Last March, at Mix09, Microsoft released the Windows Live Messenger Web Toolkit, a way to incorporate Messenger directly into your website, and today, they’ve released a new version 3.5.  Designed to enhance the user experience, and make it easier to enable sharing via Messenger, a post on the WL Messenger Developer Blog details the improvements:

• User experience: smoothed out the user experience, added a first run experience, expanded the browser support, increased the performance
• Developer experience: reduced the amount of code for you to implement “Share via Windows Live” and the Messenger Web Toolkit is now built on the Microsoft Ajax library.
• New scenarios: Allow people who don’t use Messenger to see display pictures and names of Messenger users.

The new version has built in speed improvements, has added browser support for FireFox 3.5, Safari 4, and Google Chrome 2, and added some nice first run features:

There are improvements for developers, too:

We’ve done two things for developers 1) created a new control for sharing which reduces the amount of code required and 2) changed the underlying JavaScript libraries to the Microsoft Ajax libraries.

While not everything appears to be up quite yet, you can find out more about Windows Live Messenger Web Toolkit at dev.live.com/messenger, and learn more and ask questions in the forums.

(And yes, we know we promised to enable the Web Toolkit here at LiveSide.  No excuses, but our platform (Community Server), while it’s built to handle lots more than we can throw at it, is also much more complicated than just a simple web page or site.  We haven’t forgotten, but we’ve moved to the latest SP2 of Community Server, rearranged the site ui, added a better mobile presence (and fixed our images problem there, thanks again to Chris Weeink), enabled polls, fought off some spam attacks, all while hopefully keeping you up on all the latest Windows Live news.  But like we said, no excuses.  We haven’t forgotten, and we’re working on it ;)  )