Have You Heard? MSN Messenger Is Being Shut Down Officially After 15 Years!

Windows Live Messenger that is popularly known as Microsoft’s MSN Messenger will get shut down forever on 31^st October, 2014, as per the latest tech updates. In the year 2013, Microsoft originally declared its plans to move the messenger users to Skype. Nonetheless, the IT giant kept the messenger running in china. After 31^st October, 2014, Chinese messenger users will require utilizing Skype, which will mark the completion of 15 years of long service.

The Beginning of MSN Messenger

In the year 1999, MSN Messenger began off life as an opponent to AOL’s AIM service. Both the organizations kept battling over chat dominance, and the engineers of Microsoft reverse-engineered the protocol of AOL’s chat in order to permit MSN Messenger to sign into AIM, a procedure that AOL didn’t find so good when Microsoft initially released its instant messaging service.

Over the years, MSN Messenger evolved in numerous facets. Microsoft added diversified features to the messenger to make it more appealing. Those features included custom emoticons, the nudge feature for shaking a friend’s chat windows, the feature to play Minesweeper with peers, and super maddening winks options for sending huge animated emoticons to friends.

The sumptuous 15 years of service

Let’s just jump to the improvements that got introduced in the last 15 years.

Nudge

Back in the year 2005, the nudge feature was added, which would allow users to shake the chat windows of their friends, while sending IMs. The nudge was basically introduced keeping in mind the time limit for instant responses. This enabled friends and peers to even start a conversation simply with a nudge and just nudge a friend whenever he/she is not responding.

Adding yourself to see your status

Be it testing the working of your MSN connection or seeing if you’re online or not, you could do it all. That’s why many people added themselves to their own lists and apparently, this feature was never available on Skype.

Custom icons

How can we forget those custom emoticons? They might not have been a great deal for guys, but girls couldn’t simply do without them. You could always upload your own icon that was like a 20X20 emoticon, and then, there were animated icons too, with the size of 50X50 pixels.

MSN pick-uplines

Pick-up lines! Who requires them? C’mon, don’t joke with us. Not, all of you would’ve been that great in your teenage romance. Young guys and gals did need them and they would always test what their crush feels about them through the MSN cheesy pick-up lines.

Super annoying winks

These were primarily added to annoy the hell out of anybody you didn’t like or simply wanted to have a little fun with. You know this stuff!But, the real deal was the noise theyused to make while overtaking your screen.

Auto responsesand MSN Plus

By means of broadband DSL and Cable, you could leave your MSN messenger running for 24/7. But, what if someone would message you, while you weren’t there at your PC? MSN Plus was the candy here. You could set an auto-reply, which would get posted as a response to the person who messaged you.

Custom backgrounds

Another cool feature was customizing your background image and MSN got it even more perfect, because they introduced distinct transparency filters. This meant that even if you chose the most eye-catching image, it’ll still be toned down to render a more subtle look.

Repetitive signing in and out

If you ever wanted to grab someone’s attention, you could simply switch between Online and Offline modes, which would (by luck) get your (someone) to see you sign in through the pop up window. If you get even luckier, that (someone) would start chatting with you. We’ve all done this stuff at least once in our MSN journey, I guess. 😛 Wait! I might have done it like always 😛 🙂

Bid Goodbye to MSN Messenger

So, here we are now, commemorating the fantastic 15 years of MSN. Tell us whatever comes to your mind now? We want to hear it from the MSN Messenger fans.