Posted by Ali

I am very excited! Now you can create your OWN IM button to put on your blog or in your email signature.  Just go to www.messengerbuttons.com and create your own button, it has a lot of cool ways to personalize your button.   This makes it even easier for your friends to find you on IM.

Once you have created your button, it is also easy to add it to your Windows Live Space, Outlook, Hotmail or Windows Live Mail!  Here is a button I created. 

Enjoy connecting with all of your friends and family!

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If you have a comment on this post please comment! For other questions/concerns/discussion topics/rants/raves/etc - please head over to the Windows Live Messenger Newsgroup.

A few months ago, Jason and the folks at Messenger Says let me make a post about Messenger and Spaces.  I’m excited to report that last week the Windows Live Spaces team had a big release that included updates to the “What’s New” that now make it easy to catch-up on recent activity from your Messenger contacts (and Spaces friends) in a single view:

The “What’s New” module now includes details on recent updates from your (two-way) WL Spaces “friends” and WL Messenger contacts.  The type of information in the details is:

• Photos – album title and thumbnails of up to five recently added photos
• Files – folder title and icons of up to five recently added files; you can hover to see the file name as a tooltip
• Blog entry – blog entry title and a text snippet from the
• Lists – list title and the number of items in the list
• Profile updates – a list of profile fields that were updated
• New friend – when a friend (or messenger contact) of yours adds a new friend, you see the new friend’s display name and a link to invite them to be your friend (if they’re not already your friend)

The What's New module shows up to ~25 items, but you can also click the "What's New" module header to view a full What's New page with ~100 items. 

Some other changes that we’ve made to the Spaces home include:

• Upcoming birthdays are also in the What’s New module. 
• Recent comments now includes comments on your photos and guestbook and the module was moved above the fold
• Invites to new Windows Live Events now show-up in the “Welcome module”
• There’s a link to the Community page in the top right
• New features are highlighted at the bottom of the middle column

My favorite part(s) of What’s New is that it’s comprehensive and up-to-date.  Basically, if you have permission to see content on a contact or friend’s space, you’ll get it in your What’s New.  Also, updates come through in minutes; so check back often for the latest updates from your contacts ;)

To get to the Spaces home / What’s New, just go to http://spaces.live.com and sign-in or click the “spaces” button in Messenger (shown right).

Enjoy—
--Rob

P.S. If you’d like to learn more, my colleague Dare has some more details on his space and there’s also more on my personal space including some safety/privacy tips.