I wonder if it’s just me or is the MSN Messenger Protocol having issues lately. I’ve had minor issues with it in the past few months and even heard of issues with it during my university days when which was over 2 years ago (wow, how time flies). The complaint over 2 years ago was when sending messages (using the standard MSN Messenger) it would give an error saying that the message couldn’t be delivered. And thus the conversation would end and the party who got the error message tries to send more messages and they keep failing. I didn’t suffer that problem at that time but in the recent months I’ve had it with Miranda. I first thought it was a Miranda issue so I changed Digsby and alas the same problem. Sometimes the error message says that the message failed to send due to a time out so naturally I would send it again and I was told I sent the same message twice (or even more).
I remember a friend of mine having an issue of time delays with MSN and so he tried a simple (far from being scientific) experiment sending the same message with 2 different instant-messaging (IM) protocols (GTalk and MSN) and the GTalk was practically instantaneous while the MSN took quite a while.
Today a friend of mine said she was online the whole afternoon and didn’t get any message, she then went to appear offline and all the messages flooded in.
With all these issues with the MSN protocol and the heavy reliance (at least from my experience) on the MSN protocol for business purposes it seems to me that people should migrate to another IM protocol. From the observations above it seems that MSN is an asynchronous protocol meaning that when you send it, you are not sure when the other party will receive it. I would recommend using a synchronous protocol but the problem with all these IM platforms and social sites it always depends on where your friends/family/business partners are at. You can move but if nobody else moves with you, it’s futile. Wondering if there is any widely used open IM platform that allows migration of contacts of this sort. This is also a reason why Identi.ca is pretty interesting to me, which is a micro-blogging service just like Twitter, Jaiku and Plurk but as it’s FAQ says
How is Identi.ca different from Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce, Plurk, others?
Identi.ca is an Open Network Service. Our main
goal is to provide a fair and transparent service that preserves users’ autonomy. In
particular, all the software used for Identi.ca is Free Software, and all the data is available
under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license, making it Open Data.The software also implements the OpenMicroBlogging protocol, meaning that you can have friends on other microblogging services
that can receive your notices.The goal here is autonomy — you deserve the right to manage your own on-line
presence. If you don’t like how Identi.ca works, you can take your data and the source code and set up your own server (or move your account to another one).
Wouldn’t it be great if your data were free and open?
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