Microsoft has announced ambitious plans to integrate Windows Live, its portfolio of online services such as Hotmail and Messenger, with other popular sites including Flickr, Twitter and Facebook.

The company's aim seems to be to create a hub from which you do all of your social networking, e-mailing, messaging and much more. In essence, they want to synchronise your online life.

Here are the key new features, all of which will be released “in the next few weeks”. If Windows Live is as easy to use as Microsoft makes out, and crucially, if it is bug-free when it is released, the service could be indispensible for the vast majority of web users.

Windows Live Mail

Most regular internet users have at least two e-mail accounts (if you’re reading this, the chances are you have a few more than that). Windows Live Mail will be able to incorporate all of these into one e-mail browser.

You will be able to view your Hotmail, Gmail, AOL, Yahoo! and Microsoft Outlook accounts separately in the mail browser, but also to see them all together as a single stream of e-mails.

From a simple drop-down menu, you will be able to choose which e-mail account you want to send from, so you will still have the capacity to separate your work correspondence from personal e-mail chatter, one of the main reasons people maintain multiple e-mail accounts.

The Calendar service can also integrate the various different calendars you may rely on, from work updates created in Outlook to the birthdays of your Facebook friends.

This synchronised approach runs deep in this new release of Windows Live. For example, after you have sent an e-mail to a friend, the service will be able to tell you if that person is online and let you start an instant messaging conversation with him or her at the click of a button.

Photo Gallery

Windows Live tries to make use of Microsoft’s “cloud” – its web-based computing system – giving people access to their content from any internet-connect computer. This approach is particularly evident with the new Photo Gallery service. When you install the software on more than one computer, Windows Live will ask you whether you want to synchronise your photos, allowing a user to access photos saved on a home PC from any other computer in the world.

There is also a “face detection” option for photographs, which lets you quickly run through your pictures and highlight who appears in each picture, just as you tag people in Facebook photos. This is hardly revolutionary, but is a useful addition.

Windows Messenger

The Instant Messenger service has some neat upgrades. Instead of just having a profile picture of yourself, you will be able to record a four second video which will act as your profile image. The same applies to emoticons – when you add in a smirk or a wink while chatting on IM, your friend will be able to see either an image or video of you imitating that emoticon.

Windows Live Dashboard

The Dashboard aims to become the new homepage for your life. From a social networking point of view, it tries to incorporate everything you need onto one single page.

The Dashboard links into your e-mail accounts and gives you a live feed of the latest updates from your friends. Again, this is no more exciting that the feed created in other social networking sites such as Facebook, but the Windows Live feed integrates updates from the many other online services you may be using. You will be able to see your friends' latest Twitter update or pictures uploaded by a mate in Flickr, all in the same stream of updates. To respond, you would still have to click through to these other sites, which could become a pain.

Other sites that are integrated with Windows Live include LinkedIn, Pandora, Photobucket and Yelp, but Microsoft say they will be signing up other “outside partners” in the coming months. The chances are that if there is an online service you use, soon you will be able to access it directly from your Windows Live account.

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