One of my favorite things about Windows 7 is how you can customize it and make it your own. Our personalization features give Windows 7 the ability to be as individual and to reflect who you are! Adding to this is a new Personalization Gallery on Windows.com, launched on Oct 22nd. With Windows 7, we’ve made it easy for people to customize their PC with different themes. Each theme has a custom background (or a series of backgrounds that shuffle), different Aero Glass colors, and sounds. Not only will you find Windows 7 themes on the Personalization Gallery, you’ll also find desktop backgrounds and desktop gadgets to download as well.

For the first time ever, Microsoft is working with other companies to enable them to offer their customers a branded experience on the desktop through Windows 7. The effort is part of a pilot program running until October 2010 by Microsoft Advertising. As of today, you will find themes from 7 global advertisers with well-known brands such as Coca Cola, Ducati, Ferrari, Infiniti, Pepsi, Porsche and Twentieth Century Fox on the Personalization Gallery for download. So if you are a fan of one of these brands, check them out! For more on this effort from Microsoft Advertising, see this blog post.

We’re also offering new Microsoft branded themes too – including the Xbox game Gears of War, Zune, and Bing!

So what if you want to make your own theme? No problem – it’s very easy. Click here for a step-by-step outline (and video) on how to customize and create your own themes. Once you’ve created your own theme, you can share it with you friends and family on Windows Live SkyDrive.

For you geeks out there wanting to know more about how we went about designing the ability to use themes in Windows 7, see this blog post on the Engineering Windows 7 Blog.

If you want to know how to create and share Windows 7 themes then this post on the E7 Blog is a must read.

You can apply, create, and save themes directly from within the Personalization Control Panel in Windows 7. When you create a theme for Windows 7, Windows 7 collects desktop backgrounds, sounds, mouse pointers and icons and puts it into an .themepack file. That file can be shared and them theme can then be applied on another Windows 7 PC.

I recently took a trip up toward Steven’s Pass outside of Redmond. I took some photos of some rocks near a river on a beautiful day. I’ve created a theme for Windows 7 with those photos and called it “Rocks” and I would like to share it with you! Just click below to download the theme…

I hope you enjoy the theme!

With 25GB of free online storage on Windows Live SkyDrive, you can share quite a few Windows 7 themes with friends and family.

Over the past few weeks, we’ve introduced quite a few improvements to Windows Live. I thought it would be nice to list all those improvements in a single blog post for everyone to read.

New web activities: 20 new third-party feed partners were added to Windows Live including Facebook, Digg, and SmugMug. MySpace will also be added in the coming months, so that MySpace customers can share activities and updates from MySpace to people in their Windows Live network.

By adding new feed partners to Windows Live, it’s easier for you to connect your activities various blogging sites, social networks and photo sharing sites and share them with your friends in your Windows Live network. This update will make it easier for the 500 Million users who are active on Windows live today to connect their activities on these partner sites and share them with their friends on Windows Live.

For instance, when you add the Facebook web activity – any photo, video, note or status update you make on Facebook will now appear on Windows Live via your What’s New feed. When you add Digg, any article you “digg” or submit to Digg, will now appear on Windows Live via your What’s New feed. Since Windows Live is global, it’s interesting to note that fourteen of the 20 new feed partners are headquartered in countries outside of the United States. According to Comscore, Hyves is the top social network in the Netherlands, and Metroflog is a top social network in Argentina.

There are quite a few partner web activities you can add today! Check them out by going to your Windows Live Profile and choosing “Web activities” in the lower left-hand corner of your profile

Add new contacts to Windows Live: MySpace, hi5, and Tagged join Facebook and LinkedIn as contact partners on Windows Live. Now you can exchange contacts between Windows Live and these five social networks and vice versa.

Messenger has come to Hotmail: Now you can IM through the web via Windows Live Hotmail. You can sign-in to Windows Live Messenger directly from within Hotmail and exchange IMs with your Messenger contacts.

If you are ever on a PC that doesn’t have Windows Live Messenger installed, just go to your Hotmail inbox and sign in to Messenger there to chat with your contacts. Once you sign-in, you can browse your contacts via your People page. If you are signed in to Messenger while checking your Hotmail and a contact sends you an IM, a toast will pop up in the lower right-hand corner of the page just as it does on a PC. For more details on Web IM in Windows Live Hotmail – see this blog post from Antonia on the Windows Live Team Blog.

Arrange your Photos in Windows Live SkyDrive: I blogged about this last week. Windows Live SkyDrive now allows you to arrange your photos in any order you want (thanks to Silverlight).

In one of your Photos folders on SkyDrive just click “Sort” and choose “Arrange photos”.

Photos of you: A new entry point has been added to Windows Live Profile pages called “Photos of you”. Essentially, this new link will take you to a page of photos tagged with a specific person (or yourself). It’s a great way to see all the photos your friends appear in or photos you appear in.

SkyDrive takes your Favorites: All your Favorites from favorites.live.com are now automatically moved to SkyDrive where you can use Windows Live Toolbar to sync your Favorites with Internet Explorer on your PCs.

And the Windows Live Sync website has now been integrated with the new Windows Live UI we launched with this last fall.

The new Windows Live Sync website makes a huge difference in managing your personal and shared folders and managing the PCs you are syncing them with.

Enjoy the improvements to Windows Live!

The Windows Live SkyDrive Team just announced several updates to Windows Live SkyDrive which begin happening today.

Using Silverlight, you can now arrange your photos within a SkyDrive Folder just the way you want them. All you need to do is choose “Sort” in a folder with photos and select “Arrange photos”.

The new “Arrange photos” feature isn’t the first feature on Windows Live SkyDrive to use Silverlight – the Slide show feature for your photos also uses Silverlight to showcase your photos in a nice way. 

 

You also have the ability to sort your files (including your photos) by name, size, date, or type.

There is also upcoming changes to profiles on Windows Live (to accommodate easily accessing photos of your friends) as well as Windows Live Favorites too! Again, you can get the lowdown on today’s update here from the SkyDrive Team.

13 Microsoft Products have been nominated in CNET’s 2009 Webware 100 including several from Windows Live (Windows Live Messenger, Windows Live SkyDrive, Windows Live Hotmail, Windows Live Sync and Live Mesh) and Internet Explorer 8.

My colleague Antonia over on the Windows Live Team Blog has all the details including links on where to cast your vote. Voting voting ends on April 30, 2009 (12pm Pacific Time) so vote now!

The Windows Live SkyDrive Team has posted a in-depth post offering a overview of what’s coming with their next update. First and foremost: Windows Live SkyDrive will be boosting everyone’s storage from 5GB to 25GB. Secondly, they want to give you more control over your files by offering you new features to do so:

Download photos directed to your to Windows Live Photo Gallery.

Download as a .zip file. Download an entire folder in one compressed file (initially available only in the United States, Denmark, and Ireland).

Move files between folders.

Copy files to multiple folders.

Sharing photos is huge these days. They’ve added almost 20 new features to make the photo experience on Windows Live SkyDrive even better such as supporting People Tags, bigger thumbnails, and a new online slideshow using Microsoft Silverlight.

You will be able to also keep your Internet Explorer favorites synced up with multiple PCs using Windows Live SkyDrive and Windows Live SkyDrive.

There is a lot coming to Windows Live SkyDrive! Check out their blog post for more details on what’s coming up.