Messenger Cafe: Serving 1998's Leftovers Today

Why on earth did this show up in our Hotmail inbox? We understand it's part of a "fun campaign" that the Borg over in Redmond have developed to illustrate how far they've come in understanding the human concept of "fun." Apparently fun has to do with games, so they've included that. Games and GoPets. Even a "self-proclaimed Windows Geek" isn't falling for it:

Personally, I find this kind of marketing “campaigns” corny and stupid and really doesn’t make me feel very good about using Messenger. I understand that the Messenger Team is going after a different demographic than me and who I am but seriously -- my 14-year-old sister wouldn’t find this crap “cool” whatsoever. I think the Messenger Team needs to ditch efforts like this and try to make Messenger feel “cool” again.

Are you *seeing* the cafe imagery? We can't because our eyes melted in their sockets at first glance. What we don't understand is, the Borg knows how old we are; we left our pre-teens behind in the last century. Why would a company that wants to keep people convinced it's relevant essentially spam its user base indiscriminately? To quote commenter Picturepan2 on another blog: "我觉得silverlight 应该还没有达到足够的普及。"

Okay, one last thing: there's also an area where you can chat with Real Life Moms on Messenger. If there are photos involved, this at least has potential real life internet implications, as explored in this Urban Dictionary entry on the MILF acronym.