It looks like Kurt, Samir and the rest of the Windows Live Expo team has been busy the past couple of months. From the blog post entitled on their team blog we learn

The team has spent the past 2 months working on features that were either gathered from end user feedback or were part of our long-term roadmap, so we are excited to share our work with you. As part of this update we wanted to highlight the following new features:

Integrated payment service:  Paypal’s 150 million registered users can now easily reference their account in order to complete secure person-to-person transactions on Windows Live Expo.  Buyers can purchase items from sellers on Expo with a credit card thru Paypal or using their Paypal debit accounts. Additionally, sellers can specify their preferred method of shipping and declare the cost for doing so.

 New high quality job listings: Expo now allows users to search and browse thousands of local and national job listings which are supplied by our partner CareerBuilder.

 Featured ads: The new featured ads area (provided by AdMission) allows you to generate a lot more interest in your listing by offering a fun, rich media experience that highlights your classified listing. The featured ads module will initially appear in the real estate and autos sections (example).

I chatted with Samir about the addition of integrated payments and a job listing service a few weeks which led an interesting line of thinking on my part. Besides identity, the most important pillar of social software is reputation. In Windows Live, we are building all these notions of a user's reputation which don't really overlap but tell you more about the user. For example, a user who Hotmail considers a spammer (i.e. has a bad reputation as an email user) may also be an awesome seller on Expo to whoever responds to his V1@gr@ spam (i.e. has a good reputation as a seller). Then there are the various notions of expertise being built up in Windows Live QnA. A person who is great at answering questions about Marvel and DC Comics may suck at answering other kinds of questions. How should all these aspects of a users reputation be represented in our various services? Should they be unified in some way? Is it interesting to be able to click on my profile and get an overview of all aspects of my reputation in Windows Live? Do we need a Reputation Metasystem to go along with the Identity Metasystem so we can enable federated/interoperable reputation systems?

Anyway, I digress. Check out Windows Live Expo, the newest changes to site make it an even more compelling service than before.