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.
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:
- Windows Live Spaces
- Windows Live Messenger
- Windows Live Mail Beta (but the good old Hotmail.com stayed until now)
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!"
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.
Sildeline
https://www.hulldailymail.co.uk/news/hull-east-yorkshire-news/msn-messenger-logged-back-in-3393323
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.
