MSN Messenger to end after 15 years

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-28987797

by mkaziz • 12 years ago

48 23 12 years ago

bbc.com

thejosh• 12 years ago

MSN Messenger is survived by Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Snapchat, Skype, Google+ and Instagram.

Apart from none of those are actually chat programs, except for Facebook Chat.

Macuyiko• 12 years ago

And Google+'s Hangouts. And Skype's IMs. And tweeting to each other can also be seen as chatting.

I'd say the biggest chance is the fact that all of them are web-centric or mobile-centric.

batuhanicoz• 12 years ago

What about Skype?

And if we are counting Facebook's Chat, most people I know uses Talk (Google+ Hangouts).

ceejayoz• 12 years ago

Twitter has DMs, Snapchat has text chat, Skype has IM, Google+ has hangouts, Instagram has direct messaging.

kawsper• 12 years ago

Some of my friends do in fact use SnapChat for its chatting capabilities.

userbinator2• 12 years ago

...and another relatively straightforward and open protocol is finally completely replaced with a heavily obfuscated proprietary one. I've worked with MSNP including writing a working client for it, and it was quite easy to do; it's mostly text-based:

http://www.hypothetic.org/docs/msn/sitev2.0/notification/exa...

As it evolved, MS made it more complex by changing many commands to be dependent on XML and SOAP, but 3rd-party clients could still reverse-engineer and keep up. There's been talk and some action on open-source Skype-protocol clients but I haven't seen anything concrete materialise - maybe if all MSNP servers shut down, the Chinese will up their action on Skype.

The interesting thing is that MSNP8 as of now is still functional (and I'm outside of China) - the servers are still up and presence/messaging works. Probably not for much longer though, sad to see it go.

scrollaway3• 12 years ago

MSNP may be "straightforward", but it's definitely not open and it is a horrible protocol.

At least Skype is "the devil you know". Skype would have to be reverse-engineered regardless, so at least now you no longer have to worry about MSNP.

Anything that doesn't get replaced by XMPP or an equivalently good and open protocol is pretty meh regardless.

userbinator2• 12 years ago

How is MSNP "horrible", specifically? You've worked with it?

The main difference I see between MSNP and Skype is that much of MSNP could be figured out in a day just by sniffing packets, which is probably what lead to a proliferation of alternative clients and client libraries for it. The (deliberate?) complexity of Skype means that RE attempts are more difficult, so there are fewer people with the skills and inclination to do it. Hopefully there will be more focus on it now, but it's still a huge effort in comparison.

Personally, I'm not too fond of XMPP either; something more similar to IRC would be my preference. But all of that doesn't matter when almost everyone you know used/uses MSNP/Skype, and from experience it's very difficult to change that, so any progress toward an open-source Skype client will be great.

YousefED• 12 years ago

Awesome to see you here. I've probably spent hours browsing your documentation and msnpiki. There was quite a great community around building "hacked" addons (MsgPlus) and bots for MSN Messenger :)

Still a pity to see it go (nostalgia..)! I kind of owe it the start of my "entrepreneurial" career building a website for MSN related resources (when I was 14, learning the basics of SEO and earning some Adsense money and later on programming and releasing addons). It was also great to see how Microsoft embraced the community around it!

abmussani• 12 years ago

Bye Bye MSN... no more nudge :(

guard-of-terra• 12 years ago

It is also survived by ICQ which it tried to MS-overtake.

51Cards• 12 years ago

Microsoft also recently killed off SkypeKit which allowed 3rd party applications to interact (text/voice) with the Skype platform on Windows. They are saying as it wasn't cross platform it wasn't a good solution however it has crippled Trillian (and others) which I used daily for Skype.

Since I find the actual Skype client to be one of the worst pieces of software ever written I've started introducing everyone to GTalk/Hangouts and so far most are changing over.

RyJones• 12 years ago

I worked on a few features in MSN Messenger, and I'm sad to see it pass, but the time had come. I hadn't logged in to use it for almost five years when it was shut off in the US.

zanny• 12 years ago

There are several people I do not have contact info for that I have fleetingly seen on my MSM account in KTP in the last year. It will be a shame if they shut off their XMPP servers, because then I have no way to reach them.

kmfrk• 12 years ago

The day Messenger died for me was when all my friends moved to Facebook instead.

The halcyon days where IM was somewhat private.

Shame they took so long to bring it to mobile devices, too.

drdeadringer• 12 years ago

Though primarily an AOLIM and Yahoo Messenger user back then, I remember when MSN Messenger’s "British phase-out" occurred around 10 years ago [~2004?]. I had a couple folks from the UK in my list, and we had to go over how else to chat [AOLIM, Yahoo].

I ended up phasing myself off MSN Messenger not too long after. Still a "place in my heart" type situation.

Kompulsa• 12 years ago

I appreciated the ability to have a messenger running on the computer which would always notify me of new messages, instead of having a Facebook tab open in the web browser.

icebraining• 12 years ago

Facebook chat is just XMPP, you can use desktop clients to receive messages. Facebook themselves recommend Pidgin and Adium: https://www.facebook.com/sitetour/chat.php

luuio• 12 years ago

no group chat.

MSN Messenger to end after 15 years

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