Messenger Plus! Live 4.50 has been immensely popular since its release, daily installs have almost doubled since last December and many of you can’t seem to get enough of one of the main new features: skins.

More than 40 skins have already been submitted and accepted in the official skin database and many more are coming. Because contests are always a subject of joy, I’m happy to announce that sometime this year, a big skinning contest will be organised, benefiting both developers (prizes) and users (new, better skins). Details will be announced when appropriate but as of now, something new and cool has already been put in motion in the world of skins: Will Ingles, the creator of popular skins such as Ev0, as agreed to dedicate some of his time to the creation of new skins inspired by movies and music groups.

What do they looks like? here are two example of these skins. The first one is inspired by Dr Seuss’ Horton Hears A Who, in theatres next week, and is already available as a download for all versions of Windows Live Messenger. The second one is based on the Iron Man movie that will be released in May and will demonstrate how much Messenger Plus! skins can change the look & feel of Messenger as a whole.

Not bad hum? New themed skins will be added on this site every month and will allow you to completely transform your Messenger windows to match your favourite movies, singers, and more. Your Messenger experience will never be the same, that’s guaranteed, and you’ll probably never want to go back to the original interface once you’ve tried a couple of skins either. Also, if you enjoy switching from one look to the other regularly, or, if you just don’t want to miss the release of a skin related to a movie that you’ve been waiting for, sign up to Messenger Plus! Skins Alerts to get instant notifications. Needless to say, all of this is free so enjoy the current skins as much as you can and be prepared to be amazed!

While the next version of Messenger Plus! is being tested, I thought I should write about two things that have been affecting the software recently. One is good, one is bad. Let’s start with the later, I’ll talk about happy things next time.

A new kind of scam has grown popular since last year. Some people have been registering domain names that look similar to mine in order to get money from my users. Some of these sites try to look like legitimate download sites, offering lots of other programs, while others bluntly rip off parts of the official site to look official. In every situation, the setup file downloaded from these sites asks to input a code which is generally obtained by paying a couple of dollars or euros by the mean of text messages (SMS) sent from your mobile phone. Some of these sites even replace their download link with a legitimate one from time to time to stay unnoticed for a longer period of time.

While we are still trying to shut down many of these sites, the problem is now important enough to give a clear official warning: Messenger Plus! is a very popular product and for that reason, is an easy target for scammers. Legitimate download sites will never, ever, ask you for any kind of monetary compensation to download or install Messenger Plus!, its scripts or its skins. If you have any doubt, go directly to msgpluslive.net to get your files and when recommending the program to your friends, give them a proper url. Don’t let them search for the software in a search engine as I’ve seen some of the bad sites advertising on Google, making the scam a very easy one to push onto some people.

Messenger Plus! is a software that’s free to download, free to install, and free to enjoy. If you fear a setup file you downloaded may have been tampered with, check its digital signature (right-click and select Properties). All the binary files I distribute are signed by “Patchou” with a VeriSign Class 3 certificate. If Windows displays anything else than “Patchou” and “Messenger Plus! Live” when you try to launch the setup, the file was not approved by me for public distribution and for that reason, it should not be trusted.

In order to conclude this news post, I can’t help myself but to point out something obvious and pathetic. In my opinion, problems like this one should be easily avoidable in our time. Sites registered by scammers should be recorded in some kind of big online database and people who try to access them should receive an appropriate warning. This is the job you would expect big security companies such as McAfee to perform well and as it turns out, McAfee offers this kind of service already! it’s called SiteAdvisor and you can even install an add-on to automatically protect you while you surf. The problem? According to their database, msgpluslive.net is rated red with a big “don’t go there” cross and is said to link to ”unwanted programs”, including 11 “trojans”. If you check messengerplus.ms, one of the scammers’ web sites, you’ll see a green checkmark and a note: “We tested this site and didn’t find any significant problems”. Life goes on…

First post of 2008! it was about time… today is Valentine’s Day which means that it’s mid-February and I want to make sure you all get a refresh of the last Messenger Plus! release in the first quarter of the year.

Messenger Plus! is doing fantastically well these days. The number of users is increasing at such a rapid rate that I’m not even updating the count on the main page anymore. I think I’ll probably announce the latest stats with the release of version 4.51. For now, the big news is the translation of this web site. You may have noticed that since the new design was put online in December, English was the only language available. This is all going to change in the next week or two, with more pages translated, in more languages than before. Spanish is already online and the official Spanish forum even got a makeover for this special day.

Stay tuned for some sweet skins related news soon! (and make sure you don’t spend all your time in front of your computer screen tonight ;-).

This summer, for the 6th Year Anniversary Contest, many video game systems were offered, including some Nintendo Wii, Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 Elite. At the time, I wanted to be fair to the 3 companies. Unfortunately, I have to announce today that msgpluslive.net will not promote any product related to Microsoft’s Xbox anymore. Microsoft proved to be particularly incompetent providing support for this system and I now feel the Xbox is an unworthy gift for anybody expecting proper after sale support.

If you’re interested to know more about what pushed this decision, the reasons are detailed in a post I made on Neowin’s Forum. Do yourself a favour and buy something else than an Xbox if you intended to buy a video game system for the holidays.

Happy New Year :)

… Merry Christmas and have a Happy New year!

Thanks to all of you, 2008 promises to be another great year :-D. Be sure to make the best out of what’s left of 2007 and remember that Messenger is always here when you need to contact a friend or a family member.

Have a blast and come back next year to visit us!
Cyril

This weekend is going to be big… :-)