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October 27, 2025 - Dead Media

When I was a kid, my dad would be away from home a lot. Sometimes for work, sometimes to visit his family back in Syria. So that meant we used a lot of online communication apps so we could stay in touch.
Before we had Skype, we used an app called MSN Messenger.

Because I was very young, I don't remember how it used to function, but I remember getting excited every time we turned the computer on to talk with my dad. I also faintly remember that my dad had a rubber duck for his profile image, but I don't remember what our profile image was since me and my sister would play around and change it a lot, haha.
This picture will forever be iconic for me

What's funny is that because internet connections back then was very weak, the best we could get a very pixelated video where we could barely make out the eyes and ears. I think for a lot of times video calls kept freezing so we had to only do voice calls instead. Me and my sister also used to play around with emoticons and animated stickers called "winks".

I remember trying out different letter and symbol combinations to see what emoticons come out


So MSN messenger, which later rebranded as Windows Live Messenger, was an instant-messaging program released by Microsoft in 1999, until it ended its service on 2013. When it first started, in order to get a lot of users, Microsoft made it so you could sign into Messenger with using your hotmail address and password. That, combined with integration to Windows, contributed to its instant popularity pretty much all around the world. I've heard it was very popular amongst the younger generation in the US. In 2012, Microsoft announced that Messenger and Skype would merge in early 2013 (except for China for some reason), and it officially discontinued the Messenger service in April, 2013 (in China it was 2014).

I pretty much only used MSN messenger when I was in Japan, so until 2008ish, before I moved onto skype, which is another nostalgic app for me. It looked nothing like it did in its final years, but maybe that's for another day.

Comments

  1. Ken The TeacherOctober 26, 2025 at 11:45 PM

    Yeah, I remember this too! It used to be a messenger from its paid ISP service, and the free version was a way to try and draw people in, but then broadband came along and wiped that out....

    ReplyDelete

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