posted by Steve

There’s a lot of love in the air today and many, many flowers are being passed around including dozens and dozens of roses. We here on the Messenger Team have received a dozen roses from you, our customers! These are ideas for features you’ve mentioned in feedback that you’d like us to work on!

What we’d like to do is invite you to show these ideas some additional lovin’ by voting on your favorites! I’ll start a thread in the Windows Live Messenger newsgroup (microsoft.public.windows.live.messenger) so that you, our blog and newsgroup enthusiasts, can discuss and vote on these or other ideas you might have for 9.0...10.0 and beyond!

Please note that this is not a guarantee that these features *will* be worked on, but it’s important for us to know your thoughts. Feature selection for Messenger takes into account many, many factors including customer input, business needs, available resources and level of effort estimates. It’s a complicated process but one we know will ultimately produce the best possible Messenger we can build.

At the top of that list is Customer Input because it’s ultimately *your* product. So please take some time to talk about your ideas, share more thoughts, vote and generally give us your feedback!

Here’s the “rosy” dozen features you mentioned:

· 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

Oh, wait!  Two that I forgot!  Shame on me!  (not that we're listening, for those of you on mess.be...)

· File transfer resume - Didn't complete that last file transfer?  Pick up where you left off.  Good for slow connections.

- 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.

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If you have a comment/question/concern/discussion topic/rant/rave/other - please head over to the Windows Live Messenger Newsgroup.