Windows Live Agents

» see agents.live.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

MSN carried the social internet in Turkey for most of the 2000s. Not AIM, which barely registered here, just MSN, from the internet cafes around 2002 through university and into the broadband years. Your contact list was the thing you checked, and the odd entry in it that was not a person came from here.

Windows Live Agents was Microsoft's platform for those entries. An agent was a chatbot with a Messenger address, which you added exactly the way you added a classmate, and then talked to in the same window with the same nudges and the same font. The part that made it infrastructure was the permission structure. Microsoft published an SDK and blessed the bots that used it, then ran a Partner Hosting Infrastructure so a developer did not have to keep a server up to keep a bot online. Anyone could write one and Microsoft would answer for it on the network.

It came out of Microsoft's purchase of Colloquis, the company behind SmarterChild, and the idea was shown as Messenger bots at the MIX06 conference in March 2006 before the Agents name appeared with the announcement that October. The pitch was partly entertainment and partly advertising: a brand could become a contact, which in 2006 sounded less like a nuisance than it does now.

~ the dossier ~

~ the retirement notice ~

On 25 November 2008 the Windows Live Agents team posted the final release of the 5.1 SDK, with a run of new features in it. The same post announced that the entire platform was being retired. LiveSide, which covered Windows Live closely enough to notice, wrote it up the same day and put the odd shape of it plainly: a team shipping improvements to a product it had just declared finished.

Official support was set to end after the summer of 2009, and it did, on 30 June. The partner hosting had already closed to new requests by the time of the announcement, so for the last seven months the only way to add an agent was to host it yourself, with limits Microsoft documented and did not remove. Microsoft had therefore stopped providing the one thing the platform was built to provide seven months before support formally ended.

~ what it took down with it ~

The clearest casualty was one of Microsoft's own. Tbot, the translation buddy that sat in a lot of contact lists and turned pasted text into another language, was built on Live Agents like everything else. When the platform retired support, the Tbot team had to write their own runtime to keep their bot alive.

Their June 2009 post about it is unusually candid for a Microsoft product update. "This is a significant change, and it will take us time to get to the same scalability levels Live Agents currently have," they wrote, promising an alpha and warning that "interruptions will happen as we fix bugs and add more features." A shipping Microsoft service was reduced to limited capacity and an alpha test because another Microsoft team had switched off the floor underneath it.

~ the afterlife ~

Retiring the platform did not delete the bots. Agents built before the cutoff stayed listed in Windows Live Gallery, so people kept finding them and adding them for another two years, until Microsoft closed the Gallery on 1 October 2011. That is twenty-seven months during which the catalog was live and the platform behind it was not.

Messenger itself followed in stages, folded into Skype by 2013. What Microsoft was building in 2006 has since been rebuilt twice over, and the current version of a brand you can message is worth considerably more money. The 2009 version at least gave seven months of notice, which is more warning than most of the things in this archive ever got.

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