Microsoft has been steadily rolling out new "Live" items since its introduction, there were two that got released late last night, with more planned to come out this summer.

Live Folders has been showing its face since around May, and are finally ready for some outside testing. The "storage on a cloud" Live Drive service, as it was coined earlier, will provide users with a free 500mb of online storage. (cough, cough...um... is that enough for the average user nowadays?) The storage was built for document storage only, so Microsoft isn't betting on the fact that people will be stuffing their spaces with multimedia materials like videos and music.

The Live Photo Gallery replaces the standard Vista Photo Gallery when installed. This allows users to control, manage, burn a picture or movie or create photo stitches, where photos are seamlessly stitched together to make a panoramic photo, relatively easy. It's an upgrade to the Windows Photo Gallery that comes standard with any Vista install. The main benefit to this application seems to be the ease of use for uploading images to Live Spaces, and videos to Soapbox.

More Windows Live services are said to roll out throughout the summer, as well as a Windows Live Suite that will include all of the Live services in one clean install.

Limited managed betas of the service will begin rolling out as of today with 5000 to 10000 testers, so look out for them if you're interested.

More coverage on this new release can be found here, here and here.

Take a look at some screenshots of the Live Folders interface:

With yesterday's announcement from AOL about 5GBs of online storage, the to-be released Windows Live Drive and rumored Google GDrive, all the major players are making strides into providing large amounts of persistent and easily accessible storage to their users.

Except Yahoo! - they've had a storage service forever - Y! Briefcase, but it is dwarfed by these recent developments - 30MB free, upgradable to just 100MB for $35, and a very Web 1.0 interface - no AJAX in sight.

It's not like they are not running large disk services for the backends of several properties - Y! Photos and Flickr offer unlimited storage for image files, so it's not a stretch to imagine them having the capacity to compete if they want to.

So Yahoo!... where's your offering? Is this a game of catch-up like when GMail opened the floodgates on 1GB+ mailboxes, or a case of Yahoo! forgetting an older service and letting it wither away??