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Microsoft Shutting Down MSN Messenger After 15 Years of Service
New submitter airfuz writes Microsoft took a bold move announcing that users have to move away from the old version of Internet Explorer to the new version 11. And now not long after that, Microsoft announced that they are shutting down the 15-year-old MSN Messenger. Most people have moved away from the service to Facebook and other mobile based messengers such as Whatsapp, and so MSN is left with few users. But still, ending a 15-year messaging service like the MSN Messenger means something to the ones who grew up using it.
Wasn't it already shut down a couple of years ago, with mandatory migration to Skype?
You mean the folks too young for AOL Instant Messenger? And the folks too young for IRC?
"One's"? Really?
Isn't MSN and Skype supposed to be merged?? When I open Skype it gives me the chance to login with my MSN credentials (haven't tried because I don't have one).
:-D
What does that have to do with MSN, which has been free to use?
So how much did you pay for MSN Messenger? ( which is the actual topic here. )
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Have to go back to using ICQ.
It's a perfect time for being wasted.
A perfect time to watch the stars.
- Burden Brothers, "Beautiful Night"
"I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out ...
No, wait. Nobody cares.
Says the guy with the hotmail email address.
Well, I was a teenager when MSN Messenger was being touted to the masses in the early 2000s. They were giving it a big push with Windows XP at the time. Things were still much in dial-up. Broadband was not in yet. Neither was watching videos online, much less YouTube. There was no Google yet either. Google Search came about 5 years after MSN Messenger's big push. I was about to become upset until I realized that these things happen all the time. Some service you like get shut down for no good reason. I don't use MSN Messenger. I use mostly Yahoo Messenger (it was the other big contender to MSN Messenger, AIM was big), text messages (for people not into too much tech), or even just email (with my "techy" friends and FOSS stuff). I used to visit Bloglines.com multiple times per day. They shut things down even though hundreds of thousands of users protested. They could have sold that thing for half a million. Somebody would have bought it--at least recover hardware and software costs. Since this will continue to happen, my solution is to keep an semi-offline repository of my goodies. When Bloglines went away, my sweet little collection of blogs nearly went away unless I did not save my list someplace. Now I have a list of bookmarks to all my favorite blogs, stored offline. Like that bookmark syncing stuff in new FF. I don't want it because the chances are good it will be taken away from me. And the issues of trust, and what are they doing wit my data. Human beings psychologically want a degree of control of their environment and life. I'm just doing my part to ensure I have a comfortable amount of it. Some of these services are hosted on somebody elses server (nowadays called the cloud). I'll host these files on my own computer and devices because I can control it better. I don't get to sync stuff? Ah, I'll think of something which works for me.
http://retroshare.sourceforge....
It's an IM program. Fully decentralised. All communications encrypted, authenticated by swapping public keys to make a contact. Supports realtime chat, mail, even distributed forums. Also excellent file sharing capability. The protocol is written to support voice or video, but the client doesn't include that. It can't be shut down, it's near-impossible to monitor without compromising an end-point, and it's very difficult to block at a network level without blocking all SSL traffic. Use it and annoy the NSA.
Not my project, I've no involvement at all. I just think it's really good. I've quite a few friends on it now. It's like the old WASTE, except less buggy and still under active development.
Yeah I don't get it. They pushed every off of messenger and onto skype, which is why there's only a few users left. If you were using Pidgin, you could still connect to t he messenger servers, but if you were using the actual messenger client it forced you onto skype. So much ado about nothing?
at 2 PM Sunday in a silver minivan. It'll be parked next to the eWorld reunion in the phone booth.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
I grew up with black-and-white TVs ... ending that for something better was really no hardship, and I didn't miss it. ... should I have an attachment to a 15-year-old lamp?
I also discard old furniture when it wears and no longer meets the needs
(perhaps you do, I try to be tolerant of others' kinks, but I really don't)
phim hai chau tinh tri https://www.youtube.com/watch?... Have to go back to using ICQ. -- It's a perfect time for being wasted. A perfect time to watch the stars. - Burden Brothers, "Beautiful Night"
Oh I'm sorry.
Slashdot editor's on weekend's are three year old's.
It's sad to be illiterate. It's even sadder to be illiterate and not know's it's.
Bluewave, 'nuff said.
Charter Member of The Committee Group For The Elimination And Eradication Of Repetitive Redundancy
Reliable as ever.
Good question, in fact Im just glad I dont play utopia anymore and actually talk to the 100+ msn messenger users with whom I used to game daily or Id be whining about msn too. For fsx I am referring to a requirement which is no longer available to be completed online, and for newer operating systems (8x) the install dll which is used to generate telephone activation is not discoverable by the software. In order to use this app whilst buying their new OS, at hundreds of dollars in cost between the two, I must engage support. But both of these scenarios anger me. Sincerely. This isnt just about how MS decides to discontinue one product or doesnt keep other products compatible with all previously released counterparts (while using various maneuvers to compel us to continually upgrade those other products) its about this idea that the software license is not only so much less than any trace of ownership but that its very use can be restricted/disabled at any time. I would hope that whether I directly make a purchase or indirectly fund a franchise like msn by using a free product that there be some assurances that the software we use never be taken away from us. I thought Skype would bridge that gap - and now this? I get it that app services have a cost and such, but people build social lives, businesses, daily routines into messaging software; and as far as expensive games or other products - they have no labeling that states "this may not work very well in 5-10 years, beware" I certainly dont expect ownership when I make a software purchase or create an account but if something is going to be only available to me for a limited time I want to know up front. Sure nothing lasts forever but 5, 10, 15 years? Think about the other purchases we make. These time frames are just too short imo.
will work for dragon quest localization
Older versions of MSN (Pre microsoft takeover) didn't have forced updates, thus never experienced the mandatory migration to skype.
They shut the service down along time ago, shortly after they bought skype. If you try to sign it it just fails and says you must upate to skype. I know, we had a problem with my wifes work only allowing messenger on her pc, they wouldnt install skype or any other messenger. I ended up putting skype portable on a usb drive and she ran it from there.
Some of us actually had hotmail accounts before MS bought it (although MS did bought it about one year after Hotmail was released)....
ICQ/Yahoo/GTalk/Skype/IRC - were all far better than MSN garbage. MSN was always a distraction IM system that gained popularity due to microsoft forcing people into MSN e-mail accounts and buying hotmail.
I'm glad to see it going away. One less thing for pidgin/trillian to have to work with (note: the MSN accounts on the multi-messengers are the *only* ones I recall ever not really transferring files correctly)
This is really appalling.
*from any computer to any computer*
That was something MSN messenger could do, the other only worked on the local network.
They are different in a very important way that matters to this conversation: One is MSN messenger (the topic of the conversation) the other is not. So yeah, kind of important to know the difference.
I tried MSN messenger years and years ago. As far as messengers go they were no competition to Yahoo messenger or AIM,Aim being the king. Its been at least 10 years since i had MSN messenger and noway in the gods green earth i would use Skype. Yahoo was my Fav it had before MSN and AIM. In the beginning Yahoo and MSN were most used by web cam swingers and showoffs. mostly unwelcome dick flashers. Men are such dicks
Jack of all trades,master of none
I remember we were having a blast with NET SEND at the office, using it to talk shit between developers.
It allowed for short messages only (like twitter), and no incriminating evidence was left behind so no holds barred... Until we found out that each message is automatically logged by Windows and that the sysadmin we had made fun of in those messages had been reading our clever discussions for months... Good times!
lucm, indeed.
Ah yes, HoTMaiL.
After MSNM 6.5, they ruined the client completely.
Back then, you could even have fun add-ons for MSN that could let you do fun stuff with names, display pictures.
Instead of working with the modding community, which was huge with MSN, they made MSNM 7 harder to mod, which killed off so many things.
Likewise that was just around the time they started slowly strangling the rest of the MSN Services, one by one, including one they could have made glorious, MSN Spaces.
But instead they continued to fight their OWN community until everyone else left it.
Personally, I'm waiting for a good decentralized solution.
Hopefully Bittorent Chat will fit that.
I think most are missing the politics.
This is surprising, coming as it does on the heels of Microsoft's refusal to comply with the U.S. Federal court order to hand over overseas held emails.
So I will spell out some of the political consequences here.
The service closure forces a service switch on the remaining people who were using non-Microsoft MSN clients and thus avoiding the Guangming, which operates the Chinese version of Skype, which has been modified "to support Internet regulations", which is to say The Great Firewall of China. If these users want comparable services, the only comparable one now available to them is Tencent’s QQ messaging software, which from the start has been designed "to support Internet regulations". So there are no longer any "too big to shoot in the head" options which do NOT "support Internet regulations".
So really the only people who care about this will be Chinese dissidents who want to communicate with each other using an encrypted channel through a server inaccessible to the Chinese government, and any journalists seeking an encrypted channel whereby they can move information out of China without having to have a government approved satellite uplink handy, or a willingness to smuggle out data storage some other way.
I understand how you feel but you have to move on. Forget the concept of ownership as far as proprietary software goes and don't try to make old versions of something run on newer versions of something else. Just assume that everything in that industry is like a used card with a "sold as is" sign in the windshield.
It does not matter if this is right or wrong. That's how things work now. So either you deal with it, or you start looking into FOSS and build for yourself a digital life free of the capricious nature of proprietary software.
lucm, indeed.
WE want to see sanity return to development. Stop pushing out so many fucking updates. The software world needs to grow the fuck up and use proper development and deployment. Im tired of my constructs feeling like they are blowing in the wind. Build tools that will last for generations. We are fully into the Information Age, lets start acting like it. The constant changing landscape is akin to someone re-designing the wrench and bolt design every few years. It hard to build stuff on these shifting platforms.
Good-bye
But we're talking about a free online service. Why would you imagine the service provider has some moral duty to keep providing it indefinitely? "indirectly fund a franchise" - really? They owe you because you took their gift? Entitled twit.
Nothing ever entitles you to future work from another. You can have a contract that sets some penalty they'll pay you if they don't do something, but nothing can obligate another to keep providing a service. (You do know slavery is out now, right?)
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Microsoft Messenger got a bad reputation as a target for spim (IM spam). It was enabled up to WINXP SP2 which finally disabled it by default, but by then it was an abandoned protocol because almost all users turned it off in earlier Windows OS to block the spim. It became a ghost town haunted by spammers like most Yahoo groups.
Eternity: will that be smoking, or non-smoking? I Corinthians 6:9-10
i seriously thought it was shut down years ago.
They shut it down for everyone bar China for some reason. This must be the day they turn China off too...
We don't believe in radical loony monotheistic religions from the middle east -- we're Christians.
its about this idea that the software license is not only so much less than any trace of ownership but that its very use can be restricted/disabled at any time
you disabled it yourself by upgrading to w7. if you don't want to find yourself locked up in a walled garden, you shouldn't walk into them, no matter how large or cool they may appear at first. besides, this thread is about discontinuation of *services*, not about software compatibility, so wrong place to shed your otherwise futile tears. you might learn the lesson, though.
I think they will focus more on skype since they have purchased it years ago. I just hope that the quality of skype will remain at the highest peak. Since they're really providing such high standard of services, skype's conference call quality is really outstanding.
i'll let my comment history on /. stand for itself
you, AC, are confusing disagreement with trolling
just because someone offers a counterpoint doesn't mean it's "trolling"...also, if you type idiotic bullshit that gets modded up, you might receive a harsh response...an on-topic, non-trolling harsh response
the point is, AC, you can't label anything you don't like "trolling"
Thank you Dave Raggett