patndoris TechnoGeek

With the beta 2 release of Windows Live Essentials today, Facebook chat now works!  Yay!  Another milestone for WLM and inter-operability. I’m jumping up and down for joy because I really detest Facebook chat on the website and I do so love Windows Live Messenger.  Plus, for some unknown reason, many of my contacts actually like Facebook chat but don’t use any other messenger program.  Now I can keep in better touch with those friends, and I don’t have to be logged into Facebook all the time to do it.

It appears if your contact is on both WLM and Facebook at the same time, the chat window will default to WLM (which is really fine by me).  But if the user is only online on Facebook, you’ll just see a message saying your are chatting on Facebook.  You do need to go to your Windows Live profile and make sure the check box for allowing Facebook chat is ticked in your connected services. I’m just really glad it’s working.  I’m sure we’ll see more improvements as time goes on.

This is a fantastic update to Windows Live Messenger making it more useful than ever.  Combine it with the social features already introduced and I’m not sure I have much of a reason to actually use Facebook directly anymore.  Games appear to be working now too, so those holdouts (…ahem….you know who you are….) have one less excuse not to try the new beta build.  I’ve not tested it yet, but supposedly webcam uses less CPU than before (as much as 30% less).  I used it with the initial build and quality was great.

Keep in mind it is still beta and there are still bugs - but they are rapidly being worked out and features integrated.  All in all I’m really happy with this beta so far!  If you haven’t tried it yet - give it a whirl!