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Microsoft and Skype to axe world's most popular IM client early 2013
- citricsquid 14y agoI still use MSN and I guess I don't really mind, MSN has a lot of history but it's a mediocre client and Skype is much better. I used to have 100s of contacts on MSN with ~50 online at any one time, now everyone that used MSN casually uses Facebook chat so I have... 2 people online (both of which are listed as away) and anyone that uses IM seriously seems to use Skype. It was inevitable. Does anyone here still use MSN? They say it's the most popular client, but that doesn't fit my current experience, I guess China makes up the majority of that usage? Of the people I know that still use MSN they just have it running because why not, they don't actively use it. That's how I use it.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- nolok 14y agoIt is still very popular in western europe, aol and yahoo messenger never made any real entry here and msn took the whole cake. More and more people are moving out to skype and facebook, but I still have a big list of contacts there.
- EnderMB 14y agoIt was really popular over here (UK), but it died out fairly quickly when Facebook took over. My girlfriend is a teacher and she says that none of her students really knew what Windows Live Messenger was; kids today stick to Facebook, BBM and some use Twitter.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- creatio 14y agoI actively use it to talk to my brother, 1/2 friends and for school group projects. It's super easy when I need to take a screenshot with the snipping tool and send to them. Not sure how easy that is to do in Skype (which I have but don't use).
- meaty 14y agoI use it to talk to my other half whilst in the office - that is it. I'll switch to IRSSI over SSH onto my hosted server (I'll just run a local ircd) and she can use mIRC on her laptop instead. I have no intention of using another hosted service. It would be more reliable as well - Live Messenger reliability has always been crap. (For ref, I do not use Skype, Facebook or any social tools).
- briffle 14y agoJust as an FYI, you can setup your own XMPP server in 20 min, and chat with people on facebook, gtalk, etc. www.prosody.im
- thisisabore 14y agoNope, not on Facebook you can't. Unless I'm sourly mistaken, the Facebook Jabber server does not support s2s federation (by choice, obviously) and won't let users outside the Facebook Jabber server chat to those on it. Cue walled garden rant. Wha you can do is use an existing Facebook (Jabber) account on a regular Jabber client such as Pidgin, Adium and such. No problem chatting with @gmail.com JIDs from any Jabber server though (well, besides the fact that Google's Multi User Chat support is pretty shitty in my experience, and that the two-way Jabber subscription process it bit weird in Google land). I absolutely second the Prosody advice though, wonderful server and very friendly community and devs!
- trout 14y agoHaven't tested, but this says the opposite: http://techcrunch.com/2010/02/10/facebook-chat-launches-xmpp-support/ http://techcrunch.com/2010/02/10/facebook-chat-launches-xmpp...
- pgeorgi 14y agoThis only describes the feature of connecting an XMPP client to facebook chat. S2S federation means server-to-server. That is, use your XMPP account on your own server (such as prosody, as proposed above) to communicate with facebook users (on facebook's servers). But that would go against fb's walled garden approach, so it's unlikely to come.
- mailarchis 14y agoMSN is probably big in China next only to QQ. In India, msn messenger never caught up and people started with yahoo and then moved on to gtalk.
- chollida1 14y agoI used to. Oddly enough in finance AOL instant messenger is still used a lot. You are legally allowed to issue trade orders via AOL IM. Bloomberg chat also allows you to put your AOL contacts into it and use it as your chat program. These two things have helped to keep it alive alot longer than maybe it should have been.
- rb12345 14y agoI think the reason China is excluded is probably because China gets its own customised Skype as opposed to using the standard client. https://support.skype.com/en/faq/FA10910/what-is-tom-online https://support.skype.com/en/faq/FA10910/what-is-tom-online
- mariusmg 14y agoThey kill the client or the protocol ? It's not really clear from the article. Don't care about the client itself (most IM clients suck anyway), that's why we have pidgin.
- belorn 14y agoI thought the protocol used a central server for transferring contact information between users. If they shutdown those severs, then pidgin's msn implementation wont do us any good.
- mariusmg 14y agoFound some more info about this at http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/11/microsoft-to-kill-off-the-messenger-client-and-regroup-under-the-skype-brand/ http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/11/micros... .Apparently the won't kill the servers too so there's still hope of continuing with pidgin.
- isani 14y agoThey're killing the client. Messenger accounts continue to work, and users can sign in to the Skype client with their existing Messenger credentials. Messenger will be run on the same infrastructure as before, not on the Skype peer-to-peer model. As far as I can tell, third-party clients should continue to work as well.
- TeMPOraL 14y agoSkype client should be axed instead. It's a pile of ugly looking mess and eats half of computer's resources. I dread to turn it on anywhere else than on my overpowered home PC. And don't even get me started on the Android client. It's completely useless on a high-powered tablet, and equally useless on a low-powered phone. I remember the times when official IM clients were lightweight and pleasant to use. Now you either have to go to third party / open source stuff (WTW, Pidgin, you name it), or just keep that GMail and Facebook tabs open.
- ed_blackburn 14y agoThe way they seem to be recruiting in the UK, I would speculate that they are going to re-write it.
- cabirum 14y agoumm.. Skype certainly has some usability problems, but "half of computer's resources"? Are you trying to use it on a raspberry pi?
- TeMPOraL 14y agoRhetorics. Of course I didn't eat half the resources, but was a noticable drain on the overall performance of some computers I was working on, and the UI of Skype itself was very unresponsive and freezed for seconds quite often.
- recursive 14y agoI have never noticed any slowness with it on my Nexus.
- UnoriginalGuy 14y agoMost of the Nexus devices and phone are power-houses. Skype app has improved a little but on cheap phones it is difficult to use (or at least that was my experience on a ZTE Android device).
- rbn 14y ago
- belorn 14y agoMaybe this will help the uptake of xmpp.
- pestaa 14y agoI hope you're right and very afraid you are not. Neither Skype nor Microsoft are keen on utilizing open source.
- garethadams 14y agoWindows Live Messenger is XMPP - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/live/hh826554.aspx http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/live/hh826554.aspx
- pgeorgi 14y agoIt's even worse than facebook's approach to XMPP (I didn't think that's possible): Not only does it not provide server-to-server access, it also requires client tokens for OAuth that must be requested out-of-band, so any vanilla XMPP client can't make use of that endpoint.
- marcf 14y agoCan they optimize Skype so that it doesn't require 80MB-130MB just to run in the background? How can it require this much memory to run an instant messenger? Couldn't they delay load some of the features if they aren't yet being used (such as video codecs and audio codecs and other such features?)
- LiveFanChat 14y agoShame its such poor reporting....they are actually closing Skype and "rebranding windows messenger" Basically skype is dropping the p2p architecture and is going to be using the old messenger architecture with MS servers sitting in the middle of all traffic...... I've been waiting for someone to announce a "new and improved" P2P chat application to counteract this very problem. Quick someone put a call out to Kim Dotcom and get him working on it. Cheers, Dean http://blog.collins.net.pr/2012/11/rip-ms-messenger.html http://blog.collins.net.pr/2012/11/rip-ms-messenger.html
- dade_ 14y agoGoogle needs to work hard and fast pushing google talk. This will determine Google's place in the future of VoIP / video calling in the Internet.
- gubatron 14y agogoogle talk was killed too. Now it's all G+
- hejsna 14y agoThe best way to spend any extra money saved on retiring MSN: open up the Skype API for devs to use. Adium is still the undisputed king of IM clients and with a proper Skype plugin for it I'd be happy again. Because let's face it, the Skype client is really, really bad.
- DeepDuh 14y agoGoddamnit yes. Waiting years for this.
- saiphul 14y agoSkype & IM mean different things to different people. A lot of people may be using both, but not necessarily interchangeably, even though Skype has the ability to do both text IMs as well as voice. So, unless MSFT have a seamless migratory path, they will end up losing a lot of people who will suddenly be exploring all possibly options as their next IM client.
- xutopia 14y agoSurely they know something we don't. I expected them to go the other way by bringing Skype into Messenger.
- jpswade 14y agoThis fixes the "Messenger" branding issue.
- sinesha 14y agoPerformance aside, here is what I hate about Skype compared to MSN / WLM: privacy. (1) Skype logs you in to your last known status / on MSN you could choose before login (for example, "appear offline"/"invisible"). If I just want to check if a contact is online without my aunt start chatting, I can't. (2) There is no easy way to block whole contact groups temporarily. When I'm at work, I don't want my friends to see me online; when I'm at home, I don't want to be contacted by co-workers. (3) Say I'm chatting with Bob, and he goes offline just before I send him a last IM. This IM will be delivered the next time that we are both online. Even if one of us is "appearing offline"/"invisible". So we have a way of knowing when someone is hiding: just send someone a message when they are offline. Bah. (4) Not related, but the delivery of old messages is awful across platforms. What annoys me the most about these bugs (1-3) is that they seem so easy to fix, and yet nothing is done. Meh. Do you have similar frustrations?
- petepete 14y ago(2) surely isn't a bug; if you have two subsets of contacts that you want to keep entirely separate why use a single account?
- lambda 14y agoSkype doesn't make it easy to use two accounts. There is no "multiple accounts" feature where you can be logged in as one or both; instead, you have to log out and log back in again as the other. Sometimes, you might be on-call, so chatting with friends is OK, but you still need to be available to coworkers. The problem with Skype is that it's totally closed. I use a multi-protocol IM client, with multiple accounts, so I can chat with people over AIM, FB, Google Chat, my work chat, and so on. Sadly, despite the fact that my work has Google Apps, which includes chat, they have standardized on Skype instead, so I need to have an entirely separate client, and log out and log back in when switching between work and personal accounts.
- jdp23 14y agoBack in 2006, MSN Messenger was one of the world's best-known brands (its logo outscored Mickey Mouse!); in large parts of Asia and Europe it had become a verb -- "I'll MSN you"; and had some clever approaches to ads that got extremely high clickthroughs. But then MS changed its name to 'Windows Live Messenger' to boost the Windows Live brand; underinvested in development and support; and focused its advertising on trying to compete with Google for search ads. Ah well. The path not taken.
- buro9 14y agoA truer description might be that the brand is being axed. I believe that Skype has been migrated onto a messenger backend... so really this is a unification of the chat tech onto messenger, and the brand onto Skype.
- navs 14y agoDid anyone notice how Skype now shows ads on the their iPhone app? Far as I'm concerned it and live messenger have the same overall experience. I'd do away with Skype if I weren't using it to keep in touch with clients.
- mileswu 14y agoI sign onto my various IM accounts from a variety of locations simultaneously (e.g. desktop at home, laptop in office, phone) and I find it infuriating that every protocol has a different way of handling that. MSN: Sends incoming message _only_ to the last active computer (where last active seems to be defined by which computer last sent an IM or updated your status) AIM: Sends incoming messages to all computers XMPP (Gtalk): Inconsistent behaviour. I think the priorities set by various clients screw things up. Skype: Does weird chat/history syncing between all your computers (this raises Privacy issues, as many times if I delete a chat on my desktop, it somehow reappears on my phone when I sign in on it. Also although it syncs the chat text, why not also sync whether the messages have been read or not, because at the moment if I sign in on my phone, it constantly buzzes for about 5 minutes as it 'catches' up on a ton of unread messages (which I've read ages ago on my computer).) What's worse is status fragmentation. I've set my desktop and laptop to auto-away after 5 minutes, so people know if I'm there or if they can leave a message I'll read later. Run through this situation: 1) Signed in on desktop, go away. Pidgin sets Away on my accounts. 2) Some time later, turn on laptop. Adium sets all my accounts as Online. 3) Turn off laptop to go somewhere. Adium signs out and my accounts get left as Online. Desktop doesn't re-auto-away and so people think I'm there when I'm not. None of these are ideal, and the only 'solution' I've found is to use a service like http://imo.im http://imo.im where their service only signs on _once_ to the accounts, but you access imo.im on any number of devices so it can make sure that every device has the same chat there. Problem with this is I don't like using web apps and would prefer to use native Pidgin/Adium if possible. Any suggestions?
- sp332 14y agoAccording to Ars Technica, the infrastructure will be the same. http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/11/microsoft-to-kill-off-the-messenger-client-and-regroup-under-the-skype-brand/ http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/11/micros... This is more of a rebrand than an "axe".
- Achshar 14y agoRelated: Can't seem to find Skype metro in windows store on release preview. Any way of running it here?