Pass the hours at work! (Microsoft MSN Messenger Service)

Member Name: benlovell

Product:	Microsoft MSN Messenger Service
Date:	08/05/01 (127 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Small footprint, Easy to use, Great way to keep in touch

Disadvantages: Some firewalls can block it

Hello!

If like me you sit in an office from nine to five with a bunch of dull faced old geezers you will appreciate the need for some decent human contact. This is where MSN Messenger comes in!

I have around ten contacts on my messenger at the moment all of them are my 'real life' friends as opposed to people I have met over the internet. I think messenger is great for talking to existing friends but not so good at finding friends as say using a chat room on Yahoo.

There are many cool features of MSN Messenger, you can use icons to portray your feelings ranging from the usual smilies to little people and even mail and phone icons! Also, firewall permitting you can transfer files a la napster, between yourself and your friends which can come in handy sometimes.

You can display your status if you want to stop that sudden surge of messenger activity as soon as you log in every morning, but one thing I would suggest is that you could make your own custom status like 'having a slash' or something. Also, if you use a hotmail webmail account like me, the messenger will report when you have new emails which is a real timesaver compared to having to login to hotmail everytime you want to check your mail.

Like most Microsoft products, Messenger hooks into as many other MS products as possible, some of these features are very handy, some you may never use. I regularly talk over netmeeting with friends of mine - this you can instantiate over messenger too.

Overall I would definately recommend messenger as the best instant messaging tool around simply due to its ease of use and great functionality. Messenger going to be completely reworked soon to fit in with MS's .net (programmer geek stuff) strategy, so expect some real cool new features - even though this is probably a while off I admit!

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