Private Thoughts Made Public

Last night I upgraded my Yahoo Messenger to the latest version, version 7. Admittedly it was very late in the day and I was trying to write my review of the Heaton Park show at the time, so I wasn’t in the best mood to be doing two things at once. However there are some features in Messenger 7 I like, and some features I don’t like. One of the things I didn’t like about it was that it wanted to install lots of extra features by default, so I had to go in to the install routine and tell it no, I didn’t want to pop-up blocker (I already have one in Firefox) and no, I didn’t want the yahoo toolbar and no, I didn’t want to change my home page. What is it with some companies that they feel they have to take over your computer, to give you a “complete browsing experience”. I can live without all that.
They’ve also introduced this new thing called Yahoo 360. It gives you a blog, a link to photo albums, a friend network, links to RSS feeds and so on. It’s actually quite impressive, provided you want to do things the Yahoo way, and you’re prepared to limit your readership to people with Yahoo accounts. Again, I don’t want to do that, I want my blog to be read by anyone, and I want to customise the way it looks. So I can live without that as well.
There are two features we tried out in Messenger 7 last night that I did like, though. The voice communication part of it is better than before, the sound came through clear as a bell, and you don’t have to press to talk. Depending on how sensitive your microphone is, the person you’re talking to may be able to hear you typing, but that’s not the end of the world. They’ve also improved the file sending capabilities. I share a lot of photos with other members of my family, and before we used to use ICQ to send the pics forwards and backwards. I tried to get everyone to use hello, but for some reason that didn’t catch on. With the older version of Messenger you had to send files one at a time, with this one you can drag and drop a whole bunch of files onto the chat window and it will send them all.
But for a little Instant Messaging program I think it’s now getting too big for its boots. It’s got a radio player, games, weather links, a calendar, a link to 360 so you can blog from your IM program….. it’s all too much. Some people may like the idea of having everything in one place, heck, even I like the idea of having everything in one place, but I don’t like the idea of having one program or one company providing all my content or deciding how I go about doing things. Who knows what they’re keeping tabs on. It’s like a supermarket giving out loyalty cards so they can monitor what you’re buying. Ok, so you may get some targeted money-off vouchers every quarter, but I like to keep myself to myself thank you very much. I don’t want people monitoring what i do online, where I drive, what I buy, what films and music I like and so on. If I want to give out some information about myself, I’ll give it freely, but I don’t want someone spying on me thank you very much.
Sometimes I wish we could go back to the good old days when you used a browser for the web, a chat program for chatting, a search engine for searching, a music program for music…… the edges are all getting blurred now and you end up with Yahoo Messenger, MSN Messenger, ICQ, mIRC, Yahoo toolbar, Google toolbar, IE, Firefox, Windows Media Player, WinAmp and so on and do forth. No wonder hard drives are getting bigger and bigger and processors are getting faster and faster. They need to in order to keep up with all this bloat that people keep ramming down our throats.
I was must more in the mood for ranting and raving last night. I’ve slept since then and calmed down a bit now. Try Messenger if you want (be careful what you choose to install though – I’ve no idea how well some the features like the toolbar will uninstall afterwards) and if I’m on you can try talking to me. My ID is daniel_freedman2002. Guess when I set up my Yahoo ID?