We already told you about Groups in Messenger in our Messenger review, but what are they exactly and where are they headed?
The messengersays live space, explains as follows:
Windows Live Groups are persistent groups that are membership-based. Someone creates a group and invites people they know to it. When you get invited to a group you receive a pop-up in Messenger, similar to when someone adds you as a contact.
You can choose to join the group or decline if you don’t want to receive IMs from the group. When you join a group it appears in your main window inside of a category called “Groups”.
A category called Groups? How come for me when I create a group the category Groups disappears? At my end every Group created forms a category of its own. I say created because due to some bug I can not receive Group Invites! So yea unfortunately I can’t enjoy, nor test, Groups fully :(
Speaking of categories, what are they then? Categories are what was called Groups before in Messenger, or in other words the way you organize your contacts.
When to use Groups? Groups are handy if you want to quickly contact/share stuff with a group of people (max of 20 members per Group for now), think about family, colleagues, club-members etc. Brian made this video showing you how to create a group:
Thank you, Brian. So Groups are persistent multi-person conversations, but is that all? No, there is more to come. As damaster discovered, some group options recently got enabled.
Enabled yes but not everything works yet, what it does do, is give an indication of what is to come. The opening of Windows live Groups surely has to do with it, we expect integration with that. Want to know more about the future of Groups? Why not have a look at what Brian Moudy (PM), who works on Groups, has to say about about it. You can find our interview with him here.
Any thoughts or ideas about Groups? Feel free to post them here, as they said in our interview the team does read LiveSide, or as a comment to the Groups in Windows Live Messenger article on messengersays.