Microsoft is working hard on expanding its messaging service beyond the desktop and its online properties. For that it also came up with few interesting projects such as “Messenger Web Toolkit, then Windows Live Messenger was made accessible to third-party developers for further integration. And then Window Live Wave 4 is taking the Messenger across the web to a new level. Now the Redmond Company has announced Messenger Connect that will deliver a new method for both partners and developers to connect with Messenger across the web.

Ori Amiga, principal program manager partner program for Windows Live, wrote

Messenger Connect allows web, Windows and mobile app developers to create compelling social experiences on their websites and apps by providing them with social promotion and distribution via Messenger

Amiga adds that Messenger Connect is particularly designed to centralize a few dissimilar Microsoft efforts. Instead of leveraging resources like Windows Live ID, Contacts API, Messenger Web Toolkit, etc., individually, developers would now have a chance to take advantage of a single application programming interface so as to incorporate Messenger into their websites, blogs etc. Amiga further explains that the new API is not only based on the company’s own development resources that let the IM client to be offered as a part of third-party online experiences, but that it also embraces a number of industry standards and specifications such as OAuth WRAP, ActivityStrea.ms, and PortableContacts.

We’re in the process of broadening the distribution of our new experiences. Messenger Connect is currently being opened to a small number of leading companies that are helping to provide us with feedback and final revisions. You can look for more news about our new developer portal opening up more broadly in the coming months,” Amiga explained.

Google has acquired lots these days and most recent is “DocVerse”, through which it will offer cloud-based collaboration options to MS Office users. According to Google, this will help making Google Docs more interoperable, particularly with desktop software like Office. Although it is unsaid, Google visibly hope that it plans to drive more people from the usual tools offered by Microsoft to the web-based tools offered by Google.

Jonathan Rochelle, group product manager, Google Apps team wrote -

Today we’re excited to announce another step towards seamless interoperability: we have acquired DocVerse.

DocVerse is a small, nimble team of talented developers who share our vision, and they’ve enabled true collaboration right within Microsoft Office. With DocVerse, people can begin to experience some of the benefits of web-based collaboration using the traditional Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint desktop applications.he adds

This acquisition will prove healthy for Google Docs, but for now it will be a trouble for existing DocVerse users. Google said that it won’t close down the service right away. Current DocVerse users can keep using the product as usual, though we’ve suspended new sign-ups until we’re ready to share what’s next. Now Microsoft needs to be alert and come up with something interesting to keep hold of their users.

Opera 10 was nominated as the Best Major Desktop Browser category in the Reader’s Choice Awards Winner conducted by the well-known About.com at the start of the year 2010. In this reader’s choice, readers were asked to nominate their favorite browsers and browser-related software in various categories including Best Major Desktop Browser, Best Mobile Browser, Best Overall Add-On (Non Security), Best Privacy/Security Add-On, Best Independent Browser, Best Browser Theme, and Best User Script.

About.com stated -

As expected, the Best Major Desktop Browser category turned out to be our most active; racking up over 25,000 votes. The winner may surprise a few people, as it doesn’t boast a lion’s share of the browser market. However, it does offer a fast and powerful browser which explains the exuberance of its followers.

This year’s winner got off to a quick start as the voting period commenced, and held on throughout the weeks despite a formidable push from Firefox Nation. The people have spoken, and Opera 10.x is the winner of this year’s Best Major Desktop Browser category!

Final Voting Totals

• Opera 10.x – 51% (13,234 votes)
• Firefox 3.5/3.6 – 41% (10,710 votes)
• Chrome – 4% (1,266 votes)
• Internet Explorer 8 – 1% (447 votes)
• Safari 4.x – 0% (234 votes)

Even more surprising is that Microsoft is drastically losing its market. IE 8 with 1% votes is quite a bad number especially for the desktop browser as it released the more web standards friendly Internet Explorer 8, approximately a year ago. Well, congratulations to Opera 10!

Honeytechblog has always been a fan of open source projects and of late Microsoft has designed an open source project to make it simpler for developers to pull the company’s development platform and tools. All-In-One Code Framework is available for free via CodePlex and is an exciting collection of resources, effectively code samples of Microsoft development technologies accompanied by the required documentation demonstrated the way giant work. The All-In-One Code Framework is obtainable under the Microsoft Public License (Ms-PL), which is an open source license.

Microsoft’s open source community spokesperson wrote -

The All-In-One Code Framework, which is licensed under the OSI-approved MS-PL, delineates the framework and skeleton of almost all Microsoft development techniques through typical sample codes in three popular programming languages:Visual C#, VB.NET, Visual C++. Each sample is selected, composed, and documented to demonstrate a coding scenario that is frequently-asked for, tested, or used, based on the community team’s customer support experience in MSDN newsgroups and forums.

By now the team has collected over 300 sample codes that has unique features of All-In-One, Three Languages, Technology Skeleton, Sample Source, and Uniform. Company makes a promise that developers would certainly find the code examples in All-In-One Code Framework not only classic but also extensible, structured, complete, and well-documented.

Many people are still not aware of the existence of My.Live.com, but it does. And there are no records of its success. So looks like Microsoft has planned discontinue this service for good. In less than two months from now, the giant Redmond Company would kill my.live.com that is from March 15^th onwards. However, the company does not give any reason or explanation as why it is killing the service. The users of my.live.com are now requested to switch to MSN.

The description given to my.live.com is – “My.live.com brings your online world together in one place, from news to photos to mail. To get started, select the pages you want to add. Next, you can add additional content or change the layout.” Personalization involved the addition of news and entertainment content, as well as gadgets.

Liveside shared the info -

Thank you for using My.live.com. On March 15, 2010, My.live.com will be discontinued and all users redirected to My MSN. Please note that your settings, feeds and gadgets will not be migrated to MyMSN.

The link to personalized page from www.live.com was however removed last month. The site is now redirected to Bing.com. For the users it might be irritating shift that too at a short notice!

Window Live Hotmail has about 350 million active users and there are 8 billion emails sent every day including mails sent by spammers. In fact, the vast majority of emails headed to Window Live accounts are spam. Out of which only 2.5 billion messages actually reach the inboxes of the users, according to Dick Carddock, Group Program Manager, Windows Live Hotmail. That simple display that Microsoft is sorting on average some 5.5 billion messages, all of which redundant emails that never make it to the 1.3 billion inboxes of the service.

Craddock at Window Live Blog wrote explaining the math –

We know (from measuring after the fact) that about 110 million messages that get delivered are spam. So, that’s a bit less than 5%: 110 million ÷ 2,500 million = 0.044, or less than 5%. We filter out all but 110 million spam messages out of 5.5 billion we receive each day, so that means we’re filtering out 98% of spam: 110 million ÷ 5,500 million = 0.002, or about 2%,”

There are different approaches to measuring spam. Our approach is to use real user data to measure how much spam gets through our system. We select a cross-section of customers who reflect the broad population of Hotmail customers in several dimensions‑such as age of account, country or region‑and invite those customers to participate in our Feedback Loop program. The participation rate in the program is high, with more than 50% of participants classifying messages every day, Craddoc added

It is clear that Hotmail is one of the biggest target of spammers, but Microsoft carry strong spam-fighting technology to keep spammers at bay.

Microsoft Co-founder Bill Gates is not new social networks, yet he just opened two new accounts at our favorite Facebook and Twitter. Although he had an account at Facebook earlier, but it was getting tough to stay connected with so many people, so he chucked it. But this time he made this decision to rejoin these social networks in order to be get connected to the relief work going on Haiti. For Bill these are the some of the top medium to encourage donation for the good cause.

The surprising thing was noticed by thenextweb – when it first saw Bill’s account it had 91 followers and now he has about 113,000+ followers and 3,430 listed in few hours with just 5 tweets made. As a quick note, Bill’s account does now bear the official “Verified” badge. And even Facebook has confirmed that the account is real.

The latest tweet of Bill says –

Thanks to you and all the other people who have welcomed me. I’ve got a lot to learn about Twitter but look forward to sharing more.

His account on Facebook is a Facebook Fan page so this time he would not feel uncomfortable working around. And we hope experiencing Twitter would help him achieve the motto to help Haiti victims.

In last couple of years, we have been hearing about Microsoft launching “Zune Phone”. But hopelessly Microsoft has been behind the mobile operating system game without being a competitor for iPhone and Nexus One. But then Microsoft claims that its mobile strategy is to offer software solution and not devices and even CEO Steve Ballmer once stated at McGraw-Hill media conference- “With Windows Mobile, we want to permit a range of hardware innovation, and yet, still have a pretty good experience end-to-end, with good applications, and we want the ability for software developers to target both a very high-end and a lower range or mid-range phone. And the ability to scale up and down, to work with multiple hardware vendors, to get a range of competition and innovation and price competition amongst the hardware guys is a big asset. It is certainly what our strategy is.”

However, Jefferies & Company analyst Katherine Egbert claims that Redmond is gearing up to launch a phone based on Windows Mobile 7.

According to allthingsd, Edbert stated -

Our recent industry checks indicate Microsoft will be debuting its own phone sometime in the next two months, “We expect the new phone to debut soon, at either the Feb 15-18 Mobile World Congress conference in Barcelona Spain, or possibly at CTIA in Las Vegas one month later.” “We don’t have any information about the cost of the Pink phone, nor do we know what service providers might be partnered with Microsoft,” she explains.

As far as hardware is concerned, Egbert thinks the Zune Phone will be a Microsoft / OEM partnership, and features a 5MP camera and 720p video support. Let’s wait and watch what Microsoft has in store for us next month.

The URL shortener ‘wars’ have quieted down lately and everyone was getting accustomed to Bit.ly’s unchallenged dominance in the space. It carries close to 80 percent market share a few months ago and still enjoying its position as the default shortener on twitter.com. These days, things are looking a bit more diversified and with a number of big players like Google and Facebook rolling out their own services, things are getting interesting again. And now Microsoft is jumping in but with URL that supposed to shorten but is longer than its own domain name Bing.

Recently My Microsoft Life noticed Microsoft Bing employee is using a new URL shortner while tweeting by name binged.it. Microsoft employee have been using the URL shortner for a while internally and expected to be public soon. But the strange thing is the URL itself, as it is longer than Bing.com, not like Google which has goo.gl or like facebook which has fb.me. However, seems like it is a great move by Microsoft and will work great for bing lovers. We hope this will be public soon!

The study announced –

For over 10 years was the Internet Explorer from Microsoft is the most widely used browser on the Internet – Firefox is now supplanted its rivals into second place. The Firefox in version 3 now has a clear edge over the version 8 of Internet Explorer. Firefox, therefore one of the most successful open-source software. He has even Browswer programme from Microsoft refers to the ranks behind him.

All versions of the open-source web browser now add up to a 45.6-percent market share just over IE’s 44.4 percent. At large, nearly 10% market share together reached the three alternatives browser Safari, Opera and Google Chrome.