Almost imperceptibly, social networking on the Internet has turned many of us into social butterflies. Involuntarily, we often find ourselves flitting between Internet messaging and LinkedIn to Facebook and Twitter and what have you. Accessing these social networks and content sharing sites may only take a few clicks on your desktop or some thumb jabs on your phone, but the effort of signing in and out of each seems an unnecessary exertion and waste of time... Especially if you’re prone to checking updates several times a day. So, wouldn’t it be nice to have a single screen that could integrate all these updates?
Well, the recently announced next generation Windows Live Messenger from Microsoft, promises to give you just that and more. Instead of letting you wriggle from a Twitter application to Facebook to LinkedIn, Messenger will fetch all the information from disparate social networks so that you can view and respond to everything in its unified social dashboard. You will be able to prioritise whom and what you want to read (and whom and what you want to filter out). This will streamline your reading, sharing and interactivity experience and mitigate the amount of time wasted to a certain degree as well. Messenger will be able to automatically synchronise your own status updates across your social networks as well. So now you will be able to send updates to Facebook etc., while ensconced in Messenger. Ditto for inline comments that you make. Contact information across different networks will be collated and made available in one single master list.
You will now also be able to voice and video chat in real time within the new Messenger. This high-definition, full screen video chat will let you share images (you can drag a photo from your PC, SkyDrive, Flickr or Facebook etc) and web links via page thumbnails even as you're chatting. You will thus be able to view your family or friends’ reactions in real time right then and there. Further upping the personalised quotient, Messenger will also allow you to leave voice mail-like video messages. Rather than appearing invisible or offline to everyone when you don't want to be disturbed, you will now be able to choose your presence and availability status selectively.
In terms of appearance, the multitude of chat windows has given way to a much neater, far more manageable tabbed screen chat interface. This means that you can switch between multiple conversations without muddling up various chat sessions in multiple pop-up windows. A sorely needed change, this. Away from the desktop, mobile versions of Messenger will be available for iPhone, Blackberry and of course Windows phones for access to your contacts, social updates, chats, and photo sharing.