See update at end of post.

As Jeff and Piero mentioned yesterday, the newest version of Messenger (beta coming soon) is designed to be the most meaningful way to stay in touch with the people who matter most, keeping you connected with your friends and what they’re doing across the web. We have made it possible for people to quickly see what their friends are doing on social sites like Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn. But of course, people love shopping, they love watching videos and viewing photos, and they love finding great local places to eat, relax, and spend time with others. So while the big social networks are important, there are tons of other experiences that customers want to stay up to date with.

Earlier today, John Richards and Angus Logan took the stage at The Next Web Conference in Amsterdam where they announced Messenger Connect – a new way for partners and developers to connect with Messenger. Messenger Connect allows web, Windows and mobile app developers to create compelling social experiences on their websites and apps by providing them with social promotion and distribution via Messenger.

As we thought about how we designed Messenger Connect, we looked a great deal at what was happening in the industry and where our partners and developers were looking for us to add value and provide opportunities for them to enhance the experiences they are building. A few key themes emerged:

• Connecting into existing friend relationships is very valuable: In the past, many developers wanted to build up their store for user identities, profile information and social graphs. But over the last few years, it has become increasingly clear to many developers that taking advantage of the existing relationships and communications within the large online networks is more valuable than trying to create their own walled garden.
• Emerging industry standards for social data are easing development: Whether it’s identity and authentication or it’s how contacts and updates are shared between sites, the emergence of industry standards is making it much more efficient for different developers to allow their customers to connect with each other.
• Simple and flexible controls are key for developers: Bringing in social data must feel natural to the developer’s experience. At the same time, developers have busy lives and competing priorities. So social objects have started to become much more easy to embed “as-is,” with little required customization – often just pasting a few lines of script. But when you want to customize, it’s important that the developer has the ability to go deeper and really tailor the experience.

Messenger Connect

Messenger Connect brings the individual APIs we’ve had for a long time (Windows Live ID, Contacts API, Messenger Web Toolkit, etc.) together in a single API that's based on industry standards and specifications (OAuth WRAP, ActivityStrea.ms, PortableContacts, OData) and adds a number of new scenarios.

The new Messenger Connect provides our developer partners with three big things:

• Instantly create a user profile and social graph: Messenger user profile and social graph information allows our shared customers to easily sign in and access their friends list and profile information. This allows our partners to more rapidly personalize their experiences, provides a ready-made social graph for customers to interact with, and provides a channel to easily invite additional friends to join in.
• Drive engagement directly through chat indirectly through social distribution: By enabling both real-time instant messaging conversations (chat) and feed-based sharing options for customers on their site, developers can drive additional engagement and usage of their experiences by connecting to the over 320 million Messenger customers worldwide.
• Designing for easy integration in your technical environment: We are delivering an API service that will expose a RESTful interface, and we’ll wrap those in a range of libraries (including JavaScript, .NET, and others). Websites and apps will be able to choose the right integration type for their specific scenario. Some websites prefer to keep everything at the presentation tier, and use JavaScript libraries when the user is present. Others may prefer to do server-side integration, so they can call the RESTful endpoints from back-end processes. We're aiming to provide the same set of capabilities across the API service and the libraries that we offer.

Keeping consumers connected

For consumers, this begins with letting you stay in touch not only from our Messenger experiences but also from the sites that our partners are building. Critical to this endeavor is that we do this in a manner that you own and control. So as we do this, we strongly believe that users own their data and should be able to share or access it from the websites and applications they want to. And we believe that the privacy of a customers’ data is a critical element of a secure web and the customer should be in control. So we've built Messenger Connect with security and privacy as foundational elements. Websites cannot access any of a user’s non-public information from Windows Live without prior consent from the customer, through an experience that could look like the image shown here:

And, equally important, a user can remove the permissions they have granted to websites and applications at any time.

Coming soon to a site or app near you

As Chris mentioned earlier, we’re in the process of broadening the distribution of our new experiences. Messenger Connect is currently being opened to a small number of leading companies that are helping to provide us with feedback and final revisions. You can look for more news about our new developer portal opening up more broadly in the coming months.

Ori Amiga

Principal Program Manager
Partner program for Windows Live

Update: I got some questions about OData and we forgot to mention in the original post (doh!)… our RESTful endpoints will also support OData (www.odata.org).  We’ll share more info as we roll out the bits.

We’ve spent the last few months posting about how we look at the industry, the key customer problems that are top-of-mind for us, and where we think we can improve the lives of our customers. Today in a speech at the Universidade de São Paulo in Brazil, Steve Ballmer is sharing a preview of the new Windows Live Messenger. In this post we want to talk more about our philosophy and approach for this new version. In subsequent posts we’ll go into more depth on different aspects of the experience.

As Chris laid out in his blog post last week, the world of instant messaging has evolved in the last 14 years. In the early days of IM, most of your close friends were on one IM network, connected using their PCs, and sent text-only instant messages back and forth. Today, people still want to stay in touch with their friends, but three things have changed:

• IM has evolved. It has gone beyond text to video chat – people want to share photos, videos, and links, too. People still love IM – they just want it to do even more.
• Social networks have changed how people communicate. Our second observation is that while people still primarily communicate with close friends, their communication has shifted from one IM network to a richer but more complex social landscape. Now, almost all of us communicate with close (and not so close) friends using social networks, other sharing sites, email, SMS, and IM – and we do so from our phones as often as from our PCs. Most people already have a primary social network they love, and they just don’t need another one. And although nearly everyone uses multiple services now, very few people we talk to want just “aggregation,” either. If all you do is copy and paste all the social feeds into one place, it can easily lead to a messy, combined list, half of which you're not really interested in anyway. Getting 50 random updates is less interesting than getting 5 from your family and close friends, and 1 cool video that 20 of your friends are commenting on.
• People are spending more time away from their PCs. More and more, people are staying connected on their phones, and they're spending time browsing the web and in web-based email, rather than connected to a client program on their PCs. Any connection with friends needs to be able to follow you across the devices that you use throughout the day, and should integrate into the experiences you’re having on each of those devices.

With this context in mind, we set out to do three things with this version of Messenger.

• Improving the IM experience. Hundreds of millions of people use Messenger every day, and we heard loud and clear that they wanted to do more in their conversations. We focused on improving the personal interactions with your close friends, so that you can continue to connect in even richer ways with the people you care about most.
• Staying in touch with close friends. This begins with bringing together the most complete picture of what your friends are doing across your social networks and other sharing sites, and then helping you see at a glance what your favorite people are doing, wherever they’re doing it. This includes comprehensive integration with Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, and a wide range of other sharing sites.
• Bringing Messenger with you to Hotmail, the web, and your phone. While the Windows PC is the best way to experience Messenger, we know that you spend a lot of time in web-based email, on your mobile phone, and browsing other websites. So we’ve built Messenger right into Hotmail, increased our support for SMS, and created Messenger apps for popular mobile phones.

Improving the IM experience

We know that hundreds of millions of people use Messenger every day and love it for what it provides – instant connection to their friends on Messenger. So we focused on making Messenger better for folks who love IM.

It can be difficult to have a meaningful online conversation about photos, videos, or website content when you're not looking at the same stuff at the same time. The new version of Messenger brings you richer photo and video sharing, high-definition video chat, video messages, games, and one-click access to files on your PC, search results from Bing, and photos and videos shared on SkyDrive, Facebook, and other sharing sites. And we've made it easier than ever to do these together – so you can have a high-definition video chat with your friend while clicking through a set of photos, letting you see and hear each other’s reactions while you share. We’ve also made it easier to manage multiple simultaneous conversations by putting each one in its own tab.

And of course, as part of our deeper integration with Facebook, later this year Messenger will support Facebook Chat, so you’ll be able to IM all your Facebook friends from within Messenger.

Staying in touch with close friends

Most people today visit at least one social network and dozens of content sharing sites, get email with photos and social notifications, and of course, maintain accounts in numerous places with different sets of friends and content. So we focused on connecting Messenger to the social networks you already use, and prioritizing the most important updates so you can quickly see what your favorite people are doing, wherever they’re doing it.

We know your close friends share using email, IM, and social networks. So we brought all of those together into a single view. The status from your Facebook friends who don’t use Messenger? Check. The photos your mom sent you as plain old e-mail attachments? Check. The Office docs you’re collaborating on with friends in SkyDrive? Check. And the stuff your favorite Messenger friends are doing on hundreds of sites they choose to share from? Check.

And since simple “aggregation” can make things worse instead of better, we focused on prioritizing the people that matter most to you, so you don’t miss the handful of important updates from your closest friends and family just because your college and work “friends” are broadcasting their whole life every minute of the day. Just tag your favorite people, and we optimize your feed for the stuff those people are doing. Of course, it’s not 100% exclusive to your favorites – the most interesting things from your other friends like photos, videos, and links (especially the ones being commented on a lot) are there too. This makes us a great companion to the services you already love like Facebook, Flickr, MySpace, LinkedIn and more – and when you have time to go beyond those most important updates, diving deeper into those sites is just a click away.

Lastly, we recognized that we could connect your social updates to the power of the Windows PC and really bring it to life. So we took advantage of the latest advances in hardware and graphics to give you a modern social experience. This means that Messenger brings beautiful high-resolution views of the photos, videos, and links that your friends are sharing, right to your desktop. View their Facebook albums, gorgeously presented so that they're fun to browse through and easy to comment on. Messenger is also the simplest way to update your status and instantly post it to other sharing sites you use. You can even bring your photo albums right into high-definition video chats with your friends.

Here’s a picture of the new social view for Messenger:

Bringing Messenger with you to Hotmail, the web, and your phone

People are increasingly needing to stay in touch while away from their primary PC, so we are bringing Messenger to the places you communicate from. Our upcoming release will include not just Messenger itself, but also an update to Hotmail that puts Messenger front and center there, too (we’ll talk more about that soon). And we’ll bring Messenger to breadth broad range of mobile experiences, from SMS and simple browsing, to new Messenger apps for popular smartphones. The new Messenger Companion add-on for Internet Explorer will let you share links and comments from whatever website you're on. And we’ll deliver an updated version of the the Messenger Web Toolkit (now called Messenger Connect), so websites can embed Messenger friends, conversations, and social updates directly into their experiences.

The new Windows Live Messenger

The way people socialize and connect with their friends is changing. We designed the new Messenger with these changes in mind so you can continue to use it to connect to your closest friends, wherever they are, and wherever you are. As Chris announced earlier, we’ll be releasing this to a limited number of individuals externally in the very near future, before expanding to a broader public beta, and finally to the full public release.

Here’s a video to show you a little bit of what is in store:

You can also learn more about the upcoming Messenger release at www.messengerpreview.com.

We look forward to sharing this with all of you soon, and getting your feedback!

Piero Sierra and Jeff Kunins
Group Program Managers for Windows Live Messenger and Social

Over the last few months, we’ve focused this blog on our current software and services – how we build them and how they're used around the world. We’ve also talked about trends we’ve observed both in the use of our services and in our research with customers. Today marks the point where we shift the focus of our blog from our current services to our next major release – known internally as “Wave 4.”

For several months now, we’ve had several thousand people running regular builds of this code inside Microsoft, and we’ll shortly begin expanding this testing to some folks outside Microsoft for additional feedback.

We will then roll out updates to our web services, followed by betas of our software for Windows PCs, Macs, and phones. Our approach is to release betas to the public once we think the build is in pretty good shape, learn through beta usage data and beta user feedback, and make additional refinements that eventually become the final release. Of course, we’ll continue to update the service as we see how you use it every day and hear from you about what’s working and what needs improvement.

As promised, in this blog we want to talk more about our thinking and focus as we've designed this next wave of Windows Live. While there’s a ton of great stuff to come, you’re going to hear us really focus on three key areas – Messenger, Hotmail, and Windows Live Essentials — especially how the Essentials suite completes your Windows PC experience and connects your PC to the services you use every day.

Messenger –staying in touch with the people who matter most

In the not-so-distant past, your friends were mostly on one IM network, mostly on a PC, and it was easy to keep track of what they were doing. Today’s instant messaging is still mostly about people who are online on a PC having a conversation with each other. In Messenger, these conversations occur between more than 320 million users who exchange more than 10 billion daily messages with their real friends.

But in the last several years, conversations have shifted beyond IM sessions, to activity on social networks, sharing in email, and SMS messages.

People have hundreds of “friends” across numerous social networks and sharing sites, but most people still spend most of their time communicating with a core group of people. To stay up to date with these "real friends" you have to go from site to site and wade through long lists of posts. And really, most people don’t need another social network – the one they have is just fine.

Messenger will always be great for IM, and we’ll do more to make those conversations even richer. But Messenger is evolving into a companion for your social networks, so you can stay in touch more easily with your closest friends across the many services you and they use. As we broaden Messenger's reach, we remain committed to ensuring that you’re in control of your privacy. From simple defaults that keep your private life private, to powerful controls customizing how you share.

Hotmail – the most efficient email service for busy people

Much like instant messaging, email has changed over the last several years. In the “old days” of email, you would only get mail from a real person, someone who knew your email address, and email was mostly text. Email today is a lot more than plain text – it is the way we get things done. It's where we conduct business, keep up with social networking updates, and share photos, documents and links with friends and co-workers. Similarly, your “contact list” isn’t just people you send email to anymore – it is a long list of people you communicate with in the social networks you use every day.

In past blog posts, we’ve talked a lot about how consumers are increasingly busy, and how Hotmail builds tools to save time for over 350M+ active users. We’ll focus our improvements in Hotmail on helping all those busy people get more done in email, in the most efficient way possible. This means helping you quickly see the mail that matters most, and letting you easily sweep away mail that you don’t want. We’ll also make it simpler and easier to share through email, whether you're sharing and editing Office documents with co-workers, or sharing vacation photos with friends and family.

Windows Live Essentials – completing the Windows experience on your PC

PCs running Windows continue to be the most popular way to connect to the internet. And, just as email and instant messaging have changed, the way people use their PCs has changed too. These days, folks use their PCs to communicate on social networks, send email, browse the web, and share photos and videos with their friends. Most people have a mobile phone, and many have an additional PC. And most people already have at least one social network (often more), a photo sharing service, and an email address.

Wave 4 of Windows Live Essentials includes the best tools to organize photos, make movies, and keep in touch with your closest friends, all designed for the power of the Windows 7 PC. We’ll focus on connecting your PC to your social networks, your photo sharing services, your phone, and your other PCs – and help you keep things in sync across all the devices you use.

Any time, any device, securely and safely

We’ve designed Messenger, Hotmail, and Essentials to work across the devices you use every day – the PC, the phone, and the browser. We’ll continue to focus deeply on security and privacy, so you get notified about suspicious or unusual activity, you get extra security on your PC, and you stay in control of how your data is shared with others.

In our upcoming posts we’ll go into depth on Messenger, Hotmail, and Essentials – and provide more information about the new features we’ve built and why we’ve built them. We’re excited about what’s coming next and we hope you enjoy the release as much as we’ve enjoyed building it. Stay tuned.

- Chris

Chris Jones is Corporate Vice President of Windows Live.

When I talk about what we’re doing in Windows Live, people often start by asking me: What is Windows Live?

Many folks know about Hotmail and Messenger, and there are millions of users of our other desktop apps and services like SkyDrive, Photo Gallery, and Movie Maker. So what people are really asking me is how Windows Live threads these experiences together, and how we choose the elements that make up those connections. Our overriding philosophy is very simple: Windows Live completes the Windows experience. Our goal is to provide you with the essential software + services that help you get more done and have fun on Windows. It’s as simple as that.

So how do we choose what to focus on with each release?

Consumer needs & trends

We start by looking at consumer needs and industry trends.

Psychologists talk about a person’s hierarchy of needs that start with the physical and extend upwards through safety, love, esteem and self-actualization.This model can be equally applied to how customers choose a PC: people want a safe, secure and reliable computer that just works. Then, folks want flexible tools that help them communicate and share with the people they care about. And of course, people want to express themselves and have fun too.

Going beyond “It just works”

Windows 7 has been received as a new benchmark for PC simplicity and reliability. More than any previous version, Windows 7 saves time and helps you get more done.

We wanted to know how we could improve Windows Live to help you save even more time and get more done.  So we asked a cross-section of Windows users: what do you do after you boot up Windows? What are the top tasks that matter to you?

In general, people told us they spend time doing five things on their home PC:

1. Surfing the web
2. Organizing and sending email
3. Organizing, viewing, and sharing photos
4. Social networking and blogging
5. Burning music, photos, or videos to CD or DVD

To these we can add the following macro trends:

1. Cameras are getting smaller and cheaper. And because of that, there are more cameras on all kinds of devices than ever before. Last year alone, consumers took nearly 622 billion new photos. That’s an additional gigabyte of photos every 6 months for every PC.
2. Users are facing an overload of social information stemming from the proliferation of new social networking and communication services. There’s just incredible growth in people sharing on the web. Today’s average consumer has three email accounts, two social networks, and hundreds of friends on all of them.

We looked at these trends and realized that with all these new capabilities came increased complexity. It’s still too hard to connect. Too hard to organize. Too hard to share. How do we simplify these experiences for people?

Windows Live Essentials

Windows Live Essentials is the suite of desktop apps designed to help you do more with Windows. It includes powerful yet simple tools for communication and self-expression.

The tools we offer are tightly mapped to the customer trends found in our research. Among those trends, the most notable “new” customer behavior is engagement in social networking, which didn’t even show up in the list a few years ago. This is one reason you'll continue to see us invest heavily in tools to help users deal with the onslaught of social information.

In addition to providing new ways to communicate and express yourself, Essentials applications are also tightly integrated with Windows Live web services, so you can sync your desktop mail and calendar with Hotmail, share photos on SkyDrive, update your Messenger status on your profile, and so on. You can even use Sync to access files on your computer from anywhere.

So, what is Windows Live?

People want a PC that just works, that helps them get productive right away, and makes it easy to share photos and ideas, and access their digital stuff on the go. This is the central connection between Windows and Windows Live, and how we think about threading the connections between these experiences. We're building a suite of software and services that:

• Help you organize and create beautiful new photos and videos.
• Help you share your stuff, with whoever you want.
• Help you access your stuff on the go, from wherever you want.

How are we doing?

We hope you’re already using Windows Live Essentials on your PC. If not, go try it and tell us what you think!

The feedback we've gotten so far has been positive, both statistically (in terms of usage and engagement) and anecdotally. I know Microsoft can sometimes seem like a giant impersonal corporation but I can assure you it is made of actual human beings.*  We take great pride in our engineering and craftsmanship, and we love it when you tell us what’s working. We also need to know what isn’t working – we really do want all of your feedback, as it’s the only way we’ll know if we’re on the right track.

Piero Sierra
Group Program Manager
Windows Live Messenger and Mail

*This would, of course, be the first thing a team of sentient robots would claim. I’m just saying.

As many of our recent posts have talked about, at Windows Live we’re keenly aware of the staggering array of services that our 500+ million users love and use in addition to Windows Live. Whether it’s major social networks like Facebook, photo and video sharing services like YouTube or Flickr, or any of the tens of thousands of other interesting sites and apps that are evolving all the time, we know that one of the most important ways to keep Messenger vibrant is to make Messenger an outstanding companion to this rich ecosystem. In other words, we want to help you get more out of the services you love when you use them together with Windows Live.

We’ve had a long tradition in Messenger of extensibility and personalization, and you can be sure that this is an area we’re looking at expanding further as we move forward. In Messenger today, there’s already a fun array of extensibility points for partners to plug into, and for users to take advantage of, including:

• Embedding Messenger in your website with the Web Messenger Toolkit lets users chat within the context of another site, so you can watch TV shows together or chat about restaurant reviews as you look at them together.
• Contact import/export lets you easily pull in your contacts from major email and social sites around the world, to invite friends to Messenger, and vice versa to bring your Messenger contacts with you to the sites and services you choose.
• Web activities and social feeds let users automatically share what they’re doing across the web with their Messenger friends

Embedding Messenger in your website

While hundreds of millions of Messenger users keep the Messenger client running on their desktop in the background most or all of the time, they’re also (of course) spending lots of time on other sites and services across the web.

More and more websites are integrating social features from services like Facebook, allowing their users to share their content with friends, contextually discover how their friends are using that site, etc. But when you’re sharing an interesting video, restaurant review, news, or other web content, that's often exactly when you want to start chatting with a friend.

With the Messenger Web Toolkit, site developers can easily enable just that—embedding real-time user presence and instant messaging capability into their site. With it, users can IM with one another from their website and share Messenger status messages that their friends will see in Windows Live Messenger, Hotmail, etc.

Site developers can integrate with the Windows Live Messenger Web Toolkit in three easy ways, using our simple interactive SDK with code samples, etc. You can (1) use a simple and completely skinnable Web Bar control, (2) assemble your own combination of 16 modular UI Controls, or (3) build a unique experience from the ground up using the Windows Live Messenger Library.

The SDK has many cool code samples in multiple languages (C#, VB.NET, PHP, Ruby, Java, Python and Perl) that make it simple to integrate the Windows Live Messenger Web Toolkit. So, no matter what your style, you’ve got the help you need to kick start your development and get these new capabilities on your website in a snap.

Two fun examples of sites using the Messenger Web Toolkit are Antena3.com in Spain, and Photobucket visual search:

Contact import and export

When you join a site that has social features, the first thing you usually want to do is see if your friends are there, or invite them to join you. Most of us have friends spread across a few different web services. Re-entering their email addresses into each website is probably not how you want to spend your time.

Fortunately, you can easily bring your contacts into Messenger and other Windows Live services from Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Gmail, AOL, Hyves, and more.

For partners who want to let their users bring their Messenger contacts into their site, an open, RESTful set of APIs and an interactive SDK are available.

Web activities and social feeds

And finally, as we’ve talked about in other posts, we have an extensive and growing partner program, where users can choose to automatically share what they’re doing on 75 partner sites from around the world.

As part of this program, we support and are co-authors of the activitystrea.ms standard for activity feed ingestion.

Wrapping up

We hope that whether you’re a user, a partner/developer, or both, you’re already using many of our extensibility features. And you can be sure that we’re working hard on more ways to make Messenger the best companion to the other services you love.

Jeff Kunins
Group Program Manager, Windows Live social networking