Shoutbox

At the moment skinning is just following the general trend of Live Messenger and the add-ons for it. Not very much is happening, things are quiet.

Some people who have been around for a long time move on to other things, but that's nothing new. People have always disappeared when they got busy with study, work, or girlfriends. The thing is, because not much is happening there are not much new people coming in either. It as been a while since any major Messenger or Plus! release, Microsoft isn't getting testers involved like they used to, Messenger related blogs and forums not doing much posts, people preferring social networks over IM, MS changing design in a major way between 8.5 and 2009 making it hard for people to update their skins... it's all part of a massive chain reaction which has been going on for about a year now. Because not much is happening not much fresh people come in, because not much fresh people come in not much is happening.

On the other hand, looking at the raw stats it doesn't look so bad. Still millions of people using Plus!, number of active users fairly steady, certainly when you take into account the long time since the last major Plus! release (which always gives a nice boost). People are still downloading skins.

I think it will stay like this for a while, until Microsoft comes with Messenger 2010, and until Patchou has his office rolling smoothly and Yuna pushes out MP!L5. What happens after that nobody can predict yet, all depends on how the users and community react to it. But at least it's no dead end yet.