Windows Live is expanding and releasing new products and features every week. A-List blogger Richard MacManus of Read/Write Web has an excellent post on the new Windows Live Contact Gadget.  Last week Microsoft Live Writer was released to critical acclaim.  There is more coming... a lot more.

The Windows Live Contact gadget allows users to put their Windows Live Contacts (Hotmail/Windows Live Mail and Messenger contacts) directly on a web site. So, instead of typing a shipping address into a shopping cart form, for example, the user could simply select one of their Windows Live contacts from the contact gadget.

There are lots of other potential uses of the Contact Gadget, and the growing list of gadgets available from Microsoft and independent developers.

Another gadget announced at TechEd 2006 is the MS Virtual Earth gadget used in conjunction with the Contacts gadget to show where your contacts are located.   These gadgets can be used in a variety of ways. These are just simple examples. Developers will come up with all sorts of mashups of existing gadgets and new gadgets to leverage other Live Services.

George Moore, GM of Windows Live, said there a 240 million Hotmail users, 230 million Live Messenger, 72 million Live Spaces, and 8 million mobile subscribers. He also said that at any given moment, 20 million people are simultaneously connected on Messenger and 5.7 billion messages are sent per day. Also there are 300 million F2F video conversations on Live Messenger every month. George also said Live Spaces is "now the largest blogging service on the planet". It grew to 30M accounts in its first 6 months.