MSN Says “NO” to IMified
This one is killing us. After a week of back and forth emails with Microsoft trying to get our screen name to appear online to more than 1000 users at a time, we’ve been told no. The limit with MSN occurs when over 1000 screen names request presence for our screen name at any given time, meaning that if your not one of the lucky 1000, our screen name will appear offline to existing users and new users cannot be added to our buddy list.
Now, we certainly understand that MSN has policies in place that need to be adhered to, but AOL contacted us on day one to proactively offer a solution for a possible issue on their network and things have been running fine on AIM as well as Yahoo and Gtalk. The only option we were given was to build our service on their SDK and then and only then would they lift the limit on our screen name.
So, unfortunately there are a lot of MSN users out there who will not be able to access IMified. We regret this but tried to do everything we could to rectify the situation. If you think this sucks as much as we do, send an email over to: bizdesk@microsoft.com and tell them you want your IMified. If you signed up for us on MSN and would still like to use our service, please go ahead and signup from another network.
February 14th, 2007 at 5:20 pm
Just another reason I don’t use Microsoft products. Keep persevering, you guys have a great product.
-Jeff O’Hara
http://blog.zemote.com
February 14th, 2007 at 6:38 pm
Be Skyped, like Anothr.com, or Jabbered.
February 14th, 2007 at 7:19 pm
Typical microsoft, strong arm the little guy by flexing your muscle and force your standards down their throat. I applaud IMified for taking a stand and airing the dirty laundry here. Hopefully users everywhere will rally together and put a stop to this kind of crap.
February 14th, 2007 at 7:45 pm
I can’t say I blame Microsoft in this instance… You guys are obviously pushing the limits of what IM has been designed for… and that’s a good thing. (It doesn’t make it any better in the interim, though…) This might just push some people to other IM clients though… if they’re really into your product, it might push them over to Yahoo, AIM, gTalk, etc…
February 14th, 2007 at 9:24 pm
Ever consider kludging around it?
You could use a bank of MSN accounts and “load balance” users across the accounts. A user would hit up the main IMIfied MSN account. The request would be passed off to one of the other accounts which would respond to the user, and the main IMIfied account would disconnect.
The user would unfortunately have to have “friended” the different accounts, but it’s a small price to pay if MSN users are really jonesing for this functionality.
February 14th, 2007 at 11:44 pm
I agree with Michael V. Just post the “current” IMified MSN account for connection (or a random one) on the IMified.com site.
February 15th, 2007 at 12:16 am
It’s a really pity MSN won’t play ball. I’m sure you guys can figure out a solution around the problem.
Imified is great!
February 15th, 2007 at 1:33 am
i sent a flaming mail to msn. skype would be great but as a mac user i also have an aim/ichat account, a yahoo account and a gtalk account via gmail.
But will i have to reset everything if i switch from msn to gtalk ?
(sorry i am french so not fluent in english)
thanks
February 15th, 2007 at 3:15 am
Why don’t you want to use their SDK then? It is easy to use, isn’t it?
February 15th, 2007 at 9:00 am
Anyone who thinks they are stuck with MSN should quit the messenger client and go with any one of the all-in-one solutions like Trillian to get access to AOL, Yahoo, MSN, Jabber, all in one client.
February 15th, 2007 at 9:03 am
Never say die folks… I would have stopped using MSN if I was using IMified with it. I am using it with GTalk.
I sent them a mail. Lets fight. I have written about IMified here in my blog:
http://lagopi.blogspot.com/2007/02/notes-reminders-todos-and-many-more.html
February 15th, 2007 at 9:20 am
This is pathetic. WHY HASN’T MICROSOFT ADDED SUPPORT FOR BOTS??? AIM has them. Yahoo! has them. Heck, there’s even a Skype bot (anothr.com)! But no, MSN HAS to tell us no. Sheesh!
Speaking of Skype, will you add support for it any time soon?
February 15th, 2007 at 11:17 am
Why not just use an open and free IM standard like Jabber (XMPP) that doesn’t have stupid limitations like this and in addition you also have complete control over it.
February 15th, 2007 at 12:11 pm
Microsoft has a BOT (Agent) SDK.
If you just try to build something that pretends to be a regular user of the MSN Messenger service, then you will naturally be limited.
I have heard that there is a program available and all you have to do is send an email to agentsu@microsoft.com to ask them to give you access to the Bot SDK.
February 15th, 2007 at 2:27 pm
[...] I thought they were all about developers, developers, developers. .NET 3.0 is kind of rad, but this? [...]
February 15th, 2007 at 4:37 pm
How about taking advantage of the fact that MSN and Yahoo! IM networks are now linked?
I have many MSN friends that I added to my Yahoo! messenger and it seems to work fine…
February 15th, 2007 at 5:19 pm
Why don’t you just advice your users to switch to XMPP-based services and/or to ask users to send an email to Microsoft with the question to add (at least) server-side XMPP support? (In that way imified can run it’s own XMPP server and it can scale to server all people of the world).
February 15th, 2007 at 11:58 pm
Microsoft sucks!
February 16th, 2007 at 5:06 am
Your service is very cool! I wanted to reach out to you and offer to help you get working with AIM. Here on the AIM team, we like people to use our network
You can get started with an “official” AIM bot by registering your AIM screenname at http://developer.aim.com/botMain.jsp. This is for our Consumer Bot program. If it is too limited for your needs, I can steer you to the right people on the AIM team to set up an industrial strength solution.
Best wishes,
Alan Keister
Director of Engineering
AOL Instant Messaging and Social Networking
February 16th, 2007 at 1:17 pm
Geez. Microsoft still doesn’t get it…
I’d just keep doing what you are doing and inform people they need to bug Microsoft - it will be interesting to see if they come around…
As a ColdFusion developer it’s great to see this application getting so much attention! Keep up the great work!
February 17th, 2007 at 12:39 am
[...] On Valentine’s Day, IMified “broke up” with MSN because Microsoft wasn’t working with them to support the service. Other instant messaging [...]
February 17th, 2007 at 7:59 pm
[...] The service Imified I posted about previously has run into problems with its Windows Live Messenger integration. After just 4 days of being live, the bot reached the Messenger service limits and new users are unable to add it. The Imified team tried to sort something out with Microsoft, but the result is a big NO. [...]
February 17th, 2007 at 9:14 pm
[...] OVERVIEW & FAQ | BLOG | FORUM A blog about imified. A really cool productivity tool « MSN Says “NO” to IMified [...]
February 27th, 2007 at 9:10 am
With MSN and Yahoo messengers being interoperable, could MSN users add imified@yahoo.com as a buddy? Would that work around the 1000 limit?
May 15th, 2007 at 8:56 am
[...] as well as MSN for permission to make IMified possible. One interesting note from their effort is; On MSN, it seems like user cannot be added as buddy 1000 times. That means user cannot have 1000 friends. [...]
April 7th, 2010 at 2:30 pm
with ‘we leave it to you to decide’.
April 10th, 2010 at 6:18 am
Hallo Goed artikel, helaas is mijn engels alleen niet zo goed. Zelf bezoek ik vaak nederlandse msn websites. Er zijn veel nederlandse chat gerelateerde websites.
May 2nd, 2010 at 9:42 am
@josh i guess you are totally wrong because this vid proves it http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yv1axMDj4tY
May 20th, 2010 at 12:06 pm
Enjoyed every bit of your post. Will read on…
July 15th, 2010 at 6:14 am
I`ve read few of articles on your blog and could say it was really interesting, thanks for sharing this.