I am happy to echo the announcement of Live Search API 2.0 Beta being released for general use. There's a lot that’s new in this version:

• We now offer access through new interfaces: JSON, and XML over HTTP. Of course, you can still use our SOAP interface. But now you have options.
• You said you were spinning cycles parsing out non-web results that had been shoehorned into a one-size-fits-all response structure, and we heard you.
• The new API is strongly typed and offers access to seven different types of results (web, news, images, phonebook, spell-checker, related queries, and Encarta instant answer).
• We’ve opened up our Terms of Use, eliminating the pre-set usage quota. We do require that you use this API for user-facing applications only. But that’s reasonable, right?
• We’ve retained the popular capability to batch as many SourceTypes as you want into a single request with a single query string.

To me this is really exciting as it shows Microsoft’s commitments to evolving the API for its top services and supporting standards for interacting with them such as JSON or XML.

Generally I believe that search is a very key resource for any web project and as Live.com APIs improve and allow greater monetization this has the potential of evolving into a key competitive advantage for our platform. After all folks, its not all about Live Mesh :).