Here’s more from yesterday’s announcements:
MSN Messenger will be renamed “Windows Live Messenger” and a new version of Messenger is forthcoming.
Check out the photos at iBlog’s photo gallery. Looks nice. I see from the pictures below that there’s going to be offline messaging. Cool. I’d read elsewhere that Messenger was going to be allowing more contacts too. And file sharing seems to have changed too as well as messaging to other networks, and VoIP calls (Skype/Vonage/etc support would be better here though) Oh, and from the pictures I see that the pen is still supported. Whew. Nice. These are very welcome changes. Messenger is one of my most heavily used applications and it looks like it’s getting real. This is very, very nice.
Yesterday based on the accounts of the Live presentation offerred up by Dave Winer, Michael Arrington and the like, I mentioned that Gadgets were the most interesting thing presented. Now that I see the updated Messenger, I’d put it at the top of the list.
Also, iBlog indicates that “Hotmail” is being renamed “Windows Live Mail” and all @hotmail.com accounts will be transfered to @mail.com.
So funny about this. For years, “hotmail” was the home of spammers and was a mess. If you were a small business accepting online orders, int the early days orders coming from “hotmail” were most likely fraud. It’s not quite like that today, but the hotmail name has a rather 90’s rep and name. Plus, in this day of sensitivities, it feels odd saying “hot” anything….especially on a resume or other official document.