MSN Messenger
Posted by Stuart at 05:05 PM on June 25, 2003Ok, I am a bit embarrased to do this, but here's fair warning that I am about to rave about a Microsoft product. That's right, rave, not rant. (And it's a MSN Internet product, no less).
I love the new MSN Messenger.
There I said it. I wish someone else (Yahoo) would be able to do better than Microsoft, but they haven't come close.
Seriously though, I downloaded it to my office computer yesterday and have been playing with it today. Cool features include being able to stream my webcam to multiple chat windows, include a still picture of myself in the window (actually, I don't care to see my own picture, but I like seeing a picture of the friend I am chatting with), and make my own background pictures.
But just now I found the coolest feature of all: If I have a friend who is not online, I can send an SMS message to their mobile phone through Messenger. They of course can do the same for me. So if I am on your MSN Messenger list and I am not online, shoot me an SMS. I think this feature has been there for a while, but now that I live in a country where people actually use SMS, I just now discovered it.
Supposedly you can send SMS with Yahoo messenger as well, but I haven't been able to figure out how to make it work. The MSN Messenger set up took me all of 5 minutes and it worked perfectly. Yahoo also allows multiple streaming cams, but they annoyingly open up in multiple windows.
Along the same lines, I hear that the new iSight and iChat products from Apple are impressive in their own right, but since I don't have a Mac, I guess I can't try them out.
