Over the weekend, a report surfaced claiming that Microsoft has begun to block links to The Pirate Bay in its Windows Live Messenger chat client, alerting the message sender that the link is unsafe upon sending it to the recipient. At the time, they had tested sending links even through third-party clients, only to receive the same warning message.

Soon after the original news broke, Microsoft did comment and acknowledge that they’re doing this. On Monday, the following comment was issued from a company spokesperson to The Verge:

“Windows Live Messenger is set up to help ensure customers receive IMs only from people whose IMs are welcome and has long had the capability to block certain content from being transmitted in an effort to protect our customers. Before anyone can send customers an IM, those customers must first agree to add the sender to their Contact list; this helps protect customers from unwanted IMs from strangers and from annoyances such as spam and spim (spam via IM). In addition, we use SmartScreen® technology to protect our customers from malicious and unwanted content including phishing, malware and spam. We block instant messages if they contain malicious or spam URLs based on intelligence algorithms, third-party sources, and/or user complaints. Pirate Bay URLs were flagged by one or more of these and were consequently blocked.”

This blog post was originally supposed to be about how Microsoft is censoring links to The Pirate Bay. However, when I wanted to test this out for myself, something interesting happened; I easily exchanged various TPB links over WLM with no issue. I was using Adium — a third-party Mac IM client — while the other contact was using the actual WLM client on Windows. We sent each other test links, and received them all with no issue.

Perhaps out of fear of yet another Reddit PR nightmare — this time about the company trying to censor the Internet, when in actuality an annoying algorithm (SmartScreen) was being overprotective — they silently removed the site from any blacklist manually.

Weird. I’ve reached out to Microsoft PR for comment and am awaiting a response.

UPDATE: I’ve received the following comment from a Microsoft Spokesperson regarding the possible removal of Pirate Bay links from any blacklists/filters:

“We update our filters regularly, and if we observe changes in the patterns of messages or URLs being sent, the block may be lifted automatically.”

I must admit that I am not a huge Windows Live Messenger fan and rarely use it, however, it looks like there are now a million plus iPhone users who use the WLM for iPhone.

Michael Chang, a Group Product Manager of the Windows Live Messenger made an announcement that the Windows Live Messenger app for iPhone has been downloaded over a million times in 5 days.

Now that is a huge milestone for Microsoft and shows that WLM is still being widely used by the 400 million active Windows Live Hotmail users they have. The good thing about the iPhone app is that it allows you to comment on friends photos and also view status updates from Windows Live, Facebook and MySpace and also allows you to view what your friend are sharing on Flickr and YouTube.

The social integration is definitely a huge plus for this app, and if that is not enough you can also access your Hotmail account and compose, read and reply to emails.

Interested to join the millions of users using this app? Head over to this iTunes link to download the Windows Live Messenger iPhone app.

Quite sometime back we had told you on how you can uninstall Windows live applications, using that tutorial you can easily remove any application from the Windows live suite including Windows Live Messenger.

Also See: How to Completely Uninstall Softwares

If you are looking for a easier solution to just uninstall Windows Live messenger a utility called Windows Live messenger uninstaller is what you need.

WLM Uninstaller is a portable software that provides users with a one click option to uninstall Windows Live Messenger.

Clicking on the Uninstall button will completely remove Windows Live messenger from your PC. You do not even have to visit the control panel for it.

Download WLM Uninstaller [via gHacks]

Windows Live Messenger is a very popular instant messaging software that is used by millions of users. If you are a Windows Live Messenger user you can easily send a SMS to a friend for free.

Here is a video tutorial that shows you how to send a free SMS using Windows Live Messenger.

[via]

In the press release that solemnized the deal between Google and Yahoo to display Google ads in Yahoo search results, there was also another announcement that Yahoo Messenger and Google Talk would have interoperability. In plain words it works out to you being able to message your friends from Google Talk through Yahoo Messenger and vice versa.

Both Yahoo and Google Talk are not new to having interoperability with different messenger clients.

Image Credit

Yahoo being the first one in the race had interoperability with Windows Live Messenger back in 2006. Late last year Google too announced a interoperability with AIM messenger (they have a 5% stake in AOL, the parent company of AIM owned by Time Warner).

With the recent Microsoft and Yahoo showdown it has been quite known that there has been no love lost between the two of them, the Google deal not only rubs salt into Microsoft wounds, but the interoperability between the messengers also leaves Windows Live Messenger quite a lot to lose against.

Yahoo Messenger recently rolled out a new feature to import contacts from various sites including both Windows Live and Google accounts which underlines their strategy of bringing more and more users under the Yahoo Messenger fold.  Disclaimer: I am the lead developer for the third party service that works in the back-end to bring this feature into Yahoo Messenger.

With the interoperability deal both Yahoo and Google Talk they can ensure that they will be taking more and more users towards their own bases and quite frankly the features Yahoo Messenger has been rolling out have been much better than both Windows Live Messenger and Google Talk.

My views are not biased between any of the three companies but frankly Microsoft is losing the plot in the web world and they are definitely losing a lot of money too providing cash backs and signing deals like the $6 billion payout for aQuantative, but with cash cows like the Windows operating system and Microsoft Office suite bringing them billions and billions of dollars profits each year, who are we to complain?

Want to let your messenger friends know about your Facebook Status? If you are a Windows Live Messenger User there is a easy way to do that.

Fibby is a Windows Live Messenger add-in that will allow you to set your Windows Live Messenger Personal Status Message as the status you have in Facebook.

You do not need to keep updating the Windows Live Messenger as Fibby will automatically set the status for you after performing few steps to setup Fibby to be used with Windows live Messenger.

Instructions to setup Fibby With Windows Live Messenger:

• Open Windows Live Messenger, click your display name at the top of the window, and select Options from the drop-down menu (or type Alt-T and select Options).
• Select “Add-ins” from the items in the left pane.
• Click the “Add to Messenger” button and browse to the directory where you installed Fibby. The default location is Program Files\Fibby. Select the file “Facebook.StatusUpdater.dll”
• Fibby will start and prompt you through the next steps.

Once you have successfully added Fibby, you need to turn it on by clicking on your display name on the main Messenger window and selecting “Turn on Fibby”. (It may take up to a minute for your PSM to update.)

Requirements: Dot Net Framework

Download: Fibby