posted by Sameer.

Some beta users seem to be getting an error 810003c1 when they try to login to Messenger. This error can be caused if the region setting for your account is not set. If you are seeing this error, please go to https://account.live.com/EditProf.aspx and make sure the Country/Region field is set correctly to your own country.

Thanks and have a great weekend!

  posted by Ellen

Hi Messenger Friends,

Let me introduce myself, I’m Ellen and I work in the Windows Live Marketing team. As you can imagine, I’m one of several lucky people that get to work on promoting a really fun product. And today, I get to talk about one of the great things on Messenger by being a guest blogger.

One of Messenger’s features is back - you can now call your contacts on their landline and mobile phones from your PC using Telefonica’s Voype Web Calling Service. Telefonica is one of the largest telecommunication companies in the world. And by partnering with them, we’ve been to obtain a great deal for you and provide you with really low phone rates. In the coming weeks, we will also be launching this feature in the following countries for the first time: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Peru and Venezuela.

You can now call all your friends and family globally at really low rates. It’s approximately a penny to China, 2¢ to the UK, 5¢ to Canada, or 10¢ to Mexico per minute when calling landlines. So when your friends are offline and you really need to have a conversation with them or just need to hear their voice, you don’t even need to think twice and worry about the cost.

I’m pretty excited to try this feature out next week. My friend Heather is leaving this weekend to go backpacking around Asia. I’m already planning to call her using Messenger so that I can hear her stories as they happen. I can call her on her mobile phone and I don’t have to worry about my phone bill or using my cell phone minutes! Actually, you can call anyone – they don’t have to be a Messenger contact – you can call your grandma to say hi, call into your conference call meetings, or just even order pizza! Maybe not from China but you get the point! J

All you have to do is sign-up for an account here, a microphone & speakers or headset and broadband connection. And buy credit in amounts of $5, $10 or $20.

To make a call in Messenger, it will depend on what version you have.

If you are using Windows Live Messenger 8.0, 8.1 or 8.5, just click on the phone icon either in the main window or choose a contact and click on the phone icon. From the drop down menu, select ‘Call a phone’. Add a phone number, click on enter and start talking! You’re all set. It’s that easy.

If you are already using the new Windows Live Messenger beta, there are a few of ways you can make a call. You can hover over a contact and if you have a phone associated with that contact, just click on ‘call work’, ‘call mobile’, etc. You can also open up a conversation window with that contact and click on the phone icon and enter their telephone number. For ad hoc calls, you can launch Windows Live Call from the start menu under All Programs > Windows Live Call beta, enter their telephone number and click Call. Choose whichever way is most convenient for you!

Posted by Brian

An issue has been discovered in the current Windows Live Messenger beta that may leave users unable to sign-in.  Only a very small number of users may encounter this issue but wanted to proactively message this to the community.

To avoid the issue yourself, please DO NOT block a group and then leave the group. If you plan to leave a group, please unblock it first. Following this precaution will ensure that you will not be affected by this issue.

We are currently working hard to fix the problem and allow those customers who have been affected to once again sign-in to the Messenger beta.

Thank you for your time and for participating in the beta!  We will post more information about this issue when it becomes available.

Thanks,
Brian

   posted by Steven

Hi everyone, last week was a bit quiet on the blog as the team has been working hard on the feedback we’ve been receiving.  Thanks for taking the time to post your comments, it’s appreciated.

I’ve received a number of requests to write a post explaining what Groups are and how best to use them. I thought I’d just respond to some of the questions we’ve received.

What are groups and what can I do with them?

Windows Live Groups are persistent groups that are membership-based. Someone creates a group and invites people they know to it. When you get invited to a group you receive a pop-up in Messenger, similar to when someone adds you as a contact.

You can choose to join the group or decline if you don’t want to receive IMs from the group. When you join a group it appears in your main window inside of a category called “Groups”.  To see the members of the group you can expand the group, look at the roster and see the status of everyone who is available, busy or offline.

To IM the group simply double click on the group name. This opens a conversation window with the people who are online from that group. Just like in a regular IM, if you start typing and send IMs other people in the group will receive a toast or at least a flashing notification in their task bar. When they open the conversation window they can see who is participating in the conversation.

How big can a group get?

Groups in Messenger are limited to 20 or fewer people. When more than 2 people are online the group lights up green in your main window. You can then click on it to start a group conversation.

What is the difference between a group and a category?

For quite a while Messenger has allowed you to categorize your contacts into lists called “Groups”. This made it easy to find someone quickly when you have a huge contact list. These “Groups” were personal to you alone, a kind of “tag” if you will (Family, Friends, Co-Workers). Interestingly we found that most users either don’t like the old “groups” view and rather use the View by Status option, or never bother to create custom lists to tag their contacts. Now don’t worry we didn’t remove “groups” but we did rename them to “Categories”.  We needed to do this to make room for the new Groups which are permanent and shared collections of people that can chat with each other. You can create group from an existing category. Just right-click on the category and select “Convert to group”. This will create a new group with that list of people pre-populated into the group invite wizard. The category remains as well in your contact list.

What are examples of groups I might create?

Groups are best for people that know each other in real life, online or offline. I’ve seen groups created for a variety of purposes like working groups, family members, social cliques, book clubs, soccer teams... Where I work, I’ve created a group for my team of program managers, for people working on the beta program and one for the lead developer and tester I work closely with. I’ve also created groups for my family and when Messenger gets out there a bit more I plan on creating one for the parents of my daughter’s classmates, a book club I belong to and some friends of mine that go biking on the weekends.

You see Groups are also a great way to segment your contact list by how you partition what you share online. For instance, my wife wants one place where anyone who is “family” can come and view our photos. I want one way to quickly talk to the people on my team – its great for quick IMs like:  “who is ready to go to lunch” or "can someone send out notes from that meeting…”.

What do I need to participate in a group?

All you need is the latest version of Messenger and a Windows Live ID. When you get invited to a group it will appear in your main window… click on it to open a conversation window and start IM’ing. Or expand the group and click on a member and you’ll start a conversation with just them.

What if I am too busy to participate in a group conversation?

If you don’t want to participate in IM right then but don’t want to miss anything just close the window and you’ll continue to receive the messages as long as you are signed on. When you are ready to participate open the window with the group by clicking on it from the main window and you’ll see the conversation that went on in your absence. Remember this only works if you are online to receive the messages in the background.

A quick simple video on how to create a group.  Thanks to Brian for whipping this up.

And now a question for you

This is our V1 of groups and I am really excited about what groups could be down the road. We have a lot of ideas but I’d love to hear what you are creating groups for and what types of activities you think Messenger should do for groups in the future. Please leave your thoughts in the comments.

Thanks for reading and we hope you enjoy groups!

-Steven and Brian

p.s. We have noticed a few questions about Sharing Folders and will be posting more on this topic next week.

  posted by Tolga

I just received a call from a friend who wants to give feedback on PC-to-PC Voice Call feature of Messenger. He told me that he called his parents in Pakistan who are on a dial-up (56k) connection, and he says in less than 3 seconds he was listening to his parent’s voice. Wahoo!! That’s awesome feedback!

Hello I am Tolga, Program Manager for the Voice and Video features of Windows Live Messenger. I work with a small group of individuals whose mission is to connect people and provide high quality communication experiences on any network around the world. It is a sometimes tough and challenging job but is still a lot of fun, as we have a great team.

We have made quite a few improvements under the hood over the last year. If you downloaded our latest beta (download.live.com) and are having voice or video calls with other beta users then you have already experienced them first hand.

Faster Call Connect Time.  This would be the first thing that you’ll notice when you call a friend using our latest Windows Live Messenger. You will be connected and talking in less time than ever before! Not only that but we’ve done quite a bit to improve the sound clarity and video sharpness in addition to adding higher resolution video modes (if your hardware and connection supports it). We believe you’ll be quite happy with the improvements our team has made here.

As hardware technology advanced, so did we: If you have a dual core PC, recent webcam and fast broadband connection; you will benefit more from Full Screen Video Call. Because if you have a dual core PC, and you switch to full screen during  your video call; it will be upgraded to High Quality Video Call.

(I’ve circled the ‘Switch to full-screen view’ button in RED.)

Quality of your voice or video calls depend on many factors including;

• Available processing power of your PC to Windows Live Messenger: Messenger uses real time encoding and decoding engine for your voice and video communications. The higher the processing power the better the quality of the image you send and you see.
• Available bandwidth to Windows Live Messenger: Real time encoded streams need to travel between two PCs; and higher the bandwidth faster these streams travel and hence you will have better motion picture.
• Webcam: Not every webcam is the same. The kind of lens; the circuitry they have and the driver of webcam makes difference in quality. And you can always have better quality with up-to-date drivers of you webcam and headset.

We have worked on determining situations which may have a negative effect on the quality of your communications. If Messenger notices such a situation; it takes action; such as tweaking image resolution a little bit; so that frame rate (hence the motion) and voice quality stays the same.

As a team we’d love to hear your feedback on the new voice and video calls. Please let us know and give us feedback about your experience. Get your friends and families on Beta and call them. We would be more than happy to hear your feedback. Thank you!

PS. Thanks to Aleks for his smile to the camera.