Messenger or Skype?

5/17/2009

For years I used Skype an Trillian. But for the last 5 years I have been an exclusive Skype user because it is lightweight, and it "just works well". Enough people pinged me about Live Messenger that I decided to give it a try.

Groups

I use Skype chat rooms for several groups. In Skype 4, an annoying feature was added that has disabled the ability to publish links to chat rooms. Users have to be added manually. Supposedly Skype will readd this feature back at a future date.

This has left me looking for alternatives. IRC is not an option for various reasons, but especially because of IP blacklisting that regularly occurs with IRC use. I saw groups in Live Messenger and was hopeful. However I immediately noticed this absurd limitation.

Notice the part I highlighted in yellow? Skype has a limit of 200, and we were beginning to become worried about that. But 20?

Advertising

Skype has no advertising, Live Messenger does. I am fine with some advertising and see a lot of it via Yahoo Groups, and search engines. But for some reason the advertising in Live Messenger I find to be very annoying and distracting. I think it is because the content includes images and changes so frequently that the eye tunes in on the changes.

This is on the bottom of Messenger and there is no way to hide or shrink it. It uses up valuable vertical space, especially on my ASUS EEE 1000HE which is 1024x600 and on my tablet which is 800x600. The advertising also seems completely untargetted and totally random consistently showing me things that would be more appropriate for a teenager.

Proxies

Live Messenger will not let you set a HTTP proxy. It will only use what IE is set to. I don't know why this is so hard for Microsoft to figure out, all of the Microsoft applications are like this. While defaulting to IE's settings is nice, there should be an override option.

It is nice to see the addition of test buttons. In other apps like IE, the user is left to enter and exit nested dialogs to test.

It is also nice to see Microsoft finally recognize SOCKS proxies. Many Microsoft programs still have no support for SOCKS. Unfortunately it seems broken. When specifying exactly the same parameters as in other functioning programs, the above is displayed. There is also no clear way to disable SOCKS other than emptying all for text boxes.

Conclusion

It definitely has a few nice features, but it looks like I will be continuing to use Skype as my main IM.

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