I don't think that's accurate. There were a bunch of silos in the past, too. People used to be on AIM, MSN Messenger, ICQ, Jabber and IRC, and there were others. That's the reason chat apps like Adium and Trillian supporter multiple accounts. I had friends on all those networks, and nobody was on all of them. It was a mess back then, just as it is now, except now we have even more choices.
The difference was you'd fire up Pidgin and connect to all of those accounts simultaneously, at which point it really didn't matter which individual network any given contact was on.
Now, in the smartphone era, there's nothing like that. There's a bunch of different completely siloed apps, and I can't talk to people all from one place.
Yes for over a decade I was able used Gaim/Pidgin as my one stop instant messenger. In the early days, I used it for MSN,AIM, and ICQ. And when Google Talk took off that worked too. Could even talk to my coworkers in China over the QQ network. And when I joined a company that used Skype, there was a plugin for that too. Life was good.
The consumer really has been the loser now that Apple, Google, and Facebook have walled off their messengers.
I remember setting up Trillian (later Pidgin) and setting up a bunch of accounts just in case I had a use for them - not sure I ever used AIM/ICQ, but I _could_.
Not really. That's just yet another instance of web browser, this time with chat-specific tab switching and - as I learned recently - a need to create yet another cloud account...
In Pidgin, you actually had it all in one place, with the UX defined by Pidgin.
That's another bad thing about current fragmentation. You have no way to unify the UX.
That's by design of course. The client side software is where the interfacing with the user happens, and if your business model is 'first become huge and indispensable, than figure out a way to monetize', you need absolute control over what the user sees and how they interact with your service.
Let's not beat around the bush - if you "need absolute control over what the user sees" so that you can "figure out a way to monetize", then you have already decided that you are monetizing with ads. That is the only possible reason to maintain iron control over the user's eyeballs.
This business practice of pushing the product unsustainably in order to drive out the competition was rightly condemned when WalMart did it. I don't see a similar public backlash in the tech sphere these days.
For a while, imo was meebo's successor, but they saw the writing on the wall for third party interoperability after Skype cut them off for the nth time and decided to focus on their own walled garden chat and Twitter service instead :(
Yes, it was really good. It pretty much Just Worked(tm), had a good UI for a web app, and was relatively lightweight (I remember using it even at crappy airport computers).
Yeah but I doubt most Windows users use Pidgin. What happened back then ICQ, MSN and AIM dominated at different time and geographically, even though they co-existed since the 90s. Now, not so much.
Same. Messengers used to just work, now we have a bunch of walked off shit with no intercommunication. "Are you on Slack / Discord / Skype / Telegram?" question is getting pretty annoying.
This is the sad part about today. We lost user centricity with the dawn of mobile apps.
The web (http) and internet were conduits for information and communication. Now the pipe is a dumb channel each companies territory.
I miss pidgin where you had AIM, ICQ, IRC, Gtalk and whatever others. I also miss how companies are pushing their app instead of improving their mobile presence on the web.
It's alive, but I don't know about 'doing well'. It survives among some special interest communities, but the usage is tiny compared to any of the major platforms now. You won't find your uncle on it.
To be fair, I wouldn't have found him on IRC in 1998 either. IRC has really always been a relatively niche thing and I think it's fair to say it's doing well if you define that as remaining popular within the niches it's always been associated with. Though I think this is starting to change with the popularity of Discord.
Yes Discord is starting to really starting to dominate.
More and more often these days you'll find at the bottom of a community info page a discord rather than an IRC channel. Even big pirating communities are making the switch.
How does that work? I'm a regular in the C# Discord community and one of the rules we enforce and have to enforce regularly is no illegal or shifty activity (pirating, cracking, hacking, aimbots, cheating, etc.) because the discord admins don't take kindly to that sort of thing.
Well there's obviously far too much conversation for the admins to actually snoop in on what everybody is saying so unless anybody in the group reports it then it would just fly under the radar.
If you've been to an open source conference that lasts a week the pattern is always the same: the bulk of messaging ends up on IRC.
It doesn't start out that way. First you have a lot of people pushing their favourite barrows. Then they set up IRC gateways. Then they bleed users to IRC. I've been to a few conferences that keep actual statistics of messages published, and it's always the same.
But it's well hidden. No one gives up pushing their barrow, so if you just listen to the conference gossip you would never know it's happening.
I think the main reason is because Windows XP included a basic MSN Messenger client enabled by default in 2001.
Indeed, ICQ was vastly superior. In fact, in my opinion, many of its features (such as the discovery features) have not been equalled since them. It was quite traumatic to me when it was replaced with MSN Messenger.
I remember that they bloated up their client so much with menu bars, icons and later ads that it was not snappy anymore and required a lot of memory. So people where looking for alternatives.
