I had been intending to blog about a bunch of changes in the Windows Live stack. Jani pointed me to this neat little application you can add to any website to have users of the website chat with anybody running Windows Live Messenger.  So you see a little app on my blog's sidebar (if you are reading this using a RSS reader, click here) and if you chatted from the control, my Windows Live Messenger pops up the chat and lets me do instant messaging. 

It took me 5 minutes to put this up on my blog - really that simple - go to http://settings.messenger.live.com/applications/CreateHtml.aspx to get one for yourself!

Among other updates, you can also get a @live.com ID for yourself (currently in certain geographies and very soon in most others including India) by going to http://www.windowslive.com/freshstart.html.  You can also use tools to migrate your existing Live ID to the new one.

If you thought all innovation in search was done with, you should look at www.tafiti.com

Do check out the tree view!

Windows Live Quick Applications is a set of showcase applications put up by the Windows Live team to demonstrate how building a quick community portal around a theme is easy with the various Windows Live Services and SDKs.

Take a look at some of the sample applications put up:

Contoso University sample: http://contosouniversity.mslivelabs.com/

Contoso Bicycle Club sample: http://contosobicycleclub.mslivelabs.com/

Great use of Silverlight and various Windows Live SDKs to mashup applications.  For the complete source code and reference, you can visit the Windows Live Quick Applications project page at Codeplex: http://codeplex.com/WLQuickApps