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MSN chat rooms shutdown
As it was previously reported a few weeks ago, Microsoft, in an attempt to curb the growing number of online paedophiles and spammers, has decided to close down the majority of its chat rooms around the globe. The move now, and when it was first announced, has been greeted with a varied but mostly negative response.
[blockquote]In place of chat, Microsoft has begun promoting the Instant Messenger service in which it competes with AOL Time Warner, and Yahoo.
It plans to license IM, which allows for more confined online conversations, to business customers and integrate it more closely with its money-losing MSN Web service.
Links to the chat area from msn.co.uk were still live on Tuesday morning, but access to the forums was intermittent.
The move has drawn cheers from some child protection advocates and law enforcement authorities concerned about unsupervised chat areas where some Web users have been known to prey on young children.
And, on Tuesday -- nearly three weeks after the initial announcement -- Web users greeted the shutdown with a shrug.
"Who cares if they shut them down. They're not the only chats around the world. There's Yahoo, MIRC, with 1000's of servers. Shutting down MSN really wont make any diff(erence)," read one message on a news group entitled nz.general.
[/blockquote]
Source - Reuters
[blockquote]In place of chat, Microsoft has begun promoting the Instant Messenger service in which it competes with AOL Time Warner, and Yahoo.
It plans to license IM, which allows for more confined online conversations, to business customers and integrate it more closely with its money-losing MSN Web service.
Links to the chat area from msn.co.uk were still live on Tuesday morning, but access to the forums was intermittent.
The move has drawn cheers from some child protection advocates and law enforcement authorities concerned about unsupervised chat areas where some Web users have been known to prey on young children.
And, on Tuesday -- nearly three weeks after the initial announcement -- Web users greeted the shutdown with a shrug.
"Who cares if they shut them down. They're not the only chats around the world. There's Yahoo, MIRC, with 1000's of servers. Shutting down MSN really wont make any diff(erence)," read one message on a news group entitled nz.general.
[/blockquote]
Source - Reuters
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