MSN used to be my favorite and I still use it often since most of my contacts are on it.

The new version, MSN Live, is an exciting improvement and it measures up to Skype, Google Talk and Yahoo. It also means the passing away off all those external based messenger applications. Soon everything will be carried out on the net.

Even though Messenger will soon be archaic, I'd just like to give credit to it for how it generalized chatting, made transfering files easy , customizing and emoticons. If it became the de facto chatting app worldwide there's a valid reason (apart from the fact that everybody has a hotmail account).