Years before Facebook was launched, and when Mark Zuckurberg was still a student at Harvard University, we still had our ways and means to communicate with our family, friends and attractive people often referred to as "crushes’.
During our early teenage years, MSN messenger was unarguably the most efficient means of communication. Most of us used to spend hours signed in, changing our status to "busy’ or "be right back’, and when some annoying person signed in, even to "appear offline’. It was during the MSN era that abbreviations such as "brb’ (be right back), "tyt’ (take your time), and the famous "lol’ (laughing out loudly) gained so much popularity.
Microsoft introduced MSN Messenger in 1999, primarily as a competitor to AOL, AIM and ICQ. MSN grew rapidly in popularity, and in 2005, Microsoft rebranded MSN to Windows Live Messenger. It is estimated that until five years ago MSN had 330 million active users each month.
MSN is now only available in China, but will be shut down completely on October 31st. Microsoft has suggested Skype as an alterative to MSN to active users.
If we had to be honest, we cannot think about MSN without feeling nostalgic in some way. It was there years before Gmail, MySpace, Facebook, Snapchat, WhatsApp and Twitter, and in just two months’ time, it will be just a faded memory to the virtual world!
