Fixed: “Windows Live Toolbar ships sans marketing”

This blog entry caught my attention today:

Windows Live Toolbar ships sans marketing — Microsoft News Tracker

Now Windows Live Toolbar doesn’t even get a post in a Microsoft blog that I can find.

That’s not really true… after all, we did get a mention in the Virual Earth blog (with whom I work with a lot):

Live Toolbar released. Includes great mapping capabilities
 
The Live Toolbar plugin for Internet Explorer is now available here. It has some nice features, including a number of mapping related tools:
 
1. Recognize addresses on a web page and map all of them at once. This is great when you are at a webpage like this with a bunch of addresses and you want to see them all on a map at once to compare them. with one click in Live Toolbar the addresses are passed to Live Local as a new scratchpad. You can view them, save them as a Collection, or share them with a friend. See the OSF screenshot below. One thing i really like about this feature is that the recognizer apparently is parsing the DOM in realtime, so it is compatible with AJAX sites, web forms and web editors! It not only parses the initially loaded page, but if an Asynchronous call is made to the server that delivers address information to the web page, they appear in the dropdown list as well.
 
2. get interactive inline maps on any web page. with Toolbar installed, whenever you highlight some text on a webpage a smart menu appears with a list of ways to operate on the selected text. if the text you selected is a street address, one of the choices will be to see a map right there on the webpage without having to surf off to a mapping site. very convenient! See the Showbox screenshot below

And now, we even have our own entry on the Live Search Blog:

Introducing the new Windows Live Toolbar 3.0
 
We’re excited to announce that Windows Live Toolbar is not only out of beta but also packed with new features to help you find precisely what you’re looking for, surf with powerful protection and personalize your experience on the Web. Since the toolbar is an add-in to the browser, these features are ubiquitously accessible from any web page. Our hope is that Windows Live Toolbar gives you a better overall Web search experience, so try us out and let us know what you think.

Phew! I do consider this issue fixed.