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Microsoft Messenger will be retired and users migrated to Skype on March 15
- djt 14y ago66 days isn't a lot of time. For a start up I can understand, but from MS I thought they would give people that arent happy with skype a chance to think about it.
- Pr0 14y agoI think this was first announced in November (not much more time, but at least it's over 100 days). This is confirmation of the exact deadline. Edit: Yep, that's what the article says and here's the HN discussion. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4753236 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4753236
- djt 14y agoah cool thanks for that, I didn't realise!
- corin_ 14y agoI did this on my work laptop and my home PC - the former went OK, I now have a few duplicate contacts in Skype but that's no problem, however on the latter my Skype only shows previous Skype contacts, no MSN contacts, meanwhile it won't let me start up Messenger. So not too happy with their process right now.
- jetti 14y agoI did this on my work laptop as well. The process was painless, however, the lack of interop with Live Messenger is quite frustrating. Not everybody in my company has migrated so that means that if I want to add somebody still on Messenger, I have to go to the live.com website and login to do it. I can't add them in Skype. On top of that, I can't share files with people on Messenger, which is super annoying. I hope that things get better in 66 days!
- xutopia 14y agoI expect that to go down poorly.
- umjames 14y agoIs that because March 15th is the Ides of March?
- liuliu 14y agoIt would be most interesting to see a postmortem about why Live Messenger failed. As I can recall, it is a compelling product against AOL and Yahoo! IM. It is also competitive globally (well, I mean the U.S. and China). It has a competitive web existence for a long time as well (MSN Spaces), and its status update was, basically, the grandfather of Twitter / Facebook status.
- smackfu 14y agoDid it fail, or is Microsoft just saying "why do we have two brands for the same product?"
- chrischen 14y agoTheir status updates started with changeable display names. People kept using their display name as statuses. Who knows why none of the IM products expanded into social networks. They basically did what facebook did well before facebook existed.
- lmm 14y agoThere was MSN web messenger and it was fantastic. I guess they never went as far as making your conversations more permanent or merging them with your profile (and to be fail, there would have been user outcry if your one-off private conversations were suddenly held forever)
- bentcorner 14y agoI think at the time before facebook/twitter/etc., solving the scaling problem was much harder. I recall reading something years and years ago about how they wanted to have celebrity accounts that you could add as a friend, but solving the problem of "britney spears logs on and notifies 1M accounts" was too expensive. For example, see here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/mayurk/archive/2005/03/22/400685.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/b/mayurk/archive/2005/03/22/400685.asp... In 2005, the contact limit was doubled to 300. There are probably hard technical reasons why they couldn't have social networks like twitter and facebook do today.
- andyking 14y agoMy Windows phone has access to Live Messenger baked-in. I never use it (I use Skype IM on the computer) but it's there, showing my status as "available," allowing me to publish a custom status message, check-in to places, and all the usual functionality. It's a cheap model, and attempting to get Skype from the Marketplace results in a "your phone doesn't have enough memory to run this app" error. Does this mean that I'll not be able to use instant messaging from the phone at all now? I'm not interested in the voice/video features of Skype on my mobile, but I do use Skype IM and it'd be nice to use it mobile. Or - will I be able to use Skype IM from the phone without needing an extra app, instead of WLM?
- hresult 14y agoYou fell victim of Microsoft's "upgrade" policy. Either upgrade your phone (ideally something than Microsoft's).
- 0x0 14y agoWell I guess this means I won't have to worry for much longer why bitlbee 3.0.6 broke MSN.
- josteink 14y agoAnyone have any idea what will happen to the various XMPP MSN-proxies used to hook your gtalk account up to MSN etc? I'd love to have the same for Skype, but last time I checked, Skype had them all (all unofficial clients) banned...
- navs 14y agoI remember using bitlbee with Skype. The problem was I had to keep the official Skype client running. I believe it was the same for pidgin's Skype plugin? Major annoyance.
- shmerl 14y agoThat's a good question. MS started to move in the right direction with XMPP support, even though they didn't get up to supporting federation. If that will be dropped - it would be just another proliferation of the isolated IM networks.
- Zash 14y agoAccording to http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/01/microsoft-messenger-service-not-going-anywhere-just-yet/ http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/01/micros... they will drop XMPP support.
- ChrisArchitect 14y agoI don't know about XMPP transports specifically but this is mostly a frontend app change and not the backend. The MSN/Messenger servers are still the core of all of the messaging platforms and will stay in operation.
- eel 14y agoI wonder if they are they retiring the old messenger protocol as well. Currently, I use Pidgin with my Live Messenger account, but perhaps that will stop working come March 15th.
- AhtiK 14y agoYes, Pidgin will stop working. I'm not aware of any Skype IM clients other than Skype itself.
- bentcorner 14y agoThat's unfortunate, but I'd guess that the number of 3rd party clients on the Messenger service is pretty small.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- anonymoushn 14y agoimo.im is an IM web app that supports Skype. There are a couple plugins for native IM clients that add Skype support, but they all require that you also run the real Skype app.
- navs 14y agoAside from imo.im, there's also plus.im [1]. I don't consider it better than imo.im but, you know, options. [1] https://plus.im/ https://plus.im/
- Encosia 14y agoTrillian (at least on Windows) is a great Skype IM client -- much better than Skype itself, IMO (not that that's saying a lot).
- astrodust 14y agoThis is why using Skype isn't practical. Do you really want to have that gigantic app open all the time?
- AhtiK 14y agoUsers who log into Skype with their Microsoft account are offered a merge with the Skype account to have all the MSN and Skype contacts combined. The fun bit is the last step: "From now on, please use your Microsoft account "Firstname Lastname" to sign into Skype" -- I was afraid to test this but looks like the Skype account gets deleted after this step and you have to use myname@hotmail.com when sharing your Skype details. EDIT: Turns out that both Skype and Microsoft accounts will remain working in parallel. One can log in with either of these (at least from desktop Skype clients).
- Lewisham 14y agoMy guess is this message means Microsoft are looking to retire Skype accounts in favor of Live accounts only, which makes sense to me.
- jimbobimbo 14y agoSkype account won't get deleted - you can unlink them: http://tinyurl.com/b5sthur http://tinyurl.com/b5sthur
- UnoriginalGuy 14y agoIt is a shame in the sense that it makes this tiny market even smaller. In fact the video-messenger market is now so small Skype and Google+ Hangouts are really the only viable competition (in the consumer space). I guess we also have FaceTime but Apple has made that Mac/iOS only which really limits its viability. Kind of scares me considering how much I depend on this technology and how often Skype seems to break/fail/have issues. Also don't look forward to being forced to "merge" my Skype account into a Windows Account. I honestly don't understand why this market isn't competitive? Is it patents on the streaming technology? Is it just how unreliable web-cameras are? Is it the cost of deploying the infrastructure?
- mtgx 14y agoI think a lot of people use Yahoo Messenger for video-calls, but that number may be waning. I wouldn't worry too much about it. I think WebRTC will disrupt all proprietary video-calling products, or at the very least it will force them all to work through WebRTC and be inter-operable, which would still be a major win for users. I expect Microsoft to be the very last one to adopt it, though. They probably won't even support it in IE until IE11 next year, at least.
- ZeroGravitas 14y agoSadly there's a good chance that Apple will put up a strong fight to be the last to support it.
- potatolicious 14y ago> "I honestly don't understand why this market isn't competitive?" You mentioned Skype, Google+ Hangouts, and FaceTime - none of which you have to pay for. This seems to suggest why there aren't more players on the field.
- harryf 14y agoWould be interesting to know how many users are using MSN - seeing numbers over 300 million reported in 2010. Wonder if Skype can handle the traffic?
- Tomek_ 14y agoWonder what's their strategy for Lync. I always thought MS bought Skype mainly for it's popularity in the corporate market.
- nvmc 14y agoI miss MSN chat. My friends have all long since migrated to Facebook. All I want is instant messaging.
- masto 14y agoWhat about the Kinect video chat? Isn't that based on Messenger? I would be happy to see that change to Skype.
- clauretano 14y agoDoes this mean that Skype - Lync Online (Office 365) federation will be live by then? Right now Messenger is the only outside service organizations using Lync Online are allowed to federate to (IM and presence only) [1]. I know plans have been in the work for a long time now to add Skype federation, but something seems to have stalled it --perhaps that 600M+ Skype users is a scary federation partner to a service a couple orders of magnitude smaller. [1]: http://onlinehelp.microsoft.com/en-us/office365-enterprises/hh416763.aspx http://onlinehelp.microsoft.com/en-us/office365-enterprises/...
- schabernakk 14y agoI hope they take this event as motivation to fix a few issues with skype. 1) Send messages to offline contacts. If they try to replace a messenger application this is a must. So far I always thought this isnt a wanted feature as skype is mainly thought of as a video chat application.\ 2) Read/Unread messages. Syncing which messages are read/unread over multiple devices doesnt work at all. If I have a couple of conversations on one pc and i later turn on my laptop, I drown in all the skype new message notifications. Plus there is some weird behaviour here sometimes with old messages. Few days ago I got a new message notification for something I received at least a year ago and havent looked at since.
- FreeFull 14y agoIt doesn't seem to be possible to merge two Live Messenges accounts into one Skype account. I have merged one of my accounts in, but I have two accounts in order to separate people from different parts of my life. It also only seems possible to launch one instance of the Skype client at one time. How am I meant to continue using both accounts once Live Messenger goes away?
- TazeTSchnitzel 14y agoCreate another Skype account and merge it in, presumably.
- mikelat 14y agoI guess this is the end of skype support for linux? I'll be moving to hangouts if that's the case.
- TazeTSchnitzel 14y agoNope, Skype actually had a major version update (which was well overdue) for Linux relatively recently, under MS ownership.
- simplyinfinity 14y agoTo my amazement , Trilian has Skype support without the need of your Skype runing. Go give it a try!