I just started playing around with the Windows Live Messenger beta (previously MSN Messenger) and am ridiculously happy about a feature I’ve been wanting forever that’s extremely simple–nicknames.

Finally, I can rename a “buddy” to their actual name instead of having to deal with all the creative folks out there who mask their names with phrases of the day, etc. They still have an outlet for that creativity by using the “personal message” feature but changing their name always just got to me as I seem to have a bunch of these creative types in my list of friends and it was sometimes quite a process to figure out who was who.

I haven’t really spent any time checking anything else new in it out yet but this is enough to keep me happy.