It appeared this week in south Seattle, and I've been hearing some radio ads on local stations, too. Apparently this is part of a new campaign by The Wunderman Network, called No One Wants To Look Dumb, which as far as I can tell fails its own test, miserably. Aside from the 'ad campaign from your parents generation' look and feel to the whole thing, there's the videos.

A new version of Messenger Plus! is now available for download! Many things have been updated in version 4.60 but if you’re not a script or a skin developer, chances are you won’t see much difference compared with the last update. Still, among the improvements you’ll notice that WMA sound files can be selected for Custom Notifications, all the extra Plus! features now work fine in Mobile Device chat windows, and notification popups are now shown in a better way.

If you're a script developer, you’ll find many new functions of interest in this release, like UploadFileFTP, GetElementPos, ExtractFromZIP and support for synchronous callbacks with GetCallbackPtr. Skin developers will enjoy even more improvements, like DateRange restrictions to make your skin change depending on the current date, advanced new features for Color resources to create customized colorization values and gradient colors, the addition of Font elements to distribute and use special fonts in your skin, the possibility to create a separate About Box window, Environment tags for PlusSkin elements to create conditions based on things like the current version of Messenger, and more! Just check the Change Log and download the latest version of the documentations to see it all...read more

According to some new numbers included in an email from Nielsen Online today, Windows Live Spaces, never a big player in the US market for social networking tools, lost significant ground over the past year.

Nielsen Online provides February's top U.S. social networking sites and blogs for your reference. They are ranked by unique audience and rounded to the nearest thousand, so MySpace.com had 55.4 million unique visitors in February 2008, growing 4 percent over February 2007. Please note that these are custom lists compiled by the Nielsen Online PR team with the help of our media analysts. While these lists are not meant to be exhaustive, they provide a good idea of the significant players in each space.

I'm happy to announce that sometime this year, a big skinning contest will be organised, benefiting both developers (prizes) and users (new, better skins). Details will be announced when appropriate but as of now, something new and cool has already been put in motion in the world of skins: Will Ingles, the creator of popular skins such as Ev0, as agreed to dedicate some of his time to the creation of new skins inspired by movies and music groups.

Your Messenger experience will never be the same, that's guaranteed, and you'll probably never want to go back to the original interface once you've tried a couple of skins either. Also, if you enjoy switching from one look to the other regularly, or, if you just don't want to miss the release of a skin related to a movie that you've been waiting for, sign up to Messenger Plus! Skins Alerts to get instant notifications.

In short, our team is focused on delivering APIs that enable all developers to build rich presence, IM and contacts experiences anywhere on the web that will delight users. We'll do our best to ensure that our APIs are simple to consume and provide you with the right functionality to build whatever you might dream up. To date, we've released an IM Control and Presence API that enables your users to embed their presence and a conversation window into your site. More...