Microsoft describe the MVP programme as:

We seek to recognize the best and brightest from technology communities around the world with the Microsoft® Most Valuable Professional (MVP) Award.

These exceptional community leaders come from a wide range of backgrounds. They are teachers, artists, doctors, engineers, as well as technologists, who actively share their high-quality, real-world technical expertise with the community and with Microsoft.

With the MVP Award, we thank these inspiring individuals for representing the voice of thousands in the community through the powerful and independent feedback they give us, and for helping our customers maximize the potential of their software.

Now I guess I need to start saving rather rapidly for the MVP Summit next month.

By the way, I find it amusing that I am now an MSP and MVP. I wonder if I could achieve MCP too, or any other M*P titles that Microsoft offer.

This might seem a small, trivial feature to bring to Skype but I find it really quite exciting. Currently this feature is only available in the beta version of the Skype desktop clients but I imagine that soon it will be available in the proper version of the desktop client. At that point surely it only make sense that all Skype clients would offer this functionality. This will allow users of Skype to use their iPhone or Android device to video call not only people on another device but also their friends on Facebook, even if those friends don’t have a Skype account. Now that to me is exciting.

But there’s more, we know that Microsoft plans to incorporate Skype into most of its products and with this new announcement it gets more interesting. Bearing in mind that it is now possible to video call people on Facebook who don’t have a Skype account it makes sense to me that it will be possible for people to video call their friends who have a Windows Live ID (WL ID) even if they don’t have a Skype account. Using a Skype client I imagine that soon people will be able to link their WL ID to their Skype account (like they can do with Facebook in the new beta) and then video call their friends using an Xbox 360 with Kinect, or on Windows Phone or within Hotmail.

At this point Skype becomes less of a product and more of a service. This is why I am excited as it would mean that people don’t have to have signed up with Skype to be able to use it’s video calling functionality and its exactly what Microsoft needs to be doing with Skype.

This service model for Skype would pave the way for people with a WL ID to be able to instigate video calls from whatever device, client or service where they are signed in to call any of their WL, Skype or Facebook friends even if those friends didn’t have an WL ID account.

Before this announcement from Microsoft Skype was used in two ways:

- Skype-to-Skype

- Facebook-to-Facebook

Following this announcement it is now possible to use Skype as:

- Skype-to-Facebook

I imagine though that soon Skype could be used in more ways:

- Skype-to-Windows Live

- Windows Live-to-Skype

- Windows Live-to-Facebook

I don’t imagine it will be possible to make video calls within Facebook to Skype or Windows Live clients for sometime, although that would be excellent.

You’ll notice that if my last prediction is correct then it will be possible for people who don’t use Skype to actually be utilising Skype to make video calls. This would be exciting; this idea would also show how Skype compliments Microsoft’s other products rather than competing with them.

What are your thoughts on this? Are you pleased with Microsoft’s Skype announcement from this week?

In case you didn’t know here’s a summary of some of the new features coming to Hotmail:

- Smart Newsletter Filtering which allows users to highlight and delete newsletters with a single click or unsubscribe completely.

- Categories and advanced folder management that allow users to choose to categorize their messages in the inbox as opposed to having to file them in separate folders.

- Scheduled Cleanup allows you to automatically get rid of emails of a certain age, sweeping away old newsletters and out-of-date offers. You can also now keep only the latest message from a sender.

- Flags done right that position your priority messages right at the top of your inbox. No more having to mark messages as unread or email them back to yourself to keep them top of mind.

- Instant Actions are buttons that appear when your mouse hovers over a message allowing you to delete, flag, sweep, etc. messages with one click. Users can also customize their UI by adding and removing buttons based on the tasks they use most.

You can see and read more about the new feature for Hotmail at WinRumors and Liveside.

Either leave me a comment or send me a tweet with your question and I’ll attempt to make sure it gets answered next week.

However I understand that some people might not have a few hours free today to watch the whole thing, but thankfully Microsoft also understand this and have published a condensed version of the keynote with a few of the highlights.

If you like that video and want to see more of Windows 8 then again Microsoft can help as it has uploaded several videos showing specific features of Windows 8 and I expect they will be uploading more over the coming days.

But again I understand that some of you might be at work and not able to watch YouTube videos at your desk so I’ve compiled a list of articles about Windows 8 from a wide selection of publishers. I have written my own summary of yesterday’s announcements.

- Microsoft

- Paul Thurrott – Overview – Screenshot Gallery – Features and Terminology

- Long Zheng – Analysis of Metro in Windows 8 – What Microsoft didn’t show

- Liveside – Future of Windows Live – Windows Live videos

- WinRumors – This changes everything – Hands on

- Neowin

- The Verge

- Engadget – Windows 8 overview – Hands on

- Boy Genius Report

Let me know if I have missed any other good write ups about Windows 8 that I should add to this list. What are your thoughts of Windows 8? Now to start preparing myself for this afternoon’s keynote, I’m looking forward to it.

Windows 8 is pretty much everything I expected it to be and also everything I hoped for but more that it added things that far exceeded what I thought Microsoft was going to announce let alone demo. The short demo of Windows 8 from D9 didn’t really do the OS and its usability justice but today’s many demos really did make the OS looks fantastic, especially with so much Metro.

The keynote kicked off with some talk about Windows 7 and how it has sold over 450,000,000 licenses so far and now has a larger usage share than Windows XP according to Windows Update stats. However, the keynote quickly moved on to Windows 8 and lots of demos of the UI showing more of the OS than we’d seen previously.

For me the “Charm” bar (not a name I am a fan of) that appears when a user swipes in from the right looks great with its contextual settings for the apps that a user is in and the OS wide settings like brightness, network etc. Then there’s the search charm that not only lets a user search their entire PC but also apps can be searched within too. The devices charm will allow quick access to connected devices (surprisingly) such as printers and the share charm will allow the user to share content from an app extremely quickly and easily through other apps. This idea of apps working with the OS and the other apps is Microsoft’s idea for a “web of apps” which I think is a fantastic idea.

Next we were shown Internet Explorer 10 which, to quote Microsoft, looks super-smooth and very nice indeed. The whole chrome-less is very nice. This isn’t really something new though as we all knew this would be in built into Windows 8. However, we didn’t know that OS wide spell checking would be inbuilt into the entire OS, thankfully though that is exactly what Microsoft is doing and only yesterday I said I thought that Microsoft were going to do that.

Following those demos it was time for developing and Microsoft showed how easy it will be for Win32, Silverlight or even HTML developers to create apps for Windows 8 and even how easy it is to then make those apps into Windows Phones apps. The Windows ecosystem is beginning to look very nice now. To show how much belief Microsoft has in the new programming languages it has added to Windows 8 the company has written the Windows Store in HTML, this store acts a lot like the Windows Phone Marketplace and is very Metro.

There were also some small announcements in the keynote such as Windows Defender having been beefed up with anti-virus, anti-malware etc to better protect Windows users. Steven Sinofsky did say though that it will still be possible to use a different anti-virus if a user wishes to do do. There will also be a new power saving mode in Windows 8 that will bring phone like techniques to the OS to give Windows 8 devices as long as possible battery life. Microsoft also showed off how quickly Windows 8 PCs can boot up and resume from sleep. NFC was also a quick announcement with a brief demo but it will allow PC to PC sharing which could be fantastic.

Towards the end we were shown how Microsoft will be using Windows Live to make Windows 8 even better. We were first shown some of the Windows Live apps that are very similar to those found on Windows Phone in their Metro look and their aggregation of various online services. But perhaps more important than those apps was the fact that SkyDrive is being used to keep a user’s settings and customisation consistent across all the Windows 8 PCs they use. Microsoft will also be allowing developers to access APIs to leverage the power of SkyDrive; this should be one of Windows 8 best features. It’s something I have been asking for for quite a while.

It wasn’t all about the new Start Screen and Metro apps as Microsoft has also worked on some new things for the classic UI in Windows such as bringing much better multi monitor support to Windows 8. Users will be able to have a single wallpaper across two or more screens and will also have an extended taskbar.

One other thing to point out is that Xbox Live will be coming to Windows 8 and it wont just be games but all kinds of entertainment. I wasn’t sure at first if this was an “accidental” showing of the Xbox Live tile but this has since been confirmed by Major Nelson of Xbox.

Perhaps the most exciting thing though of all today is that in about 5 hours time people all around the world will be able to download Windows 8 in the form of the Windows Developer Preview. This will be very much a preview release with some of the features shown today not being available but the most significant things, such as the Metro UI, will be in the preview. If you missed the live stream of the keynote today then you’ll be glad to know that is already available to watch on http://www.buildwindows.com/.

I plan to write some more articles tomorrow and I’m looking forward to getting up early and installing the Windows Developer Preview on one of my desktop PCs.

What are your thoughts on Windows 8?

Windows 8 (obviously)

Expectations:

- New Metro UI

- New dev platform, new app package

- New hardware announced and shown off

- Windows Store to be announced and demoed

- New social platform/app for Windows similar to that found on Windows Phone

- Xbox Live to be integrated into Windows 8

- NUI will have a strong presence on the OS with

Hopes

- Single sign on via Windows Live ID on any Windows 8 PC

- Project Gustav is an app for Windows 8 touch PCs

- Outline of how the Windows ecosystem will be available across nearly all device types

- Xbox games can be played on Windows 8 PCs

- Kinect integration build in

Windows Live

Expectations

- New Windows Live apps/web apps to be talked about

- SkyDrive to become more prominent within the Windows ecosystem

Hopes

- Windows Live Mesh will become platform for synching all files and app data to the cloud

- Single sign on via Windows Live ID on any Windows 8 PC

Windows Phone

Expectations

- Nokia to announce at least 1 of their Windows Phones

- Mango’s planned roll out announced

Hopes

- Microsoft to talk about its plans to align Windows Phone 8 and Windows 8

- Microsoft announce new phones

Xbox and Zune

Expectations

- Xbox Live to be integrated into Windows 8

Hopes

- Microsoft either fully support Zune with new software, or kill the brand and merge with Xbox

- Xbox games can be played on Windows 8 PCs

Misc.

Expectations

- Microsoft Translator to be integrated into Windows 8 or to announce “Telephone Translator

- Office for Windows 8, making use of Metro UI, shown off

- New Bing web app announced and released

- Internet Explorer 10 is either released to beta or new Platform Preview is released

Hopes

- Bing HTML5 is released

Do you think I have missed anything off of this list? (I probably have as I rushed to write this while keeping up to date on Twitter with all the latest BUILD leaks, rumours and speculation.)

Don’t forget to follow me on Twitter for all the latest news about BUILD and shall be “live tweeting” the keynotes, I’ve already been busily tweeting away, and check out the BUILD page for more BUILD news. You will be able to watch the BUILD conference live at the BUILD site at 9AM PDT or 5PM BST (GMT +1).

First up it sounds like Windows Live will be going much more multi platform than it currently is with SkyDrive apps apparently planned for Windows, Windows Phone, iOS, Mac and Android. Currently there is only limited SkyDrive on some of those platforms such as Windows Live Mesh on Windows and access to SkyDrive through the Office Hub in Windows Phone, but to have a separate app for SkyDrive would be excellent. Microsoft have said before that they might have been wrong to hide SkyDrive away as an infrastructure and that they should have made it a destination, which is exactly what the apps will do. Making SkyDrive a destination will mean that far more people are aware of it whether more people use it or not is a different thing entirely.

Personally I think SkyDrive has always been a destination, I go to SkyDrive online but sadly can’t really get to it any other way. What I see as the infrastructure is Windows Live Mesh, currently on Windows its all the wrong way round. There should be a SkyDrive app not a Mesh one. Mesh should be the name of the invisible tech that keeps all my files synced across all my devices.

Whilst SkyDrive is Microsoft’s competitor to Drop Box its not nearly as well used, regarded or known about because its not a destination; its not something that people can easily use on a lot of platforms even if its just as good. If Android users can download a SkyDrive app to upload and access files on their PCs and Macs via clients on those OSes then it could certainly gain a lot of attention. If this can integrate with with Office then this could interest businesses as well as consumers. I think Microsoft should also make the photo experience first class in the SkyDrive app.

Of course if people start using SkyDrive more and more then they are likely to want more storage than the 25GB for all their documents and photos which nicely brings us on to the second rumour; SkyDrive is set to allow users to upload an unlimited amount of documents and photos. The current 25GB storage limit will then be used as a limit for all other files.

The problem that could be faced with having an unlimited number of documents stored on SkyDrive is that it might get difficult to manage them all but thanks to another rumour this wont be too much of an issue. SkyDrive is expected to get “multiple file selection” so a user can select many files and edit/move/etc them as a batch rather than individually.

Of course if this is all correct, and it all seems to make sense, users will want a nice easy way to manage all their devices that have the SkyDrive app on them which could well be what the rumoured “devices integration” feature is.

All the rumours work well together and in fact go so way to supporting each of the rumours. As a heavy user of SkyDrive and a big fan I hope we hear more about Microsoft’s plans for SkyDrive at BUILD or at least over the coming weeks. I still want music to be a 1st class citizen in the SkyDrive alongside documents and photos.

But, the news isn’t entirely with SkyDrive as Hotmail have their own announcements they want to make. This was announced yesterday when the Hotmail team sent out invites to Microsoft focused sites inviting them to two different events in the US. It’s thought that this will be a “reinvented” Hotmail which could be a HTML5 version of the site or just a version for Windows 8 only. It wont be long until we find out.

It’s great to see the Windows Live team working hard on new things following the past few years of very few updates and I look forward to what is announced at BUILD or shortly after about what is coming to Windows Live.

If you know anything else about what is coming to Windows Live over the coming weeks and months then please do let me know. There must be some Skype stuff planned too.

The first “thing” is that I hope Microsoft will talk about the future of Windows Live both the service side (Hotmail, SkyDrive and Messenger) and the apps (Photo Gallery, Movie Maker, Mesh, etc.). I’d hope that they will announce how HTML5 is being used to create web apps for the Windows Live services and even online counterparts for some of the apps. I also expect there to be Windows Live apps for Windows 8 but not sure in what ways they could be different from current apps apart from being Metro versions.

It would also be good if Microsoft spoke about, or at least hinted at, their plans to bring Skype into the Windows Live fold with integration in Messenger. You never know we might also be shown SkyDrive apps for a wide range of platforms that have been rumoured for the past few weeks.

However, there’s another major but more abstract “thing” that Windows Live could benefit from and that comes directly from Windows 8. It’s expected that Windows 8 will have social features similar to those found in Windows Phone so that users can easily stay in contact and up to date with all their friends from a variety of online services. The only thing that a user needs on a Windows Phone to be able to access these social features is a Windows Live ID linked with all their online services. I don’t see why the method would change for Windows 8, after all Microsoft seemed to reiterate their stance on social integration not federation only yesterday.

This could mean that if people want to get the most out of Windows 8 then they will need a Windows Live ID which will certainly increase the number of people with a Windows Live ID. Now there might issues of anti-trust here so it will be interesting to see how this is handled but I can’t see a way for lots of social services to be incorporated into the OS without leveraging Windows Live’s social partnerships.

Aside from possible growing the number of users of Windows Live this kind of integration would probably mean that there would be a lot more interest from consumers and online services in Windows Live. Within a few years of Windows 8 being on sale hundreds of millions of people will be using it and if it features online integration from a variety of services there could be an awful lot of interest in it. Consumers might expect that the service they use be partnered with Windows Live so they can stay in touch with their social graph. Equally businesses will want and need their service to be partnered with Windows Live to reach the largest possible number of people.

This kind of interest in Windows Live would be a dramatic change from the perception of the service which does not currently get consumers or businesses excited. People might expect an online service to be partnered with Windows Live so that they can access it from within Windows.

The opportunities for the Microsoft ecosystem are pretty big too. We can already see that Windows Live is used to allow a user to keep up to date on the web, in Messenger and on their Windows Phone. But it would be even better if all anyone had to do was sign in to their Windows Live ID on Windows or Xbox to be able to get the access to their entire social graph. There could also be the potential, although I highly doubt it, that Microsoft open this up so that anyone could plug into Windows Live and allow people to access their social graph on non Microsoft products.

I am very much looking forward to BUILD next week where maybe some of my hopes and expectation will be proved correct.

This news has got me thinking though of the future. Business Insider already have an article detailing the future plans of the partnership between Facebook and Skype. Liveside has already asked what this news means for Messenger and wonder what Microsoft will have planned for the IM service.

One thing that should not be overlooked is the fact that Facebook is partnering with another internet service, aside from Microsoft I don’t believe Facebook have done this before. In most cases it wouldn’t have made sense for Facebook to partner with another service but I think they could have done for some of their features (Places could have been a partnership with Foursquare). This is a great endorsement for Skype as it means some very positive things for the company, 1, Facebook believe it to be a better video service than it could have made; 2, Skype will get quite a few more users and becomes more social and accessible and 3, it’s name and brand will get more exposure, it should gain popularity from partnering with Facebook.

Facebook + Skype is a strong partnership with two heavy weights of the social and communication world.

I imagine it wont be too long before its possible to call a friend via Facebook when they are on a mobile phone, either through a Facebook mobile app or through a Skype mobile app. Obliviously Microsoft have big plans for Skype, this partnership with Facebook makes it more apparent why Microsoft brought the video service, so I imagine there are plans to allow users to use their PC, Windows Phone and Xbox to call each other and now they will be able to include Facebook as a means of video calling. That is three screens and the cloud, just not a Microsoft cloud.

This partnership brings together 3 large user groups in a more meaningful way than Windows Live’s Facebook integration had done before. I imagine that when Microsoft purchases Skype, Skype’s users will be transferred, at some point, to Windows Live. Skype has about 700 million registered users and Windows Live has over 500 million, that’s a lot of people when combined, even assuming that most of the users are on both Skype and Windows Live. With Facebook now allowing people to use Skype and I expect some way in the future for Facebook to call Skype users directly that means that this collection of users will also include the 750 million Facebook users. I think the total number of people using Windows Live, Skype and Facebook will be in excess of 1 billion.

Perhaps the only upsetting part of the Facebook + Skype deal is that Skype is only being used for video, that is it. Yes, there are likely plans allow Facebook users to call physical phones too I don’t see Skype text IM service ever coming to Facebook. Facebook only want the video and calling features and that is what they have got, interestingly that is also all Microsoft really want. I think that Microsoft and Facebook will be keen to position to Skype as a calling service and give no coverage to the IM aspect of Skype, it already competes with Messenger and Facebook Chat.

I think once purchased by Microsoft Skype will lose it’s IM feature and in fact I don’t know if Skype will have a separate client for PC. I imagine it will be integrated into everything as an addition feature rather than its own product.

Windows Live + Skype

I think that Skype will be brought to Windows Live allowing people to call their friends within Windows Live using Skype, this will be possible in both the Messenger client and also in the browser in Hotmail. I think that Messenger will continue to exist as the text IM service that complements the video chat functionality.

Video calls will take place between users of Messenger and Hotmail and those of Facebook. It’s already possible for users of Facebook and Messenger to easily chat via IM and I see Skype being the video extension of this integration. There will be still be need for individual Skype apps but I think it will be positioned as a feature.

Windows Phone + Skype

It’s not hard to imagine Skype being integrated into Windows Phone that will allow users of Microsoft products and Facebook to instantly video call each other. The fact that it could be possible for people to directly call a user of Windows Phone from Facebook is a pretty good feature and will build upon the mobile OS’s Facebook integration; this could well become it’s biggest unique selling point for many people.

As I’ve already said, I imagine that Messenger will be used to perform IMs so I don’t expect it to be possible for users to IM via Skype on their phone.

Xbox + Skype

Not much to say here other than if Microsoft were to make games for Facebook that integrated in some way to those on an Xbox Skype could well be a useful way to communicate with gamers around the world.

Windows 8 + Skype

I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Skype was integrated into Windows 8, perhaps as “Chatter”. Again this wont be a product but as a way to call someone.

I am really looking forward to when Microsoft are allowed to purchase Skype to see what can come of the acquisition. I expect to see Skype to become all about calling people rather and to be a feature of many Microsoft products, not its own broad communication product. This can already be seen with the Facebook partnership where Skype is providing the infrastructure for the video calling and not much else.

What are your thoughts on the Facebook + Skype partnership? What do you think of my thoughts for the future of Skype and how it will work with Microsoft and Facebook?

I think this is a pretty good demonstration of how well Microsoft’s communication services can work together and how well they integrate with Facebook.