Impressions on the new Windows Live Messenger Beta

I think I've unravelled the analogy between Churros and Microsoft - it's their design language for their new products! Moist and chewy, if the new beta for Windows Live Messenger is anything to go by.

Go download and install it here and you'll immediately notice the difference. Everything gets bigger!

Literally. In fact, the fonts have become so big you can't even see my full name on my bar. The new Messenger beta has also become kind of "more social." You can choose a select few of your chat-buddies to become "favourites" (wow, what a ground-breaking feature) or add them to groups (kind of like how your phone's contact list allows groups).

Then there's that ticker at the bottom that collects all the subtitles from your friends' names and displays them like like a news feed. It also collects changes in your friends profile like "Mr A just changed his profile picture..." and feeds it to you a la RSS. This feature I like. It shows Microsoft's really been paying attention to how consumers are using their features. When Heath Ledger passed away, more than half my contact list turned up with "RIP Heath" messages.

One thing I didn't like was the fact the large fonts and layout made for a very short list of friends and a lot of scrolling. So much so I've started making use of the search function now.

The best function has got to be this though - the fact you can map emoticons to profile pictures and change them according to your "mood". For example, if you use the smile smiley, your profile changes to a picture of you smiling. Of course, you have to setup the pictures first, and I don't get why they couldn't just let you upload various pictures for this instead of forcing you to use that "Wizard" that requires a webcam. Not so smart eh?