MSN Chat
» see chat.msn.com as it lived, on the wayback machine
~ the obituary ~
everyone in turkey was on msn messenger by the early 2000s. that part is not in question, it was on every screen at the internet cafe and every home machine on ttnet. msn chat was the other thing, the public rooms full of people you did not know, and that one i mostly stayed out of. i had a contact list. the rooms were for meeting strangers and i was not looking.
msn chat grew out of the chat rooms microsoft had run from the early days of msn, rebuilt over the years on its own version of the old irc protocol. you picked a room by topic or by country and typed into a wall of scrolling text alongside a hundred other people. it was free and it was open, which meant anybody could make a room and anybody could walk in. that openness was the whole appeal and also the thing that eventually got it killed.
in 2003 microsoft closed the rooms across most of the world in one move, something like twenty-eight countries at once, turkey among them. the stated reason was child safety, after a run of bad press in the uk. in the united states and a few other places the rooms survived a while longer as a paid subscription tied to a passport account, about twenty dollars a year. paying to sit in a chat room already sounded like the end of the road.
~ the case file ~
| Born | mid-1990s, chat rooms bundled into MSN |
|---|---|
| Peak | early 2000s, open rooms in dozens of countries |
| Killed | 14 October 2006, last paid rooms closed |
| Lifespan | about a decade |
| Made by | Microsoft |
| Killed by | child-safety pressure and the cost of moderating open rooms |
~ how it actually ended ~
the paid rooms did not last. in august 2006 microsoft announced the rest would close, and on 14 october 2006, three years to the day after the first big shutdown, msn chat was gone everywhere. the messenger kept going for years afterward. the rooms did not.
~ what got buried with it ~
the open public chat room was already dying by then, pushed out by the private contact list. you did not need a room full of strangers when you had msn messenger and a list of people you actually knew. msn chat closing was one of the early signs that the web was moving from open rooms to closed lists, from meeting strangers to talking to friends. we mostly did not notice at the time.
~ leave a rose ~
an anonymous tribute. one rose per visitor per day.
@}-->-- ... roses left here
~ leave a wreath ~
a rose fades by morning. a wreath stays on this grave for good, with your name on it.
paid once through stripe. payments are handled by OÜ Lakeview, the small company that keeps rip.so running. the money pays for the hosting and the nightly digging. adopt it and the headstone reads "maintained in memory by" you. the groundskeeper plants new wreaths at the next tending, usually within a day.
» one email a week: new graves and the anniversaries of the dead. subscribe
other messengers: pixiv Chat, aMSN, MessageMe, Chikka
also died in the 2000s: PrivatePhone, Hellgate - London, Headbone Zone
~ leave a note ~
visitors before you have left these graveside notes. anonymous welcome.