Blogger and Blog*Spot will be unavailable Friday J…
Update (4:12PM): The maintenance is over and lasted for about 3 minutes.
What time is it? Beta time
If you are up for some Messenger beta testing beta' read the rest of this post
If you aren't up for beta testing beta' check back next time
Important Details:
What's new:
I have listed what's new in order of appearance...
Windows XP SP2
OK OK I know Windows XP SP2 is definitely not new (in fact it is almost 3 years old), what is new is that Messenger 8.5 Beta1 has bumped up the minimum OS requirement from Windows XP SP1 to Windows XP SP2.
If you are still running Windows XP SP1 I am absolutely shocked and you can:
Get SP2 here OR
Better yet you can get Vista here
Setup - the look
The next thing (or probably the first thing) you will notice is Messenger Setup looks different than previous Messenger releases. However it is the now same as the new setup experience for WL Mail and WL Writer
Some before and after glamour shots of setup:
Setup - the desktop short cut
During Messenger setup you may notice that you are not prompted to create a desktop shortcut for Messenger. If you have an desktop shortcut from a previous release it will continue to work. Let us know what you think about this change here.
Setup - the start menu short cuts
After setup you will notice that the start menu short cuts are included in a Windows Live folder so you can easily find all your Windows Live clients. If you had Messenger installed previously your other start menu short cut will still appear.
Setup - Microsoft Update
If you read through the setup screens carefully you will notice that updates are going to be published through Microsoft Update - affectionately known in the office as MU pronounced "moo". Meetings about this are entertaining - we sound like a bunch of cows chatting it up - moo this, moo that, etc. Any moo, during the beta we will be testing this out with your help of course. Stay moo-ned I mean tuned
Sign-in - the look
Right after setup of course you need to sign-in. A picture is worth a 1000 words (according to someone) so I will let the picture do the talking here. This reminds me of those games in a magazine where you are supposed to spot all the differences. Can you find them all
Menus - the look and feel
After installing a Beta the first thing you might do is look through the menus to see what has changed... for this Beta the menus haven't changed but you will get to them in a different way.
Contact Window - the look
After you sign-in you will likely want to find someone to IM with. For this example I am looking for my dad - Dan.
Conversation Window - the look and a little feel
Now on to IMing, you will notice the typing indicator and "Last message received.." information has moved. After you have used if for a bit, let us know what you think by voting in the poll (note if you are reading this in an RSS reader - click here to see the poll). We collect feedback in multiple ways - the poll is an unscientific but fun method so you may not see changes based on it. If you are really passionate about it head on over here to provide detailed feedback.
New Emoticon - the bunny
While you are IMing you will likely want to send an emoticon or 2 or 100
I would like to introduce you to the bunny emoticon ('.') ....
OK so you are thinking if we like moo-ing so much why did we add a bunny instead of a cow. Stay tuned.. the mystery will be solved in an upcoming post
<Nicole laughs as she adds a cliff hanger - not as good as the Lost ones but still>
What else is new around Windows Live:
Windows Live Writer
Most of the MessengerSays posts are created through Windows Live Writer including this one. If you haven't used Writer yet let me tell you it really rocks! Here are some of my favorite things about it:
Windows Live Writer has also released a new Beta today! Important details:
Windows Live Mail
You can also use Windows Live Mail to check and organize all of your email. I use it for all of my newsgroup activity as well. If you haven't used Mail yet let me tell you it rocks! Here are some of my favorite things about it:
Windows Live Mail has also released a new Beta today! Important details:
----
If you have a comment on this post please comment! For other questions/concerns/discussion topics/rants/raves/etc - please head over to the Windows Live Messenger Newsgroup.

We are VERY HAPPY to announce that you can once again see your Windows Live Hotmail using the Live.com mail gadget. You can add the gadget back to your page by clicking here.
Remember, you must be a Windows Live Hotmail user to see your mail - be sure to upgrade if you haven't already!
Thanks everyone for your patience. Please let us know if you're seeing any issues.
We are VERY HAPPY to announce that you can once again see your Windows Live Hotmail using the Live.com mail gadget. You can add the gadget back to your page by clicking here.
Remember, you must be a Windows Live Hotmail user to see your mail - be sure to upgrade if you haven't already!
Thanks everyone for your patience. Please let us know if you're seeing any issues.
I would like to share with you my thoughts on how user reviews can improve site search on an ecommerce site. We are seeing an increasing number of our customers allowing their visitors to write reviews and rate their products. Many are using our partners, PowerReviews or BaazarVoice to do this. On a personal level, I can see why this trend is happening; I feel more comfortable buying a product if I can read reviews first. By offering reviews on an ecommerce site it means the prospective customer doesn't have to go somewhere else to get these. Having reviews on a site should increase conversion rates.
The additional information collected from these reviews and ratings can be used to enhance site search in the following ways:

User reviews empower people by allowing them to express themselves and influence the choices of others. This fits nicely with SLI's Learning search which uses peoples selection from search results to improve the relevance for others. Together user reviews and site search are a nice complement.
In the last few weeks, we have got some questions about how to display the IE7 Feed View in RTL (Right-To-Left) reading order, which is used by several languages.
The good news: we do have support for RTL.
IE decides whether to show a feed in RTL reading order based on one of three things:
If you are a publisher of an RSS Feed, here is what you need to do to make it show correctly.
IE‘s Feed View is looking for the RSS 2.0 language element (e.g. <language>en-us</language>), or the XML xml:lang attribute for Atom 1.0 feeds (<feed xml:lang="en">) to determine which direction the feed page should have.
If the language the publisher indicates is known to be displayed RTL by default, IE will automatically switch the ordering. In this examples above (en is "English"), the feed will display as LTR (Left-To-Right). Conversely, if the language element is set to Arabic (<language>ar-SA</language> or just <language>ar</language> for RSS 2.0) the feed will be displayed in RTL (Right-To-Left) order.
Here is what the header of the feed should look like. The value of the language element should be changed to any of the values shown below, depending on the language of the content you are trying to display.
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<rss version="2.0"><channel>
<title>BBC Arabic News | الصفحة الرئيسية</title>
<link>http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/rss/-/hi/arabic/news/default.stm</link>
<language>ar</language>
...
(You can see this feed live in IE here to see what RTL feeds look like).
Atom 1.0 header should look like this:
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<feed xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom" xml:lang="ar">
The following languages will be displayed as RTL by default:
Please note: the language value must be in lowercase (e.g. ar-SA, he-IL, ur-PK, etc.). The second part of the value (which typically indicates the region), is not used in any way by IE's feed view, and may be omitted.
When the language tag is not included by the publisher, the default IE language is used. For example, if you’re using an English version of IE, then all feeds without the language element are treated as LTR. If you’re using a Hebrew version of IE, then a feed without the language element is treated as RTL.
Finally, there are times when the feed’s language is different from the default language, and the feed language element is not set by the publisher. In this case, you can manually change the layout to RTL or LTR using the Page menu, encoding-> Right-to-Left Document: or via right-clicking directly on the page itself. See image below:
Hope this helps,
Nick Achmon,
Software Development Engineer in Test
