From the Microsoft Live SkyDrive team blog...

Our next update

People are taking more photos than ever—50 billion in 2007—we figured you could use a little more storage space. How much? You told us you liked the last fivefold increase, so we're doing it again, bringing the grand total to 25 GB of free online storage.

Nice!

A lot of people are not happy with the new Hotmail look. So, the Windows Live team created this Q&A blog entry to address the issues people have been bring up.

Update on the new Hotmail

Personally, I use Hotmail so infrequently (I check it a couple of times a week), the changes haven't really bothered me (yet).

Microsoft is shutting down MSN Groups on Feb. 21, 2009. However, unlike Google's somewhat abrupt shutdown of JotSpot Family Sites, Microsoft is giving us a lot of lead time. And, while Google provides no migration tools for JotSpot Family Site users, Microsoft is providing two migration paths for MSN Groups users.

So, a big thanks to Microsoft for not only providing the MSN Groups service for free for many years (I've been using it since 2001), but also for giving your users (me) a lot of time to prepare and for providing two migration paths.

JotSpot Family Site is a customized version of the JotSpot Wiki that Google bought a couple of years ago. JotSpot itself became the Wikik engine underlying Google Sites. But, JotSpot Family Site disappears on Dec. 1, 2008 with no migration option from Google. And, it doesn't have any data export tools to export contact lists, family trees, photos, etc.

I set one up about 18 months ago for my family and it was a great tool. It doesn't require any technical knowledge to use. It has a great default layout that makes sense to families and other groups.

I updated the Google Chrome browser on my Asus Eee PC 1000H netbook the other day. It looks like the multitouch feature on the Asus Eee PC 1000H does not work with it. Multitouch works fine with IE7 and Firefox 3 on the same netbook.

Zoho Docs brings together Zoho's web office apps in the way Google Docs does for its apps. It brings together documents created by Zoho Writer, Sheet, and Show (word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation) into a single file management scheme. This makes a lot of sense. I often wondered why they did not already do this when I first started using Zoho's web office components.

The Google Apps Blog announced that the Google Calendar can now export your calendar to .ICS files. I tested it with my calendar. It created a ZIP file containing separate .ICS files for each calendar set in my account. Nice...

Security researcher Dan Kaminsky made a simple web-based DNS Checker for you to use to check if your Internet Service Provider (ISP) has patched the DNS server flaw you've probably been reading about on various news sites. You can it on his website/blog at:

DoxPara Research

You can learn more about the DNS flaw and DNS in general on one of my must-listen-to podcasts: Security Now episode 155.

There's only so much TV time for the Olympics and many many simultaneous events for broadcasters to choose from. So, naturally, they choose either the popular events or events with an athlete with a special audience drawing power. So, what do you do if the sport you are interested in is not popular this Olympics? If you are in the US (not sure it is available outside the US), head over to...

NBCOlympics.com

Google's satellite partners were able to get images of Beijing through its haze and smog (or clouds as they call it). Here's the blog entry and a link to their map of what appears to be the main stadium.

Olympic imagery update

Google Map of Beijing Olympic stadium

Yahoo! finally got around to redesigning and renaming del.icio.us after buying it way back in December 2005. The new name is the much easier to remember...

delicious.com

Yahoo also redesigned the site to be faster and added a few features (like sorting book marks alphabetically). You can read more about the redesign on the Delicious blog.

Went over to FeedBurner to get a sense if Google still hates this site (not referring to it in search queries). The message above is what I get after I login and try to look at my feed stats. Looks like FeedBurner is broken.

The new Microsoft Live Search has a couple of interesting new tweaks when search for pictures of video. If you hover over an image's thumbnail, it expands slightly and provides text information about its size and location. Hovering over a video thumbnail actually plays the video in the thumbnail area.

Generally speaking, this site has a small but steadily growing number of people who visit. If you believe sites like Compete.com (and I'm not sure I do), unique vistors are up about 700% over the past 12 months. I'm guessing this means that 14 people visited compared to 2 last year :-)

Google announced that their Knol project...

knol.google.com
Knol is open to everyone

I'm taking a look at Gmail's new My Contacts feature that should bring some much needed order to contacts lists that have grown with each new email that arrived in my Gmail inbox. I wonder if this is more of a preparation for Android phones vs. fixing Gmail though. I fiddled around with adding contact information and it looks like it is really prepping to be phone-ready.

Twitter (the web service we have a love-hate relationship with) bought Summize and renamed it...

Twitter Search (makes sense)

Twitter has become its own information eco-system and it makes sense to integrate Summize as it search tool.

I wrote a blog item over on the O'Reilly Inside Port 25 site titled: Do We Need an Open Source Friendly Visual Studio Express? I had not tried the latest free Microsoft Visual Studio Express Edition(s). So, I went over to...

Microsoft Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Edition