Reading through Paul Thurrott’s SuperSite Blog last week, it appears that Microsoft announced new integration of Windows Live Hotmail and Bing. While it’s fine and dandy for the two products to work together, they announced a feature that has existed since February. Heck, they even own up to it:

We announced in February that Windows Live was piloting a new feature unique to Hotmail we’re calling “quick add.”

They went on to say that they were adding Bing integration to the “quick add” feature (the currently available options for which can be seen to your right). In reality, nothing at all changed with this feature. Don’t get me wrong, this could be a very useful thing, but every single option that is there was there yesterday, and as I recall, has been for a long while. Obviously, before June it was powered by Live Search, but as far as I know, it worked for the past month too.

Apparently, there’s not much new in the Hotmail department.

Microsoft announced today a new search initiative (and yet another brand identity) for their struggling game against Google, and unfortunately, it’s not exactly the best name. Microsoft has used too many different brandings for its search initiatives within the past decade (unlike Google and Yahoo who, well, used the same name all throughout), and besides creating confusion for people, all it does is make it harder to create those mental associations Microsoft is looking for.

Once all is said and done, Bing is a search engine which aims to present more relevant information. Since this is the perpetual, never-ending goal of search engines, I can’t actually say that Bing is something new, nor can I agree with the “decision engine” marketing term because, in the end, all search engines exist to help us make decisions. Hopefully, Bing can provide better results than Google, but that completely depends on how much time and effort Microsoft invests into Bing. Given that search was the future, Microsoft might’ve been better off finding a new disruptive technology as opposed to fighting an established goliath.

Back to the name:

Long ago, Yahoo tried to get their name woven into the fabric of public literacy. Yahoo wasn’t successful for the same reason Bing won’t be successful either: they’re both ever so slightly too hard to pronounce as a verb. Here’s a good rundown of worked and what didn’t:

• Yahoo has two syllables with weak starting consonants, of which one is the confused letter Y.  It also ends in an audible vowel which, when paired with the next word in the sentence, makes pronunciation harder. Since the next word after the term would likely have been “it,” saying “yahoo it” doesn’t properly roll off the tongue.
• Kumo (the old name for Bing) doesn’t work because it ends on a vowel and has one soft consonant in the middle, deflating the word itself. The word “Kumo” makes the person saying it feel like he’s losing enthusiasm as a result of not holding some degree of assertion through the name.
• Cuil sure as hell didn’t work because no one knew how the hell to pronounce it. (It’s pronounced “cool,” unlike the name)
• Google works because both syllables start with a solid consonant, and the word itself ends in a silent (and therefore irrelevant) vowel. Larry and Sergey got lucky with the name; they were just making a play on Googol, but the end result is the same. The name itself implies an assertive action through the use of hard consonants but succeeds in avoiding aggression because it ends in a soft consonant. The consonant ending also allows the word to easily be appended to other words during pronunciation, especially the word “it.”

Bing is a different case altogether. It’s a monosyllabic word (like Cuil, but it doesn’t look as intimidating), which means the rules change a bit. One-syllable words have the advantage of being quick to pronounce and easy to remember, which also means that the word is best starting and ending with a rather solid consonant (Digg is a good example), but there are too few permutations of letters for any cool monosyllabic words starting with a good, solid consonant to be unused in this world of Web 2.LetsNameOurWebsiteAnything. The problem is that Bing actually sounds cool and usable. Unfortunately, Bing has two drawbacks which set what would otherwise be a rather successful name up for failure:

• It sounds too much like “ping.” While this won’t be a problem for lay-users who don’t know what an ICMP Echo is, it will be a problem for the more advanced users who will inevitably struggle to differentiate the pronunciation of “bing” from “ping.” The problem is that when the advanced users have to put too much effort into saying something, they will subconsciously lose motivation to spread the word, which limits the spread of the brand. This would be the biggest drawback of all since Bing is yet another tech service looking for appeal.
• It just feels analogous to ‘hit,’ ‘bang,’ ‘tap,’ and any other term which falls into that category of slang.

There aren’t really any words left with four letters ending in “ing” that haven’t been taken already, and Bing actually sounds better than what’s left. The best goal for any name is to be easy to pronounce in context while serving as a subconscious motivator to do the act to which the name is tied, which is why Google worked, and which is the only way any other name can work.

Honestly, I wish Bing the best of luck. The world knows how badly Google now needs a competitor in the search space. It’s just that Microsoft’s resources might’ve been better spent on disruption rather than throwing blunted stones at a shielded Goliath. If you want to read a full rundown of the service itself, drop by the WinSuperSite and have at it.

Like any other product, I’ll start off with the install experience. Drawing on ideas from the Wave 2 installer, this one is more refined and clean, especially since component selection has been switched from web-based cookie to the install program itself. Another good thing is the prerequisites section that tells you exactly what it will install along with the products selected.

As you install, setup billboards inform you about the benefits of Windows Live. I guess it was inevitable that these would be stuck on.

Of course there’s the obligatory screen offering you to set Live as your default everything, as well as participation in the CEIP.

Naturally at this point Messenger opened automatically. The WIC component required a restart so I did that before continuing.

Messenger

Windows Live Messenger, the flagship product of the suite, had some notable changes over even the leaked M1 build.

Some consisted of minor visual tweaks: A contact’s status have been changed from the “buddy” symbol to a series of colored squares, representing a certain state. This also ties in with the outline around the display picture, although something about it seems out of place. Also, other statuses, such as “Be right back” and “Out to lunch” are gone.

The other statuses and their display picture outlines

When mousing over a contact, a toast consisting of actions pops up. Same thing goes when mousing over your own display picture.

The contact list layout options have moved into the main options window. While this is probably necessary for the amount of options that have been added, it may be inconvenient for the fact that it may take one or two extra clicks to change the view.

Instead of a simple color changer, there is now a “Change your scene” preference window that also includes colorful backgrounds that you can apply to your Contact List window, and others who message you see your theme on their conversation window. Again, this sacrifices Fitts’ Law for more customization.

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Finally, a new “What’s New” row,  shows your contacts’ latest updates a-la-Facebook News Feed.

Mail

Windows Live Mail has gone through some changes too. The UI has been simplified a bit.

Pretty much the only notable feature added is the calendar, which syncs with Windows Live Calendar and comes with predefined holidays (country dependent). I smell a Windows Calendar replacement coming.

Photo Gallery

Along with a refreshed UI, Photo Gallery sports integration with Flickr and people tagging, along with extensibility via other plugins.

People (well, anything) tagging in action

You can link your Windows Live ID through Photo Gallery to your Flickr account. (This isn’t new, it’s just now integrated into the default install of the application)

You can now filter images by exact rating or a greater than value.

Writer

The app that I used to write part of this blog post now has integration with MSN Soapbox and YouTube to directly upload or link from existing videos.

Also not new but to clean up branding is map integration. Formerly called “Windows Live Local”, it now identifies itself as “Live Search Maps” and uses the latest version of Virtual Earth.

On a strange note, after writing part of this post with Writer, uploading it to the blog, and then attempting to download the post for editing, Windows Error Reporting threw me a message. The program didn’t crash, but for some reason the post could not be retrieved from the server. Tinfoil hat wearers are in luck: Sending a report doesn’t send you the contents of what you’re working on.

Movie Maker

I was most anxious to try this, but for some reason it wouldn’t play or let me add videos to a project (possibly due to ffdshow related issues). For this reason I just took a couple of screenshots of the UI. The ribbon works almost exactly as it does in Office 2007.

Conclusion

So that’s about it for the Wave 3 products. I didn’t try out the Toolbar or Family Safety betas since those aren’t as commonly used as the other products. Overall, things are looking up for the future of Windows Live, and pretty soon we’ll see how these products (or a forthcoming version) integrate with Windows 7.