I was voting on best frock and checking if I’d cut it as a celeb. when I saw the NineMSN and Dolly Australia team announced they’ve integrated the Windows Live Messenger Library (WLML) into their site, allowing people to chat inline and share content.
The experience is not only slick, they’ve also done some ingenious things to make the WLML work across pages (i.e. you can switch pages and it will keep on working.
Below are some screen-shots I took from my Mac (using Firefox) just to prove it works cross platform too (I also use my mac for other things)
Go to http://dolly.ninemsn.com.au and on the right hand side you’ll see the DollyMessenger widget
When you choose to sign in they pop a window with the WLML sign in control
You need to sign in using your Windows Live ID (if you don’t already have a session open)
After you grant permission, the parent window takes focus again and you see all of your buddies
You can collapse the dolly messenger too and you get that little pink bit on the right hand side, it starts blinking when there is a new message for you.
You see all of your buddies and the conversations which are running
Conversation
Spending more time on the site chatting… (getting brand impression and ad time :))
During a conversation I can choose to browse to another page
and the conversation persists
How do they do it? there is a popup window called “brain.aspx” and that hosts the javascript WLML object, and it talks back to the parent window to refresh the UX.
I had just installed Firefox and didn’t change the search box to Live Search – below you’ll learn how to do that.
From the search drop down you can choose More search providers
Search the Firefox Add-ons page for Live Search
BAM! you can be using your mac and using Live Search
Hi Angus, interesting. It would be nice to get some information which highlights whether integrating Live into a site in such a manner provides any of the expected benefits. For example, what is the average usage of the Live-provided feature? What is the average increase in page time per visit after the Live-provided feature has been enabled?
This sounded interesting so I tried it out (Firefox on Vista), but it just stalls on the message "Checking system requirements to launch Web Messenger" and never gets any further. Guess the library (or the error messages) still need some refining.
Hi Angus K,
Were you using FF 3? This currrently doesn't support FF3. Supported browsers are IE6+, FF2 and Safari.
As you know, we continue to showcase compelling applications built on top of the Windows Live Messenger
Yeah, I was using FF3. Oddly enough, I did get it to load on about the 10th reload, so presumably it wouldn't be impossible to get it to work "officially" with FF3. (And I'd wager there's more FF3 than Safari clients out there!)