Windows Live ramping up

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Times certainly are exciting for Scott and the boys over at the community site for all things Live - www.liveside.net. 

Virtual Earth

I've been wanting to blog about the new version of Virtual Earth, for example, and describe some of the excellent new features as well as the improved, much more slick looking UI - great work from the Virtual Earth team.  They have posted about 10 Hot new features in Virtual Earth which is well worth a look.  Here is the list in summary:

  1. Rolled up routes or Abbreviated Directions
  2. Improved Directions Printing
  3. Category Browsing in an Unfamiliar area
  4. Ghost nodes while drawing lines and shapes
  5. Severe Traffic indication
  6. Subscribe to changes in a KML file via RSS
  7. Force Feedback with XBOX controller
  8. Category Sensitive Details page
  9. Traffic sensitive routing
  10. Transparent Buildings

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For me, one of the outstanding new features is Bird's eye view in 3D which the Live Labs guys worked on with the VE team - nice to see cross-team working guys! :-)  This is just amazing and combines some of the technology in Photosynth into Virtual Earth for some truly astounding results.

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SharedView Beta 2

But Virtual Earth is just the tip of the iceberg, SharedView for example allows you to collaborate on documents with up to 15 people in real-time, think of it as a consumer or student version of Office Groove.  You can get more information from the LiveSide blog post on SharedView.

Microsoft Points

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A micropayment system with ties into Xbox Live and Zune which allows people to buy small things online and not have to hand over their credit card details etc.  Again Liveside has loads more info here.

Linked Live IDs

If you're like me you might have more than one Live ID - I know don't ask!!! One of the nice additions to the account.live.com is the ability to link multiple Live IDs together so that you can easily log out of one account and in to another. 

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