Windows Live Startup Experience
When you first try to launch any of the Windows Live applications, a new Startup Experience application gets in the way. We put in our credentials just fine and as far as we could tell, it didn't do much. It would be nice if it added our Windows Live ID to all the Windows Live applications but alas this did not work.
The next window appeared to contain an embedded website: home.live.com. It got my city of residence incorrect, so I changed it and then clicked Skip. After that, it closed down and didn't launch the application I was trying to open in the first place. All in all rather useless, though we expect its functionality to change significantly with newer builds.
Windows Live Messenger
This is the application we were most interested in, so of course it wouldn't work right off the bat. As with previous private betas of Messenger, Microsoft is limiting the users that can sign to just its private beta testers. Just as with previous private betas of Messenger, there are ways around it.
If you set your status to anything but online upon sign-in, you'll see this message, only slightly altered from previous versions.
After that, you'll be asked which tab of Messenger's new Social Mode you want to open up first: Social or Friends. Milestone 2 defaults to Social Mode even if you later choose Contacts Mode (though you can disable this is in the options) Unfortunately, both submodes, Social and Friends, are equally atrocious bloated monsters.
In any case, here is the Social part of Social Mode (notice the two options in the top left). The contact list you're used to is on the right-hand side. The left side pulls highlights from your What's new feed on Windows Live. All over Messenger, the "what's new" list has been renamed to "social highlights."
Here is the Friends part of Social Mode. The two sections have swapped left and right. As you can see at the top, the status updating was broken for us when we tried it.
We don't know very many people who use Windows Live as their social network; most prefer Facebook. We were thus delighted to see that Facebook status updates are coming to Messenger. That said, this functionality doesn't currently work: clicking on Facebook opens up the useless Windows Live Startup Experience, and clicking on the other links sends you directly to home.live.com. You need to give Facebook permission (more on this at the end of the article). We think it's safe to assume that if you have the Wave 4 version of Windows Live Home, all this functionality works much better (Twitter works just fine out of the box because tweets are public by default and you don't have to sign in to see them).
The add menu has been moved but it's exactly the same as in previous versions.
There's a new options menu with slightly more options. We'll switch to Contacts Mode in a second, but first will click on More options and see what's new (there's a lot, but nothing too major).
Under Personal, the personal message option is gone (apparently it's all status updates from here on out) as is the option to choose a display picture or configure your webcam. Under layout, "what's new" is now "social highlights" (those options are changed at profile.live.com). There's a new Conversations tab that lets you toggle tabbed conversations and whether or not to warn before closing multiple tabs. Under Sign in, you can turn off signing into Social Mode by default and enable or disable always signing out and closing messenger when you close the main window. Under Messages, it seems that Offline Instant Message settings have disappeared while Message History has been moved. Handwriting is also gone, though there's now an option to turn off underlining words. Messenger does this for every word it thinks will be good to add Web content to (it's very distracting). Alerts and Sounds seem to be the same. There's a new History tab that has the options moved from messages. Under File Transfer Options, Windows Live OneCare safety scanner has finally disappeared. Phone, Privacy, Security, and Connection remain the same.
Ah, good old Contacts Mode. There's not much new except how categories are viewed and the share box. Again the option to add more networks is visible in the bottom right (Facebook chat integration?). The add button is now just text, and the Mail icon is gone. Overall the UI just seems slightly shuffled around.
The first change you'll notice when having a conversation is the tabs. Easily the most requested feature for Messenger, the feature is finally here.
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