Microsoft's new Windows Live Services, launching now in New Zealand (details and screen shots here), shows the company understands the key to Web 2.0 success: It's about the aggregation, stupid. At least, it's achingly close to understanding.

The revamped Live series of online products includes a Live Home and Profile pages that sports a Facebook look, offering similar displays of friend networks, status update feeds, shared online photos, blog links and other personal info.

In a radical break with the past, the new Live Spaces portal accepts update feeds from more than 50 partners, from the likes of Facebook (5% owned by Microsoft) to interesting upstarts like the mobile blogging service Twitter.com to out-and-out rivals like Yahoo's Flickr.

Conveniently, you can also see your friends Facebook status updates, and the 49 other feeds, from inside your Hotmail inbox, or during an Instant Messenger session.

There's one conspicuous absence from the family of Windows Live Services feeds: Google.

While logistical hurdles are behind Windows Live 3's incremental roll-out (some new services will launch this month, some in December and the new-look Hotmail in January), politics is surely behind Google's absence.

That's a pity. The enlightened approach to pull third-party feeds into Windows Live Services will cement HotMail and IM's position as the planet's most-used apps, with 460 million active users between them accounting for a whopping 11% of total hours spent online.

From such a position of strength, Microsoft has nothing to fear from adding Google's Gmail or other properties to its Windows Live feeds (although it does work in the other direction, to a limited degree; you can upload a site created in Microsoft's Writer to Google's Blogger).

Rather, consumers would then know that Windows Live, and their HotMail inbox in particular (Google's Gmail does not aggregate feeds) was a one-stop shop for their social updates, and a logical first (and, perhaps evenually, only) destination for their social networking needs - and all software, including business software, is going social. That would be a tremendously powerful place for Microsoft to sit.

Maybe Google feeds will arrive with Windows Live Services 4.0 -- or maybe Google will update Gmail to aggregate feeds from Microsoft products in the interim.

Regardless, Microsoft New Zealand is now going to put more emphasis on promoting the free, ad-supported Windows Live Services, a suite of products that Windows Client Business Group Manager Ben Green admits has been little known, or understood, beyond Hotmail and IM in the past.