Saturday 24 July 2010

Windows messenger live beta

in a moment of weakness I installed it. This was a mistake. I don’t like it.

The original messenger was a useful lightweight tool for one on one conversations with people about technical issues when debugging things. Like good old VMS phone or Unix talk it was a valuable tool, and also let people know when you were online.

The new messenger is bloated, wants to take over your life and bury into your social networks, take over your on board camera. No, sorry, I use skype for video chat. Messenger is for some simple text based purposes only.

In short the new messenger is not a communications tool it’s bloatware

Oh yes and it changes bing to be the default search engine on my firefox install and installed the bing toolbar without asking, and changes some other settings such as your nice handcrafted id picture.

Now it is true that after about ten minutes of fiddling I turned off all the bits I didn't want and got it back to performaing as its old lightweight text based chat application. But I shouldn't have had to do that.

And I'm technically astute - what does someone who's not do?

Personally, I’m going to ditch it as soon as I find a useful light weight alternative to this bloated bit of monkey poo. Your milage may of course vary ...

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