Cruising the journals at Ars Technica, I caught wind of a new promotional service for Windows Live Messenger called Minimise Me. Minimise Me is a collaboration between Microsoft and MRM Worldwide (UK) that allows WLM users to easily create their own personalized character to use for their profile picture. It also creates a small set of personalized emoticons based on the character that you create. Alternatively, users can choose a character based on a UK celebrity to download or use as a starting point.
The character creation tool is very simple, but offers a wide range of characteristics and tools to customize those characteristics. In my character creation I resized several elements and adjusted the position and color of others. If you have tried the Spore Creature Creator or the Mii creator on the Nintendo Wii, you will feel immediately at home. After creating your character, you can download it. By default, the service will download a small executable that will install the profile picture and emoticons directly into WLM. From the final page you can also click on the “Help with Download” link to download your character as a 96×96 jpg to use on other services such as Windows Live Spaces or Facebook. Hopefully this feature will be elevated to a more prominent position so that users do not miss it as I almost did.
I realize that there are probably already sites out there that provide a similar service and there are hundreds of places to download unique emoticons, but like the folks over at Ars Technica, I find this release particularly interesting in the wake of the announcement of avatars for the Xbox 360. Microsoft has been pushing personalization across their platforms lately and it will be interesting to see if this service grows beyond a simple promotion. The 3D animated avatars of the 360 might be a bit too much for the Windows Live platform, but these IM avatars may be a quality alternative.
