Universally accepted chatter (Microsoft MSN Messenger Service)

Member Name: wxcat

Product:	Microsoft MSN Messenger Service
Date:	28/09/09 (44 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Widely used, lots of features

Disadvantages: Bloaty

Microsoft MSN Messenger and the newer Windows Live Messenger has been the instant messenger of choice for most people in the UK for the last almost 10 years. It used to be so bad before this that everyone used Yahoo Messenger. MSN used to be a small 5MB application; the recent Windows Live Messenger is now 60MB.

When companies are trying to work away from bloatware, and other applications are less than 1MB in size, Microsoft fails on this count badly. You can however get MSN Messenger for every format, PC and MAC, and on all kinds of mobiles that have internet, something most messengers haven't got to yet.

MSN is fully featured and you can now do almost anything you want to in Messenger. These include video chat, sound, drawing messages, different colour and style fonts, backgrounds, ability to send files, and ability to send offline messages. Although it has all these features, the video feature is well outclassed by Skype, and the file transfer is about as slow as you can get.

You can store as many contacts as you want on MSN, and you can sort them by Online/Offline or in groups as you want them. They have modes for when you are away or busy or you can appear offline, so you can see who's online and chat while looking as if you're not online. Over the last few years they have changed this from a maximum of 150 contacts, and you used to not be able to have swearing in you're username, which has also been relaxed.

In the latest version you can also allow MSN to show what music you're listening to in Windows Media Player, by way of a plugin for Media Player. This is only visible when playing audio in Media Player and only to full users of Windows Live Messenger.
One program I would recommend downloading if you use MSN regularly is to get Messenger Plus, made by a coder called "Patchou". This gives you so many useful additional features that are more use to the user. One of the more useful things is you can tell when a contact last logged on and when they last spoke to you, and whether they have you in their contact list, and also allows you to log youre conversations if you so wish to do that.

Summary: What we've grown accustomed to using!

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