The MSN Haystack
I reckon MSN has fallen head-over-heels in love with the magic of the mouse-over popup helpful tooltip window. The brand, spanking new version not only seems to take away the traditional text menu on top, but makes the icon-based sidebar central to its functions. Which is great, only the graphics aren’t automatically intuitive until you mouse-over for an education.
For that matter, people don’t help the situation, because people insist on having rambling poems and epic stories as their user handles. I know there isn’t a big restriction on the limit but really, when I’m looking for someone, say Paula, and I have to mouse over every single contact out of 200 to find her e-mail address (which has a chance of compounding the problem by being something like themoonshinesabovemyprettylittlehead@mail.com) and guess who she is, only to find that she chose to be “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. I love thee to the depth and breadth and height my soul can reach, when feeling out of sight for the ends of Being and ideal Grace” for the day… … …it’s time to give up.
Bring on the poetry, bring on the lyrical user handles, but please, put your name right at the start first. My hair thanks you.
Edit: Ohh. They’ve hidden the usual menu behind a teeny little grey-on-navy blue arrow on the top bar. I found this by mousing-over the icon. Naturally.
I don’t want to put my name right at the start. How? :P
…*narrows eyes*
I know I have said this before but I can’t stand MSN itself and the whole daily “Identity Crisis” thing is one of my major peeves with it. Another is all the menus and ads.
Using Trillian or GAIM gets rids of the menus and ads problem. But the “Quote of the day” nicknames is build into the MSN protocol. Therefore I usually just remember email addresses to know who put that picture of the Lor Mee they had for lunch as their MSN pic.
Of course none of this actually solves Vicky’s problem seeing as how I’m sure her MSN list has tons of people…
These days we get to learn all about our friends’ and little cousins’ love lives through how manic-depressive they sound on their MSN nicks… having used GAIM, Trillian, and now Adium for the past 4 years, however, I’ve taken to renaming my contacts to their real names. A practice that inevitably results in a “you mean you DIDN’T READ ABOUT IT on my MSN nick?” sort of exclamation, one too many times. Sigh!
If I could be dictator for a day I would put a stop to MSN nicknames of >5 words (if I could be dictator for more than a day, I would put a stop to proprietary MSN software.. including Messenger, or Windows Live, whatever they call it these days, and new releases with improved and better emoticons.) /ramble
Oh well.
that is HILARIOUS. I’m sorry it really is- i particularly enjoyed the bit where you re-discovered the location of the original menu. NERD! Nerd nerd nerd!
Popagandhi: I KNOW! Tell me about it- the manic-depressive and therefore a sneak preview into cousins’ love lives things is ringing loud and clear with me :) Kitsch!