According to Paul Thurrott from WinSupersite:

The three new Metro-style apps that Microsoft is providing in this release include News, Sports, and Travel… suffice to say that these new apps are nothing special. They look and work exactly like the Finance app, providing what are essentially beautiful frontends to RSS feeds from trusted sources.

And indeed, these new apps are quite beautiful, and greatly resembles the other Metro style apps from the Bing team such as Weather and Finance. WithinWindows managed to post some screenshots of the News app, showing just how beautiful it is:

According to WithinWindows, the News app features multiple sections, including Bing Daily (as shown above), My News, Trends, and Sources, which lets you pick between the many information sources used by the app. Unfortunately, this is no RSS app and won’t allow you to pick your own sources:

It’d be interesting to see what the other two apps look like, but rest assured that it’ll probably look just as good. Let’s hope their functionality could match its beauty.

Since then, with the introduction of Windows Live Wave 4, Microsoft improved upon these “web activities”, and created what they called “connected services”. These are limited to a few social networks only, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and MySpace. Whilst “web activities” only pulled the user’s own content on these networks and fanned them out to other Windows Live users, “connected services” allowed users to pull in all their contacts from these social networks into Windows Live, and view their friend’s social updates all in one place – Messenger Social. Contacts from different networks are automatically de-duplicated, so you can learn about all of your contact’s updates across the web all in one place. This formed the basis behind Windows Phone’s “Putting People First” experience, and soon also Windows 8’s People experience.

Microsoft has realised the potential of the newer “connected services” experience, and realised that instead of creating another social network, users preferred simply “connecting” their social networks to Windows Live (or Windows Phone), without having to manage yet another Profile. As such, Microsoft has recently made some changes to its Messenger Social and Windows Live Profile services, re-focussing the purpose of these services. These changes include:

• Discontinuing “web activities”, which simply shared updates to other Messenger friends, while retaining and continuously improving the “connected services” (such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google, and more). Users are now presented with the following message:

  

  In fact, Microsoft has already removed all the “web activities” from Windows Live Profile’s Services page. All you see left is the below services, which gives you a good indication of which services will be improved upon in the near future (i.e. YouTube/Google, Sina Weibo):

  

• Removing unnecessary profile information such as “Favorite things”, General profile info, Education info, and Social info, whilst retaining core contact information. Users visiting the Favorite things page are now greeted with the following message:

  

What do you think about this move by Microsoft? Do you think they’re doing the right thing with this refocus of Messenger Social? Let us know in the comments below.

• We’ve shortened our regular URLs by 40%. Our previous URLs didn’t even fit inside a Tweet! Oh the shame!

  

• You can shorten them even further thanks to our new partnership with bitly and the new domain for shortened SkyDrive URLs: http://sdrv.ms

  

• We’ve added OpenGraph support to our URLs so that when you paste them into places like Facebook, a nice thumbnail preview gets generated

  

• Since bitly powers the shortener, you also get great power features. For example, you can add a ‘+’ to the end of any short URL to see statistics. You can also generate a QR code for that URL by appending ’.qrcode’ to that URL.

  

It’s great to see that Microsoft is constantly adding new features to SkyDrive, and is listening to customer’s feedback on what areas to improve on. Here we’re hoping Microsoft is busy working on the next update, and as part of it SkyDrive will address some of the suggestions that we, and many of our readers, made.

Thanks to a tip from Robin van Veghel, users are now receiving a notification from the Windows Live team indicating that the SMS alerts feature will be discontinued on May 31st. See the contents of the notification email below:

Dear Windows Live customer,

We’re contacting you because we are making a change to the Windows Live alerts feature for Microsoft Hotmail, Microsoft SkyDrive and Windows Live Messenger.

You might be using the alerts feature to have text messages sent to your phone when a new mail, Messenger social or SkyDrive comment arrives. The Windows Live mobile alert feature is being discontinued as of May 31st. This means you will not receive text messages on your phone when a new mail, Messenger social or SkyDrive comment arrives.

Please remember Hotmail, Messenger and SkyDrive may be accessed directly from your phone or phone’s web browser. For more info, see Get mail on your phone, Get Messenger on your phone, and Get SkyDrive on your phone.

We remain focused on making Hotmail, Messenger, SkyDrive and your Windows PC the best that they can be. Note that this change has no impact on your ability to access Hotmail, Messenger, and Skydrive.

Thanks for your understanding and patience as we update our services.

Sincerely,
The Windows Live Team

It makes sense for Microsoft to discontinue the SMS mobile alerts, given their focus is now on creating mobile apps for the iOS, Android, and Windows Phone platform. And for those without a smartphone, mobile browser version of Hotmail, SkyDrive, and Messenger social is also available (as long as you have a data plan and a mobile browser).

This didn’t go over too well with a number of developers of hobbyist-type applications, including Long Zheng of istartedsomething.com and the developer of an app experiment called “Real Live Search”.  Long posted his frustrations on his blog, asking:

For a company that has a reputation for embracing and supporting developers like no other, the changes Bing has and will be rolling out for its developer program is pretty much a slap to the face. And for what? Just a few bucks here and there from hobbyist developers?

Well today, in a Bing Search blog post, Microsoft has announced that not only are the APIs officially available via the Azure Marketplace, they’ve changed their pricing strategy, offering a free tier:

• For up to 5,000 queries per month, developers can access the API for free on the Windows Azure Marketplace. At this level, the large majority of our existing developers – including non-profits, educational institutions, and smaller scale applications– can continue using the service for free.
• For greater than 5,000 queries per month, developers can purchase a subscription on the Windows Azure Marketplace. Developers interested in using only web results can also sign up for a lower cost offering.

In addition, for a limited time, all Bing Search API subscriptions for any tier are available for free, to help in the transition process”.

• Photos – Besides the new home screen, the updated version will also allow you to access photos and videos stored PCs that you’ve connected through the SkyDrive app. In addition, the app will also allow you to quickly import photos and videos from a camera.
• Mail – As revealed previously, the new Mail app will feature a new teal accent color (instead of green). Attachments can also now be added to new messages without selecting the body of the message first. The Mail app will also support notifications, much like how the Messaging app’s notification works in the Consumer Preview.
• Calendar – The Calendar also gets a new purple accent color (instead of green). The new Calendar app will also now allow the ability to turn on or off individual calendars, as well as customise a specific color for each calendar, much like it’s Windows Phone counterpart. The Calendar will also support Windows 8’s notification system.
• People – The People app retains its orange accent color from Consumer Preview, however as mentioned previously, its Live Tile is actually “live” now showing a grid of contact’s display pictures much like its Windows Phone counterpart.Perhaps one of the most-improved app out of the ones listed here, the updated People app’s What’s New module will also feature an improved layout for easier navigation. A highly requested feature – Contact linking – will also be available, allowing you to link contacts if they are not already automatically de-duplicated (possibly due to having different names on different social networks). Furthermore, the People app also now supports the Share contract, allowing you to share information through supported social networking services.
• Messaging – The Messaging also gets a new magenta accent color (instead of purple). Not much is revealed, except the fact that the app now supports offline messages to both Facebook Chat and Messenger contacts. There’s no mention of file transfer support, or audio/video conversations.

We expect changes coming to other bundled apps too, such as Music, Video, Xbox LIVE Games, and more. Paul Thurrott also mentioned that there will be new bundled Metro-style apps coming in the Release Preview too, in addition to Weather, Finance, and Maps. We understand one of these will be the News app as revealed in previous screenshots. With only 3 weeks to go, we can’t wait to see what else is in store. What other improvements would you like to see before the final version ships? Let us know in the comments below.

As you can see the new Microsoft account website features a much cleaner look, with a slim Metro-style header on the top, as well as navigation items on the left bar. Elements such as text boxes and buttons have also been optimised for touch, and is consistent with Windows 8’s Metro design elements. The navigation has also been re-categorised into five sections:

• Overview – where you can edit your name, email address, personal information, password, security info, or close your account
• Profile – brings you to your profile page at http://profile.live.com
• Notifications – allows you to manage email preferences and marketing preferences
• Permissions – manage your linked accounts, parental permissions, and connect your Microsoft account to other services and accounts (such as Facebook, Twitter…etc.)
• Billing – brings you to your billing page at http://billing.microsoft.com

We understand that the new Metro-styled theme will be applied across all existing Windows Live web services, including Hotmail and SkyDrive. As shown in the screenshot above, the Windows Live branding will be removed from the header. Each service will also have its own unique accent color, for example, SkyDrive’s will have a blue color theme consistent with its Windows 8 app’s Live Tile. You can still navigate between the various web services by pulling down the header navigation menu, as shown below:

The new header is also expected to have web IM integrated, much like the current Windows Live web services. We’re not sure exactly when the new Metro-styled web services will roll out, but in the mean time stay tuned to LiveSide as we’ll have more news coming for the next version of Hotmail, SkyDrive, and other (ex)-Windows Live services.

However, we noticed that the Photos app entry included several updated screenshots, showing a new home screen as shown below:

The new home screen now features a panoramic background photo, similar to Windows Phone’s Pictures hub, which we believe will be customisable and can be rotated based on your Pictures library. We believe this will also be reflected on the Live Tile for the new Photos app, giving the tile a much more refreshed look.

We also noticed that the Photos app now has a thumbnails view, something we think is missing in the Consumer Preview (edit: thanks to LiveSide reader doctorwhofan98‘s comments, thumbnails view is in the Consumer Preview):

This brings the app closer in line with how SkyDrive displays your photo albums on the web interface, and allows users a much easier view to see all their photos at a glance.

The updated apps are currently under internal testing, and is not available on the Consumer Preview. However, we expect the apps will be made available alongside Windows 8 Release Preview, announced to be coming in the first week of June. It’ll be interesting to see what other improvements Microsoft has made to these apps. Stay tuned!

However, even if you’ve opted in, you’ll only get the social sidebar (and that only after logging in to Facebook on Bing.com and/or connecting social services such as Twitter to your Windows Live ID), as the Snapshot feature is not yet live.  It is currently being tested on a small subset of users, according to a Microsoft spokesperson (so if you’re seeing it, consider yourself lucky!).  It should be available soon, however.  The press release announced that the new Bing will be “rolling out over the coming weeks and broadly available in the U.S. in early June”, so it shouldn’t be long before we see Snapshot results, although they won’t appear for every search:

Initially, snapshot will be displayed for searches where Bing can determine a clear customer intent focused on accomplishing a specific task including restaurants, hotels, businesses and movies. Over time, the feature will be expanded to a greater number of places, things and people. “The technology we built on the back-end can scale incredibly well so we’re particularly pleased,” says Connell.

In addition, Microsoft is making full use of its new tagline for Bing, “Bing is for doing”.  The new slogan, revealed back in January, is all over the new marketing materials for Bing, including a new video just posted today that shows scenes from the Search Summit and ends with Qi Lu saying that Bing can enable users to “Do More, Know More, and Be More”, and we’re sure we’ll be hearing that line more, too.

Compete has Google increasing its share (for the first time since December, 2011), up to 65.9% in April 2012 from March’s 65.5%.  It shows Bing at 18.3% of US market share (excluding Yahoo!’s numbers), numbers that have risen steadily since October of 2011.  Yahoo!, which Compete has tracked as gaining slightly over the past 3 months, dropped 0.7ppts from March to April, according to a Compete press release.

Meanwhile, comScore shows a similar gain for Bing and Google (with slightly different numbers, placing Google at 66.5% US search market share for April 2012, and Bing at 15.4%), and a similar decline for Yahoo!.

What may be a bit lost in focusing on the market share numbers is that total searches have not been gaining, and in fact according to comScore are down 7% over the past month, possibly an indication that users are spending more time searching (or just using apps to find what they need) on mobile devices and less on desktop browser searches.

So what does it all mean for Bing?  Certainly at 15% or 18% share, depending on who you believe, Bing has made strides from where it was when it changed names from Live Search, where it stood at some 9% share.  Unfortunately, most if not all of this gain in share has come at the expense of Yahoo!, while Google has remained stable (although perhaps not gaining as much as it may have without a serious competitor).

Bing’s most recent update, making Bing even more social by furthering its connection with the likes of Facebook and Twitter, may help to popularize the #2 player in search, but what would really help Bing is to increase its position as the search engine for Facebook, in addition to Facebook as the social element of Bing.  While Bing and Facebook continue to work closely together, we’ve heard nothing recently about either an increased Bing presence on Facebook, or a launch by Facebook of its own search engine, something that has been rumored in the past.

Should Facebook take on Bing as its search engine?  Will it?  Or will Bing’s continued socializing via Facebook, Twitter, and others be enough to gain share on Google (who are trying to do the same thing with Google +)?