14 DAY TRIAL // There’s no official confirmation from Microsoft at this point in time, but speculation indicates that the first public Beta for Windows Live Wave 4 is just around the corner. According to third-party sources, the Redmond company could start serving downloads of Windows Live Essentials Wave 4 Beta clients as early as today, April 28th, 2010. The Beta downloads mentioned above, among which there are Messenger, Mail, and Photo Gallery, are said to come accompanied by access to Wave 4 Beta services such as Windows Live Hotmail.
The speculation is based on a number of websites that are forecasted to go live today. Fact is that Microsoft watchers worldwide already witnessed www.messengerpreview.com, www.hotmailpreview.com and www.windowslivepreview.com going live for an extremely brief period of time on April 27th, 2010. At the time of this article, however, none of the three websites mentioned above were accessible. It appears that the Preview websites for Windows Live, Windows Live Messenger and Windows Live Hotmail have all been taken down, with just the lucky ones having had the chance to get a sneak peek at the content.
It is important to note that all three websites share the same registrar, namely MarkMonitor INC., according to the WhoIs information. At this point in time, the name servers for the websites also point to MarkMonitor, but this detail is bound to change, as the sites move to Microsoft. Make no mistake about it, MarkMonitor has registered the websites for Microsoft, just as it did with Bing.com, for example.
As users can see from the screenshot on the left, courtesy of Neowin, the webpage features information on the “new Messenger,“ revealing the fact that, when it will be launched officially, the destination will offer both content and downloads of Windows Live Messenger 2010/Wave 4 Beta.
On April 21st, 2010, Chris Jones, corporate vice president of the Windows Live Experience, revealed that, “For several months now, we’ve had several thousand people running regular builds of this code inside Microsoft, and we’ll shortly begin expanding this testing to some folks outside Microsoft for additional feedback.
“We will then roll out updates to our web services, followed by betas of our software for Windows PCs, Macs, and phones. Our approach is to release betas to the public once we think the build is in pretty good shape, learn through beta usage data and beta user feedback, and make additional refinements that eventually become the final release. Of course, we’ll continue to update the service as we see how you use it every day and hear from you about what’s working and what needs improvement.”
