Xbox LIVE Video Kinect (to give it its full name) allows you to chat via the Kinect’s video camera with friends who are also using Kinect, or on Windows Live Messenger. It includes an Auto-Zoom Focus which instantly finds you and follows you around the room (if you’re moving about) so you’re always in frame. Kinect’s integrated microphone means that there’s no headset required too.

When you go into the Video Kinect menu, you’ll be shown a list of your friends who have recently been online. Some will also be on Kinect, others on Windows Live Messenger, but you’ll see an integrated list.

Once you’re chatting with a friend, you can choose to watch a video together, which will open up in a separate box on screen – you can choose Movies, Sports, News and Music videos all from the menu bar at the bottom of the screen.

Video Chat on the TV used to be the stuff of science fiction, but next month, it’s all yours. Check out Video Kinect in action.

Thanks to the (optional) “full view” feature, Messenger users can check on social networking updates, photos, and status messages from Windows Live friends, Facebook friends and MySpace friends or reads news from MSN.com. If you click “connect more services,” you can also pick dozens of others to your dashboard, including popular social sites like flickr, Twitter, Pandora, Digg, Hulu, YouTube, Photobucket, Last.fm and many more.

Now, the new version of Messenger kicks up the social networking integration to the next level by allowing you to not only see and respond to social networking activity via the dashboard, but to directly chat with Facebook friends in real-time. Even if you don’t use Messenger IM itself, the app can now function as an always-on “people app” that alerts you when your friends come online in Facebook, explains Chris Jones on the Windows Live Team blog.

To get the new Messenger, just head over to the Windows Live Essentials beta homepage here and hit the “download now” button. 

With this new IM application, you can do more than just chat in real-time with friends. You can also use the app to view and comment on your friends’ status updates from around the social web, including those from Facebook, MySpace and the Windows Live service itself.

You can also see, News Feed-style, what your friends are sharing via other social services like Flickr, YouTube and all the others supported by Windows Live. In order to integrate these additional services into the IM application, you’ll need to set them up here using your Windows Live account.

As far as the IM features themselves, the new app lets you chat, receive messages even if the app is closed, upload and share photos with friends, create photo albums, add captions to photos, access your Hotmail email without leaving the app (read, reply and compose supported) and get email notifications within the app.

The app is available for free in iTunes.

Users will be able to link their BBC account to the above social services. They can then tweet or share on Facebook what they’re watching. Windows Live Messenger users will be able to sync their viewing with their IM friends in order to watch and chat about a show together in real-time.  According to the press release, this chat integration is an experimental feature – if it turns out to be successful, they’ll integrate more messaging services in the future.

In the new Messenger, when your friends are offline, you can leave them a video message, just as you did before on the standalone service. You can see this new feature in action on a video found here on the WindowsLivePreview.com website

That said, if you have messages you need to retrieve from the Video Messages service before it’s closed, you need to do the following before July 21st rolls around:

1. Go to the Video Messages Beta website and sign in with your Windows Live ID.
2. Open a video message and then click the Save button.(You can only save video messages if the sender has given you permissions to save or forward their video message.)
3. Choose a location on your computer, enter a name for the file, and then click Save.

The new Messenger Connect API lets developers do 3 main things:

1. Create instant user profiles and friend lists. In other words, portable friend lists you can choose to share with websites by signing in.
2. Enable real-time IM on websites plus feed-based sharing options
3. Easily integrate into multiple development environments (an API service exposes a RESTful interface, wrapped in a range of libraries including JavaScript, .NET and others)

For end users

But for consumers, what the Messenger Connect will allow for is the ability to pull together “all of a user’s social networks into one ‘passport’ that they can use around the web,” writes Martin Bryant on The Next Web blog. Yep, that means you can tote around your Facebook identity and others too, all in one package.

“Like the new version of Windows Live Messenger, it supports Facebook, Myspace and LinkedIn but will additionally be supported by over 100 third party partners at launch,” Bryant explains.

While Microsoft claims that the aim is not to compete directly with Facebook’s Open Graph, “we’re not trying to be a social network, we’re trying to be the best companion to social networks…,” Microsoft’s John Richards told TNW, there are some similarities between the two services and how they both let you port your social graph around the web.

However, privacy is being positioned as the biggest difference. The official blog post reads: “…we believe that the privacy of a customers’ data is a critical element of a secure web and the customer should be in control…Websites cannot access any of a user’s non-public information from Windows Live without prior consent…”

Security and privacy, in fact, are listed as “foundational elements” of the new service, which should be a big plus for consumers who want the convenience of a social companion service without the fear of over-sharing.

The new API is part of the next version of Messenger, coming soon and available for preview here: http://www.messengerpreview.com/

Designed primarily for Live Messenger users, this program offers additional personalization options including display pictures, emoticons, and Messenger scenes. You can then coordinate your Messenger avatar with your Windows 7 theme as the Experience Pack lets you create a desktop background featuring your personalized avatar against a “destination” background – like the beach, the mountains, an African safari, a hiking trial, etc.

The avatars are created using a combination of your own photo and a cartoon figure for a mashed creation a bit like those in the famous “Elf Youself” holiday animations.

While this download may seem a little silly to some of us more, err, mature users, you can bet that the kids will get a kick out of it. So go ahead and post this link to their Facebook wall: http://experience.windows.com.

The first device to feature the new software is the Nokia E72. Meanwhile, Nokia E71, E75, and E63 users can download the “Nokia Messaging for IM” application from the company’s app store called the Ovi Store. Here’s the direct link for the download.

When running the program, it will automatically detect your profiles and accounts, allowing you to check or uncheck the boxes of the items you want to backup. And should disaster strike, you can also use the application to restore the backups it creates.

MailBrowserBackup is free software licensed under the GNU GPL v2. You can download it for Windows XP SP2, Vista, and Windows 7 from here.

Not only is the new visual search feature powered by Silverlight, it taps into another Microsoft technology, too, with its Windows Live Messenger integration – a  move that connects Photobucket’s 70 million users with the 320 million Live Messenger users around the world. With a single click, you’ll be able to share the URL of a photo in your search results with anyone you have in your Live Messenger contact list.

At the time of writing, the visual search feature had not yet gone live on Photobucket.com, but it should be arriving soon.

To learn more, check out dev.live.com.

If you haven’t already added the new web activities, you can do so from here.

The feature arrived yesterday in Brazil, Canada, China, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, and the U.S., to join the countries that received web messenger last month (France, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Spain, and the UK).

To access the new web IM, look for a drop-down menu up at the top of your Hotmail inbox that says “Messenger.” Even if you’re already signed into your desktop client, you can sign in again here, manage your status, view your contacts, etc.

And to start a conversation, just click on the presence indicator next to the sender’s name in your email. Alternately, you can click on the user’s display picture in Windows Live People where you’ll also have the option to start an IM conversation.

To get started, developers can choose the level of customization by using the pre-built and skinnable Web Bar control, using the 16 modular UI Controls, or building the entire experience from the ground up using the Windows Live Messenger Library. But the easiest way to begin is to use this tool, which provides a step-by-step guide and sample code to get you started. 

See a video demonstration for more information.

You can try it out now from dev.live.com/messenger.

If you’re having a conversation with someone, you can go to the Files menu and choose “Send a file or photo.” However, if you would rather make file available online for them to download from SkyDrive (and perhaps make it available to several others at the same time too, even if they are not online), you can go to Files –> Publish Files online from your conversation window.

If you choose that option, you’ll be taken to your SkyDrive on Windows Live where you can upload your file(s) and choose the people you are sharing the files with.

Even if you’re not in a conversation, you can quickly access your SkyDrive from Windows Live Messenger from the “Actions” menu. Just click “View your online files” to be directed to your SkyDrive homepage.

Using SkyDrive with Live Messenger is a great way to share both individual files, photos, or entire photo galleries with your friends and family when you’re chatting online. You can even share files publicly with your whole Windows Live network or the world by sharing them on SkyDrive and choosing those options from the drop-down box. Your shared files will then get posted to everyone’s What’s New feed. It doesn’t get any easier than that.

• Windows Live Messenger – o software campeão de bate-papo (instant messaging).
• Windows Live Mail – um gerenciador de e-mails para acesso offline e edição rica de e-mails. Tem suporte para os principais serviços de e-mail (Hotmail, Google, Yahoo, etc.).
• Windows Live Writer – uma excelente e premiada ferramenta para escrever blog posts. A grande novidade é a inclusão de corretor ortográfico para português.
• Windows Live Galeria de Fotos – um gerenciador de fotografias e vídeos digitais com edição de fotos, criação de DVD, revelação online, e publicação para as principais comunidades de fotos (Windows Live Fotos, Flickr, SmugMug). Grande novidade é a detecção de rostos para você identificar seus amigos com marcas (tags).
• Windows Live Movie Maker – um editor de vídeos para você compartilhar com amigos e publicar vídeos na Web. Tem suporte para MSN Vídeos e YouTube.
• Windows Live Proteção Para Família – um serviço que ajude você manter filhos seguros na sua navegação online através de filtros de conteúdo. Você inclusive pode configurar os filtros remotamente via Web.
• Windows Live Toolbar – uma barra de ferramentas para seu navegador Internet Explorer que mantém você conectado aos seus serviços como e-mail, calendário, fotos, e novidades da sua rede social.
• Microsoft Outlook Connector – uma ferramenta que permite o uso do Outlook como gerenciador de seus e-mails do Hotmail. Ele sincroniza e-mails, contatos e agenda do Windows Live com o seu Outlook.

Façam o download agora para ter os softwares mais atuais da família Windows Live.

By combining these cameras with Windows Live Messenger, you can can engage in live video chats with your friends and family at any time. And if your friends aren’t available online (or if they live on the other side of the globe and you don’t want to wake them!), you can always record a video message using the new Video Messages site at http://videomessages.live.com. 

Want to buy one now? Both are available from the new Microsoft Store.

Anything you add to the Group Calendar will show up on the calendars of all the other members of the group, too. Although the calendar is automatically shared between group members, sharing with others is only possible if you invite them to join your group. 

The Group Calendar feature is a great example of the integration we’re seeing between the different tools available in Windows Live, all of which can be downloaded from here.

The calls to and from Windows Live Messenger users will be free and calls to landlines and cell phones will be available for a fee. The rates are as follows: about a penny to China, 2¢ to the UK, 5¢ to Canada, or 10¢ to Mexico per minute when calling landlines. 

To get started, just sign-up for an account here. Remember - you need a microphone & speakers or headset and broadband connection. You can buy credit in amounts of $5, $10 or $20.

Then to make a call, the process will vary depending on what version of Messenger you have. Here are the steps, courtesy of the WLM blog:

• If you are using Windows Live Messenger 8.0, 8.1 or 8.5, click on the phone icon either in the main window or choose a contact and click on the phone icon. From the drop down menu, select ‘Call a phone’. Add a phone number, click on enter and start talking.

• If you are already using the new Windows Live Messenger beta, there are a few of ways you can make a call. You can hover over a contact and if you have a phone associated with that contact, just click on ‘call work’, ‘call mobile’, etc. You can also open up a conversation window with that contact and click on the phone icon and enter their telephone number. For ad hoc calls, you can launch Windows Live Call from the start menu under All Programs > Windows Live Call beta, enter their telephone number and click Call.

This new service will be a direct competitor to Skype, a popular program for making phone calls via the internet.