I was on the beta testing team and have been using Beeper for a little over two years now.
The convenience of having an application to house all of your chat networks is amazing.
I think they mostly died when GChat turned off XMPP support and became a walled garden.
Most of the protocols supported by Trillian were walled gardens too - AIM, ICQ, MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, etc were all proprietary.
I think they mostly died when GChat turned off XMPP support and became a walled garden.
Trillian had paid full-time developers too. I’m not sure what’d they’d be doing differently to what Trillian did.