Cardioid

As you all probably know by now, MSN, aka Windows Live Messenger, is being shut down by Microsoft in favour of Skype, as of today. I am quite sad at this forced change.

I’ve been using MSN for a long time. My current account is about 6 years old, but I had an older one that I used during high school. It was the primary way to get in touch with me, and I spent a lot of time chatting with people I’ve met online as well as people I know irl.

I remember when it was changed to “Windows Live Messenger”, yet everyone I knew still kept on calling it “MSN”. I remember when it used to have an awesome handwriting feature, that me and my friends would use to draw silly things with, and when it was taken away by a newer version, I stuck out on the older version for the longest time until I was forced to upgrade it. I remember the whiteboard function, where you can draw and write stuff concurrently. I remember the minigames you could play, including a word filter that translates your messages into Pirate or Robot-ese, or ‘fo-shizzle-ese’.

I remember the major UI overhauls, including updating the default icon set to something ugly (I will forever miss the old :S emoticon, I’ve never been able to find another one that conveys the same meaning).

my fave set of MSN icons

I remember when it started trying to be a social media service, and used your real name instead of your display name, and hating that. I’ve been using “MapleRose (f)” (f for the flower) since forever, and I didn’t want it to display my real name).

I admit I don’t like all of MSN’s changes over the years. They keep on taking away features I loved. I also admit that Skype is much better at video and audio calling. MSN loves to disconnect randomly and drop calls.

But MSN is still my favourite IM service. I’m someone who’s sitting in front of a computer a lot, and by IM is how I talk to people outside of face-to-face. It let me keep on touch with friends half way around the world as well as friends just a few blocks away.

I sort of understand that it’s unrealistic for Microsoft to keep two similar services running at the same time, but I really really really wish that before forcing everyone to convert, they upgraded Skype’s messenger with MSN features, you know, like actually combining the services instead of totally dropping a feature that’s popular and used by a lot of people and making them downgrade to a crappier IM.

I get to keep my contacts, hooray. What about the rest of the features that I regularly use?

I have hundreds of custom emoticons that I either created, or stole took from other people. I’m most proud of my Gundam SEED gif set, that I can’t use on Skype anymore. Instead, I get to use Skype’s ugly set of default emoticons.

I also have lots of avatar images and custom backgrounds (until they took that feature away at least) that Skype won’t let me import or change easily.

I’ve had this orange text for the past 6 years (using MsgPlus) that I’ve gotten very used to. Skype doesn’t support any font colours other than black. So far, I’ve only found how to customize the font that I receive, but it applies to all the messages that I get. Aesthetics aside, it’s really really useful to see who said what at a glance judging just by their font and text colour, especially in group chats.

It also kinda droves me nuts that when you start chatting with someone, the text goes from bottom up instead of top down (ie the bottom of the screen fills up, instead of starting at the top). It doesn’t matter once you typed enough that the text window starts to scroll, but it bugs me when you haven’t said enough for text to fill the window yet.

I also wish you can hide the giant stupid video button. No, I don’t want to have a video chat with this person, stop putting that obnoxious green button there taking up screen space.

Functionally Skype works as an IM, if you just want to use it to talk to someone. But for me, MSN wasn’t just simply talking to someone; I used it to interact with other people, and being able to personalize my responses is a huge part of it. It makes me sad that it’s being stripped down to just a simple text IM client in Skype.

RIP MSN (2007-2013)