Facebook, Twitter, HD chats now on Live Messenger

A day after launching the iPhone version, Microsoft today pulled the curtain off a new version of Live Messenger for PC, their popular Instant Messaging application. It adds a number of much-needed features like tabbed conversations and social networking integration. Following is Microsoft's new mantra for the Live Messenger -- "The new Messenger will provide a great way to have more meaningful conversations with the people you care about most. It will also bringing together your social networks and sharing updates, cutting through the clutter, and staying up to date with your favorite friends".  We got a sneak peek at the new version and these are the main features we saw.

1) Integration with social networks: Instead of fighting with the rest of the world with their own social networking portal, Microsoft has decided to rather aid the aggregation of existing services. Thus, with Live Messenger, they have tied up with popular networking mediums like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and LinkedIn. The messenger can pull updates from these applications and aggregate them in one window. Thus, you can say, comment on other people's Facebook photos or update status messages for all social networks at once -- right within the Messenger interface. 

 

2) HD-quality video chats: Skype did it a few months ago, and now Live messenger supports High Defintion (HD) video chats as well. We got a demo of an HD video call using a Microsoft HD web-cam, and the quality was pretty impressive. Again, quality will depend upon the web-cam you're using and the internet connection you're on. We bet you'll need a fairly high-speed internet access to have HD video conversations. 

 

3) Photo sharing: There's improved photo sharing in the new Live messenger. For instance, one can do an image search on Bing or pull a photo through a Facebook album, and instantly share it in the chat conversation. All this happens within the Live Messenger application

4) Tabbed Conversations: Just like most of the browsers of today, tabbed conversations are added to Live Messenger. This is helpful since many users would possibly be chatting with more than one person at the same time. 

5) Messenger in Hotmail: Like Gtalk's integration in Gmail, the Live Messenger will now also exist in the bottom left corner of your Hotmail. Thus, you can chat without the need to install the application.

A few other notable features include: Games that you can play online with friends, leaving a video message (like voicemail) and sending SMS via Live Messenger among others. Microsoft hasn't released this software to the world yet, but detailed info has been posted on a dedicated website.