It seems both my instant messengers have gone crazy. People don't get all my messages, get them 5 minutes late, and sometimes I don't get their messages. It's a little frustrating, because miscommunication is much worse than no communication at all.

Come to think of it, Yahoo! Messenger and MSN Messenger are both free services. I do not pay to peruse these services; so I can't really point a finger at them. Just like what's happened to free email - available, but unreliable. So just like email, instant messenging will also go paid? If it's not too expensive, I'd seriously consider

The reviews of the new MSN Messenger 5.0 have'nt really been too encouraging. And I agree. Other than being yet another unneccessary cosmetic change, this upgrade was just another incorporation of some completely useless, and particularly annoying features. For example, the extremely irritating MSN Today popup, a dastardly sin that the Yahoo Messenger had already commited. And a new set of sounds that replace the pleasant old ones. The new "user is online" sound is not quite what you'd like to hear at 2 o'clock in the night when you're reading a scary story. (Of course, they're far more pleasant than Yahoo's "user is offline" sound - a horrifying creaking door from those vampire movies.)

I think it'd be cool if someone could make a small tool so that I could type in google: apples -oranges into my browser and it would take me directly to the Google search results. Yahoo messenger uses something like ymmgr: and MSN uses msmn:; so I think it should'nt be too difficult to implement.