Microsoft News Tracker

The Wave 3 enhancements to Windows Live promised in November started rolling out today according to Dharmesh M. Mehta, Director of Windows Live Product Management:

Today we’ve started releasing the first set of updates to our web services, and these will continue to roll out globally over the next 24 hours – including a new version of Windows Live Home, Spaces, Events, and SkyDrive, as well as completely new web services such as Windows Live Groups, Photos, and Profile.

Mehta’s blog post has more details and some screen shots from which I have borrowed the following of Windows Live Profile, the social networking foundation that caused all the buzz when the Wave 3 features were revealed in November.

Click through for a larger image, but the idea is that " Your new profile is the place to decide what information about yourself you want to broadcast." much like Facebook or MySpace only for Windows Live. The added bonus is that it can also show your activity on other social networking services like Twitter, Flickr, and Yelp to mention a few. Not a bad approach when playing catch up.

So is Windows Live going to challenge Facebook or MySpace? I don’t see how unless it benefits from an incredible fad. Well then, will it be popular enough to be worth Microsoft’s expenditure? We’ll see and some of the specialized services may well have a life of their own.