Sunday, 21 April 2013

Nostalgia for MSN Messenger

Image: chyang313
Do you remember the days of Friday night MSN? You’d spend all day at school with your friends and then as soon as you were home you’d log onto the family computer, sit through that old dial up noise and log on to MSN Messenger just so you could create a huge conversation where you and those friends sat around sending each other smiley faces and slices of pizza. 

Perhaps you had a more productive childhood than me and my friends, but when I heard the news that MSN were putting an end to their Messenger, I did feel the slight tinge of nostalgia for the days before Skype, but then I remembered that nothing has changed…

The drama of the webcam. What a nightmare. When you’ve got no plans for a whole day except watch Masterchef and paint your nails, it’s an absolute disaster when you hear the Skype noise coming from your computer: you’re not wearing any makeup. You don’t want to appear vain, but your hair looks like it went through the car wash backwards. “My webcam seems to be broken…”

The emoticon battle. This one isn’t unique to the video messaging, Facebook chat is a culprit as well and it can get out of hand. It starts with the cheeky :P, it turns into the XD and it escalates to so much more. You can get dancing ninjas, the afore-mentioned pizza and my favourite for Facebook, type in :putnam: and press enter. I KNOW. 

The abbrevs. (Abbreviations for those not in the loop) Most of them make sense, brb for ‘be right back’ lol for ‘laugh out loud’ to everyone except my dad who stands by ‘love you lots’ even g2g as ‘got to go’ is acceptable. However, as tweenagers we took it too far, starting with LMAO, then came the naughtier LMFAO and then the absolutely ridiculous ROTFLMFAO. Just no. 

The games-athon. I’m pretty sure that I learnt how to play chess, checkers and battleships through MSN. Unfortunately this one hasn’t survived the shift to Skype and sadly long gone are the days of ‘waiting for player 2’...

The choice!

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