Things have been pretty quiet on the Messenger front lately. We have not seen a new build released since the end of October when it went into public beta. That means that it's time for some shiny new Messenger goodness from Redmond. With that said, in accordance with our manifesto, I am not going to give any specific release date on the 8.1 build since this sort of thing shifts all the time up until the actual release. However, we can safely say that you can expect to see the new build in the very near future.
Also, here are just a few more notes on the current status of Messenger 8.1. The word is that we will see the final build released to the web in early 2007 and that the 3rd party add-ins feature will continue to be in beta when version 8.1 is released.