Live Messenger and Techno-Loyalty
Wow, look at this... I’m actually posting on my blog.
I'm one of the people lucky enough to be involved in the Windows Live Messenger Closed Beta, and I love it, I've done some playing and you may have already read some comments on my use of shared folders. I must say I love them. Their main use for me is backing up files, as you're probably aware if you're reading this blog I'm an admin over at the Art Asylum Forums, one of the admin duties is to back up the board, which is easy enough and I have a hard disk full of copies of the board database. But what happens if I'm not around and someone else needs to restore it? Well now thanks to the joys of Shared Folders in Live Messenger I can automatically sync my backups with Brandon so that both of us have access to the latest copies. How cool is that? As soon as he signs into messenger his "local" copy is automatically upgraded to match the one in our shared folder!!
The coolness doesn’t end there either, take a look at all the new features. Yup, these plenty of them, one of the highlights along with Shared Folders is the ability to rename your contacts! I don’t know about you but I have several people on my buddy list who relentlessly change their display names and pictures, I may be slow but I find it hard to keep track of who’s who. Now I can just override their crazy names with sensible ones so I always know who I'm talking to!
What’s this rambling over Live Messenger got to do Techno-Loyalty? Well I've been talking to various people about Live Messenger and a few people have stated they couldn’t care less as they use Yahoo or Google services and are staying with them. When I ask them why they just say they prefer that particular provider.
This raised an interesting concept to me. Do people become loyal to a particular tech company? Personally I'm a bit of a feature whore. I go where I get the best service. My mail is Gmail, my Browser is Firefox, My search engine is Google, my "live.com" style page is the customised Google and my IM program is Live Messenger (and before that MSN).
Admittedly its sometimes a pain and I would love cross communication between services but this is just the suite I find that works for me. Are you the same or are you loyal to a paticular company?
posted by Ady Carter @ 6:08 PM
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