MSN Messenger

» see messenger.msn.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

MSN Messenger launched on 22 July 1999, originally as a small free download bundled with Hotmail. by 2002 it was the dominant instant messenger in europe, latin america, the middle east, southeast asia, and most of asia. ICQ was older. AIM was bigger in north america. but for the rest of the world, MSN was the one.

in turkey specifically, MSN was huge from about 2002 to 2010. every high school kid had an MSN account. it was the first thing you opened after school. it stayed open until you went to bed. the contact list was your social life, externalized. you had your school friends, your cousins, that one girl from saturday night, and your english teacher who you regretted adding.

microsoft killed MSN in april 2014, migrating users to Skype. nine years later they killed Skype too. so the whole microsoft messenger lineage is now dead. but MSN had its specific moment, and for turkey that moment was the entire 2000s.

~ the record ~

~ the nickname ~

MSN had a "display name" that you could change to anything. for turkish high schoolers in 2004, the display name was a creative outlet. song lyrics, mostly. tarkan lyrics. teoman lyrics. some english pop song you wanted everyone to know you were listening to. you would change it three times a day.

there was an entire genre of cryptic display names that were obviously aimed at one specific person. "you said you would call." "i'll wait, but not forever." "thanks for nothing." these were always read carefully by the rest of your contact list, who would then private message you to ask if everything was OK and what was going on.

~ the appear offline ~

"appear offline" was a status option that made you invisible to your entire contact list while still letting you see who was online. for a generation of turkish teenagers, this was a real social tool. you could see when your crush came online without them knowing you were there. you could check if a specific person was around without committing to a conversation. you could be there without being there.

the problem was that everyone knew about appear offline. so when you saw someone "offline" in your contact list, you assumed they were actually appear-offline. so you appeared offline too, in case they were actually offline-offline and you did not want to be the only person on. by 2007 most of my contact list looked offline at any given time, even though most of us were online and watching each other not appear.

~ the nudge ~

the nudge was a button that, when pressed, made the other person's chat window shake violently for two seconds. it was meant to get someone's attention if they were away from their computer. it was used almost exclusively to be annoying.

the nudge had real social weight. nudging someone you barely knew was rude. nudging someone you knew well was either friendly or aggressive depending on context. there was no middle ground. you nudged your best friend to wake them up in the morning. you nudged the girlfriend you were mad at and she nudged back and you nudged again, and so on, until somebody actually started typing a real message.

~ the slow death ~

microsoft bought Skype in may 2011 for 8.5 billion dollars. about a year later, in november 2012, they announced MSN would be shut down and users would be migrated to Skype. the migration happened through 2013 and finished by april 2014 in most countries. china got an extra six months because microsoft had partnership obligations there.

the migration was clunky. Skype on desktop in 2013 felt heavier than MSN ever did. the contact list did not transfer cleanly. some features were missing. nudges did not transfer at all. for the people who used MSN heavily, the migration felt like the company replacing your favorite messenger with a worse messenger that worked badly. most of those users did not migrate. they either stopped using a microsoft messenger entirely, or they just used whatsapp, which by 2014 was already eating MSN's job.

~ what we lost ~

the display name as a daily art form. modern messengers do not have anything equivalent. whatsapp has a status that nobody uses. instagram bios get updated maybe twice a year. the MSN display name was something you changed multiple times a day, and your contacts read it, and that was a real channel of communication that does not exist anymore.

the friction. MSN required a desktop computer. it required you to log in. it required you to be at home. the messages were ephemeral by design (no archive on the desktop client unless you turned it on). everything about it was designed for sit-down conversation between two specific people. that shape is gone. modern messengers are background notifications, not conversations.

for turkish people my age, MSN is the messenger we measure other messengers against. nothing else has come close. whatsapp does the job. it is not the same. anyone in turkey who used MSN between 2002 and 2010 will tell you the same thing.

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