In addition to today’s Internet Marketing Monitor coverage, we felt these stories were worth pulling out of the multitude of news items for June 27, 2007:

Microsoft Announces Next Generation of Windows Live [Read/Write Web]

Windows Live version 2 (which is not an official name) will be about integration, says the software giant. In the coming months, the focus of Windows Live products will shift toward creating an integrated, suite-like experience. In addition, today marked the launch of two new Windows Live products: Windows Live Photo Gallery beta and Windows Live Folders beta. The former is an upgrade to the Photo Gallery application that ships with Windows Vista while the latter is a 500 MB online storage application. Both new products are in a managed beta stage at this point.

New Announcements From Google [Various Sources]

Google had it’s share of announcements today, too. Docs & Spreadsheets got half of a visual refresh. The document list (which you see immediately following login) has been redesigned and looks muuuuch nicer. In addition, new ways of organizing and managing files have been added (including folders… yay!). A suggestion feature (akin to Google Suggest) tries to guess what you’re searching for as well. The actual applications in the suite remain unchanged - but I can’t wait to see if they eventually adopt the nice look of the document list. Picasa got a couple of updates as well. “Map My Photos” lets you assign photographs to geographical locations and then display those images in map form (or in Google Earth). Google also added a mobile version of Picasa Web Albums. And finally, Blogger in draft - which lets you try out new Blogger features before they go live - has added two new features to play with: polls and “enclosures”. According to Google, enclosures “turn your blog feed in to pod/video-casts”.

Mark Zuckerberg: ‘A crazy kid’ [Valleywag]

I wouldn’t normally include something like this in HOL, but I loved this story. Supposedly, when a non-Facebook employee suggested - to the “grown-up” managers - that the company sell, the response went something like this:

Obviously, we all want to sell, at least some of the equity. But Mark owns the whole thing and he’s a crazy kid. He doesn’t let us in on his ideas, and all he cares about are the users.

How awful?! Someone who cares about the users? If I could gasp any louder I would. It’s just… well… lunacy. Smart kid. News Corp could take a page or two from Zuckerberg’s “care about the user” book and apply it to MySpace.

I apologize for the light postage. We’re working on a big project that most of the day (and possibly most of the tomorrow). Have a great night, folks!