By Edith Colegio
If you haven’t already, you should think about adding social capabilities to your website. This will help you attract new users, and keep them on your website for longer and get them to come back more often. The use of existing toolkits like the Windows Live Messenger Web Toolkit can be very useful to achieve this.
Using the Windows Live Messenger Web Toolkit
You can use this toolkit to integrate presence, instant messaging, and contact information using the following interfaces
Windows Live Messenger UI Controls
These controls are a set of UI building blocks. The UI Controls are easy to add to an existing XHTML page. They provide a professional UI for all pieces of a Windows Live Messenger-enabled site and enable you to integrate Windows Live Messenger into your site with minimal code
Windows Live Messenger Library
It’s a client-side library for building Web-based applications that integrate with Windows Live Messenger. With this library, you can build presence-enabled instant messaging applications that Web site visitors can use to interact with each other and Windows Live Messenger client users.
This is the architectural diagram of these technologies:
Use of Web Application Toolkits
There are a lot of web application toolkits that will help you as well as the Messenger toolkit. For example this application shows you how, using a few lines of code with the Windows Live Messenger web toolkit, it is possible to add social capabilities to a web site with instant messaging from a website to various client endpoints like Windows, Windows Mobile, Xbox 360 and Mac.
This application toolkit will also show how to bring information about users from Windows Live such as their presence, profile information and profile picture.
