I'm in the Windows Live opening session at day 2 of Mix and Brian Arbogast is providing some great news about where we're going in this area.

He has talked about 5 Windows Live APIs that are being made available:

1) Silverlight streaming that I blogged about yesterday

2) Live Spaces photos: API access to photos stored on Windows Live Spaces. See http://dev.live.com/spacescontrol/

3) Live Contacts: We have already had a "contacts control" for some time, however we're now allowing developers a ful API to access Windows Live contacts without using the control. See http://dev.live.com/contacts/

4) Windows Maps with Virtual Earth: We have released v5 of Virtual Earth, see http://blogs.msdn.com/virtualearth/archive/2007/04/28/virtual-earth-version-5-is-now-live.aspx

5) Windows Live Search: With the Web Service, you can query for web results, images, news, phonebook listings, feeds, and metatags. See http://dev.live.com/livesearch/

He also talked about the very clear new commercial terms for each of these services:

1) Silverlight streaming: 4GB free space, free unlimited streaming for a year up to 700 Kbps, 10 mins max video length, and free up to 1 million mins/month at launch

2) Spaces photos: unlimited free use of web control and API if you have less than 1 million unique users per month, above that ad revenue sharing or pay $0.25 per unique user per year.

3) Contacts: Exactly the same terms as Spaces.

4) Virtual Earth free limit raised limit to 3 million map tiles per month, which is a huge number. It was pretty impressive before but this means that the vast majority of sites will be able to use our mapping services for free.

5) Live search: 750,000 queries per month free, which includes use of search control and soap API.

This is some great news and I want to explain why. For me, there are four important points to make here:

  1. Microsoft has a huge, huge social networking presence already with Live Messenger, Live Hotmail and Live Spaces. We're increasingly allowing developers to make use of that data and the success of these services
  2. We have a very clear commercial business model - there's real clarity of how it works and we're commited to keeping that clarity
  3. We are here for the long haul. We're not at risk of disappearing overnight
  4. We have a long track record of working with developers and we're committed to making sure that these services are developer focused and developer friendly.

I don't believe there is anyone else out there who can make these claims. The announcements today are just the tip of the iceberg, you will see a significant ramp up in activity around Windows Live over the coming months.