The bottom of the article links to the history (individual features) of other IM programs from that era as well like ICQ and Yahoo Messenger.
Microsoft pivoted to Skype. Saved you a click and reading about 1000 words.
Which Microsoft then shit all over (to be fair, Skype started that process even before MS bought them) and eventually renamed it to Microsoft Teams.
And for a while, there was also Skype for Business (formerly Lync (formerly Communicator)).
Yeah that was part of the brand reshuffling they did to obfuscate things. Lync was their shitty chat app they tried to convince businesses to use that everyone hated. They bought Skype, renamed it to Microsoft Teams, renamed Lync to Skype for Business, and killed MSN Messenger. When people still didn’t want to use LyncSkype for Business, then they killed that as well, and now it’s just MS Teams.
I’m surprised no one mentioned Facebook.
I recall using MSN as far as in to 2009, but the friends I was connected with migrated to Facebook when their chat feature rolled out.
From my ignorant point of view Microsoft had in its very own hands a solid competitor to Facebook but ended doing absolutely nothing with it.
I still can recall the MSN/Hotmail profiles - it was kind of a news feed that recorded all your statuses from MSN (or you could add your own there). Your contacts could add comments on those. I seem to recall at some point you could add posts with pictures too.
But all of that just disappeared when they ditched MSN.
They could’ve beat Facebook in its own game easily, as they had the advantage of their huge userbase - but somehow they missed on that too.
Anyone remember the short-lived Great War of the Messenger Apps? For a few months back around… '98? '99? MSN tried really hard to shoehorn its way into working with AIM. About every day there would be an update from MSM Messenger to allow it to work with AIM. Then AOL would fuck with their own protocol to ice out MSN users again.
I think these shenanigans also impacted the Trillium Messenger app too, which up until then had been flying under the radar of messenger interoperability.
I might be getting some of these details wrong.
And then Jabber came to fix it by introducing an open protocol, and Google started supporting it, and all was well. Then when everybody was using Google Chat they severed the Jabber compatibility, locking everyone in to their platform. Now we’re back wading around in enshittified shit and Jabber is dead.
Support matrix!! It already has international support, just needs to be a bit better with stickers and qol stuff. I’ve been using it for years. It’s nice to know I don’t have to worry about my privacy at all with chat rooms that can continue on without the original server.
People blame Google for the death of jabber because of one blog post from a disgruntled contributor but the truth is jabber was never popular and Google chat died as well.
Jabber was a mess, most of the clients were barely compatible with Each other and it was a wild west of feature support. Some clients were well featured with the ability to send richer messages, but typically only worked with a specific server and the same clients. Jabber did a crap job at making sure clients and servers interacted properly with each other and didn’t push the standards quickly enough, forcing clients to do their own thing.
Which is all Google did, they went their own way because nobody used jabber and the interoperability was causing more harm than good. It didn’t work, Google talk died and many years later clients like WhatsApp took over instead.
facebook, google talk, etc. all relied on the XMPP protocol. you could add your facebook messenger friends to google talk or any of the open source clients like pidgin. it was the holy era of instant messaging. federated. solution. no bullshit lockdown to a specific system like in the days of ICQ, Skype, etc.
then both facebook and google talk locked down their XMPP server and i lost 80% of my friendlist on XMPP. and that was that. i had to get facebook. i had to get google mail. especially relevant when microsoft bought skype and it turned to shit.
guess what. today we’re split on even more clients than we used to be. need signal, whatsapp, facebook messenger, telegram, discord, band, matrix, threema, session, irc, slack, and steam chat installed on my fucking device. and all because meta and google pulled the rug to isolate their systems and force user conversion.
no, thanks. open source federation is the only solution to unshitification and that’s never going to happen as long as people do shit like leaving x for bluesky instead of mastodon etc. leaving facebook for band instead of literally any other fediverse platform (because facebook has devolved to ads and facebook groups - everything else is irrelevant or dead on there). etc etc.
I used that until they pay walled it. Then I found Pidgen I believe it was called. It was open source and could connect to pretty much every messenger and IRC and stuff. Then my friend just switched to texting lol
Pidgin. Before that it was called Gaim.
It still works, as there are plugins to integrate it with almost everything.
I knew it wasn’t spelled exactly like the bird lol. But yeah I used that shit for years. I don’t really have a use for it anymore or I’d probably still be using it
I might have been 10 minutes too young for ICQ. I think that’s what the college kids were playing with when I was in high school. For my cohort it was the big three: MSN, Yahoo! and AIM. You probably had all three installed on your computer and probably all running at once. They’re probably why my entire generation can touch type. Vital tool for teenage social life at the turn of the century.
This was Microsoft’s era, too. The main reason Apple survived the 90’s was because Microsoft invested in them to counter anti-trust allegations. They paid Apple to keep existing so they couldn’t be called a monopoly. Internet Explorer was the web browser, any others in use were a rounding error. No one had a Mac, a few people were still clinging to their Amigas. THE platform for personal/home computing and internet access was a Pentium PC with Windows ME or XP, which came with MSN Messenger out of the box.
Two things happened nearly simultaneously: Facebook Messenger and the iPhone. Graduating high school in 2005, your freshman year of college you probably started hearing about the cool new site that’s kinda like MySpace except it’s only for college kids. By your junior year all your new college friends were on Facebook and all your old high school friends that never logged on let alone talk to you were on MSN. And if you graduated in 2005, your junior year was in 2007, the year the iPhone was launched. MSN Messenger had been present as baked in “functions” of certain media phones at the time, but I don’t think they ever made it to the App Store or even the Play Store on Android. Facebook was fast to adopt mobile apps, and for awhile there it was the one messenger service that interoperated between desktop on a web browser and smart phones across platforms. SMS didn’t run on the desktop, iMessage is Apple-only, AIM, MSN and Yahoo were nowhere to be found and Telegram, Signal, Discord etc. weren’t around yet. So everyone standardized on Facebook Messenger.
Meanwhile, Microsoft bought and ruined Skype.
I think that’s what the college kids were playing with when I was in high school.
Started college in 1995, and I indeed did have ICQ before too long. Still remember my number (6725571).
You probably had all three installed on your computer and probably all running at once.
I remember using a program called Trillian (which is still around!) in the late 90s/early 00s. It allowed you to connect multiple IM accounts in one app. It was sorta finicky, but it got the job done.
I haven’t thought of those apps for years, I used Pidgin! I had to look up the program name.
I still use Pidgin, because I still have some old work related contacts who use Skype, and I’d much rather use Pidgin than keep Skype around. It will do discord too but it’s a bit kludgey.
As a diehard Netscape Navigator user, I scoff at your browser choice.
The running joke in my day was everyone used Internet Explorer… to download Netscape.
In 2003, Internet Explorer had a 95% market share. Your running joke was demonstrably untrue.
Those were the days. 🥲
It was awesome. Especially paired with the msn messenger plus mod.
Near the end of its time and also when WiFi was taking off, I had friends with everyone in a uni house, but their WiFi was quite unreliable, so every hour or so I’d get 6 “person is online” pop up toasts appear simultaneously, stacked up on top of each other.
