Skinning Windows Live Messenger has never been an easy task. Most people struggle to understand what is going on when you make and skin and do not know where to start. I created open live to try and help those new skinners out and to give experienced skinners something to save them a bit of time.

Open Live is a special version of Windows Live Messenger 8.5 that has been edited to make a skinners life a lot easier. The key features of open live are as follows:

• No MSNRLE images, all images are normal png, jpg, bmp, ico and gif
• Easy one line edits for things such as text colors and spacing of buttons
• All images are named and labeled to show what they do and are also in organized folders
• Comes with guide images and source images for animations and those tricky images
• Comes with pre-made and pre-translated options and about windows

"We provided a look at our roadmap late last year and we remain on track--delivering A/V support to our corporate users and continuing to work with the Windows Live team to make A/V support available for (consumers)," senior marketing manager Amanda Lefebvre said in a statement.

We haven't really been working on Web2Messenger for quite a while now, but it's been silently running in the background doing what it's supposed to do. The only real problem was that changing your passport or signing up wouldn't work, as the add-user routine in the bots were broken. Initially I've just wanted to keep Web2Messenger running as both Andrew and I find it quite useful, but as people kept on bugging me about the aforementioned bug, I took some time yesterday to try and fix it. For now it seems fixed, and in case it fails again I've added some event logging that should alert me to the exact place it's failing so I can pinpoint the problem easily.

Now, we aren't opening up Web2Messenger to the grand public yet, but I did drop off a few invites to a forum and a news site to generate some new buzz around it. Reason being both that I'd like to see my bugfix tested, and that I'd like to get some feedback on things. Web2Messenger in it's current form has no real future. We're currently running into our maximum capacity, but making no real profit. We would like to add an extra server (think roughly 200$ per month), but we're simply unable to afford it. We're hoping someone might have a good idea or opportunity to get some proper advertising income so we could put some more time into W2M. So, if you have any ideas about how to generate some income, or have an idea for a sponsoring deal or something, please do not hesitate to reply to this forum thread or use the contact form.