Hello!

Finally had a chance to start poking around at the new "features" of the latest version of MSN Messenger. It is nice, but more commercialized than ever. A few free games and themes, but most now require payment: Micro$oft is trying to milk the Messenger cash cow for all it is worth, it seems... What bothers me most is that the people who are most likely to pay for these features are the relatively uninformed users who buy Windows and don't realize that most of the Micro$oft defaults are nowhere near as good as a lot of the other, free stuff that's out there: in other words, Micro$oft is taking advantage of people's ignorance to turn its monopoly into even more $$$ than ever.

I was annoyed enough the other night to change my MSN Messenger profile name from "ehewlett" to "eh! (switch to Hello: www.hello.com)". Hello is a great photo-chat program from Google, which, while it doesn't totally replace MSN Messenger even for me, provides the most effective photo-sharing/chat interface I have seen yet. And, being a Google app, it contains (as of this writing) absolutely no advertising other than its integration with Google's free photo-organizing program, Picasa - which, like Hello, is the best application of its kind that I know of (and I shelled out a good $40-50 for Adobe's PhotoAlbum, a good, but much slower, more cumbersome photo-organizing program, the second-best that I know of).

My idea is that if those of us who know of good alternatives to MSN Messenger start advertising them in our MSN Messenger profiles, we might eventually raise enough awareness of the alternatives to MSN Messenger (like Hello, or the excellent, interoperable, free, open-source chat program, Miranda) that we eventually might not need the ever-more-ad-laden/commercialized MSN Messenger! Alternative chat-program users of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but M$ ads!