My Musings

PS-Ashley Rocks!

Friday, September 06, 2002

As many of you know, I love to complain about stuff. Especially random, trivial, unimportant stuff. Sadly, I can't complain about these things to my friends because nobody likes a complainer. Well, actually, I have complained and argued about stupid crap many times before, which is how I found out that nobody likes a complainer. So perhaps if I do my complaining here, I'll be less tempted to do it in real life. So here's my little tirade about why MSN is better than AIM.

First of all, it shouldn't be possible to talk to yourself. If your goal is to talk to yourself, then AIM seems to me like the absolute hardest way of achieving it. Just think the words in your head, you fool! Now, I can understand putting yourself in your buddy list. It's a handy way to check on your away message and profile all at once, and it's the only way to check your warning level without asking somebody else what it is. That said, it's just stupid that you can send IM's to yourself. On this issue, MSN is, I admit, almost as dumb as AIM. When you add somebody to your buddy list on MSN, you get a message saying that the addition was successful; if somebody adds YOU, you get a notice that it happened (which, by the way, is something AIM lacks) and the option to either add the person to your own list or block them. So when I added "chessman15" to my buddy list, I got a message saying that I was successful in adding myself to my buddy list; a few seconds later, a window popped up saying that I had just added myself to my buddy list, and I was given the option to either add myself to my own buddy list in return or block myself in order to stop me from talking to me. Then I heard the familiar "BWUH!" and was told that Boris had just signed in. For a brief moment, I lost all faith in MSN. But then, just as I was about to lay the killing blow by messaging myself, I got the most beautiful "you just did something terribly and horribly wrong, you computer-inept retard" message I've ever gotten in my life: "You cannot send an instant message to myself." My faith was restored.

My second gripe with AIM is the ability to warn yourself. That's right--if you send an IM to yourself, you can warn yourself, and if you keep IM-ing yourself, you can warn yourself repeatedly. This is really dangerous--once you say something to yourself, there's nothing you can do to save yourself from your own wrath. And, as some of you know, you can even warn yourself anonymously and you'll never know you were the one that did it.

This leads me to my next gripe, which is the anonymous warning. Right--like you reeeeally won't know who did it.

Next up is the infamous character limit on the profile. 1024 characters (yes, I AM aware of the grammar rule that states that you can't begin a sentence with a number, but I happen to hate that rule very much) are simply not enough! I mean, a SPACE is considered a freaking character. I can't remember the last time I wrote a profile without first seeing that infuriating "you've exceeded the character limit, you pathetic, pea-brained excuse for a donkey" message and then being forced to edit. Also, colors and stuff are counted as characters, as is anything pasted (even ordinary text). I'm not a computer expert, but I somehow doubt that extending it to 5000 characters would cripple the AIM servers and send the whole system crashing to its knees.

MSN, of course, doesn't have any of these problems--it doesn't let you write profiles and it lacks the stupid and completely pointless warning system. My major issue with MSN is that you can't customize your away messages and that the ones it gives you are pretty drab. But even this has its ups. First of all, MSN doesn't have away messages, per sé. Instead, you change your status, which appears in your friends' buddy lists. So if you change your status to "be right back," you'll show up in your buddies' lists as online, but also "be right back." You also have a nifty "appear offline" feature, which is a lot like signing off except you don't sign off. And changing your status to "away" doesn't open up a window that your silly parents will close when they use the computer, leaving you with 50 IM windows from people who wondered why you ignored them. The buddy list on MSN is cooler, too. Let's say that Dan, Kenny, and Min are online. My AIM buddy list would show "DanTheMan2020202," "thatoneguy2287," (I guess picking really bad screen names is something that runs in that family) and "NeoSandmaker," whereas MSN would simply show Dan, Ken, and (&)Chendog (the (&) in front of Chendog makes a little doggy appear in his name when he talks to you. Yeah, Min's weird). Isn't that so much nicer? And if you want to talk to multiple people, you just start talking to one, click "invite" and then pick another one, and BOOM, you're set. On AIM, however, you have to invite everybody to a chat room. Chat rooms suck. I can't turn off all the annoying AIM sounds and everybody's names are all in funny colors. Why can't you just invite people into a conversation?

My final gripe with AIM is the incompatibility between AOL users and AIM users. On MSN, everybody's an equal. On AIM, however, there are two different groups--the people who downloaded AIM and the people who are logged onto the internet through AOL. The two groups can't read each other's profiles or directly connect and AOL people can't see the smileys. This is extremely sad because most of the AIM smileys are better than their MSN counterparts, and because directly connecting gives AIM MSN's biggest advantage--the ability to see when the other person is typing. MSN does this automatically; you don't have to "directly connect" or anything to see when the person you're talking to is typing stuff. It's extremely handy because when you talk to people who write long things instead of typing stuff out in bursts; you never seem to know if they're typing something or just sitting there, picking their nose and waiting for YOU to say something.

Right now I'd really like to write a concluding paragraph that summarizes all of my points, but I don't feel like going back through what I said to find out what they are. In fact, many things I could've said better, but I think that writing the stuff out did what it was meant to do, which is: make me want to stop bitching about how bad AIM is. After all, who cares?

.: posted by Boris 5:21 PM

Comments: Post a Comment