Messenger is 10, Apollo 11 re-enactment
July 30, 2009
Messenger's 10th birthday
Back in the dim, dark ages of 2000 or so was when webDotWiz installed MSN Messenger (as it was called then) and wondered what use this free communication tool would be.
Well, firstly, it saved money on phone calls for those quick, short messages you wanted to share with family. Then webDotWiz found another use: it was a quick and simple way to share web site addresses with members of the webDotWizard classes - it only took a copy (CTRL-C) and paste (CTRL-V) of a web address to share an interesting site - no more asking the webDotWizards to laboriously type in a web address (especially those long and complicated ones).
From its early days, Messenger could carry an audio conversation with a person on your Messenger contact list. All that was needed a cheap microphone/headset - a $5 cost - and you could chat away as long as you wanted. A great feature for those who don't like typing. Audio chats even worked on a dialup internet connection and the person you chatted with could possibly be on the other side of the world.
In the early days of webDotWizard classes, while waiting for a web site to download or email to arrive on the dialup connection, it was common to share one of Messenger's games - Bejewelled became popular and competition was strong to achieve the highest score.
When broadband arrived, another Messenger feature could be utilised, namely video chatting. As with audio chat, you could chat with people from anywhere in the world. Again, this feature was free, apart from paying your monthly internet service provider fee and the first-up cost of purchasing a webcam.
From its earliest days, Messenger has enabled contacts to easily share photos and documents. The latest version of Live Messenger makes this task as easy as it can be - simply drag a photo or document onto the Messenger chat window to share with your family member or friend. At the other end, your family member can simply view the photo or choose to save it to their computer.
If you set up separate Windows Live IDs for home and work, you can easily post reminders to yourself between the two places by using Live Messenger's off-line messaging feature. IM your reminder to your work Messenger contact address and even if you're not logged in the message will pop up when you sign in.
Currently Live Messenger is used by 330 million people and the IMs sent number the billions. Messenger is not only used in the home - a recent survey indicated 21% of business people use it during meetings to make after-work plans. The Groups feature, added early this year, lets you share with a group of people in one step and enables those in your group to contribute, too, to the group's plans and discussion.
Apollo 11 re-enactment
"Where were you when man first stepped on the Moon?" has been a question often posed over the past couple of weeks. Many of us now old enough to remember headed for the nearest TV set to watch man step on the moon as the event occurred. The picture quality wasn't the best but many of us saw the event happen in real time. This couple of minutes of TV have been replayed often during the period of the fortieth anniversary celebrations of the Apollo 11 mission to the moon and the Parkes observatory even found better quality film that had been recorded by a member of the Parkes Apollo 11 staff.
The fortieth anniversary of Apollo 11 was celebrated by a re-enactment of the complete mission from liftoff of the Saturn V rocket carrying the Command-Service Module and the Lunar Module to splashdown in the Pacific Ocean about nine days later.
This fortieth re-enactment took place over the Internet in real time through sites such as wechoosethemoon.org, NASA's radiocast and NASA's Apollo 11 fortieth anniversary remembrance site.
We Choose the Moon runs (yes, you can go to the site and replay the mission at any time) the complete mission with animations of important stages such as liftoff and separation of the lunar module from the command module. As well audio of the conversations between Mission Control and the astronauts in either the spacecraft, command module or lunar module were sent across the Internet using Twitter so everybody could follow the decisions being made as they happened.
webDotWiz decided to participate in the re-enactment as much as he possibly could. He was tuned in to the audio between Mission Control and the astronauts on wechoosethemoon.org and had the transcript of this audio loaded in another browser window. A historical note: all audio was transcribed by a team of typists in a room off the main communication area at mission control as events happened - somebody didn't know how to correctly spell Parkes, for example, but correctly named Honeysuckle Creek and Carnarvon stations who also particpated in the mission.
The transcript was needed since it had the times at which conversations occurred between mission control and the spacecraft (there were many hours of silence such as when the crew were resting). webDotWiz then posted the position and velocity of the the spacecraft (Command Module or Lunar Module or both) to Twitter at the appropriate times during the nine days as well as times of significant events such as separation of the Lunar Module from the Command-Service Module and the landing of the Lunar Module on the moon.
The reasons for using Twitter are firstly that a post is limited to a maximum of 140 characters (one can't get carried away) and, secondly, webDotWiz has joined his Twitter and Facebook services so that Twitter automatically passes any post to webDotWiz's Facebook page. In turn webDotWiz has his Windows Live service joined to his Facebook site so in one swell foop webDotwiz's Windows Live network of friends and family were informed of the mission as well.
Services such as Twitter are only new and the Internet as a social media facilitator is only beginning. The days of the Internet as a passive resource for "looking up stuff" and writing and answering emails is disappearing to be replaced by communication between people who share their ideas and interests. That's why Live Messenger has grown to be used by 330 million people.