Feed your Messenger

I try not to make it a secret that MSN Messenger is my favourite IM app. I lived inside of Trillian for a long time (few years) because it simply was the best client out there. As Google Desktop started taking off and I found less and less reason to be connected to five networks. Not to mention that all my business pals were dragging me to MSN Messenger. Then came the webcam. Bye Trillian. Now on to the cool part. Microsoft has organized a contest called "MSN Messenger World's Best App Contest" and it has some pretty cool apps already in the App Gallery but more importantly I think someone at Microsoft figured out one of the major Google Secrets. Yup, even better deal than Indian PSS: Get people to work for you for free. So for a few grand and a bunch of free software they have managed to get a ton of free apps written for them and give even more people and even more developers to work on their messaging platform. Brilliant!