With the Windows Live Messenger Library, you can turn your site into its own social network. Visitors to your site can sign into their Windows Live Messenger account and chat with their friends from right inside your web page. Imagine your web community growing exponentially as users invite their friends - and those friends tell their own friends about the experience.
Here's a quick tour of the features in the Messenger library. In upcoming posts I'll dig deep into each of these features and show you some code you can drop right into your site.
Cool new UI
You can build any new Messenger UI you want. It can be HTML + JavaScript, Silverlight, or even Flash. This is one example from iBloks Video Messenger:
You control the whole experience except for signin. All the details of sign-in and authentication are handled by Microsoft. Your site doesn't even have to ask for the user's ID and password. You just create a <div> to host the signin control:
The user clicks Sign in and Windows Live ID handles the rest.
Contacts & Conversations
The Messenger Library exposes the users contact list so your site can show their list of buddies however you like.
From this list, your users can start up a conversation. Conversations can be one-on-one, or free-for-alls with up to 25 people.
Presence
The library gives you access to the user's display picture, online status and personal message. You can give the user a way to change their status and personal message.
Application Messages & Presence Extensions
The Windows Live Messenger Library also enables a few things that can't be done with the desktop Messenger client. Presence Extensions let you set properties on the user's presence. One way to use this is set a flag when users log into your site. Then you can sense if the two users in a conversation are both on your site and enable custom features accordingly.
Application Messages are custom message types that your site can use to implement special features. If both users are signed into your Messenger implementation, your application can send custom messages that you create. These message can do many things - send pictures, notify users about updated content, or even set up an online game.