Thursday evening I had a chat with Kris Hoet, marketing manager at MSN Belgium. Normally our conversation would have been very short as the person he was looking for was not at the office. I can't recall how we started the conversation, but we talked for more than one hour on Windows Live.com.
First of all, I'm very fond of the brand new "infinite scroll" of Windows Live Search. No more clicking to go to the next page of the search results. You just keep scrolling. Really neat. And so far the upgraded search engine seems to return precisely the results I'm looking for. Nathan Weinberg explains a lot of the features of Windows Live Search at the Inside Microsoft blog news channel:
After my chat with Kris, I also replaced the currently installed MSN Toolbar and Desktop Search with the new Windows Live Toolbar (Beta). Now I have also access to Onfolio and Live Favorites. These Live Favorites allow me to synch my favorites across all PC's I work on. One of the other neat features is that you can basically use any search engine from within the toolbar's search box.
It seems many people also added quite a lot of bots to their Messenger account. Up till now, I didn't. But after talking a bit about it, several potential ideas for using a Messenger bot popped-up. I'm pretty sure that we'll see more and more of these bots in the near future. Kris sent me a link to a website that contains a lot of Dutch and English Messenger bots: http://www.mensmerk.nl/chatbots.html. Go and try them yourself.
You need a special SDK (software development kit) to develop such bots. For a limited time, Conversagent offers a free license of such an SDK. A few days ago, Dutch Cowboys blog (in Dutch) reports that Oberon Medialab from The Netherlands is Microsoft's first European Messenger ISV (independent software vendor) that offers a Messenger (ro)bot platform. As said before, this is only the beginning...
Bots aren't the only software you can create for MSN Messenger. You can also develop your own "activities" that can be used during chats. A lot of examples are available on the MSN Messenger World's Best App contest website. What about the Live Translator: you chat in one language and your correspondent sees the text in his own language? I remember seeing this as part of an Imagine Cup 2005 finalist application, but now it is available in the real world.
More information on developing for MSN Messenger is available on the MSDN MSN Messenger Developer Center. That's also the site where you'll find the Messenger Activity SDK.
You can personalize the Windows Live website with several gadgets. Not only just the set that Microsoft thinks to be useful, you can also develop your own gadgets. For more gadgets and information on developing them, check out the Microsoft Gadgets website. It seems there are also Belgians that submitted their gadgets already...
After the opening keynote of Developer & IT Pro Days some people asked me what the difference is between the live.com and start.com websites. You can find the answer on Sanaz Ahari's blog.
Do I think Windows Live is important for developers? Well, it's important for a lot of companies and thus it will become important for a lot of developers. On top of this, I think it's fun to build these bots, activities and gadgets for Windows Live, so don't hesitate to experiment with this stuff now... And feel free to let me know if you built something...
You can check out the latest Windows Live products at http://ideas.live.com/.