I never posted about Alerts, but having been planning/product management on the service for a couple years and driving our acquistion of MessageCast (Dave, Mike, Royal & Co.) there have been a number of significant events recently.

Branding Options for Messenger Alerts
A feature that the team refers to as "super toast" was recently enabled.  It's a great feature that enables the publisher of content using the Alerts service to brand the IM end-point, in ways that ad value to the user.  Expect more interesting applicaitons of this in the future.

Release of Windows Live Alerts SDK
This SDK is built on our hosted service (what had been MessageCast) and completely repaces the former SDK, that went by many different names .NET Alerts, Microsoft Alerts, and MSN Alerts.  Follow the link for details, but needless to say it enables 1:1 or 1:many scenairos across IM, e-mail and mobile (SMS) while maintaining the opt-in and user controlled nature of Windows Live Alerts.

Alerts Integration with Windows Live Spaces
Now you can now sign-up to receive updates in real time for blogs, photos, lists and comments from your favorite Spaces. Simply click on the “Sign up for alerts” link in the Visitor tools module (sample below) of your favorite Spaces and start receiving your updates right away.  This was a feature we almost implemented serval times with Spaces, but along the way we acquired MessageCast, Spaces became massive, moved datacenters, etc.  Needless to say, we're all glad it's arrived.

Perhaps it was having watched An Inconvient Truth and wanting to be doing my part prevent global warming, or perhaps it was the $1.08 for a super efficent CFL bulbs--that payback in 3-4 months, but we decided to swap out most of our house.  A couple weekends, serveral hours of work, and 38 bulbs later we're there we're saving an avergage of 20 KwH/day, which for our house results in almost a 30% reduction in our electric bill.  That should save $1.75/day on average with an annual estimate of 10,500 pounds of CO2 reduced.

They look good too.  Visit OneBillionbulbs.com and calculate your savings.