Messenger

With my busy job at Microsoft, it’s hard for me to stay in touch with friends and family year round. I lived in Maine ten years ago, then Canada, then Colorado, DC and finally NYC before moving to Seattle. That means a lot of friends in a lot of different places. So, when I do connect I want it to mean a lot and I want it to be in person. That’s why I love Windows Live Messenger’s video chat, Facebook chat sync and photo-sharing services. In fact, I love it so much I’m devoting this week’s chat to the topic.

As many of you know, I’m pretty new to Microsoft but I love finding those who have been here for much longer and listening to their jokes and stories. There is a cool culture that surrounds living and working in the Pacific Northwest with smart, driven and talented individuals. It sort of makes you wonder how one gets here.

I haven’t blogged here in a while, but that’s because I’ve started posting over on Inside Windows Live instead.

Members of the Windows Live Team as well as other teams from Microsoft are down at the Internet Identity Workshop (IIW) this week in Mountain View, California, USA. This is the 12th gathering of some of the thought leaders in the internet identity space and it's where many open web standards have been conceived in the past; Open ID v2, OAuth, Activity Streams as well as many others. Here's how the IIW describe the event:

Hotmail (with SkyDrive and Messenger) provides free email and collaboration services for 360 million people around the world. Over 30 million of them have tried out Office Web Apps in just the first six months they were available.  Microsoft also offers Exchange, SharePoint, and Lync for millions of businesses and other organizations.

If you’re using Windows Live Essentials on Windows Vista or Windows 7 and have Microsoft Update turned on, you’ll see an optional update this week in all 48 languages where Windows Live Essentials 2011 is available.

Today, Facebook chat is available to Hotmail customers worldwide, wherever Facebook is available.

In 2009, we introduced the application contacts feature, which makes it possible for web sites to offer the ability to IM based on site-defined user relationships.  Messenger users can  chat with other Messenger users based on the relationships they have on web sites without becoming Messenger friends and sharing email addresses.  Based on low usage of this feature, we have decided to remove support for application contacts in the Messenger Web Toolkit in six months.  Core IM functionality will continue to be supported afte

We’re excited to announce today that Facebook chat is now available to over 75 million more Messenger customers worldwide, wherever Facebook is available.

If you are using Windows Live Essentials on Windows XP, or are still using a pre-2011 version of Windows Live Essentials (including Messenger), starting this week, you’ll see a required update that is rolling out in all 48 languages. This minor update to Windows Live Messenger and the other Windows Live Essentials programs includes a set of important security updates, performance improvements, targeted bug fixes, and some other, minor changes.