I was reading up on MSN Messenger over at BigBlueBall.com and came across a cool article about How to Create a MSN Messenger Tab. It turns out that it's a fairly quick and easy thing to do.

I downloaded Tab manager 2003 Compiler for MSN 6 from TC Software, learned the program in about fifteen minutes, and then built the necessary components. These were just:

1. A dedicated icon for MSN Messenger (in .png format) which was 31x31 pixels square on a transparent background; and
2. A simplified page for use inside Messenger. This is a dynamic page (powered by Cold Fusion & SQL) which gets generated every time it's requested. If a LOT of people end up using this tool, then I'll generate this page statically every minute. I'll monitor the log files to see about that. Note: Something I learned after some testing is that MSN Messenger actually functions as a browser, and all links on pages inside of it will click-through inside of it unless they're specifically targetted with a target="_blank" in all HREFs.

For now, the content is just the 50-most-recent Classified Ads, but I'll add more content to it later, once I'm sure the idea is worth putting time into.

My own initial testing indicates that it functions properly on machines where MSN Messenger version 6.0 is running (I've tested on Windows 2000 & XP), but not at all on machines running version 6.1. I've been reading up on all the hardcore Messenger websites, including MSNFanatic and Mess With Messenger to find out why this is, but nobody has a solution for it yet. I'm going to keep looking into it, and hope that this tool isn't going to be available for a limited time only (until all of us inevitably upgrade). If you find any information about this, please let me know here.

Also, if you have suggestions on how this service can be improved, please let me know that, too. In the meantime, enjoy.