MSN Slags

Y'know, the people who willy nilly add others to their MSN Messenger lists with no thought or care about who it is they're adding. Perhaps I'm being over-protective of my own list but (family and work contacts aside) there are only people of a certain calibre on mine, and therefore it also has to be someone I know pretty well.

Of course it's due to the way we all use instant messaging. For me IM is pretty much a a direct line to myself, as (and if not more) important than my phone. It's not something I can give away too easily and to too many people. I don't give my phone number to just anyone in the same way.

I guess that for some IM is just a timepass, a virtual (and so not real) playground that they don't have to take seriously or under the same social rules as other forms of communication, and so do not care who they have on it. That in itself is fair enough, but for me it's an equivalent and recognised form of communication and so it's unlikely that someone who doesn't feel the same way will fit into my use of it.

And although the good people at Microsoft have recently decided to bump our contact list capacities to three hundred (at last!) I think I need a bit of a spring clean of my list. Of course I don't have warn people that I may disappear from their lists; the point is that those that do get deleted will either not notice or, more likely, not care anyway.