Messenger team engineer Ines has posted some information about the Sharing Folders feature in the upcoming Messenger 8.0. Here is what she said:

Most of us learned how to share in kindergarten – but the creators of the internet must have been absent from school that day, because for something so common, sharing files is one of the hardest things to do. Today, you have a couple of choices. You can use e-mail or FTP, but both take up too much time and require too much work to even be considered “quick”. Often times, you just want to have something as simple as one folder for each friend with whom you want to share with. From that very simple idea, the Sharing Folders feature was born!

In short, the upcoming Windows Live/MSN Messenger 8.0 software will allow you to define a folder to share with each of your contacts.