The IM Control enables you to embed a Messenger chat experience into your web site or blog. When people visit your web site, they are able to send you instant messages when you're online. When they send these messages, they are prompted to provide a display name that you'll see when they contact you. Up until this point, the default name that has been populated is a localized version of "Visitor." We recently added support for enabling you to override the value that is shown to one that you choose. This is particularly useful if your site already supports authentication since you can now provide a display name for the user who is initiating the conversation. You can see this behavior in action in our Windows Live Messenger for Facebook application.

To provide the display name, use the query string parameter 'inviterDisplayName' and be sure to URL-encode the value that you provide. We'll be updating our documentation soon to cover this functionality in more detail. As always, please let us know if you have any feedback.

Thanks,
Steve