When I was a teenager, the hub of my social life wasn't the park, after school clubs or the bit of pavement outside a corner shop; it was MSN Messenger! There was recently a thread on Reddit about 'What do you most miss about the internet?' and the first thing that came to my mind was MSN messenger. Unsurprisingly, one of the top comments said the same and lots of people shared their own memories of this now antiquated social platform. It was a nice bit of nostalgia so I thought I would share some of my own. Please feel free to let me know anything I missed out!
#1 - Having an edgy username.
To a thirteen year old in the early noughties, your MSN username was a great way to express what a deep, complicated soul you were. Most people did this through song lyrics. You could vaguely express something you were feeling but if somebody asked you about it and you got embarrassed you could say, 'oh, it's just a song I like'. Other people just threw together random words/phrases that they thought sounded evocative in some way. I was one of the latter. In fact, I must have put far too much thought into it because I still distinctly remember my username as being '$ublime_Plague'. Yes, with the dollar sign included. At one point a girl I liked even had a matching username with me. So cool.
#2 - Getting peoples attention.
If you wanted to speak to someone but you wanted them to start the conversation or you just wanted to show how hilarious you were, there was one tried and tested method. If you signed out and back in to MSN a notification box would appear at the bottom right hand corner of everyone's screen saying '$ublime_Plague has logged in'. If you signed out and in repeatedly, these notification boxes would stack up until they filled your friends' screens from bottom to top. As ridiculous a way of getting peoples attention this sounds, so many people did it.
#3 - Pretending you were busy.
This is one where I genuinely don't know if I was the only person sad enough to do this. On MSN you could set your status to something like, 'busy' or 'gone away' to show people that you might not be able to respond straight away. When realising people might be noticing that I had been online for six hours straight and worrying they might realise I literally had nothing else to do, I would occasionally set my status to 'busy' and just ignore peoples messages for a while to try and give the impression that I was doing something else and had some sort of life. I didn't.
#4 - Online only friendships.
There were a few people on my contacts list who were from my school but I literally only spoke to them online. We would have long, meaningful (well, kind of) conversations on MSN but them completely ignore each other in the school corridors. This was teenage awkwardness at its finest. Of course, there were also a few contacts I had met online but if my friends asked me about them then I definitely knew them in real life!
#5 - 'Listening to'.
On MSN you could make it so that it told everyone under your username what song you were listening to. Obviously, you were going to ensure that anything people saw would show you as having a respectable music taste. If I show people that I'm listening to Radiohead then they will think I'm mature and serious (despite the fact that in reality I bloody hate Radiohead). You could also file share songs through MSN. It would take about an hour to download a single track but if a girl sent you a song she liked, you were damn well going to wait an hour for it to download and then pretend to love it.
