When hovering over the Messenger link in the header a Facebook category appears on this site. The status of contacts is shown just like within Messenger, if a friend is available to chat to they have a green icon and an orange one for away; if you are also friends with them in Messenger then they can also be set to busy which is a red icon.

What this possibly means though is that your Windows Live contacts are not fully integrated with your Facebook contacts. For example, a person may be online on Messenger as well as Facebook chat, but might appear as two different contacts on your Messenger contact list. Guess we'll have to live with that given that it'd be quite complicated to match your Windows Live contacts with Facebook's contact. We wonder if any other social networks or protocols will be supported though!

Well of course to us, it "makes sense" to interoperate with Facebook (we hate having to keep the browser open during a FB chat), but Windows Live Messenger has been a notoriously closed system in the past, so we’re not sure it will make sense to Microsoft. However if it means losing customers who find themselves using Facebook Chat more and Windows Live Messenger less, that may change. We should be hearing more about the Windows Live Platform later this year, so maybe there’s hope that Facebook Chat may be part of that "major focus".

Windows Live participates in an industry defined by change. Consumer choice is continually expanding with new services launching almost daily. To this end, with Windows Live and Messenger, we are making it easier for consumers to integrate contacts, communications and sharing across the multitude of internet services they want to use. We'll interoperate where it makes sense, as we've done with Yahoo! and customers of Office Communications Server. We'll continue to invest in contact portability and identity standards, as we've done with our contacts APIs. And we'll integrate feeds, as we've done with over 75 top web services in the last year. This will continue to be a major focus going forward.

As promised, everyone can now download and install the latest version of MessengerDiscovery - version 2.1. Everyone is invited to test this new version and report bugs/give feedback. MessengerDiscovery 2.1 has been in development for three of months and has undergone some rigerious testing to ensure that you do not encounter any major bugs even though it is a beta.

It has been a couple months since a major update but I am happy to announce that MessengerDiscovery 2 is back into full-time development. Along with a new MessengerDiscovery version I will be announcing/releasing a few new products that I've been working on during my big break.

"We are currently aiming to achieve full integrative support for widely popular instant messaging networks. Therefore, we have started discussions with the back-end and front-end Developer Teams of AOL LLC, Skype Ltd and Google Inc. Furthermore, we have intensified our cooperation with Facebook Inc. for a similar purpose," says Dharmesh Mehta, Windows Live Messenger Product Manager.

"I can't promise too much yet, but I think it's just what Windows Live is missing currently," states Dharmesh. "You'll soon be able to add Facebook [...] on Windows Live. This means that […], if you’'e a Facebook user, you can choose to allow info and photos that you post on Facebook to show up in 'What's new' for anyone in your network on Windows Live,” says Brian Hall, General Manager for Windows Live.