Over than past few months, the Microsoft Virtual Earth team has been preparing the service for one of it’s biggest updates since the release. What’s the definition of "one of it’s biggest"? Well it’s over 48TB of new and improved imagery. Chris Pendleton, Virtual Earth technical evangelist at Microsoft, announced that the service has updated it’s global vector data for the majority of it’s tile sets.

The update includes multilingual tile sets for all zoom levels, localized tile sets for Japan, and all Bird’s Eye imagery has been updated with new road map labels. Microsoft has also added tons of new imagery data for the following countries: Albania, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Croatia, Estonia, Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Greece, Herzegovina, Hungary, Kaliningrad Oblast of Russia, Latvia, Lithuania, Mexico, Montenegro, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, and Slovenia.

Does your localized view look any different?

View: Microsoft Virtual Earth

Source: Neowin.net

Microsoft has just made the updated release candidate of the Windows Live Suite wave 3 at download.live.com. Thanks to Sean Bradford for alerting us.
Microsoft has updated the Messenger client to Version 2009 (Build 14.0.8050.1202) as can be seen below from the about Window:

There is no beta tag anywhere on this build as it’s a near final build and Messenger plus does work with this build but not all features are usable.

Overall the UI has been enhanced in most areas with minor changes. The main improvements are the integration to Windows 7 with the new jump lists feature.

The sign in has changed slightly

The Windows 7 jump lists:

The toasts that pop up when users sign in have been updated too:

The contact list and IM windows remain largely the same:

At an event in the Netherlands yesterday, Darren Huston, Corporate Vice President of COI at Microsoft, revealed that the updated Windows Live Wave 3 RC applications will be released next week.

LiveSide bloggers were on hand to get the scoop that the applications will be released next week at download.live.com. Final versions of Hotmail, Calendar and People are expected in February 2009 too.

The Messenger Wave 3 RC will include the new UI we revealed at PDC and Messenger icon, shown below.

Microsoft’s Live.com portal will change significantly this evening. No longer will it be a simple search engine with a few other services bolted on. It’s now a social network, too, pulling in activity information and content from around the web. They’re also launching Windows Live Photos and Windows Live People, and other services. Check it out at Home.Live.com.

A lot of what they’ve done is exactly what Yahoo has been talking about for over a year now - leveraging social connections that already exist (Yahoo is using email, Microsoft is using Messenger) and doing a lot more with it.

Users are automatically connected with any friends they have on Windows Live Messenger, which is by far the most popular instant messaging service worldwide (Comscore: Microsoft Messenger has 268 million worldwide users, compared to 116 million for Yahoo and 6 million for Google Talk).

Read more @ TechCrunch

Microsoft’s Live Search engine can provide what the company calls "instant answers" to various questions, and the company said on Wednesday it plans to expand the feature in the next month.

Current instant answers show up for some queries for encyclopedia facts, traffic, and horoscopes, according to a blog post from Live Search Product Manager Theo Vachovsky. He then offered a teaser for coming attractions: "Check this blog in a month to find out about other cool new instant answers on Live Search."

Microsoft declined to share details, but did confirm that "new instant answers features will be releasing in the next month."

Read more @ Cnet News

In July of last year, Microsoft threw its weight behind supporting the OpenID protocol. In February of this year, Microsoft joined the OpenID foundation’s board. Now, Microsoft has committed to OpenID further by announcing that Windows Live will become a OpenID provider and that you will soon be able to use your Windows Live ID account to sign in to any OpenID enabled website.

OpenID is a distributed authentication method for allowing users to securely use a single digital ID to sign into multiple websites on the Internet. AOL and Yahoo already allow users to authenticate against their AOL or Yahoo credentials on sites using OpenID. Google so far has not adopted OpenID through any supported means.

Currently Microsoft’s OpenID implementation is on their Windows Live ID Integration environment, intended for sites and software providers who provide OpenID authentication to test against the service. Your normal Windows Live ID cannot currently be used for OpenID. Microsoft does not seem to have any plans to allow the use of your OpenID to login to sites that require a Windows Live ID. Meaning you’ll still need to maintain accounts at Yahoo, AOL and Windows Live to login to services on their individual sites. However, in becoming a provider, Microsoft has taken a step in the right direction towards opening up their services.
Microsoft has given no specifics on when they plan to make OpenID authentication available on their public servers.

View: Sign-Up for Testing

Microsoft just demonstrated the latest UI for Windows Live Messenger in a Windows 7 session here at PDC.

Check out the video here:

Also, the new messenger icon:

Microsoft has gradually started rolling out the Windows Live Hotmail Wave 3 update but at some point in October every Hotmail user will have access to the new version. Part of the update are a new, clean look with themes support (not unlike the Windows Live Messenger Scenes in 9.0), a more convenient contact picker and overall faster performance.

Back in August there was some talk of bringing back WebMessenger to Hotmail, but from what we’ve seen there’s currently only the presence of Messenger Display Pictures at (see screenshot). The new About page promises more advanced Messenger integration starting early 2009:

"IM through Hotmail. See if your Messenger contacts are online and say "Hi!"

Community member Arkon was lucky enough to be one of the relatively few to have his Inbox updated to the new and much anticipated Windows Live Hotmail Wave 3 public beta, and he has much to share. Many notable changes include the integration of that spiffy “Scenes” picture that we’ve seen in messenger, the link “Manage Newsletters” that currently doesn’t work, and a new interface when selecting a contact to send an email to.

Explore the screenshots to see those features along with several others.

Sources:
http://www.mess.be/
http://www.geeksmack.net/?p=125

Microsoft has been doing a lot this week to help boost the image of the future for their Live services, along with the recently released "wave 3" of Windows Live utilities, Microsoft has sent an email out to their Live Hotmail subscribers outlining some of the changes they have planned to give a boost to the service.

Based on customer feedback, Microsoft has focused on making the next version of Live Hotmail faster, in fact they claim the next version will be nearly 70% faster when signing in, opening and viewing messages when used with a broadband connection and up to 56% faster on slower connections.

To add a new twist to the ever increasing storage-size war between Microsoft, Google and Yahoo… Microsoft has upped the ante by planning to introduce a storage system that "will grow with you" — while not mentioning specifics, they claim that as you need more storage for your messages, you’ll get it and while there will be a limit it will be "so large that chances are you won’t even come close to them."

Other new features include the ability to IM directly from the Hotmail interface, improvements to the calendaring system and a revamped UI. Rumor has it that the UI will attempt to merge some of the innovations of the latest version with the more familiar, simpler, Hotmail that layout users were used to before the last upgrade.

You can also try the older leaked here