I love messing around with Messenger, but lately it seems that the whole community is falling apart. MSN Fanatic, once one of the biggest communities of messenger hackers, is mostly just an archive of time long gone. Mess.be only rarely updates with something worth mentioning, and seems to have an enormous amount of advertising compared to the actual news, and only the forums are of any real value to me nowadays. The only forum still really active seems to be the Messenger Plus! forums, but they seem to cater more to the average joe that wants a random script done instead of people genuinely interested in doing some more advanced stuff.
So I’m asking myself (and, through this blog, you), what are good places to hang around as a messenger hacker these days? And what are good news sources when it comes to the more underground what-microsoft-doesn’t-want-the-public-to-know stuff ?
Like you say it used to be MSN Fanatic, but I don’t even bother visting there anymore, rarely seems to be anything new.
I don’t think there’s anywhere right now. The vast majority of people just wanting to develop their idea will simply flock to what Plus gives them and create their own COM component if necessary. Just like the old VB days on Fanatic, most of the basic stuff has already been written or is done for you by now.
The community has matured and those from earlier days have moved on to other things or have simply grown tired of the constant need to update everything simply because Redmond decided to re-engineer what was already working.
I think it’s a good reflection of how excited people are about these latest client releases. I can’t say anything has really excited me since MPOP, which most of us have had for over a year now. Pretty easy to see that the less interest in the platform is proportional to how much development (or hacking) that’s going to go on.
I think the news source you’re seeking doesn’t exist since mess became more commercial. LiveSide sometimes ends up with some things as well too. I think most things just travel by mouth or more literally, by text.
Probably not exactly what you’re looking for but give Messenger Stuff (http://www.msgstuff.com) a look …
I used to help in Mess.be giving them lots of hot news about messenger to publish but is veryyyyyyyyyyyy rare when them just get them in the main site… is a shame cause everytime my help is rejected I lost more my desires to spend time writting to them…
I used to think my website got the scoop on all the little stories around the Messenger community, but that was when I had time to post, and browse the various forums on the topic. Nowadays, I’m just not motivated and I’ve seen my standards slip. It’s the money, rather than the joy of creating something people read that keeps my going. I know it sounds bad, but it’s the truth.
Personally, Messenger has lost its edge in the new social networking world. I don’t really use it any more. That and there seems to be no new people becoming interested and considering developing or writing for it.
The best thing out there is LiveSide, which covers all Windows Live products (including Messenger) in great depth. Those like Patchou, Dwergs and yourself (TB) all seem to have moved on. It’s a bit of a shame really.