It’s a bittersweet day for longtime Windows Live Messenger users like myself. Microsoft has announced that Skype, which it recently acquired, will replace Windows Live Messenger during the first quarter of 2013. Messenger, of course, has been around for more than 12 years, serving millions of users worldwide.
Microsoft is encouraging users to upgrade to the latest version of Skype, which features integration with Messenger. In fact, the Redmond-based company has actually been moving Skype over to the Messenger backend for some time now. In theory, you shouldn’t notice much of a change, aside from which app you use to sign in.
In the final post on the Inside Windows Live blog, Microsoft’s Brian Hall promised that “We will enable Skype to work better with Outlook.com than Messenger ever has.” Interestingly, China is the only country where Messenger will not be retired.
With group video calls, Facebook integration, screen sharing, and landline calls, Skype has many more features than its predecessor. A few Messenger features, however, have not yet made the jump to Skype, such as the easy sharing of images and videos.
Goodbye Windows Live Messenger, I’ll miss you. At least Skype is pretty awesome too.
Any word on if Skype will ever officially be integrated with Facebook Chat, on the Facebook end? Facebook video calling is already managed by Skype’s servers, so I don’t see why the two won’t eventually merge, as well.
The two have actually been integrated for some time now. Facebook users can’t directly IM a Skype account, but Skype will allow you to chat with your friends on Facebook. But yeah, I could see them becoming even more integrated in the future.
china is left out most likely because they have a special version of skype called “tom-skype” which is compatible with the governments “filtering” requirements. upon searching the web, this is an excerpt: “When Nart Villenueve forgot the password to his Chinese MySpace page and began looking at the Chinese version of Skype (TOM-Skype), he uncovered the massive privacy breach with TOM-Skype. His findings were that full chat messages (including those of Skype users communicating with TOM-Skype users) were being stored on servers in China. He also discovered that the data was being stored on insecure publicly-accessible webservers along with the encryption key needed to decrypt the information. The messages are tracked by keywords relating to what the Chinese would consider “sensitive political subjects.” Analysis also revealed that information might be maintained by specific user names.” being a journalist, this shouldnt be “interesting” that they have been left out, as it obviously takes a lot of jumping through their regulatory hurdles to offer an online communication platform
Am I the only one that has skype run like crap on android? I dont want to have to use it more. it always crashes on my phone and tablet.