Within five days of its launch on the App Store, Microsoft’s Windows Live Messenger app has been downloaded more than 1 million times.
Apple may be too cool for app school, but one of the most popular apps being downloaded to the iPhone right now is Microsoft’s long-standing instant messaging app – Windows Live Messenger.
Whilst uptake of the new Messenger app has been promising, this isn’t the first time it has been available on mobile handsets: “In addition to the more than 1 million iPhone Messenger users, there are over 24 million people who connect with Messenger friends from other mobile phones through a client application, their phone’s browser, or SMS,” said Michael Chang on the Windows Live blog.
The Live messenger iPhone app is not just a buddy list with IM – it pulls in all the social media services that Windows Live users have associated with their account so you can see friends’ status updates from Twitter and Facebook, as well as view the latest photos uploaded to Flickr or recent blog posts, plus there is a section just for viewing and uploading images to your Live Photos account and checking your Hotmail inbox.
This is part of Microsoft’s plans for completely revamping its Live Messenger offering, which is also heading to the Xbox and will be integrated with the forthcoming controller-free Kinect for live video chat.