Don’t you hate it when you’ve added a friend to your MSN list – but their hotmail address and nickname are totally different than anything you’d expect. Initially it doesn’t seem like a problem, but sometimes you just don’t chat to that person on MSN that often, and pretty soon you’re wondering who the heck that person on your list is.
Then suddenly they message you and you have no idea who you’re talking to. You check their profile, but they haven’t bothered filling it in, so you’re still lost.
And you’re just sitting there, chatting, waiting for something, anything, a tiny clue into who exactly this person is!
Sometimes you’re lucky, and they finally say something that clues you in to who they are. Other times, not so much – and you just hope that you didn’t say anything stupid.
A casual “who the **** are you?” usually works for me? 😉
Yeah, that’s kind of a pain; although, to be fair, it only seems to happen maybe once every 6-9 months and the Trillian people are pretty on the ball about releasing a patch quickly.
the only thing i hate about trillian (after using it for a period) is the IM service providers always updating their codes in order to thwart the trillian users. I just find it too much of a pain in the arse.
You might try using Trillian.
I have friends who have either cryptic MSN ids or they change their display name to something lengthy/equally cryptic. Very annoying.
In Trillian, you’re able to right click the person’s name and rename it to whatever you want (I usually just put it as the person’s actual name). Note that you lose out on some of the MSN functionality (webcam stuff, etc.), but I’ve been very happy with Trillian overall — make it very handy for me as I have friends on Yahoo, MSN, AIM, ICQ *and* IRC. Much better than messing about with a bunch of different programs.