May 08
Super Toast a.k.a. Branded Notificaitons Have Arrived
For those of you that have followed the Windows Live Alerts service, you'll have noticed the team's evolution of the service, with new features that enable content providers to brand their notificiations and now associate advertising with content that their readers have opted into receiving through the Alerts service.
The team has referred to the evolution of this feature set as "Super Toast". The term "toast" being our name for the little window that pops up within Messenger when a users receives a notification about content they've elected to receive.
- Classic Alert: an IM based Alert with a small logo of the content provider (Newsweek example)
- Branded Alert: an IM based Alert where branding is applied to (mess.be example)
- Alert with Advertisement: an IM based Alert where an applicable ad is associated with the notification (the MSN Weather Alert with Ford Escape example)
While the Classic Alert (Newsweek example) has been for several years, the Branded Alert (mess.be example) is relatively recent and the Alert with Advertisement (MSN Weather with Ford Escape advertisement example) is brand new. We're excited to release this latest improvement to the service that tens of millions of users around the world enjoy.
If you're interested in integrating Windows Live Alerts with your application or content, please evaluate the zero development solution for content published via RSS or the SDK available on MSDN that will enable more sophisticated notification scenarios, including 1:1 or personal alerts.