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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??" Indeed, however, it was possible to keep using the MSN client, if you - like myself - loathed the Skype client for the buggy, cumbersome, un-intuitive piece of poo that it is. I'm not sure if the Skype and MSN infrastructure was merged, though, but since they're now announcing a shutdown I suppose it wasn't.
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.
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."
It is still available in China, but not for much longer, hence the announcement.
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.
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.
Yeah, i agree, software wear and tear is a bitch. After 15 years of continued use, i reckon most of the 0s are cracked open, and the 1s are likely entirely dull.
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
MSN Instant Messenger got a bad reputation as being related to the system service named "messenger.exe" which was an entirely separate thing for sending messages to other machines on a LAN.