There are some adverts running at the moment that jar with me a bit. The charity World Vision is advertising for sponsors. Nothing wrong with that of course. And the adverts are hardly going to be works of creative genius either. It’s pretty much what you would expect from that sort of advert.

But there is one thing that really annoys me about them. They go out of their way to point out that the advert is aimed at Scotland. The image to the right is from an advert I saw in MSN Messenger (they know where I live!). If I recall correctly, the television ad says something like, “Come on Scotland!”

I’m not sure what to make of it. There is nothing else particularly Scottish about the adverts. The actor is English, and I recall an older advert featuring John Craven. I am guessing that similar campaigns are running all over the UK, either with no reference at all to Scotland, or with a reference to your particular region. “It’s your call Anglia!”

My guess is that England does not get its own name check, either for England or regions of England. I know there are a few bloggers who get annoyed about Scotland getting fancy labels on its food in supermarkets while England has to make do with being British. English in British out, they call it.

But I don’t really understand the need to mention Scotland in the adverts. Does it actually make Scots delve deeper in their pockets this line is included in their adverts? It must do, otherwise it would be hard to justify the extra cost and effort involved in making different versions of adverts for different parts of the country.

Just as it was beginning to look like we would only need to use MSN Messenger and Google Talk to be able to talk to just about anyone (nobody uses ICQ any more, right?), MySpace have decided to create their own IM client.

And just because it’s MySpace, it will be huge. Let’s face it, if there’s anybody in a position to completely demolish the MSN / AIM hegemony in IM-land it is MySpace. I guess we can look forward to random emo-posers, strange men who always seem to have their tops off, and really awful bands all randomly adding people just to say, “A/S/L?”

Of course, Tom is your first friend when you open MySpaceIM. You can say any shit you want, but he’ll always respond, “Woo!”

I just got told to download the new version of Windows Live Messenger Beta, and it’s another radical change. Too many people must have died of shock after seeing the last version, because it is right back to basics. I imagine things will still change quite a lot before it comes out of beta because it doesn’t quite feel cohesive yet. Sometimes the wee man icon is a nice modern-looking glassy thing, and sometimes it’s a grey pixellated 1990s monstrosity.

At first I didn’t like the highlighting thing that the previous version did — when everybody’s name would expand to two lines when you hovered over it. But I got used to it, and by the end I actually quite liked it, even if it sometimes made actually trying to talk to the right person a bit more difficult. I had assumed that that was the reason why the display picture no longer appeared on the contacts list — but we’re back to basics and the display pictures aren’t back. I quite liked that feature. It feels like a backward step now. One welcome advance (and it’s not really an advance because this happened in ye olde MSN Messenger anyway) is that the “personal messages” are now easier to tell apart from the contact name.

Actual features like timestamps, offline messages and shared folders are all still there, but they now feel like they’ve been lopped on to a five-year-old interface — some parts look nice and shiny, other parts look old and ragged. As I said, though, I’m sure that will change before it comes out of beta. I’m just surprised that they’ve taken away all the radical interface ideas. It must have been seriously unpopular.

I’ve taken the piss out of Google Talk a few times on this blog. Well, with the buzz about the new Google Chat idea that integrates IM into Gmail (which is being phased in), I felt like testing out the chat history, which saves your Google Talk conversations in your Gmail account (the one feature that I can use at the moment).

So I had a wee conversation with my brother just to see what the chat history was like. It’s pretty basic, almost exactly the same as the chat window in Google Talk. But that’s all you need. And because for some reason MSN Messenger’s chat history won’t work for me at the moment (serves me right for using beta versions of both MSN Messenger and Internet Explorer I guess), it’s +1 for Google Talk.

And as my test conversation went on I ended up being very impressed with Google Talk. To be fair, I had only ever used it a couple of times, and that was on the day that Google Talk launched. Which is a bit ago now.

Anyway, the upshot of it is that Google Talk simply does the job. It’s a swish, clean and basic interface, that gets across all the information you need in a novel way. I was surprised that they still haven’t got emoticons there yet — I suggested that Google just wanted to be retro about it, and my brother said that he liked Google Talk’s approach to emoticons anyway!

The appeal of Google Talk, I’ve decided, is that it sheds all of the bloat that comes with all the other major IM clients. MSN Messenger is just about the only IM client I use, simply because it’s what all my friends use. But it is filled with stupid features like nudges and winks and goodness knows what else. I really could do without all that. Google Talk goes right back to basics, and gives you what you need: instant messaging, with VOIP on the side.

My brother expressed his disappointment that Google Talk had not become a kind of Jabber-style application that would let you communicate with users of MSN, Yahoo! and AIM. Google Talk hasn’t revolutionised IM in the same way that Gmail revolutionised email — but it’s not Google’s fault that there isn’t a standard, er, standard for IM. This reminds me, though — what happened to MSN and Yahoo! merging their IM systems. I haven’t heard anything about that in ages. I take it this is still happening?

And VOIP! I had never tried this before. It suddenly occurred to me that I could use the microphone that came with my iRiver. My brother informed me that pink sockets mean microphone sockets. Yes.

This in turn spurred me on to finally download Skype. I’ll be honest with you hear: it’s pretty shit when you haven’t got any contacts. And can you believe that ‘doctorvee’ was taken! What a bastard! I have had to invent a variation: doc-vee. Ew.

So the desire to test a pretty basic chat history feature in Gmail when I was bored led to a mini revolution in the way I use IM. Until tomorrow when I revert back to MSN because all my friends are on it. Because that’s the other problem with IM. No matter how good an IM client is, it is difficult to switch over simply because you have to use the one that all your friends are using, otherwise you’ll have nobody to talk to. Which means using MSN. Gah!