Messenger Plus!

» see msgpluslive.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Messenger Plus! was on every machine I sat down at between roughly 2003 and 2008. MSN was the only chat program anybody in Turkey used in those years, and Messenger Plus! was what you installed shortly after MSN itself, because somebody in your contact list had a nickname in four colors and you wanted to know how. That was the entire distribution strategy and it reached 62 million people.

Cyril Paciullo, a French programmer who signed everything as Patchou, released the first version on 19 May 2001 under the name The Messenger Plus! Extension. It formatted text with tags that worked like BBCode, and it put tabs on your conversation windows long before Microsoft got around to it. It also kept an event log, in plain text or HTML, of every conversation you had.

The part that made it more than a skin was the scripting. Messenger Plus! ran JScript, which meant anybody could write a plugin for a chat client they did not own and hand it around, and people did. Sound clips were the visible version of the same idea: a short audio file fired straight into somebody else's window, which in 2004 felt like reaching down the wire and touching the other end.

Nobody I knew thought of it as a separate piece of software with a person behind it. It was just what MSN looked like.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how it landed ~

The money came from adware. Early versions bundled a sponsor program from Circle Development, and the agreement you clicked through to get it was written to look like an ordinary license, which is why plenty of people installed it without registering that they had agreed to anything at all. By version 3.60, on 27 September 2005, the sponsor had its own separate agreement in several languages and you could decline it and keep the add-on.

That is the honest ledger here. A free product with tens of millions of users, funded by a bundle most of them never read. The developer did eventually build the door that let you say no, which is more than most of his contemporaries managed. Almost all of the free software on a Turkish desktop in 2004 was paid for the same way, and very little of it ever got as far as offering the choice.

~ the funny part ~

Sixty-two million is a strange number for an add-on. It is more users than most standalone products ever manage, and every single one of them was borrowed from Microsoft. Messenger Plus! never had an account system and never had a contact list of its own. It sat on top of a client with 330 million monthly users at its 2009 peak and took a slice of them for free.

It is also why the thing stayed invisible to the industry while it was alive. There was no funding round and no acquisition to write about. There was one man with an installer, and a very large number of people who decided colored text was worth a download.

~ what remains ~

Microsoft announced the merge into Skype on 6 November 2012. Messenger users got the email on 8 January 2013 saying the service would stop on 15 March. The actual phase-out began with English accounts on 8 April 2013 and finished at the end of that month. Mainland China kept the service running until 31 October 2014. Patchou shipped Messenger Plus! Live 1.8 on 3 March 2013 so the add-on would speak to both services during the handover, which is a lot of work to do for a program with a published expiry date on it.

There was a Messenger Plus! for Skype, out on 12 January 2012, with a last stable build in February 2014. It never mattered the way the original did, because Skype was not the place where your whole address book already lived. msgpluslive.net answers nothing at all now. The lesson is the one every add-on gets taught eventually: the users were never yours.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »