MSN Messenger 7.0
So since I have nothing new to talk about since everything at work is the same old boring stuff and I can't talk about my secret side projects yet and I've been too busy with wedding stuff to really play a lot with Beta 2, I thought I'd point out/discuss a couple neat features about MSN Messenger 7.0 that came out a couple weeks ago.
First off, the new description box under your name is fantastic. Before this version, people would change their names to express themselves in whatever way they felt like at the moment. This was totally great because you got to see things about people that you possibly didn't know or just neat things like "I'm in Redmond" or "Work sucks" to name a few. Add on top of that the ability to show what music you're listening too and this geek is in heaven. I pulled up my list the other day and a fellow consultant I've been doing some work with lately happened to be listening to the same band I was. He even was listening to the same album. I messaged him to say, "Hey, did you start listening to them because you saw I was?" He said yes and we giggled like the geeks we are and said what was even more geeky than him seeing what I was listening to and listening to it himself was that I actually noticed he did it. ;)
There are a ton of other features in the new version you should check out if you haven't installed it yet. The contact card is pretty neat, but it would be nice if they'd open it up for us to put a different blog other than an MSN Spaces Blog. It would also be nice for descriptions to do automatic links when I paste a link in there. I can see why they maybe didn't add that feature, but if I have someone on my list, I trust them, so why not show links? When listening to music, it's a link to MSN Music to check out the song and possibly buy it which is great, but this feature doesn't work half the time and returns nothing.
Now for questions. Does anyone know if the API's are open (they would have to be in some way I would think for the automatic "what i'm listening to" stuff) so we can make our own programs to set the description? I would LOVE to write an app for my SmartPhone that links in with the Location Based Service and figures out where I am when I run it and sets the description on MSN to "Location: Fort Wayne, IN" or something like that. Or even just an app that would run when I log in to say "@Work" or "@Home". What about us uber geeks? ;)
UPDATE: Just saw Phil's talking about the music feature too!