Microsoft employees are using the latest Milestone 2 daily builds, whereas the majority of user are on leaked Wave 3 Milestone 1 build. Here’s what’s showing up for the first time in these pictures.

• Personalisation
• Simplified header
• Improved Personal Status Message (PSM) – First introduced in Messenger v7 along with the music PSM, showing your contacts what you are listening to.
• The new buddy icons
• The “What’s new feed”
• Tabs – These have been moved from the side of the contact list down to the bottom, just above the advertisement, saving screen real estate and making them less intrusive.
• Favourite Contacts - these are the contacts you are most interested in. Positioning this special group of contacts at the top gives you at-a-glance information about their status and activities
• Groups – Allowing groups of contacts to communicate with each other through Group IM, this update takes the existing multi-party chat functionality to a new level. Of course it also opens up others scenarios such as sharing files and photos.
  PhotoShare application - This is a new application that allows users to transfer photos to their contacts for viewing. The main part of the conversation window shows a large preview for one of the photos, with the right hand side column showing smaller previews for the upcoming photos

Source:→ LiveSide