Karan sent me an invitation to the Windows Live Messenger beta this week. Lacking anything more meaningful to blog about I’ve decided to give it a 25 cent review. As you know, I’m no fan of Microsoft so you should factor that bias into my ‘findings’ if you will.

MSN 8 Beta
It’s an awful lot like the last version with a new skin applied to it. However, there are a number of new features which stood out; some good and some bad.

The Good: Sharing Folders – Nice idea but didn’t get the chance to test it. I assume this would allow for easier file sharing between users but that’s just a guess. Contact search – located in the main widow and searches were super fast. Of course I could just scroll down to find my contact but appaerently that’s so last year.

The Bad: Video Carousel – I found it distracting, even more distracting than the ads in the old version. Thankfully this can be turned off in the Options panel. Of course when you turn it off, you get ADVERTISING ALL THE TIME. BAD BILL!! BAD!!

“Enable file transfer for potentially unsafe files types” is turned on by default. Bad Bill! This should be turned off by default. How many users ever go into the Options let alone know what this means? This should be turned off by default and it should be difficult to turn on. Unless you are a geek and then it would seem easy.

It adds any contact listed in my Hotmail account to my list of offline users. Maybe some people would find this useful but I’m not one of them. I did have a quick chat with the new version and it seemed to be the same to me. The chat window, to my eye, hadn’t changed at all from the last version. Hopefully this is just because they are still in beta.

Overall, there are some nice new features, it looks nice and seems to work well but it won’t get me off Trillian or Adium for my chatting needs. I guess it’s safe to say that Karan won’t be sending me anymore beta invitations. However I do enjoying baiting him; he’s been ill, so give him a few days to respond.