MSN Messenger 7 To Be Released Mid-2005

While it’s safe to assume version 7.0 will be released mid-2005.

Quote from Bruce Jaffe, Corporate Vice President and CFO of MSN:We have a new messenger coming out this year. I can’t talk too much about those features other than to say the messenger and your buddy list and your community represent a really powerful ecosystem that goes beyond just who you instant message with. If you think about taking this community and saying, “well, I can go hit the Web and find out what the general population thinks about, say, Harry Potter.?￠a??? But what I really want to know is what my qualified friends and friends of friends in my circle who happen to be my buddies, what they think about Harry Potter because they are all in that same social circle. The power of taking community along with the address book and the calendar and all those functionalities that we have with messenger and the related products and bringing them together into some social network is really powerful. We’re just at the tip of that because that’s a little bit more visionary than what’s all going to come out next year. But certainly some innovations on messenger.