New Windows Live Messenger Beta Love

The Windows Live Messenger team released a new beta version, and it's so much improved over the last one. They even took a bunch of my UX suggestions!


(Photo courtesy of Mark's Flickr collection :-))

Now, while I think its newfound simplicity is elegant, I noticed my friend Summer in Singapore has a personal message up of "OMG Why is MSN ugly again!". She thinks the big blue and green buttons were cute, and that the new version looks like MSN 4.0.

I guess it's really hard to please every demographic. :-)

Anyhow, I've gotta say that after years of using a million and a half IM clients - aim, gaim, trillian, icq, msn, yahoo, gtalk, (zephyr, talk... the list goes on and on) - I've gotta say that I'm quite satisfied by the latest Windows Live Messenger featureset and user experience. I actually found out recently that my first hiring manager at Microsoft (the guy who more or less hired me into the company) is now the Director of Program Management over there. Gonna have to ping him for lunch sometime soon.

By the way, if anyone else wants to try the latest beta, I've got 7 invitations - leave a comment or drop me a line with your email address.