6.27.2006

Oh Tom, I found your new toy

Yes my friends, I found out that MySpace has its own instant messaging client. I discovered it by accident really. I'd posted a bulletin titled 'Living in 2006' and somebody neglected to mention Yahoo or MSN in it. I almost mentioned ICQ, but thought, "Nobody uses it anymore." So, I went to the internet's stop for all things: Wikipedia. I looked up ICQ, and then I was like, "Well, let's check out how it compares to other clients." I scrolled down a bit and saw one that said MySpaceIM. I checked its Wikipedia entry, and it had a link: http://www.myspace.com/myspaceim . I clicked on that, downloaded and installed the client. Once I discovered that it was legit, I posted the bulletin, so if one of these days somebody retitles it and leaves the last sentence in, and somebody is like WTF and Googles for what it was called originally, it was, "Look at this... I'm totally serial!"

Right now, its in beta testing. For a beta its pretty friggin loaded! If you have under 100 friends, it gives you the option to add all of your friends to your IM list, otherwise it just lets you add your top friends. It provides skins, but the downside is that you have to restart the program before the skin will apply... much like Firefox and its themes. From what I can tell you can send offline messages like you can do in ICQ and Yahoo, since if you open a window it tells you that messages will be delivered the next time that user logs on. One thing I also noticed was that it brought up my conversation with one person I chatted with when I opened up a different person's window. That was pretty weird, but I guess since its in beta, it'll have little things like that. Another little bug is that if you use shift+up-or-down-arrow key to try to highlight more than two lines of text, it will go up without highlighting any text. Shift+left-or-right-arrow key will highlight text. A friend reported some speed issues... my computer is almost seven years old, so I can't tell what's slow or what's not slow!

Overall, its a great product in the making!

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