A tricked out messenger ride
May 6th, 2008.
I started using MSN messenger in elementary school. I had tried ICQ, and had dabbled in IRC, but neither of them could match MSN. Somewhere along the line MSN became the standard IM program.
I understand that this isn’t the case everywhere. I have
this theory that geography plays heavily into the IM application of choice. For
instance, while working the call center I would sometimes need the customers
e-mail address and 90% of the time they would have a yahoo email address. And
scores of people were calling in about yahoo messenger, which I didn’t even
know existed. This shocked me because nobody in my area uses yahoo for
anything, let alone email. The only person I know who uses a yahoo email
address is Oldmanlever. AIM is another one. I know one guy who uses AIM, and
only because he has a lot of friends in the states.
I watched MSN messenger grow. I started using it somewhere between versions 2.0 and 3.0. At that time it was a pretty basic IM application, and it was especially popular because all of my friends had hotmail accounts already. I spent a lot of time talking to friends on MSN messenger, so I was always looking for ways to spruce up the experience. It started pretty innocently with block checkers, finding ways around the words which they would not allow in contact names, displaying multi-line contact names, creating ascii art and things like that.
Then people started coding messenger bots. Suddenly I had a contact on my list which would tell me a joke when I issued a command, or do a quick math calculation or return a definition from the dictionary for me. I was squeezing functionality out of the program that nobody else knew about, no matter how lame it may seem now.
That got old pretty quickly too. But then the patching started. Programmers all over the world were putting out these patches which kept on adding functionality to messenger. There was the polygami patch which would allow you to have more than one instance open. There were patches to make the window transparent, and to change the alert noises and the logos. You could send emoticons until someone elses computer crashed, or just use login pop-ups to show a message on your friends machine. Then a guy named Patchou came out of the woodwork and dropped a pretty hefty piece of messenger history onto our laps. Messenger plus.
Messenger plus took all of the patches and combined them into one application which integrated itself right into the background of messenger. Suddenly MSN names could be rainbow coloured, and chat sessions were being logged, and you could send messages with noises. There were more font options, dynamic msn names, custom scripts you could install. The sky was the limit for these people.
The place to find out the latest messenger news was a little Belgian site called mess.be. These guys were ahead of everybody when it came to messenger. If there was a new version of messenger they had it 2 months before it was released, with patches ready to go within the first couple days. If some Russian Microsoft developer took screenshots of a new feature in the next build they knew about it. If there was a vulnerability, bug or easter egg they were the first to report it. I spent more time on this website than I should have.
Now, as a 19 year old IT student I don’t screw around when it
comes to my instant messaging. I make sure my MSN is pimped out to the brim
because Microsoft sure as hell didn’t get it right the first time. I use a
combination of WindowsLiveMessenger 8.5 MessengerPlus and the messpatch to make
my IM experience fit my exact specifications. Some of the non-standard features
I use the most are;
- Chat logs encrypted with 1024-bit encryption
- Timestamp added on the end of every message
- Unlimited nudging
- Tabbed message windows (Firefox spoiled me)
- Password protected preferences
- Show users as idle rather than away when appropriate
- Boss protection; hides messenger with a keypress
- Extension of message length limits
This makes things difficult for me because my tricked out
messenger can’t follow me across platforms. If I could port this and utorrent to linux I would switch to Ubuntu in a heartbeat. I’ve tried things like Pidgin, and
truly wish I could switch to an open source messenger without losing all of my
features. Maybe it will happen some day, until then I'll be rubbing elbows with Bill Gates.
