In 1999, I was 10 years old. I was there when MSN Messenger first arrived. It felt like something sent from God. It was a serious rival to the likes of AOL's AIM (AOL Instant Messenger) and ICQ. At the time - AOL was king; disks advertising 'x days free trial' for AOL were all the rage. But over at Microsoft, they'd designed a great tool, with a memorable logo. The logo was simple - eye catching and became an instantly recognisable symbolization which appeared all over the web. Here is how it looked:
If I asked people today what a .NET Passport is, they might look at you with a confused look in their eyes. A .NET Passport was your passport (your registration) that allowed you to use MSN Messenger.
The screenshot to your left is how the early MSN Messenger looked. Simple - uncomplicated - fast - reliable(ish). The whole point of MSN Messenger was to contact your friends. You'd simply add them via email address and you'd be able to see whether or not they were online - think of it like WhatsApp....but in 1999.
Not only could you have instant conversations with your friends - but you could see whether you had any new emails. Eventually, MSN Messenger began to evolve. Updates added functionality and the MSN Messenger service grew. Up until 2009, there were 330 million users. At the time - everyone had MSN.
MSN was often used by people to chat up the hottest girls in the year. Rejection via instant messenger was less painful than rejection in real life. "BRB m8", "LOL", "TTYL" - acronyms that we still use daily formed by avid users of MSN. As soon as you got home from school, you'd jump onto MSN, say "wuu2?" to your friends and wait eagerly for their reply which would be something like "nm, u?". It was better than it sounds - honest.
The screenshot to the right shows what MSN Messenger was becoming. It was now a place where you could add a fancy tagline, such as: ☆đση'т ¢σρу, вε σяιgιคℓ☆. There were literally hundreds, if not thousands of websites dedicated to people sharing quotes, taglines, custom profile pictures - the works.
With later versions of MSN Messenger - there were all the signs of adverts coming into the picture. As you can see, there was space for ads on the bottom and ads on the left hand side of the software; MSN Homepage links at the top too. It was so great - yet starting to get annoying to use, especially if you were used to the first few releases.
Microsoft changed the branding of MSN Messenger to Windows Live Messenger for v8 in 2005 - this caused some anger in the community, as we'd gotten used to calling Windows Live Messenger "MSN". Ads and general bloated software lead to more annoyance, but we continued to use it anyway, because quite frankly, it was a fantastic tool.
2012 signaled the end for Windows Live Messenger when Microsoft acquired Skype for £5.1 billion ($8.5bn). As Skype already had an instant messenger built in, most of us knew deep down that the days of MSN would become just a memory. In 2013, Microsoft shut down the service as users made the transition to Skype.
It's a real shame to have to say goodbye to MSN Messenger - it really did pave the way for services like Whatsapp, Viber, iMessage and other copycat services that still exist today. For all the reasons listed above and many more, it really does prove that technology never stands still. Things move on and we must enjoy them whilst they last. So whilst you're snapchatting, Whatsapping and tapping on your technology today, know that it might not be there in years to come. Good bye MSN Messenger.
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