Fresh form the press,  Microsoft Corp. CEO Steve Ballmer previewed the next generation of Windows Live Messenger to students at the Universidad de Sao Paulo. It has many new functions and will be made available in the coming months. Watch the video and Press release after the break.

New Windows Live Messenger Previewed in Brazil

The next generation of Messenger is the best way to connect with your closest friends

Singapore – April 30, 2010 –Today in Sao Paulo, Microsoft Corp. CEO Steve Ballmer previewed the next generation of Windows Live Messenger experiences as part of a discussion with students at the Universidad de Sao Paulo. The new Messenger is the first of the upcoming new suite of Windows Live communications and sharing services to be revealed.  Over 320M customers worldwide use Windows Live Messenger every month sending 10 billion messages every day.  This latest version of Messenger includes new ways to have richer and more meaningful conversations as well as a new social experience that brings together you and your friends’ social networks and sharing experiences to give you the best and richest way to stay in touch with your closest friends.

“As internet usage continues to explode, consumers everywhere are sharing more content across a variety of different social networks, photo and video sites and other sharing experiences, making it hard for people to stay in touch with the people they care about,” stated Haresh Khoobchandani, Senior Director, Business and Marketing Organisation, Microsoft  Singapore. “With the new Messenger, we focused on providing tools that make it easy to cut through all the clutter and keep up with the best of your social updates from across the web.”

Messenger will pull together updates from social networks like Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn allowing friends to share, comment, and send messages across these networks all from within Messenger. And Messenger also brings in updates from other websites your friends are using (even if you’re not) by letting your friends connect them into Messenger.  So you can get updates from places like Flickr, Zune, YouTube  and others all within Messenger. Better still, now that all of this information is in one place, Messenger helps you keep it from getting out of hand because updates from your “favorites” — those you have picked as your closest friends — will automatically rise to the top.

Messenger is currently available to customers in over 76 markets and 48 languages worldwide. Today’s announcement kicks off a series of new experiences that will be delivered to customers on their PC, on the web and on their mobile phone.

New features announced today include:

• High-definition video chat. The new Messenger now provides full screen, high-definition video chat.  And you can even experience video chats while you play a game, share photos and chat so you can see your friends’ reactions in real time.
• Integration of Bing results. Integration of Bing search results makes it easier to add photos and videos from across the web without having to leave the conversation window.
• Messenger Connect. Lets any website integrate Messenger so you can chat and share with your Messenger friends. This also lets your friends get updates from all these different websites within Messenger so they don’t have to create accounts and networks in all those places.
• Social Highlights. This new view of your social updates is designed around those “favorite” people and making their social updates gain prominence.
• Single contact list. When bringing all these networks and updates together, we’ll also do the work to de-duplicate those contacts and give you one master list of friends with all the different ways to communicate and share content with them (across all those different networks).
• Synchronized status updates. When you post an update in Messenger, you can have this automatically synchronize with your status on other networks and vice versa.
• Messenger for popular smartphones. You can now get Messenger on your Windows® Phone, iPhone, and other top smartphones.  This gives you access to all your contacts, lets you see your social updates, start a chat, share photos and update your status while you’re on the go.

When the new Messenger is released in the coming months, it will be available for download at http://download.live.com.

To learn more today, please visit http://www.messengerpreview.com/

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Click Here to Watch the Preview Video

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