Bye bye MSN messenger
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Dr Lobster*
- Posts: 2123
- Joined: Sat 30 Aug, 2003 20.14
Anybody remember the webmail provider which popped up around 2001 - it was UK based, ran a TV advertising campaign and allowed you to choose from a large number of domains. I remember the interface was green and the logo might have been in a handwriting type font... It was ahead of its time and I remember stumbling across this provider a few years ago where it still seemed to be going but wasn't accepting new signups.... What was the site??
Upload service: http://www.metropol247.co.uk/uploadservice
That was another.com. I used to have an email account with them, then all of a sudden they started posting articles and links to websites claiming within a few years nothing on the internet would be "free" (this was in 2002), and insisted I started paying to use them. So I left.Dr Lobster* wrote:Anybody remember the webmail provider which popped up around 2001 - it was UK based, ran a TV advertising campaign and allowed you to choose from a large number of domains. I remember the interface was green and the logo might have been in a handwriting type font... It was ahead of its time and I remember stumbling across this provider a few years ago where it still seemed to be going but wasn't accepting new signups.... What was the site??
Skype isn't a *brilliant* IM client, but I don't think it'd take too much to make it better. Its persistent group chat stuff is handled better than MSN ever did, but its UI has way too much white space (for some reason, I think only the Mac client lets you fix this with CSS). A few of my friends missed being able to choose your font and custom emoticons, but on balance it's probably better they're gone (the features, not the friends). The only feature I'd really like is a nicer way to share media - iMessage style inline images/video would be nice, and a bit less rubbish than MSN's intrusive photo sharing thing.
My single biggest problem with Skype is the shoddy handling of the account merging process. Skype now maintains discrete contact lists for Facebook, MSN and Skype itself with no nice way of deduplicating my contact list. Even when people have merged their Skype/Microsoft accounts, they appear several times on the same contact list, and I can have multiple conversations with the same person depending on *how* they logged in to their account. It's all a bit backwards because I'm still not sure whether the plan is to make Skype accounts obsolete, or just the Messenger component of a Microsoft account.
The only upside, in theory, is making things more consistent across various bits of glass, except I note the iOS Skype client is monumentally shit at IM, either crashing altogether, a weird bug where it never autocorrects the last word in a sentence, and hangs on the keyboard for minutes at a time.
My single biggest problem with Skype is the shoddy handling of the account merging process. Skype now maintains discrete contact lists for Facebook, MSN and Skype itself with no nice way of deduplicating my contact list. Even when people have merged their Skype/Microsoft accounts, they appear several times on the same contact list, and I can have multiple conversations with the same person depending on *how* they logged in to their account. It's all a bit backwards because I'm still not sure whether the plan is to make Skype accounts obsolete, or just the Messenger component of a Microsoft account.
The only upside, in theory, is making things more consistent across various bits of glass, except I note the iOS Skype client is monumentally shit at IM, either crashing altogether, a weird bug where it never autocorrects the last word in a sentence, and hangs on the keyboard for minutes at a time.
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Dr Lobster*
- Posts: 2123
- Joined: Sat 30 Aug, 2003 20.14
Another.com - thank you!
It was a pretty decent service, it stopped using it for the same reason now you mention it. Seems to be a domain auction site now trying to flog off all those generic domains they bought up.
It was a pretty decent service, it stopped using it for the same reason now you mention it. Seems to be a domain auction site now trying to flog off all those generic domains they bought up.
Upload service: http://www.metropol247.co.uk/uploadservice
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madmusician
- Posts: 153
- Joined: Mon 11 Dec, 2006 19.11
- Location: Worcester, UK
I remember AtKidz - an ISP aimed at children that filtered 'unsuitable' websites on an ISP level. We were given CDs at school and I remember begging my parents to let me install the software only to find it all far more limiting than what our BT dial up provided! (IIRC only BBC websites and the At Kidz website itself were allowed through, with no options to change this!)
AtKidz also took over EYT (the Daily Telegraph's monthly CD ROM for children - http://www.mediakitchen.co.uk/portfolio_cdroms_eyt.htm) around the time it was renamed T:Drive (although I can't remember whether this was before or after the rebrand).
Oh wow, the memories. This was all 1999-2000, when I was a mere eight year old.
EDIT: It seems that the atkidz takeover of the Telegraph CD ROM came a couple of years after the rebrand, after it had moved onto CD from Floppy. http://www.accessmylibrary.com/article- ... azine.html
A year-or-so later than I remembered it, but that makes sense...
Hopefully we've still got the CDs knocking around somewhere, as they were very good fun!
AtKidz also took over EYT (the Daily Telegraph's monthly CD ROM for children - http://www.mediakitchen.co.uk/portfolio_cdroms_eyt.htm) around the time it was renamed T:Drive (although I can't remember whether this was before or after the rebrand).
Oh wow, the memories. This was all 1999-2000, when I was a mere eight year old.
EDIT: It seems that the atkidz takeover of the Telegraph CD ROM came a couple of years after the rebrand, after it had moved onto CD from Floppy. http://www.accessmylibrary.com/article- ... azine.html
A year-or-so later than I remembered it, but that makes sense...
Hopefully we've still got the CDs knocking around somewhere, as they were very good fun!
ASDA used to give out a dial up CD - something like "Red Hot Cross Bun", with a logo stylised like The Sun (it might have been a News International thing).
Diamond Cable offered a free dial up service if you took a landline with them (line rental was about the same as BT) - it was an 0800 number and everything. NTL quickly stopped that after taking over.
At one stage ic24 offered a weekends-only 0800 dial up too, no adverts either - just a 30 minute limit (and a similar wait to try and get a line in the first place!).
Diamond Cable offered a free dial up service if you took a landline with them (line rental was about the same as BT) - it was an 0800 number and everything. NTL quickly stopped that after taking over.
At one stage ic24 offered a weekends-only 0800 dial up too, no adverts either - just a 30 minute limit (and a similar wait to try and get a line in the first place!).
From what I remember, it was just called "Currant Bun", I was still at school at the time and we used to take loads of discs and smash them up and whatever. I remember them being given out at Comet too.WillPS wrote:ASDA used to give out a dial up CD - something like "Red Hot Cross Bun", with a logo stylised like The Sun (it might have been a News International thing).
Though NTL did bring in their own free ISP, NTLWorld in 2000, though you literally had to wait months for the CD to arrive through the post. They started charging for it in early 2002, but by that time people were going onto broadband anyway.Diamond Cable offered a free dial up service if you took a landline with them (line rental was about the same as BT) - it was an 0800 number and everything. NTL quickly stopped that after taking over.
Funnily enough though, I do still have the letter from Diamond Cable informign us of the rebranding to NTL!
Oh yay, Currant Bun - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/307761.stm
You know it's of a time when it loads up with "BBC ONLINE NETWORK".
"the People's Portal" - Murdoch never really understood the internet, did he?
You know it's of a time when it loads up with "BBC ONLINE NETWORK".
"the People's Portal" - Murdoch never really understood the internet, did he?
In fairness to Murdoch, this happened only 4 years after freakin *MICROSOFT* proclaimed that the world wide web would never take off and the future of internet access was through walled garden content providers, putting huge resources into their own MSN service (ooh, I've actually managed to reference the original subject of this thread lol) and even though Microsoft did launch IE in late 1995 this was a small, back burner project initially...they clearly had a web browser more to show their face in the sector rather than to lead the field. Such was Microsoft's lack of belief in the WWW as the future of the internet that Windows 95 originally shipped with no internet support at all - as in even TCP/IP networking was not present but had to be installed manually.WillPS wrote:Oh yay, Currant Bun - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/307761.stm
You know it's of a time when it loads up with "BBC ONLINE NETWORK".
"the People's Portal" - Murdoch never really understood the internet, did he?
It took Microsoft until 1997 for them to actually put some serious resource in developing IE when they finally realised that 'the web' and 'the internet' had become synonymous and that there probably was little future in the 'content provider' model of internet access - it was too expensive to provide and too restrictive for the users, nobody benefitted from it.
That being the case, I think we can forgive a tabloid newspaper for not quite getting it right about the internet when the world's largest software company was getting it so horribly wrong only a couple of years previously.
To Microsoft's defense - they didn't buy Myspace at its absolute peak and then run it into the ground.