Ever been to a restaurant like TGI Fridays and see the sampler platter? Basically a dish with a little bit of everything included.  Not enough of anything for a meal, but you can try things out and see if you like them.  I recently had an opportunity to work with Koji Kato from Live on an API sampler. 

Instead of potato skins and  jalapeno poppers, this sampler has mini-applications for a number of the Live APIS.  This has applications on everything from Virtual Earth to a Messenger Activity project to a Live Contacts Project to.. to.. to.. Lots of stuff. It even includies some workflow foundation for API coordination and aggregation (that one's called Merged Search). Each one has a quick intro lab so you can try it out, expect to see some more in depth labs for some of the more complex applications (i.e. workflow).

The project's name is Live In A Box, and it's located over at CodePlex - http://www.codeplex.com/liveinabox. Check it out.