About 12 years ago, Danny Glasser was heads down dealing with a problem. Users of Microsoft NetMeeting, an audiovisual communication client, were having trouble finding the people they wanted to talk to. This wasn't exactly ideal for a service that billed itself as a collaboration tool, so the team set out to find a fix. The proposed solution: enable NetMeeting users to maintain a list of the people they cared about, to be able to see when those contacts were online, and to be able to easily initiate NetMeeting calls with those contacts. It was dubbed the "Buddy List" project.

NetMeeting is no more, but what the team came up with ultimately became the world's leading instant messaging service. Ten years ago today, MSN Messenger made its debut. "It definitely felt like we were working on something special," said Glasser, a partner development manager with Windows Live Experience. "I don't know that I could have predicted accurately the number of people who would use it, but we had a feeling it would be a big thing."

Big thing, indeed. According to comScore, six out of every 10 instant messenger users chat with Windows Live Messenger. The service has more than 330 million active users who send roughly 9.4 billion messages every day. That puts it behind only Windows, Office, and Hotmail in terms of Microsoft consumer products used around the world, said Dharmesh Mehta, director of Windows Live product management. But more interesting than the sheer volume of messages being exchanged is the passion people have for Messenger, Mehta said. "The number of users is massively impressive, but the amazing thing for me is to hear about the ways it has changed people's lives."

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