Thread: Windows Live Events

EVENTS, THE LATEST MEMBER OF THE Windows Live family, grew out of Live Spaces and Hotmail. Microsoft saw a lot of people using these two services to plan get-togethers. The idea is that you use the service to relive the occasion, whether by sharing photos or discussing who hooked up with whom on forums on the event's site. There's integration with other Live services, too-Spaces, Messenger, and Hotmail. Organizing a party or other occasion in Live Events can be as dead simple as you want, or you can take advantage of lots of deep customization.

The front page of Windows Live Events (which can be reached via Windows Live Spaces' menus), has only one button: Create an event. Of course, to get there, you need to be logged in with your Win¬dows Live ID (aka Passport)-the only requirement for hosting an event with the service. Some may gripe at the increasing Passport-ization of Microsoft's services, but it's really par for the course: All of Google and Yahoo!'s personalized services require a sign-in, too, as do Evite and MyPunchbowl.

Over a hundred prebuilt templates are tailored to birthdays, showers, bachelors, holidays-even Diwali-and more. You can also include a Windows Live Map to aid with directions. Live Events makes a distinction between template and theme: the former is the entire design including theme, layout, and modules, while the latter com¬prises just the colors and accent images. These take effect right on the form when you select them, as you're building the invitation.

A text-entry area gives some formatting capabilities such as font, size, color, and so on, but you can't insert a picture here yet. You can choose whether to share your event with anyone on the Internet (more on this later) or only your invited guests-the default. Then you just hit the Create button, and you're done with the invitation.

If you want to get really hands-on, the Advanced option lets you specify font, size, background color, and alignment-you can even upload your own back¬ground image. This option is buried, though: Evite lets you do it right at the start of the creation process. It's hard to see Live Events making a huge dent in the entrenched, universally known and used Evite. But it does offer a free, easy, yet powerful way to cre¬ate attractive invitations and keep track of RSVPs.

What could push it ahead of the competition are the sharing features such as its photo slide shows and discussions that you can add to an event's page. If you and your friends are already on Live Spaces, it's a no-brainer, and it's still useful if you're not. But there's a definite push toward Live services, and Live Events still has some catching up to do with Evite and MyPunchbowl.