One of the exciting new features of Windows Live is the idea of a building a network of your friends and family.  But this new network has also caused some confusion on how it relates to your messenger contacts and the contacts you have in Hotmail.  Here are two recent posts from the Windows Live Community that help clarify things:

• Your Windows Live network explained by Jamie 
• Windows Live…..Sorting People on your Network by Technogran

LiveSide.net has a good post explaining the network concept as well.

With that understanding of what your network is all about, how do you start finding and adding new people to your network? 

One place to start is with our Windows Live Community members who are sharing their expertise with posts on http://www.windowslive.com/explore.  Since we can only highlight a percentage of the total community posts on our website, you might want to add some of our community members to your network so you’ll see all the new things they post.  I put together the brief video below to walk through the process of finding and adding someone from the community to your network.

Find and Add People to Your Windows Live Network:

I try to make sure all the community members are in my network so I can see all the great things they are blogging about.  Some of the community members use other web activities like Twitter and Flickr and if they’ve added those to their Windows Live Profile, I can see those too.  It really makes it easy to stay up-to-date with people that are in the know.

I hope you enjoy building your network in 2009.  Happy New Year!

- Marcus, Windows Live Community manager

When you have a question about something, it’s always reassuring to be able to ask experts for help.  And when it comes to questions about Windows Vista, there’s a new place to find those people, look for answers, and if you don’t find the answer you need, pose your question to the community.  Appropriately enough, this new place is called Microsoft Answers. 

Speaking only for myself, I hope this is the future of customer support for not only Windows Vista but other products as well.  Especially when it comes to consumers like you and me, the simple idea of people asking and answering questions is so much more effective than searching through KB articles and other arcane support resources.

Members of the Windows Live Community know how beneficial and rewarding it is to share their knowledge and expertise with each other and with people new to Windows Live.  Now this same community approach is moving to Windows Vista and Microsoft Answers is just the beginning.

- Marcus, Windows Live Community manager

For this latest installment of my Windows Live podcast series, I connected with Vasudev, a gold-level member of our Windows Live Community.  We’ve been meaning to record the podcast for a while, but the technical challenges of configuring a Live Meeting with computer audio and recording that audio proved a little daunting.  But we prevailed over the technical gremlins and were able to have a great conversation.  Vasudev told me a bit more about how he uses technology, how he is involved in various Microsoft communities, and even what some of his hobbies are.  I confess I might never understand Cricket, but now I know someone I can turn to for education.

You can download this specific podcast in the format you prefer using the links below:

• Conversation with Vasudev (WMA format)
• Conversation with Vasudev (MP3 format)

Or subscribe to my whole podcast series using these links:

• Windows Live Podcast Series (WMA format)
• Windows Live Podcast Series (MP3 format)

It was great talking with Vasudev, and I look forward to meeting him in person some day.

- Marcus, Windows Live Community Manager

When we released the first beta of Windows Live Messenger 2009, I blogged about the "signature sound" feature that I thought was so cool.  Well, I think it must have been a little annoying to some people and/or they couldn’t figure out how to disable it, so this latest beta refresh has changed that feature around a bit.

Now, instead of assigning a signature sound to yourself, you assign it to your contacts and you pick what you want to hear.  It’s simple, just right click on a contact, and select Choose sounds for this contact:

Then you have the added choice of picking sounds for both when your contact signs in, and when they send you a message.  I’ve collapsed both lists of sounds here to show them, but you can just click the highlighted buttons to expand the lists:

The feature has changed around a bit, but I still think it’s cool.  What do you think?  Please leave me a comment.

Now to start picking sounds for all those folks on my contact list…

- Marcus, Windows Live Community Manager

Brandon LeBlanc just posted a great blog entry about three new plug-ins for Windows Live Writer:

• Digg This
• Twitter Notify
• Flickr Upload

Check ‘em out and please let me know what you think!

- Marcus, Windows Live Community Manager

In case you missed it, our friends over at Windows Live Wire have announced a refresh of Windows Live Essentials, the suite of downloadable programs for your Windows PC.  Please give it a try and let me know what you think by leaving a comment.

- Marcus, Windows Live Community manager

Several of our community members have been responding to our latest challenge about using Windows Live for the holidays.  I thought I better get my contribution added to the list as well, at it all centers around a coffee cake.

Several years ago we had this great coffee cake when visiting some friends.  I asked for the recipe and they graciously made me a photo copy of it.  Now fast-forward to today.  As my wife and I prepare to go “home for the holidays”, I wanted to share this recipe with my in-laws and make it for them while we’re at their house.

Now I could just fold up the recipe and take it with me.  But being a geeky guy, I thought of another solution.  I’ll use Windows Live Photo Gallery to scan in the copy, fix it up, and then post it to SkyDrive so I can download it and print it when I’m at my in-law’s place.  As I was doing this I found a few tidbits about Windows Live that came in handy.

First, Photo Gallery isn’t just for photos.  I used the File, Import… command to get the recipe scanned in:

Second, I used the Crop and Straighten features of Photo Gallery to fix up my sloppy scanning:

And finally, I used the Publish menu to put this into a new album on Windows Live Spaces.  With this new release of Windows Live, albums are now stored on SkyDrive:

I can download it now from anywhere in the world and start baking the cake, providing I have all the ingredients.  Actually, now that I think about it, my mother-in-law can look at it ahead of time to make sure we have everything on hand.

I’ve put this in a public SkyDrive folder, so if you’re looking for something to bake for your holiday celebrations, just click here.

Wishing you a most happy holiday season,

- Marcus

P.S.  Let me know if you like the cake!

At the outset, I have to confess that I’m not sure if this is a new feature in Windows Live Writer or not.  But it’s new to me as I just discovered it.  Did you know you can enable a real-time word count display in the status bar of Writer?  It’s handy when you’re authoring posts and want to keep them under a certain length.

Turning it on is easy, just click on the Tools menu, then Options…, and then click Editing in the options window.  Check the word count checkbox:

Then you’ll see the count at the bottom of the screen:

There are lots of other cool options in Writer.  What have you found?

- Marcus, Windows Live Community Manager

Windows Live Tags: how-to,clubhouse,Writer,word count,length