A Chinese guy from Shanghai with the nickname Picturepan2 claimed to have tried out the upcoming Windows Live Messenger 2010 Beta or better known as Wave 4 and has posted a couple of screenshots on his blog over at LiveSino.net. He even said on Twitter he was puzzled that there isn’t any advertisements at all. I believe it’s because the beta version is still in development stage and probably Microsoft didn’t bother to embed ads into it yet.
It seems like the folks at the Windows Live Team has improved on the Windows 7 taskbar integration by adding the four default status markers (available, away, busy, and appear offline), a feature which easily allows users to quickly select their status from the thumbnail previews.
Unlike other version of the Windows Live Messenger, the 2010 version will support tabbed chats windows which looks similar to those in IE8. To start a conversation, I believe users can either double-click on anywhere in the tabs section and a list of contacts will be displayed or select a contact from the list and a chat window will automatically open in a new tab.
Apparently, Microsoft has combined both the “Winks” and “Emotions” into one button. The icons seem to remain the same but it would be nice if the Windows Live Team could add a few new winks or emotions icons.
There is an improvement to its Photo Sharing. Besides allowing users to share pictures from your computer, the new Photo Sharing feature will enable them to share their online albums on Windows Live Photos, or even search the web for photos directly without opening a new browser window.
Whatever you’ve seen above is not the final user-interface of the Windows Live Messenger Wave 4, and additional improvements will still be made to the beta version. It will most likely be released in March 2010, alongside with MSN Messenger iPhone app.
Via LiveSino.net