Messenger + Facebook
Somewhere between late April and early May, the guys from the Messenger team released their application for Facebook. After about 4 months, they broke the million download mark, which is pretty awesome. That’s 250.000 installs a month, roughly 8300 a day. So in the meanwhile they’ve been tweaking things a bit, and the V.2 version of the client now lets you sync your status message in both Live Messenger and Facebook. Saves you a little time, which is nice.
Another thing that I’d like to point out is that it really makes sense to send feedback to the teams that develop the apps. Here’s why:
One of the most frequent pieces of feedback that we received was that the Human Interactive Proof (HIP, the numbers and letters that need to be entered before a conversation can be started using the IM Control) was annoying. We have removed the HIP challenge from the flow. You can now start a conversation in Facebook without entering a HIP challenge. Another frequent piece of feedback was that users had to enter a Display Name when we already knew their name in Facebook. We have also removed that. Your display name is set to your name in Facebook. Without the HIP challenge dialog and the display name dialog, there are now ZERO dialogs in the Facebook application before you can start a conversation. No Windows Live ID auth, no HIP challenge, no entering a display name. You just click on someone’s name and start typing!
See, that is the beauty of what we’ve become. We listen. We change things. Don’t hold back on your encounters. Let us know.
Kudos to the Live Messenger devs for this one!
September 22nd, 2008 at 11:51 am
That is great of course, but as Facebook now has their own standard messenger system built in, you can directly communicate with everyone on facebook, not only messenger users, so I think the actual use of the app is very limited/non-existent.
I for one have never used the app (why would I - if I’m online, I just use the real Live messenger).
Microsoft is getting quicker and quicker, which is good: next time they might be the ones who develop the messenger app of Facebook itself, with cross platform functionalities - which would have been great! :-)
September 22nd, 2008 at 12:55 pm
Agreed, Facebook has its internal messaging system, but one thing I’m sure of benefits Live Messenger is just to be there and be present. Also, it drives the awareness of an embeddable client in third party websites, which could be interesting to anyone out there with a private website who wishes to be able to communicate in real time with the readers or visitors of that site.
I’ve installed the Live Messenger app months ago, but haven’t actively used it yet since the trial I did after the install. I can’t see myself using it very much either, but if there are over 1 million downloads, surely that must mean some people are having fun with it.
Before the official launch, unofficial and ‘untrusted’ mash-ups were available. It’s this presence (amongst other reasons) that triggered the team to create an official app.
So: presence and blocking out rogue apps, whilst fullfilling demand. Three good reasons to be there, I think.
September 22nd, 2008 at 1:46 pm
agree. :-)