MSN Messenger

~ the story ~

Microsoft's MSN Messenger launched on July 22, 1999. By the time it was renamed to Windows Live Messenger in 2005, then quietly merged into Skype on April 8, 2014, it had spent the better part of fifteen years as the default communication app of post-Soviet Eastern Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, and most of South Asia. It was, for a stretch from roughly 2002 to 2009, the most-used messaging app on Earth that wasn't email.

And yet, when it died, almost nobody held a wake. The Skype migration was forced. The contacts list was preserved but the soul was not. Microsoft called it "an upgrade." It was an extinction event.

~ the rituals ~

MSN was full of micro-rituals. Each one is now extinct.

Logging in. The doorbell sound. The flower icon spinning. Your contact list slowly populating, top-down, as the server caught up. Most of us would refresh just to see who was online; that one person who might be online right now.

The status. A song lyric, an inside joke, a passive-aggressive message aimed at one specific person. A sentence in parentheses next to your name. "(don't message me unless you're sorry.)" The status was the original tweet, the original story, the original close-friends post. It had no character limit and no algorithm.

The display name. Different from the status. The name itself. People rebranded weekly. From "ahmet" to "AhMeT" to "~*AhMeT*~" to ".:[ ahmet ]:." to "ahmet (offline)". The display name was a tiny rebellion against your government name.

The "appear offline." This was the most consequential boolean in 2005 internet life. Appear offline meant "I am here but I am hiding from you specifically." Everybody knew. Nobody could prove it.

The nudge. The single most aggressive feature ever shipped. You hit a button, and the recipient's chat window would shake violently across their entire screen. Nudges were used for: emergencies, attention-seeking, declarations of love, declarations of war, and absolutely nothing.

~ the death ~

MSN died because Microsoft bought Skype in 2011 for $8.5 billion and decided to consolidate its messaging products. The Windows Live Messenger client was retired, contacts were ported to Skype, and the experience became something that resembled MSN about as much as a Tinder match resembles a love letter.

Skype was a video-call tool with a chat function bolted on. MSN was a chat tool with a video-call function bolted on. The difference was everything. Skype's UI was laid out for big-screen broadcast; MSN's was laid out for tiny-window-at-the-edge-of-your-screen-while-doing-homework.

Within two years of the Skype migration, most former MSN users were on WhatsApp on their phones. Within five years, the MSN era was a meme on Twitter rather than a living thing, though by 2020, telling a 15-year-old that you used to "go on MSN" sounded like saying you used to go on the Pony Express.

~ the hole it left ~

MSN was the last messenger built for desktop computing as a primary medium; everything that came after assumed your phone is in your hand. There is something MSN did that no current app does:

You knew when somebody was at home, in front of a real computer, in a real room, with their door closed, and they had chosen to be available to you specifically. The presence indicator carried physical information. Online meant seated. There is no equivalent in the always-pocketed age.

The asynchronous-but-immediate rhythm. Conversations could pause for ten minutes while someone went to make tea. The technology assumed you had other things going on. Modern messengers assume the message is the only thing in your life.

~ words from mourners ~

"my crush had 'sometimes you have to lose yourself before you can find anything' as their MSN status. i had to ask my friend what 'lose yourself' meant. it was a song. that's how i learned about eminem.", e.s. 36

"we broke up over msn. she signed in just to send me 'goodbye, you'll always be in my heart' and signed out. i sat in front of the computer for two hours waiting for her to come back online."; k.a. 39

"my mother saw my display name was '<3 burak <3' and asked me at dinner who burak was. that was the day i learned about privacy settings.". f.y. 34