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Their status updates started with changeable display names. People kept using their display name as statuses. Who knows why none of the IM products expanded in
by chrischen 14y ago
Their 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.