Betty Aoki at The Windows Live QnA blog has the news:
It’s with great pleasure, a lot of late nights, and barrels of caffeine, that our team launches the public Windows Live QnA beta.
For all you thousands of beta testers who took a chance on us, nagged us, mocked us, and made us better – we thank you. Keep doing it. Enjoy.
Hit the link for some tips on usage and go to http://qna.live.com for the real thing. Marshall Kirkpatrick has some thoughts on the increasing ubiquity of question and answer services at Techcrunch.
As for Alerts, Chris at LiveSide reports:
The MSN Alerts service has now been migrated over to Windows Live, and is available from http://alerts.live.com.
The link didn’t work work for me at first, but now does, so it’s likely just rolling out. Alerts is a service that sends news alerts to users via IM, email, or to a mobile phone. Also for the bottom line, the home page has a large tower graphical ad in the right sidebar.