Windows Live Messenger Preview announced

[the new social view for Messenger]

[updated – my mistake, the bits are not quite baked enough for release yet. We’ll be releasing this to a limited number of individuals externally in the very near future, before expanding to a broader public beta, and finally to the full public release.]

The Wave 4 version of Windows Live Messenger has just been made available as a preview following an announcement by Steve Ballmer. You can learn more at  www.messengerpreview.com 

I’ve been using it for a few weeks now and it has a whole slew of social features built in. Not least, you get a totally new social pane in the main window that shows feeds from Windows Live, Facebook and other services. You see photos your friends have posted from Facebook right there in the Messenger pane. You can also send messages to Facebook directly from Messenger.

Bing search results are integrated, Hi-Def video is supported for video chat and you get a single contact list with your contacts across Live, Facebook etc. Tabbe conversations is just a simple idea that you realise you can’t live without and you can also change your status using a jump list of sorts on Windows 7 via the taskbar.

Over 320m people send more than 10 billion messages every day. I hope they like the new client – personally I think it’s a big leap forward.

Find out more on the Windows team blog