Microsoft has upgrade for Live Messenger

May 2, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

SEATTLE

Microsoft Corp.’s next update to Windows Live Messenger will bring people more ways to keep an eye on their social network accounts.

After various fizzled attempts to build Windows Live into a social network in its own right, Microsoft has moved farther away from competing directly with Facebook, Twitter, News Corp.’s MySpace and other popular sites.

Live Messenger, Microsoft’s IM program, already displays friends’ Twitter messages, Flickr photo uploads, Yelp reviews and other tidbits from around the Web. The update, coming by the end of the year, will let Live Messenger users not only monitor but send updates to such sites as Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn.

Fear that’s too much information? Live Messenger will more prominently display updates from contacts marked as favorites. The program will also try to consolidate the contact list, so only one entry shows up for a friend even if she’s on all five of your networks.

The new version will upgrade video chatting to high-definition quality and make it easier to chat by video while exchanging text instant messages and sharing photos from a PC hard drive or a site like Facebook.

Poll: More Americans connect with government

WASHINGTON

More and more Americans are interacting with local, state and federal government offices online. They are turning to the Web to renew driver’s licenses and car registrations, to apply for hunting and fishing permits, to pay parking tickets and other fines and even to track campaign contributions and stimulus spending, according to a new study.

In a survey of more than 2,000 American adults conducted in late 2009, the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that 82 percent of Internet users — or 61 percent of American adults — had looked up information or completed a transaction on a government Web site over the previous year.

Associated Press