{"id":17413,"date":"2009-07-22T10:00:00","date_gmt":"2009-07-22T10:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/2009\/07\/22\/microspeak-whale-boy\/"},"modified":"2009-07-22T10:00:00","modified_gmt":"2009-07-22T10:00:00","slug":"microspeak-whale-boy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20090722-00\/?p=17413","title":{"rendered":"Microspeak: Whale Boy"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Today is the tenth anniversary of Windows Live Messenger. My colleague Danny Glasser <a href=\"http:\/\/messengersays.spaces.live.com\/blog\/cns!5B410F7FD930829E!77942.entry\"> provides some history behind the product<\/a>, and you can watch a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=gNBplwf9N-M\"> tenth anniversary celebration video<\/a> created for the occasion. And thus is inspired today&#8217;s Microspeak: <i>Whale Boy<\/i>.\n <i>Whale Boy<\/i> is the nickname for the pawn-shaped Messenger buddy icon. His normal state is green, but he changes color or picks up a piece of flair to indicate various changes in status, such as <i>busy<\/i> or <i>away<\/i>.\n I don&#8217;t know the etymology of the term, but I suspect it came from his somewhat rotund appearance.\n Sample usage (which I made up just now; not from an actual document): &#8220;Why don&#8217;t we light up Whale Boy when the user regains connectivity?&#8221;<\/p>\n<p> Bonus Microsoft trivia: At timecode 3:40 in the video (spoiler alert!) Steve Liffick presents Whale Boy with a strange glass object. That is the Microsoft ten-year service award. Stick around for 25 years and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.proudlyserving.com\/archives\/2006\/01\/upgrade_to_the.html\"> collect the entire set<\/a>! <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Today is the tenth anniversary of Windows Live Messenger. My colleague Danny Glasser provides some history behind the product, and you can watch a tenth anniversary celebration video created for the occasion. And thus is inspired today&#8217;s Microspeak: Whale Boy. Whale Boy is the nickname for the pawn-shaped Messenger buddy icon. His normal state is [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1069,"featured_media":111744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2],"class_list":["post-17413","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-history"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"<p>Today is the tenth anniversary of Windows Live Messenger. My colleague Danny Glasser provides some history behind the product, and you can watch a tenth anniversary celebration video created for the occasion. And thus is inspired today&#8217;s Microspeak: Whale Boy. Whale Boy is the nickname for the pawn-shaped Messenger buddy icon. His normal state is [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17413","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17413"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17413\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17413"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17413"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17413"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}