Microsoft Russia recently purchased the domain MSN.ru at an undisclosed price, but experts say it could have amounted to a million dollars. Microsoft confirmed the acquisition so if you visit MSN.ru now its homepage sports the ubiquitous Microsoft icons with Windows Live in the spotlight.

Microsoft intends to boost its share in Russia and acquiring the .ru domain is part of the plan. “MSN is getting more and more popular in Russia, and this is very important for Microsoft Russia”, said Petr Suzdalev, Microsoft Russia spokesman. “We will undoubtedly continue developing MSN.ru”.

One of Russia’s most expensive domains was Vodka.ru, sold at $1M. Vodka.com was more expensive at $3M. In 2005, Google bought Google.cn and Google.com.cn for $1M. So did Microsoft really pay $1 million for MSN.ru? It is certainly a possibility, and the domain is definitely worth that amount. It’s also interesting to note that in Russia and China, foreign companies seem to prefer to pay the actual market value for domains they failed to register when they had the opportunity to do so, rather than entangle themselves in lengthy lawsuits with an uncertain outcome.

Source.

Chris Payne, Windows Live™ Search Vice President will leave Microsoft to start hiw own business.

Payne rejoined Microsoft in 2001 after spending three years with Amazon.com, where he led the building of a number of groups within Amazon.com that focused on video, electronics, software and wireless. Before Amazon.com, Payne worked for eight years at Microsoft, helping ship four versions of Microsoft® Access.

You knew that this will happen someday… Microsoft testing their MSN Reporter in a very few countries, actually three only (The Netherlands, Belgium and Norway).

Too much “Vista” style for me, so far I don’t like how it looks and haven’t tried it yet cause I don’t understand none of that three languages.

According to LiveSide

So far there has been considerable interest in the new service, with reportedly 500,000 and 800,000 users visting the site in the 1st and 2nd months respectively.
With articles getting upto 10,000 votes and 1,000 comments, this is a on a completely different level to most existing social news sites.