Christopher Payne from Microsoft is giving a demo of Microsoft's new live.com services. He's standing on stage in a suit. The visual discontinuity of that is jarring. His assistant, Frederick, is adding new widgets to a page, very AJAXy. The visuals are pretty slick.

Live search let's you search within the results. There's a smart scroll bar that dynamically grabs information as needed so that you don't have to click "next" and "prev" to get other results.

Image search has been completely rebuilt. Nice slider bars allow you to reduce or expand the size of thumbnails in image search. Again, the continuous scroll works for images as well.

Feed search allows you to search for feeds, preview the entire feed in the search results, and then add it to the built-in live.com aggregator.

Live.com has somethings called "search macros." You can build a recipe search engine, for example, and then share it with others. There are 43 examples (a coincidence?) on the Microsoft Gadgets site. You can mess with priority, results, and so on. He demos by searching for "crush" on the normal search engine and gets lots of results. He then goes to the custom "seattle" search engine and does the same search and finds lots of information about the Crush restaurant, more specific.

Intent based queries are a powerful way to build community. Doc Searls said yesterday: attention is much less important than intention.

Microsoft bought OnFolio today. This seems like an Internet Explorer sidebar and it included with the Windows Live toolbar. It allows you to build collections of things something like, although not as complete, it seems what we just saw with Plum a few minutes ago.