Windows Live Messenger

In this beta, Windows Live Messenger has gotten a complete makeover and the focus for the program has changed from an instant messenger client, to a complete social networking hub. There's a brand new social networking dashboard which shows activities from any of the social networking services that you've added to your profile. Any updates from these services (e.g photos/videos uploaded, status changed, new tweet) are shown in the main Messenger window. If you add the Facebook or Myspace activities to your profile, then all your Facebook and Myspace friends are added into your contact list in Messenger (and actually over all the Windows Live services) and duplicates (e.g a person's Messenger account, Facebook account and Myspace account) are all combined into one profile automatically. It's not perfect and it does make a few mistakes sometimes and also can't recognise some contacts and won't combine them (but I believe you can do it manually through Windows Live People) but it's pretty nifty stuff. If you don't want any of this stuff, you can turn it off and continue to use Messenger as a simple instant messenger client.One controversial feature involves display names. To simply how your profile appears to your friends, in Windows Live Wave 4 web services and Messenger 2010, you no longer have a display name - in it's place is your full name (kinda like Facebook). This is going to upset a lot of people in the short term I believe because they no longer will be able to set their names to something with lots of lovehearts in it or anything, but in the long term, it will make things much simpler and people will come to accept it just like they did moving from Myspace to Facebook). It will save me a lot of work renaming contacts to their full names so that I would know who they were. You can still update your status and this has actually been enhanced. You can now share links, photos and videos from your status and have your status automatically posted to your social networks. Tabbed conversations have been added to Messenger after years and years of lobbying and Messenger Plus having to implement the functionality for Microsoft. There's some great advancements around photo and video sharing with HD video chat support and much improved photo sharing. The handwriting tool has been removed, because few people used it (mainly because they didn't own tablets). So Messenger 2010 is exciting and the final version should bring along the Facebook chat functionality that Facebook Chat users will find incredibly useful in fixing the shortcomings of the web chatting experience (or lack of it).

Messenger Sign In

First Time View Choice

Messenger Social Highlights View

Messenger News View

Conversation Window

Tabbed Conversation Window

High Quality Photo Sharing

Improved Jump List

Improved Thumbnail Previews (now without the useless avatar preview & with status changing buttons)

New Toasts (alert popups)