Back in 1996 when I was on dial-up, life was so much easier. Back then when I logged on to the net (after hearing that wonderful sound of my dailup modem going "KWeeeecharirsoiroissjfkjeijfldskkkkkssssksksksksks") my internet session would start of with several "’Oh-Oh’" sounds of ICQ messages that had been waiting for me. Man .. that was an awesome program. No matter if you where online or not, you could send people messages and they would be stored OFFLINE untill those persons got online. And vice versa. If you where ‘away from your computer’ (or even when you had the darn thing disconnected from the internet or… "God Forbid" TURNED OFF) your instant messages would arrive. Icq was a wonderful little program that unfortunately got obese and turned into bloatware faster then Oprah in a Donut factory. But back then I had a ton of folks in my ICQ list from all over the world. Really cool ! It wasn’t until some years later that I heard about MSN Messenger. Some "nooby friend" introduced it to me, and I was pretty reluctant to switch over to MSN messenger after he told me about it. But because ICQ was slowly dying down and all my "local friends" where on MSN .. i decided to make the switch.
I have been using MSN for some years now, and in the beginning it was crowded ! Everybody seemed to be on MSN and my local posse used it as our main means of communication. But that has changed. With my internet peeps being mostly abroad I came to the conclusion that MSN messenger was not something they used in the states a lot. So my MSN list became a collection of end users and local contacts (family and stuff) and thanx to Googletalk, Twitter and Skype .. I hardly use it anymore. But because both Skype and MSN and Twitter in some way, require that you are online for them to function decently .. there was never a decent replacement for ICQ.
Wat buggs me big time about MSN these days is this "msn spam" Somehow spammers have gotten a hold of my MSN address and have "added" me in their contact list to shoot me stupid messages about teens and webcams and porn and stuff. (great.. this one line is gonna get googled and i’m gonna get lots of horny guyz on the site again). My beef with msn is : What the frack is the problem with you and security ? Never mind that my "@msn" address is such a giant spambucket that I haven’t used it for years.. Now the ‘contact list’ security is out the window too ? Djeez ! If it where not for the fact that I can turn off my MSN account in Adium while the rest is still running, I would ditch msn (and my local online community) alltoghether. Its another classic example of MS and poor security if ever I found one. Msn spam .. go away !