February 02, 2009

Multiply - Relativly new Community-Platform, recommended by MSN to Replace Groups

Or:

The Sudden Appearance and Death of Social Networks 

Do you remember the old "MSN" and Yahoo?  The first and largest social plat-forms of all, which actually were making up the Web2.0 -- well, those were the times...

I have no numbers and user statistics here, but you can find them on Wikipedia somewhere inside the many pages I'm going to cite.

#1 MSN erased their Social Network Step by Step:

1. MSN Chatrooms were closed in October 2003

Hmm... So this was right after I started to use them? There is no clearly defined date to be found anywhere. Probably because it was handled differently in every part of the world. At some time in 2002/3, here in Germany the MSN Groups came, and the Chat was integrated. In other places, MSN charged fees for the chat until 2006. 

Whatever, one day a message appeared in the English groups which had not already moved to other places where they didn't have to pay:
IMPORTANT NOTICE:
Chat Service will no longer be offered on or after October 16th, 2006. We appreciate your use of the service and apologize for any inconvenience.

If you wish to use alternative Windows Live communication services, we recommend the following Windows Live services:

Here are some more voices about the Closure of MSN Chat 

https://us.cnn.com/2003/TECH/internet/09/24/microsoft.chat/
Wednesday, September 24, 2003 Posted: 2:52 PM EDT (1852 GMT)

LONDON, England (CNN) -- Microsoft says it will drop chat room services in 28 countries next month, in a move it says will ward off pedophiles and junk e-mailers.

But tech analysts said the changes would help the software giant get rid of users who don't pay and are not contributing to the company's bottom line.

"They're trying to move people to their paid subscription sites," said Ian Brown, director of the Foundation for Information Policy Research, a technology think tank. "They are shutting down services for which people are not paying and getting a good bit of P.R. out of it."

In a statement, the Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft said it made the decision following the growing abuse of the Internet, particularly in unsupervised, anonymous chat rooms.

The company pointed to a rise in the use of junk mail known as spam and "unsolicited and inappropriate material, particularly with regards to children."

Popular but often abused

Online chat rooms are one of the most popular tools on the Internet and one of the most frequently abused. 
There have been a series of cases where pedophiles have used chat rooms to "groom" youngsters for sexual abuse. 
But Microsoft's decision to close unsupervised chat rooms has triggered a heated debate among free speech advocates, children's rights groups and Microsoft rivals.

Of course, it is clear, MSN used those pretextual arguments, because the free (unpaid) services didn't make them money. Seems, at that time Microsoft was not rich enough to provide free services? To maintain them properly on top of that would have cost them too much. And who admits this, lol.

At my time, which means 2001 or 2002, the MSN chatrooms were supervised and soon imbedded in MSN Groups. The Owner /Admin had to open them. It was up to the admin, if they let strangers enter at all, or if they had to invite users. And the Admin would kick out unwanted visitors as well. Any unwanted guest could and would be reported to the admin. Every user could switch off personal messages or block those who bugged them.

Apart from mostly everyone could "walk" into any chatroom, MSN had the safest and cleanest Chatrooms of all. True, it got harder and harder for the admins to keep them clean, when the spam and worse abuse increased, but what probably bugged MSN most, was that they could not keep control over the User-Created Content, which meant among other things at that time already, MSN could exploit their chatrooms for advertising revenue...

... how MSN had "parental controls" that would make sure kids were safe online. Apparently, they weren't safe enough. It's not like people are going to stop chatting. Now, however, they'll move to other places that are even less monitored and that aren't as clear in trying to make sure children don't give out their information online. MSN has every right to punt on the issue and let others deal with it - but simply closing down those chat rooms isn't going to solve the real issue, and may make it even harder to protect children.


A commenter to this named Mike predicted : "Internet for the normal public joe will be dead!"



https://windowslivearchive.wordpress.com/2008/10/23/changes-to-msn-groups/ 

Microsoft recently sent a letter to all MSN Groups users and managers to let them know that MSN Groups will be closing down soon, and that they can move their groups to Multiply.

If you are an MSN Groups user, you’ll need to move your group to the Multiply service by February 21, 2009.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Groups

Prior to February 2020, Yahoo! Groups was one of the world's largest collections of online discussion boards

On February 1, 2020, Yahoo! removed online access to discussions and all other features except simple membership management, essentially turning all groups into mailing lists, and on October 13, 2020 it announced that Yahoo Groups would shut down completely on December 15, 2020.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Live_Messenger
MSN Messenger (colloquially known as simply MSN[1][2]), later rebranded as Windows Live Messenger, was a cross-platform instant messaging client developed by Microsoft. It connected to the Microsoft Messenger service while also having (as of the final version) compatibility with Yahoo! Messenger and Facebook Messenger. The client was first released as MSN Messenger Service on July 22, 1999, and was marketed under the MSN branding until 2005 when it was rebranded under Windows Live. It has since been officially known by its second name, although its first name was still used colloquially by most of its users.[3][4] In June 2009, Microsoft reported the service attracted over 330 million active users each month, placing Messenger among the most widely used instant messaging clients in the world.[

Following the acquisition of Skype Technologies in May 2011, Microsoft added interoperability between Skype and Microsoft accounts, allowing Skype (which had features unique to its platform and a wider user base) to communicate with Messenger contacts. In 2013, Windows Live Messenger was discontinued and Microsoft began ceasing service to existing clients. 

https://pandorafms.com/blog/what-happened-with-msn-messenger/
Msn Messenger was not able to survive so many changes and lost users quickly, until Microsoft decided to replace it with Skype, announcing its final closure on October 31, 2014


Sildeline

https://www.hulldailymail.co.uk/news/hull-east-yorkshire-news/msn-messenger-logged-back-in-3393323

I logged back into MSN Messenger and learnt a lot about my teenage self

MSN Messenger predated modern social media and was used by millions of young people

For those of you who are too young or old to remember it, you will have missed a piece of innovating technology which was the central nervous system of your life.

Tom Kershaw is a senior reporter for Hull Live and the Hull Daily Mail. He is currently covering breaking news in Hull and East Yorkshire.(he was 14) After re-downloading the archaic manuscripts of my past conversations, it's quite easy to see how so simple, yet addictive MSN Messenger was.

It was your entire life set out before you and punched into just two lines of around 500 characters.

What music you were listening to, the song lyrics, tiny emojis and multi-coloured names. Oh, and don't forget your crush's name followed by a love heart.

Sadly, the reign of MSN Messenger - later rebranded as Windows Live Messenger - was short lived and pre-dated many modern forms of social media, like Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp. 

In 2008 when Facebook took over social media, I used Facebook chat instead of conversing over MSN, which became redundant from my life. It was shut down in 2014 and was technically replaced by Skype.

I reloaded up chats from 11 years ago to find out just exactly what kind of a person I was - and what I miss from the days of low broadband connection speeds.


and Feed Aggregators

This is actually just a Test for cross-posting between Multiply und Blogger.
Here on Multiply they have an interesting Blog-Function: You can import all your Blogs into the Blog here. (testing Blogger now.) Lately I imported all my feeds into swurl.com/spacelady, and into friendfeed of course like everyone does.
But from Multiply one can also cross-post back to the imported blog. Of course it would be nonsense to post the same content to every blog one has. One can select which posts to import and edit them also, and the export is selective too. I think it is ideal for a blogger with several blogs to be able to manage them all in one place. A kind of "Metablog" (I tried on Bloglines, but it did not work.)
I wished, I could find such a system for WordPress - or is there a plugin I just cannot find?
One of these appliances one can post to everywhere is ping.fm - but this only for microblogs and profile messages.

https://lifestreamblog.com/choose-your-lifestreaming-service-carefully-swurlcom-is-no-more/
 / By I found out yesterday that Swurl.com has shut down. Swurl isn’t the first Lifestreaming service to go the way of go dark. They join several others which I update on my Lifestreaming services listing page. But in this case it was a little surprising considering that the service received quite a bit of fanfare when they launched just 8 months ago. https://lifestreamblog.com/create/
http://blog.friendfeed.com/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posterous Posterous shut down in April 2013, after being acquired by Twitter the previous year.
Test 3: Now I must look, if it is an RSS feed and this here post is automatically re-imported.
Test 2 was: does the draft save to the recipient-blog? - No, it does not, must be published first.
Test 3: No, it is not an automatic feed, and it must be imported manually, and it is kind of tedious to uncheck all the posts you already have imported or did not want to in the first place.
Still it is cool to be able to post to two blogs at the same time - for me, when I post bilingual, and for everyone who talks about the same thing under slightly different aspects in more than one blog.
Hmm - for those who might think now it would be a good idea to quickly set up multiple blogs and blast out 25 times the same... NO!!
This would be exactly the useless spam that brought about the Google-slap against Squidoo 2 years ago. A blog post should always be unique. This convenient posting to more than one blog in one go should be considered as a kind of social bookmarking of an idea in advance, like you would normally do bookmark an excerpt in various places after a post is finished.

1 comment:

  1. hello... hapi blogging... have a nice day! just visiting here....

    ReplyDelete