MS-Next

Steve of the Windows Live Messenger team posted on the valentine day on the list of with will be worked on for next version of Windows Live Messenger, presumably WLM 9. The none guarantee of features are listed below.

• Contact/group unique behaviors, such as playing a unique sound when a specific contact or group member signs in or out 
• Support for multiple accounts at the same time. For instance, someone could log in with their work email account and their home or social email account and send/receive IMs from both groups of contacts at the same time! 
• A Spelling / grammar checker for conversations. An optional feature to make sure IMs are spelled and worded properly before sending.
• Tabbed chat – conversations are in one window with tabs allowing you to select individual conversations to be brought forward. Similar to tabbed browsing in IE7
• A way to automatically install messenger updates and fixes without downloading a whole new messenger (like Windows does) 
• The ability to appear offline or have different statuses for different groups or contacts. For instance, you might appear offline for group A, busy for group B and yet let 2 or 3 other contacts see you as available.
• An easier way to invite friends and family to download and install and join the Windows Live Messenger community 
• Animated display pictures or custom avatars (or other enhanced personalization/online presence features.) 
• Stored and searchable chat history
• Better formatting of text within individual IMs – bold, underline, colors, fonts 
• Easier/better search for contacts - maybe a directory of messenger users or better integration with spaces for finding WLM users there?
• N-way audio/video conferencing
• File transfer resume
• Skinning. Skinning means that it’s possible to alter most if not all of the appearance of Messenger, hiding or emphasizing specific features of the application.

It’s seem the team try to full fill some of high requested features such as tabbed conversation window which available in some plug-in for age, advanced contact, and the most complained file sharing feature. We don’t know on what’s N-way audio/video conferencing but apparently that no innovation here. It’s not a big jump for what-to-be-call next version. No sign if Windows Live Messenger will take advantage of technologies available on Windows Vista such as Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) which Yahoo is working for its messenger.

If the team wish to work on small, fixing and improving features, we suggesting for short list:

• Improve speed of file sharing.
• Advanced emoticons management (roaming, backuping, restore or import and etc.).
• Fixing sign-in disaster, sorry but it still there.

At the end of day, the next version should be 8.5 instead of 9.0 otherwise the team should take time to looking for how to innovate its IM. There is a lot of things you can do with WL Messenger. If you want to completing with Skype on audio/video conversation you may implement separating video conference windows from conversation windows, improve video quality. For more adding some feature like watch video together (just like Music Mix). Well, it long to be listed.

For the team itself, you should improve the your way of communication with your beta testers. Not just asking people to join news groups and reward them but let them alone there while you kept quite. Don’t being as worse among other Windows Live service team. Enough speak.