote (remote navigation requires Microsoft Media Center Remote and IR)
• Make free PC-to-PC calls to other Windows Live Messenger users.

You can be part of this beta! We have only 2 invites (small number, but more coming soon) and if you want to be in with a chance of getting in on this amazing beta, take part in our rather unconventional contest!

How this works
Technology has got me into trouble before. I was at a party, this weird girl gave me her number so I typed it in and put as the name (without her seeing me) “Hayley - weird”. I went to the same club a few weeks later, the same girl saw me and asked why I hadn’t called her. I told her I didn’t have her number - she persued this and took my phone, and entered in her number again. When she went to save it, it said “Do you want to replace ‘Hayley - weird’?” That got me into hot water with a few of her friends. So… the question is:

“How has technology got you into trouble?”

The two best comments will get the beta invites - leave your name and email address and your comment so we can get back to you.

With little news coming over the networks and the wires, Windows Live Mail desktop beta has been refreshed and somehow rolled out. Now this is very confusing, as a little time earlier, my application crashed and caused me to restart.

I restarted, and the advertisement pane just vanished. So maybe now the final version won’t have advertisements? Who knows, the adverts are still around on my Windows Live Hotmail and Spaces pages, so who knows.

The new build appears to be 8.0.1226, three builds up from the previous version reported here. No differences are noticed as yet - the beta tags are still in place, and as of 00:43 BST in England, LiveSide hasn’t reported it yet - as it seems, we’re the first people. Check out the screenies below.