MSN Messenger

Long before it became fashionable for opinion columnists and old people to frequently wonder if the current generation was going to hell in a handbasket due to their over-reliance on social media (seen in every major newspaper editorial section from roughly 2006 onwards), a group of savvy teenagers were already part of a social networking phenomenon – MSN Messenger. I was having a drink with a group of friends the other night and we were reminiscing about the hours spent online chatting idly to friends. In a fit of inspiration a couple of us logged in to our old accounts, only to find that the rich online community of our time had become a ghost town, populated only by sassy spam-bots and tumbleweed drifting by.

In George Lucas’ 1973 film American Graffiti (surely the most important movie Lucas would make that decade) he portrays the American youth-culture of the early 1960s: t-shirt wearing, rocknroll listening, hair-slicked adolescents with nothing better to do after school than hop in their hotted-up cars and cruise the streets of California looking for something – anything – to do. While lacking hot-rods and the upbeat, good-time rock of Buddy Holly or the Beach Boys, my generation experienced something similar. Coming home from school, we’d rush for our computers and log on to MSN Messenger, our online mass-communication network of choice. I’m guessing anyone born from 1985-1995 probably was a heavy user of MSN from around 2000-2007, the period in which most of that generation were teenagers and ‘Facebook’ was a word that described what school bullies did to over-enthusiastic nerds.

I was born in 1990 and a heavy user of the program from roughly 2002 – 2007, logging in most days for an hour or more. I don’t remember much about signing up but I do vaguely recall seeing my sister using the service and getting her to help me set up a Hotmail account so I could join in the fun. The various Hotmail addresses that we all dreamed up were quite special in their own right; mine was black_betty411@hotmail.com. I remember thinking I was desperately cool to have such an obscure, old rock song as my username until Spiderbait came out about a year later and flooded the charts with their good, but ultimately inferior, cover version.

As with most activities undertaken by teenagers, many adults couldn’t see the point. ‘You’ve spent all day seeing these people at school, what do you talk about?’ To be honest, I couldn’t answer then and I can’t answer now. All sorts of things that occupy fifteen year old minds, I suppose; school gossip, television, music, movies. The sheer amount of time spent online meant that most of the chat was bound to be filler – and a lot of time was spent on conversations that ultimately went nowhere (for maximum effect, read the following while constantly playing the MSN message alert sound, found here):

d33my says: hey

d33my’s friend says: hey

d33my says: whats going on?

d33my’s friend says: nm

*ten minute pause*

d33my’s friend says: u?

*d33my’s friend is offline.*

At least, that’s how I remember it. Maybe I was more unpopular than I thought. Of course, there were regular contacts (usually your best friend/s) that you had long, in-depth conversations with. As various Messenger updates were released, the ability to play games was added, along with the ability to send hand drawn picture messages, which satiated teenage boys’ ingrained desire to draw and distribute filthy sex-oriented images. Did girls do this too?

There was something particularly special about seeing the little status box pop up in the bottom right corner of the screen (accompanied by the equally satisfying sound effect) which told you your crush was online. After a while you’d develop a special sort of peripheral vision in which you could determine who had signed in just by the first couple of characters of their username, particularly if it involved various emoticons. Of course this was fraught with danger when your mates got wind of who your crush was and changed their username to something incredibly similar, leading you to look like a dick by starting a conversation with someone without checking their email address and finding yourself flirting with the same person who had given you a wedgie two hours ago.

In fact, there were many similar pranks/activities to spice up your MSN experience when simply chatting with people got boring. Remember being added to (or starting) huge group conversations with someone’s entire contact list? It became a sort of online Survivor to see who would outlast everyone and be left alone with Андрій from Ukraine who vaguely knew your friend’s brother’s girlfriend. Or how about sending Nudges to someone every ten seconds (or however often MSN allowed it – I can imagine a Beta version of Messenger without the nudge time limit which would have caused everyone to violently smash their computers to bits within seconds) and having them nudge you back? This would usually go on until either both people got sick of it (rarely) or one party blocked the other (often).

MSN was also beneficial in many ways you might not initially imagine. I know for a fact my typing speed was aided specifically from constant MSN usage – no-one’s going to wait for someone to take a full minute to type ‘how are you’ so you’d better learn fast or stick to handwriting letters. Of course many people learned bad typing habits (I do not touch type in a traditional manner; rather my hands hover over the keyboard like mutant hummingbirds and peck wildly at letters until the correct combination is reached) that can probably never be unlearned.

As far as I remember hardly anybody used the space for a profile picture with a picture of themselves. Instead, they were filled with funny pictures, album covers, skimpy bikini models or super-hunks. There was also the fun of coming up with a unique screen name, which could be changed quickly and often. Song lyrics, inspirational quotes or swear words were favourites amongst my contact list, and a lot could be discerned about someone without even starting a conversation with them but rather examining their username. Nearly anybody who had a flower or love-heart in their name was a girl, someone who used obscure song-lyrics was a wannabe musician and anyone who used an actual name like ‘Steve’ was probably a cop. I remember using Google to find an ‘MSN name generator’ which would come up with cool lyrics or quotes and have appropriate emoticons to match. I tried Googling the same thing as I was writing this and my anti-virus software identified the number one result as a security threat. Such is MSN’s fall from grace.

And what a fall it has been. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly why MSN is no longer as popular, but the advent of sites like MySpace (which deserves another post entirely) and Facebook coupled with the prevalence of mobile phones (and cheap texting) had a lot to do with it. Of course, I’m basing my assumption of MSN being ‘not popular anymore’ amongst my own friends, and to a wider extent, generation. I’m not sure if younger or older people still use MSN regularly, and I’m sure there’s some obscure country in the world where it’s still used by the teenagers as the communication model of choice. In fact, as recently as 2009 Microsoft announced that the service still had a rather impressive 330 million active users. Similarly, I’m not arguing that MSN was the first or only or even biggest online instant chat service, but from my experience it was the one that most people I know used.

There’s every chance that the success of sites like Facebook and Twitter owe much more to MSN than we give credit for. It established in an entire generation a familiarity with online connection and the concept of an online network of friends. More than that, the countless hours spent on MSN established a strong desire to have such a connection, and paved the way for our current penchant for online social networking. If you’ve never done it, I imagine it’s actually quite novel to have an online text-only instant conversation with someone but thanks to MSN, for most people of my generation we’ve scarcely known different.

It’s strange to write a retrospective style piece of a phenomenon which was still wildly popular less than a decade ago. For one thing, it makes me feel cultured and wise, and I can imagine gathering the grandkids around the digital fire and having them entranced at my stories of MSN in much the same way I remember thinking how novel it would have been to send a telegraph to someone. Furthermore, it once again highlights the breakneck speed at which online culture develops. I was surprised to discover that I only signed up for Facebook at the start of 2009 (it feels like much, much longer) - if I take my estimation of using MSN for about five years, then I currently still have more years’ experience on MSN than I do on Facebook – something which seems utterly peculiar. Perhaps in another five or six years’ time when we've migrated over to the next big social networking phenomenon we’ll be reminiscing about the good old days of Facebook. But it's comforting to know that there's a group of young adults out there who, deep down, would all be pretty happy if we rejected social networking progress and made a large scale retro-migration back to MSN.