aMSN

» see amsn-project.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

i lived on msn in those years like everyone in turkey did. it was the messenger, not aim, not icq by the end, just msn on every screen in the internet cafe and every desktop at home. the official client only ran on windows, though, so the first time i put linux on a machine as a computer engineering student, aMSN was how the contact list came with me instead of getting stranded.

that was the whole point of it. aMSN was a from-scratch open-source rebuild of msn messenger, first released in may 2002, written to run on anything with the right toolkit under it, linux and mac included, down to nokia's internet tablets. it chased the official client feature for feature, down to the display pictures and the webcam, so that using it never felt like a downgrade so much as the same thing without the windows tax.

it worked because it stayed compatible, and that was also what killed it. around forty million downloads by 2011 made it one of the most-fetched projects on sourceforge. but every feature depended on microsoft's protocol staying reachable, and microsoft kept changing it. the 2009 client moved video to a new system that broke aMSN's calls, and when microsoft folded msn into skype the network aMSN talked to stopped existing. the last release shipped in may 2012.

~ the record ~

~ what it was ~

aMSN belonged to a small family of clients built by people who wanted msn without being told which operating system to run. it was the answer to a specific frustration: the network everyone you knew was on would only let you in through one door. aMSN cut a second door. for a linux user in the mid-2000s that was not a luxury, it was the difference between being reachable and being invisible.

~ the long tail ~

nothing replaced it because the thing it connected to went away entirely. when microsoft retired msn there was no protocol left to clone, so aMSN did not lose to a competitor, it lost its reason to exist. the people who ran linux and still wanted their friends moved to whatever those friends moved to next, which by then meant facebook chat and phones. the clone outlived a lot of official software and still could not outlive the network it copied.

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