A Microsoft employee was spotted testing what appears to be a new check-in service on Windows Phone, according to his Twitter updates from an app called “Windows Phone(viaWindowsLive)INT.” The app’s name, when clicked in Twitter, simply redirects you to the main Windows Phone 7 website. It’s also mapped to a test version of the Windows Live Messenger service, according to AllFacebook’s Facebook app tracking service. The “INT” likely means “internal.”
This news is notable not only for the checkin component, but also because, currently, Microsoft does not have a Windows Live Messenger client for its Windows Phone mobile operating system. It only has an official app for iPhone, and officially sanctioned thapps for Windows Phone and Android.
This news was spotted by the bloggers at MobileTechWorld and WPCentral, who discovered a tweet from a senior test lead at Microsoft, Ken Dacey, which read “Doing testing of Windows Phone,” followed by a checkin on Microsoft’s campus. The tweet, tellingly, has since been deleted.
However, you can scroll through some of his other tweets and find they have also been posted from the same “Windows Phone(viaWindowsLive)INT” client. That client application, found here on Facebook, has 561 monthly active users, and has been rated by a handful of Microsoft employees. (Discovery of the client mapping was made by @manan on Twitter).
Statistics surrounding the usage of this app have increased over the past month as well, as charted by AllFacebook.
We’ve also found a couple of test accounts on Twitter posting from this same “INT” application: twitrtestuser1 and twitrtestuser2.
It’s possible this Windows Live Messenger app will be released publicly alongside the major operating system upgrade known as “Mango,” arriving later this year to all Windows Phone 7 devices.
What Will the New Messenger App Really Do?
Windows Live Messenger is Microsoft’s instant messaging client, but over the years, the service has expanded to include activity and updates from other social networking sites. The current desktop client now aggregates updates from Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and other social sites while also allowing you to share your activity from services like YouTube, Flickr and WordPress with your network of Messenger friends.
Users can also chat via the service or with Facebook friends, video chat, send video messages, watch videos together, play games, share files, watch photo slideshows and more.
On mobile phones, Live Messenger is much simpler, focusing primarily on chat and photo sharing.
Although Microsoft is permitting third-party app maker Miyowa to distribute Windows Live clients to the Android and Windows Phone platforms, many of the app’s end users are unhappy with the experience. Comments and ratings are low, and there’s even a petition of sorts for an official Windows Phone app. Microsoft also hosts its own suggestion/feature request forum thread on the topic, which has nearly 500 replies to date.
Update: To clarify, Microsoft actually helped Miyowa build its apps as gap fillers.
The current speculation regarding the recently spotted service is that it will be Microsoft’s answer to Google Latitude – in other words, a native check-in service deeply integrated into the phone. We don’t know if that’s necessarily true. After all, given the desktop clients current hooks into Facebook, it’s just as possible that the Windows Live Messenger will serve as a third-party client for Facebook checkins.
