Despite their dominance of the IM application market, Microsoft are still hard at work trying to tweak and improve Messenger, and are currently looking to rebrand it under the Windows Live moniker which will also take in their new improved MSN Search and Hotmail tools (which will become Windows Live Search and Windows Live Mail respectively). The chaps over at EliteBastards take a look at a Beta release of Windows Live Messenger (still tellingly called MSN Messenger 8.0 in places) to see what's new and what's improved in the application.

If we look past the rebranding and see Windows Live Messenger as simply MSN Messenger 8.0, then that pretty much hits the nail on the head. It really is about 0.5 better in terms of features - Nothing revolutionary, but with some neat little added extras that will no doubt add to the Instant Messaging experience for power users of the tool.

Of course, this being Microsoft, we find ourselves worrying about security - Will offline messaging be vulnerable for use as spam? We already see malware that affects less careful users to spam people on their contact list, and this could become all the more rife with the addition of this feature leaving more of a captive audience. Then there's Shared Folders... I'm sure I hardly need to voice my concerns about the potential for disaster were vulnerabilities to creep into that, or indeed simply malice on another users part to saturate someone's connection with a vast quantity of shared files, or a plethora of illegal content. Of course, hopefully I'm just being way too cynical here, and these could both be useful tools if they are kept free from abuse.

If we can look through that all that however, you certainly can't complain about the extensions to the featureset of this application. The Voice over IP abilities are no Skype killer, but might well have their place, offline messaging can be handy if you need to leave an urgent message for someone when they return to their computer that needs more attention than a simple e-mail, and shared folders is a great extension for anyone who needs to transfer a bunch of files to a friend or colleague in one fell swoop - All issues that aren't showstoppers during day to day use of MSN Messenger at present, but also items that I could see myself using once everybody has transitioned to Live Messenger.