Is Windows Live Still Alive?

Originally published on Cloud Avenue.

About a month ago, Microsoft rolled out its previously announced 3rd wave of Windows Live Services refresh.
The purpose of the release was to position the Live Services as the central hub for everything you do online the new Live Home shows input from your various services (Hotmail, SkyDrive, etc.) as well as an activity stream composed of your friends’ activities on both Live Services as well as other external services such as Twitter, Flickr and blogs…

What initially seemed like a promising new start for Microsoft, leveraging on its already existing Live Messenger social network now seems, a month or so after its rollout is pretty much dead. Most of the people I know (including myself) that tried using the new Live Home quickly gave it up as its simply as there’s simply nothing to do there with an anemic design and an activity feed that does not allow any interaction, Microsoft’s new homepage is simply a “Read-only Social Network”.

Microsoft missed out on what makes a social site successful social interaction! duh!

It should have encouraged users to interact using its platform by allowing rating / commenting / sharing / replying / etc. on feed items.
By not doing so Microsoft is actually making users leave its homepage platform to use other services (Twitter, FriendFeed, etc.) when they actually want to do something with the content rendering its platform pretty useless.

All that is left now is to wait for the next wave, expected at the end 2009 Q4, and hope for a more mature product that can… well.. Live.