ymsn?

ICQ was the sh!t. And then AIM caught on. And all of a sudden (for me), Yahoo IM was the bomb. Now, most of my friends are on MSN. Many of them are on other networks, but MSN seems to be the dominant one. At least, for now.

Thing is, I don't know why MSN is popular. The software is messy, ads all over, and doesn't seem to have much in the way of user friendliness. MSN doesn't have the store-and-forward feature -- meaning you can send a message to someone who's offline, the server/system will hold onto it (store), and send it along to them (forward) when they log on next. YIM and ICQ do it; MSN and AOL don't.

And yet, most of my (online) friends are resident on MSN as their primary instant messaging address. So. Why MSN? Just because everyone else is?

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

some workplaces don't allow other IM software besides M$.

Anonymous said...

i personally like gtalk. but no one is on it or even knows about it yet.

stuck with msn cause work doesn't allow downloading program and i can only access msn via their web-based e-messenger. So that's that.

virg

Fumbling said...

half my friends are on yahoo, half on msn. so i keep both open

Ben said...

I wouldn't mind so much if I were able to use Trillian at work (or better yet, Proteus on my Windows machine). But I can't. So while at work, I have MSN and YIM running, which captures probably 80% or 90% of my friends. (That's plenty of partners to procrastinate work with.)

But I just don't like that the UI is so messy on them both -- extra wasted window space, and my laptop's screen real estate is at a premium!

Kevin said...

I think it's the mob effect. If more people are on one network, then more people will go there. Why stay on a less-used one? It doesn't matter how good another system is -- what's the point if it has no people?