posted by Aaron

We here at Windows Live love to create software that makes keeping in touch with your personal community fun and exciting. If you love to chat on Windows Live Messenger, use Windows Live Writer to post to your Windows Live Spaces page and post photos from Windows Live Photo Gallery then we have just the community for you.

We are looking for people to share their stories, tips or tricks, or product reviews of Windows Live with others. We’ll show the world what amazing things you can do with Windows Live.

You can start by taking this quick survey so we know where to get you plugged in.

Thanks for being part of our Windows Live community!

  posted by Dharmesh

Greetings Messenger fans –

As some of you noticed, we had a problem from Friday night to Saturday morning where our Messenger service was incorrectly blocking some legitimate IP addresses.  We sincerely apologize for any difficulties this caused our users.  And we want to thank those of you that reported this problem to us so that we could quickly fix it.  Because of your help, the incorrect block was only in place for a few hours. 

As you can imagine, we are very serious about our efforts to block virus, malware and other harmful URLs from being passed on to our users.  And we're continually working to improve this process so that we can keep our users safe without having a negative impact on your Messenger service.

There have been some pretty outlandish speculations on what happened so I'd like to give you some facts about our process for trying to block unsafe URLs and about what happened Friday night:

• There are a number of factors that can be used to determine whether a URL is potentially harmful: number of times a URL is sent, the frequency of the URL being sent, the number of accounts the URL is sent from, manually checking the URL, comparing with other "block lists", etc.
• When a URL is deemed harmful, a block can be instated for a specific URL (i.e. www.<domain>.com/<page>) or an entire domain (i.e. *.<domain>.com)
• This entire process for Messenger is managed by a 3rd party that is a Microsoft partner
• On Friday, Microsoft did not request to block any of the URLs that were accidentally blocked
• The blocks were made by our partner as a result of their process to block harmful URLs
• We are still investigating the specific reason our partner made these incorrect blocks and we will work with them to improve their process for detecting harmful URLs while not blocking safe ones

As always, we're open to feedback on how to make Messenger an even greater service.  And again, our apologies to the users that were impacted by this.

  posted by Dharmesh

Greetings Messenger fans –

I have a great follow-up to the recent news about an incredibly successful first year for the i’m Initiative. Windows Live Hotmail announced today that they are joining in on the i’m Initiative started with Windows Live Messenger.  This means that now you can use either Messenger or Hotmail (or both) and help raise money for the cause of your choice.  Check out Hotmail’s blog for the details. 

This means that for all you passionate i’m participants out there, now’s the time to double down and start having your email use help make a difference like it has with Messenger. 

New to ?  Then go to http://im.live.com to learn more.