Posted on 05 Jan 2007
Tencent: TM 2007 Beta 1 First Impression

Tencent Inc. of China has released a new version of messenger, i.e. Tencent Messenger (TM) 2007 Beta 1. It is designed to meet the needs of office use, and new features such as e-name card, TM secretary, memo, auto-responder, encryption when sending sensitive message, and etc have been added to this 2007 beta 1. It is only available to use on Windows 2000/XP platforms, and the download size is relatively small, i.e. 9.81MB. Click here for the download page. You need to have a QQ account in order to login for use or you will need to create another new TM account as required by Tencent. I still wonder whether it would be worked on Linux or some other platforms than Windows. As you can see in its home page, this messenger’s window is small, and therefore, it convinced the users that it would not consumed a lot of memory or resources of the users’ PC.
Unlike QQ, its target market is corporate office. Since QQ is famous in China, and most of the users are the relatively young people that use QQ for social networking, chat, and etc. This TM seems to be designed for the niche market, i.e. corporate people. What caught the eyes of corporate for this product is its security enhancements. TM 2007 beta 1 is known to have some password protection, encryption system as mentioned above that well-suited for the corporate white-collar workers. When compare these two products developed by Tencent, they have a common characteristics, i.e. free!
I believed the launched of this messenger would posed a threat to the MSNShell, another well-known brand name in the China’s messenger market. Since there are problems as posted by this blog (in Mandarin) when using MSNShell due to the Taiwan quake. The launched of this TM 2007 beta 1 tend to served as an expanded plan to lure away some MSNShell users.
N.B. MSNShell is served as a product that enhance the features of MSN Messenger. Some plugins have been created to further improve the user experiences of MSNShell.



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