Live from the Web! Bring the Windows Live Messenger Experience to Your Web Applications

or years, online chat has been progressively and swiftly revolutionizing how you communicate with friends, family, coworkers, and businesses you deal with. It is the foundation of the original chat room concept and the heart of instant messaging applications. Online chat—also called instant messaging or just "IM"—connects people for one-to-one or group chats, for social networking purposes, or for business directives, such as enabling access to technical support, customer services, or sales. Now, Windows Live Messenger lets you add IM and social support to your web applications through a rich set of features offered by the Windows Live Messenger IM Control, the Windows Live Messenger Presence API, and the Windows Live Messenger Library.

Extending Windows Live Messenger features to the web makes it possible for personal sites, community sites, and business applications to increase their reach and interactivity with visitors. For community sites such as your blog, or other social networking sites, this could mean sharing your online messenger presence so that visitors can easily contact you. You can also supply fully functional or completely customized web-driven instant messaging features from your site or web applications to enhance this interactive experience. You can apply the same ideas to business applications in the form of supplying technical support directly from the corporate site or interacting with other departments or personnel. In either case, an important benefit of web-enabled Windows Live Messenger is that it allows visitors that don't use Windows Live Messenger to interact with other Windows Live Messenger users, without installing the Windows Live Messenger Client.