After more than two years of overhauling its free Web e-mail service, Microsoft plans on Monday to drop the "beta" term from its Windows Live Hotmail service, according to sources familiar with the company's plans.

Microsoft has already dropped the beta tag in a few places, including the Netherlands where the service launched in final form back in November. The company also decided back in February not to completely drop the Hotmail name. Until then, Microsoft had been testing the product under the Windows Live Mail name.

Throughout the testing process, Microsoft has been adapting the product … Read more

Tune in to CNET Live today

Hosts Tom Merritt and Brian Cooley have struck gold with their new Live streaming program on CNET TV. With a hot live guest every week and an opportunity for viewers to call in to get their personal tech queries answered, it's the best thing to do on a Thursday afternoon...since afternoon cartoons!

Past guests include Justin Kan of JustinTV and James Kao at Green Citizen, who shed some wisdom on earth-friendly tech. Last week, Biz Stone from Twitter.com joined CNET Live to talk about the future of mini-blogging. Tom and Brian also took a number of calls, … Read more

Elite data transfer headaches--already?

New owner of an Xbox 360 Elite? Well, if you were planning on transferring your Xbox Live Arcade games along with the rest of the data from your old 360, think again. There seems to be a major problem with how the transfer kit imports the games, involving DRM--yes, even games now suffer from this poorly thought-out technology. After a successful hard drive transfer, all of your purchased Arcade games will magically downgrade to demos. In order to have full access to these games, you must sign into Xbox Live (thanks to Joe at The Pensive Gamer for pointing this … Read more

Can Silverlight hit this one outta the park?

Baseball fans will want to keep an eye on this promise. Microsoft's Silverlight could be used to bring live Major League Baseball to your mobile phone. The MLB folks were on stage at MIX in Las Vegas, showing off the next generation of baseball video services. Their capper was a live game on a Windows-enabled cell phone. We've embedded MLB's presentation to the left.

Pikspot launches, joins media mashup fray

Pikspot is a new social network for groups to upload and share media. Each group can create its own themed page and add various pieces of content such as audio, video clips, and images. It's not a P2P network per se, consider it a media-hosting site like SplashCast with extended group features. Will it be the next big thing in media distribution? I'm not so sure about that, but it is launching with a lineup of content from several TechTV notables who have formed a channel called UndoTV. For any Webware readers who have watched CNET TV's new call-in help show CNET Live, this might be right up your alley.

Adding media to Pikspot channels is fairly simple. There's a batch uploader for photos and plenty of options to tag and credit content. Channel owners can also opt to let subscribers (registered users who have added the channel to their subscription list) add their own content. To sort through it all, there's a simple search. You're also able to browse through tagged content in a cloud, which is pretty neat looking.

Any Pikspot channel or piece of content can be embedded off-site on blogs or social networks. Like some of the embeds we've seen recently with SplashCast and Kyte.tv (hands-on), Pikspot lets users browse through the channel's entire content catalog and interact with other community members via comments without leaving the embedded player.

To customize a Pikspot channel, owners can select from a large selection of templates, or make their own using a fairly full-featured editor that gives complete control over the color scheme and branding. Any site still retains a small banner at the top of the page to bring you back to Pikspot, like you get on Blogger, Ning, and other networks.

The Pikspot experience is fairly slick, but I do have my nits to pick, mainly the upload speed for adding media to the service, which I found to be really slow. I'd like to see the inclusion of a live chat for each channel, as I had a lot of fun with this feature using Kyte.tv recently. That being said, the commenting system is really simple and includes a Digg-like way to vote on which comments are (and aren't) worth reading.

I'm very interested to see which other content providers stick their work on Pikspot. Since anyone can upload content, we're bound to see some copyrighted items on there. If it's anything like Joost, with the right people in charge, we'll see more partnerships and content provider-sponsored channels fairly soon.

I've embedded a Pikspot player below.… Read more

At Mix, Microsoft's Windows Live platform group loosens up

Microsoft next week at its Mix '07 conference plans to detail more generous business terms for partners to use its Live online services and to open up new application programming interfaces for Windows Live Spaces.

The company will allow outside developers--which can be at commercial enterprises--to build mash-up applications that generate up to one million unique user visits at their sites per month for free. Beyond that, Microsoft will charge 25 cents per user per year or look to establish a business relationship where it can deliver online ads to those sites, company executives said.

In addition, Microsoft will provide … Read more

CNET Live Episode 3 Show Notes

Thanks again to Biz Stone for coming on the show, it was good fun chatting about Twitter in person.

Things we crave

Tom: Keychain light sabers

Brian: Outdoor HDTV

Twitter

Text message championship

Video editor Jahshaka

Instlux way to install Linux without a CD

Download of the week: GAIM universal instant messenger

Battery doesn't charge on your iPod

Best of the Web: Buyyourfriendadrink.com

Next week: Kyte TV

Meez teams up with Photobucket

Photobucket members will discover a new option when logging in this morning. The company has partnered with Meez, the 3-D avatar service to give Photobucket members a place to store and host their 3-D avatars. We don't normally cover personal avatar services, but when they partner with sites with over 40 million users, it's worth noting. Meez has approximately a million users (which in and of itself is no small feat), and the service has apparently seen quite a bit of growth in the last few months.

Users can pick from a ton of options to make their … Read more

Kyte.tv launches: live blogging tool meets social network

Kyte.tv is a new service that lets people create their own TV channel. It's a bit of a mashup between a live blogging tool, a social network, and some of the live Internet TV channels we've been seeing lately with Justin.tv, and UStream.tv. Although, instead of strapping a camera to your head, you can use a cell phone.

The mobile client is a small Java application for several Nokia and Sony Ericsson phones that allows Kyte.tv users to upload photos and chat with others in a Kyte.tv channel. The mobile live blogging component is called "Lifecasting" which lets users upload pictures from their camera phone in real time. You can set it to automatically take a picture every few minutes, or every time you click the shutter. Either way, photos will show up on your channel instantly and viewers will get a visual notification that you're "live."

Kyte.tv channel owners can create as many channels as they want and add music, photos, videos, polls and text. A channel consists of a display screen, a playlist, and integrated chat room. Each channel also gets its own custom URL and branding, which is chosen by the channel owner. Alternately, there's embed code to place the entire Kyte.tv experience on a social networking profile or blog post (like we've done after the break).

One thing to note about adding music: you can't upload your own tracks. Instead you have to pick from a small selection of music from indie music service IODA. It's a lot like the music integration you get with Photobucket's video Remix tool.

What Kyte.tv has done really well is the live chat room. While it's lacking admin controls and private conversation options, you're getting the same chat experience on your computer and your phone. It's also really easy to use, as long as you're handy with your phone's keypad.

Kyte.tv is a fun service that opens up a lot of options for live blogging. Like we've seen with Twitter, mobile blogging has exploded with the help of easy-to-use tools that can be used and accessed on multiple platforms. Likewise, live video broadcasting has become something normal people can do with services like Pocketcaster and UStream.tv. Kyte.tv is happy medium between the two.

We'll be broadcasting live at various points during the day, so to visit our Kyte.tv channel, just click the read more link below.… Read more