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Thursday, July 9, 2009

MSN is CRAP

Windows Live Messenger is CRAP!
You got it? Ok here's why.

Closed
MSN is a closed and proprietary protocol. As a result, you can't use an other client than the official one without getting various issue. For instance, no third-party client will offer audio or video chat. They can also experience "network outage" because of an update on the servers that render them incompatible.

Official is bad
Even the Windows Live Messenger client is badly done. It can eat up 80 MB or memory without any reasons, it's full of ads and worst than all, is not even cross-platform yet! Ho yes, there is a Messenger:mac client which doesn't support audio and video chat and use a incredible 250 MB or RAM! An other thing, since it's widely use, there's viruses for it. Did you never received strange message from an other contact? Now you're starting to see the wide picture.

Privacy free
Most people believe that the MSN network is secure and censor free. This is a very wrong belief. First of all, if you want to talk securely you need encryption which is only supported on third-party MSN client. Since over 80% of the MSN users depend on the official client, they simply can't use encryption. And to add up to the so called privacy, every thing is monitored. Yes it is just software but we don't know if the servers write communications logs. And one this is certain: there is a software that read every message sent since they are censored! Try to send a link with download.php in it. You'll find it very difficult. did you ever saw something like "There was a problem in delivering the last message."? That's probably our censor friend working.

Never trust those who you don't know
Here's a little solution, if you can live without audio chat and video chat then third-party clients is the way to go. If you miss them too much, then be prepared to live with a RAM eater, a privacy sniffer and a virus friend. Or not? There is other solutions out there. MSN is not the only IM network out there. I'd recommend AIM since it's probably the only one which is at complete opposite from MSN. It is an open source 100% cross-platform protocol with very light weight clients which doesn't censor its users. And an other time, there's nothing that force you to use the official client.

I hope some people will do the switch for their own benefit. Have a nice week.

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