This is a major aggravation for me. I see two "business"-use purposes for Live Local: (1) to obtain directions; and, (2) to look for places you might be interested in going. Sure, there are others, but these are the two that I think most people will be productively using the system for.

With that said, Live Local only really covers one of these fully -- obtaining directions. I am happy with its direction-giving, for the most part, but I am absolutely left to my own devices when it comes to the latter usage. Sure, if I know exactly what I'm looking for (i.e. fast food), I can do a quick search to find where the local McDonald's, Taco Bell, and Wendy's are, but what if I want to search for something a little more abstract. Let's just say furniture. Do a search for furniture stores and you'll get a good enough list of places. That's all fine and dandy if you know the places and what they're all about, but what happens when you've never heard of one? You'll want to visit their website to see what they're all about and what they might have to offer instead of wasting time and money (in gas) driving across town. Is it so much to ask that there be a link to a website so I can browse directly to it? I hate to say it, but Google Maps does it and I loved that feature. Now, I have to open a new window (read: tab) and search Live myself. That's just aggravating.

Ya know, in a world -- and especially a product -- more and more driven by the concepts of Web 2.0, you'd think that this type of thing would be a gimme. I'm not sure why it was left out. Hell, grasping a hold of the Web 2.0 concept a bit more, I'll even go as far as to say that I want to see ratings on the map results, as well. Show me an average rating of what people have said about the place. Let me give it my own rating, while we're at it. From there, if ratings are what I'm interested in, I can take a look at what people have said. I want to say that Yahoo does this. Wouldn't it be nice to bring both of these together into our product? Ok, that was rhetorical and I'm probably going a bit far, but you get the idea.

Windows Live Alerts help you keep up with forum replies, stocks, traffic, sports, and a quite a few other services. As you might imagine, when something changes in the source, you can be notified via email, IM, or phone. I don't have any complaints about the service, but I would like to suggest one addition: search-based alerts. Once again, this is something Google offers that I thought was pretty nice. Essentially, you'd sign up for an alert and would receive an email daily, weekly, or monthly with whatever new search results are added to the global search index.

Some might wonder how/why this is useful. Well, there were a few instances where I used it. First, I put my name in there. Initially, this was just to try out the service to see what it was like, but after a while, I found it helpful to see how/where references to me came up around the web. Some I knew about, but others I didn't. This allowed me to respond to someone's blog if they were commenting on something I said, for instance. The second use was to get alerts on a few of my favorite tools. At the time, Update Version (command-line .NET assembly version updater) and DotNetNuke (open source .NET portal) were two examples.

The concept is pretty simple. I don't know what it'd take to build that into Live Search, but it would definitely be a nice-to-have.

Windows Live Search is all about getting search down to its bare essentials. That's exactly why Google was so successful over the years. Users went to the site, got what they wanted, and only what wanted. Their tasks were seemingly streamlined for them. One step of this streamlining process, albeit minor, is auto-focusing on the most used element of the site. Live Search does good, but for some reason, Live Local doesn't. I'd like to see that changed.

Resolved

Windows Live Custom Domains is great. Before I started with Microsoft, I was using Google's offering. Of course, at the time, Live Domains wasn't available. Despite all that, one thing that I wish I could do in Live Domains that I can't is setup email forwarders. Probably ever email system that I've ever used allowed me to do this, so I'm hoping it can make it in there sometime.