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Nine Features MSN Instant Messenger Should Have
March 2004 by Lauren E. Darcey
MSN Instant Messenger is a powerful correspondence tool for personal and business usage. Single account sign-on
with .NET Passport is supposed to allow shared accounts, etc, however many people end up using this one account
for both business and pleasure. MSN Instant Messenger falls short when it comes to contact organization, and here
are a couple of features we'd really like to see Instant Messenger have in it's next version.
- Ability to Customize Other People's Names.
What about when you have four guys named Rob on your project and you cannot tell which one is speaking? MSN needs to add the ability
for the individual to override certain contact names with their own equivalent. Also, how many times has your 13 year old cousin
logged in with completely inappropriate names?
- Ability to Customize Your Name for Other People.
Sometimes you might want to change your name to something silly, like She Who Must Be Obeyed, but do you want your clients to
see this name? Perhaps not. MSN needs to add the ability to set your display name for various groups of people separately.
- Status by Group
Perhaps you're constantly being messaged by your friends while you're trying to work, or getting client messages when you're surfing the net at home. Ideally,
MSN would add the ability to show different statuses to different groups - so you can appear busy or even offline to those that are not appropriate to chat with at the time.
- Working Hours
Much like Status by Group, setting appropriate hours for chatting to certain groups and contacts will help keep inappropriate chatting to a minimum.
- Server-side customized settings
Moving back and forth between home and work IM clients works well in theory, but your custom display pictures, emoticons, font settings and backgrounds are
saved on your local machine. MSN should have an optional (even for pay) feature to store a certain amount of data either on your hotmail account or whatever, so that
no matter where you login to Instant Messenger, your custom settings are retained.
- Emoticon & Display Picture Sharing
You can send backgrounds and pictures to a friend, why not make it easy to share display pictures and emoticons? Also, MSN's custom icon selection is truly pathetic. I keep
wondering if they are depending on third parties to create emoticons, but all the third parties look suspicious and unintuitive.
- Group or Individual Based Logging
Right now, logging is an all or nothing option. I have little need for logging my personal conversations, but my professional conversations are quite often useful to keep track of. MSN should add the ability to log
- Ability to Send Messages to those Offline
Some messaging clients allow messages to be sent to people who are not current online and available. This can be very useful for short messages and reminders.
- Emoticons sorted by most recently used
When I click on the emoticon menu, I don't want to see the same generic icons all the time - I'd be happier seeing the last 10 emoticons I've personally used. This would save me time of sorting through the full set of emoticons looking for the skeptical smiley face.
For more information about MSN Instant Messenger, check out the
Microsoft MSN site.
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