Windows Live Gallery

» see gallery.live.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Around 2007 almost every MSN Messenger window in Turkey had emoticons in it that Microsoft never shipped. You collected them from somewhere, dropped them into the client, and used them until somebody in the conversation asked you to stop. Windows Live Gallery was the official version of that somewhere: a Microsoft-run shelf of small things you could bolt onto Windows or onto Messenger, free, with no purchase and no developer program in the way.

It opened on 24 july 2006, grown out of the older Microsoft Gadgets site, at the exact moment Microsoft was trying to turn Windows Live into one brand instead of a pile of separate products. The Gallery is where the parts lived. Desktop gadgets for the Vista sidebar, buttons for the Windows Live Toolbar, Live Search macros, plugins for Windows Live Writer, applets for the SideShow screens that a few laptops had on their lids, and the whole Messenger side of it.

The Messenger side is the part that actually traveled. Emoticon packs, winks, display pictures and backgrounds cost nothing, weighed nothing on a slow line, and were the only personalization available in a client that otherwise looked identical on every machine in the country. In a place where MSN was the entire social internet for most of a decade, a folder of custom emoticons was a personality. The Gallery held the sanctioned ones. Everything else came from sites Microsoft would have preferred you did not visit.

~ the record ~

~ what was actually in it ~

A gadget was a small piece of HTML and script that ran in the Vista sidebar, or loose on the desktop once Windows 7 arrived. Clocks, weather, CPU meters, RSS readers, currency tickers. It was the first mass audience Microsoft ever handed to somebody who could write a hundred lines of JavaScript and wanted a million installs, which is a description of an app store written two years before the App Store existed. The Gallery also carried Windows Live Agents, chatbots you added to your Messenger contact list and talked to like a person.

The catalog rotted from underneath while the storefront stayed open. Live.com's personalized homepage and its web gadgets went on 30 march 2010. Windows Live Spaces dropped gadget support in june 2010 and the whole Spaces product was handed over to WordPress the year after. Each time one of those platforms was retired a shelf inside the Gallery emptied out, and nothing was ever put back on it.

~ what really happened ~

The Gallery closed on 1 october 2011. The reason was Windows 8, still a year away and already decided: the desktop gadget was finished and the Metro app was the replacement, sold through a real store with a real developer program and a revenue split behind it. A free shelf of hobbyist HTML did not fit that, and Microsoft did not pretend otherwise. Messenger users were pointed at third-party sites for their emoticons, which is a polite way of saying they were pointed at where they had been getting them all along.

The security story people remember comes later and gets the order backward. Advisory 2719662, the one that shipped a Fix it to switch off the Windows Sidebar and gadgets entirely, went out in july 2012, nine months after the Gallery was already gone. The Gallery did not close because gadgets were dangerous. Gadgets were declared dangerous once nothing was left that needed them.

~ the long tail ~

Windows Live Messenger followed in 2013, folded into Skype. Windows Live Writer was open sourced and lives on as Open Live Writer, maintained by volunteers, which makes it the one survivor of the entire Gallery. The gadgets themselves are still out there as.gadget files on download sites, unsigned and unsupported, and people still install them on Windows 10 and 11 through third-party sidebar clones.

What the Gallery understood was that a computer is something you decorate. Vista gave you a strip you could fill, Messenger gave you a window you could make ugly, and the Gallery handed out the parts for free with no account attached. What replaced it is better engineered and much less fun, and it wants a card on file before it will show you a weather widget.

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