11 ms·

The fall and rise and rise of chat networks

86 points by dineshp2 11y ago

firasd 11y ago
I was just thinking about this. In 2010 (when many people were building GroupOn clones) I don't think people thinking about tech really saw this coming: that chat apps would not just be successful at such large scale but also subsume VOIP, ecommerce... Otherwise large companies would have valued and focused on their older chat apps like BlackBerry Messenger, MSN Messenger, AIM. Even actively used apps like Google Hangouts and Skype didn't really go aggressively after the user base now held by WhatsApp, WeChat, Facebook Messenger.
- w1ntermute 11y ago
  > I don't think people thinking about tech really saw this coming: that chat apps would not just be successful at such large scale but also subsume VOIP Because they couldn't have predicted how badly Skype would botch the transition to mobile: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10927899 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10927899 As for e-commerce, that's still controlled by Amazon, not any chatting apps (at least in the West).
  - firasd 11y ago
    Yeah I was thinking in terms of the future, especially if FB integrates digital wallets like WeChat. Not the Amazon-like shopping part necessarily, but payments, talking to customers, stuff like that.
- PakG1 11y ago
  Blackberry's former co-CEO saw it coming. But he lost a battle to reposition the company in a way where he thought they could go for the opportunity. That being said, if he had won that battle, who knows whether or not he would have actually succeeded in his vision though. http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/the-inside-story-of-why-blackberry-is-failing/article14563602/?page=all http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/the-inside... Relevant quote: Inside RIM, the brash Mr. Balsillie had championed a bold strategy to re-establish the company’s place at the forefront of mobile communications. The plan was to push wireless carriers to adopt RIM’s popular BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) instant messaging service as a replacement for their short text messaging system (SMS) applications – no matter what kind of phone their customers used. It was a novel plan. If RIM could get BBM onto hundreds of millions of non-BlackBerry phones, and charge fees for it, the company would have an enormous new source of profit, Mr. Balsillie believed. “It was a really big idea,” said an employee who was involved in the project.
  - firasd 11y ago
    Interesting. Also telling because of how their deployment and revenue model was tightly coupled to carriers (old school thinking) v.s. being consumer-driven from app stores.
  - tomp 11y ago
    > If RIM could get BBM onto hundreds of millions of non-BlackBerry phones, and charge fees for it, Why would carriers want to get on board with it? Just take a look at heir resistance to free SMS replacement, now imagine they had to pay fees for it as well...
gsibble 11y ago
I find it very odd how chat apps (AIM, MSN, etc.) died and gave rise to.....chat apps (WhatsApp, WeChat, FBM). I'm still not sure what caused the mass migration.
- fossuser 11y ago
  I think it was mobile - I remember having a Nexus One and trying to get chat to work on my phone. Nothing really existed. The best option was Meebo which allowed you to sign into AIM and a few others, but push notifications were terrible and you often got logged out for no reason. People wanted chat on phones and FB, WhatsApp and WeChat filled that gap.
  - computator 11y ago
    > I think it was mobile. Nothing really existed. But it would have been so easy to extend AIM and MSN Messenger to the mobile realm and carry along their hundreds of millions of users. If they had mounted even a half-assed attempt at a trivial cost to their overall budgets they would have been unstoppable due to the network effect. The only way they could have failed is if they didn't try a mobile version at all -- that's the part I find so surprising.
    - PakG1 11y ago
      None of those former chat companies (or parent companies) were mobile-focused at the time. Yeah, Microsoft had Windows CE, but they (like all other competitors) were unable to predict the monsters that iOS and Android would become and how much phones would change because of their ability to run big-feature 3rd-party software. So you have all these companies who don't expect phones to become powerful functional computers, seeing they have only crappy operating systems. Why would you make chat platforms for those crappy operating systems, especially when nobody saw any reason why SMS would die? Mobile bandwidth sucked too. Finally, in the case of Microsoft, if you're playing catchup, why make it for another platform instead of your own? You have to remember this is WAY before Microsoft changed its stripes and did things like release MS Office on iOS. In hindsight, it's all so obvious. I don't know many people who thought it was obvious at the time; yes, some people thought about it, but none of them did anything about it. I think a perfect storm of factors, including better mobile networks, better phone hardware, and new phone operating systems all collided to take everyone who was PC-centric by surprise.
MichaelBurge 11y ago
Most people I know use Skype for the same purpose that I used MSN Messenger for back in 2000. I think I pay $6 a month for a telephone number through Skype. The idea of valuing a cell phone chat app at billions of dollars seems silly, because if the cell phone companies made text messages free there would be no reason for the chat apps to exist.
- mintplant 11y ago
  It would take more than that. SMS delivery delays can be long, MMS is quirky and unreliable, and support for group messaging is bolted on at best and varies widely between carriers and handsets. Mobile chat apps are popular not only because of price but because they offer better UI and more reliable infrastructure than texting.
  - MichaelBurge 11y ago
    I feel like these are solvable problems. Even if SMS isn't the right solution, it's clearly already technically possible to send text between phones in an efficient manner using the existing cell phone infrastructure. I could see some low-ranking Google engineer pushing out an update to the default chat app on my $50 Android that allows it to either use SMS or a Google-operated HTTP endpoint, without realizing that he accidentally caused tens of billions of dollars in chat app valuations to evaporate overnight, since the default app is now good enough for most people.
  - digi_owl 11y ago
    Best i can tell, group MMS is something Apple drummed up that has no formal spec. Anyways, the reason why these chat systems can be more reliable is that they do not have to deal with crossing network boundaries. If you send and SMS or MMS, it may have to be handed between carrier networks. With a Whatsapp message, stays within their server farm.
    - thaumasiotes 11y ago
      Well, obviously, if I send a whatsapp message over my cell data connection and someone else receives it over their data connection, the message had to be handed between carrier networks (with the internet intermediating). Why is being intermediated by Whatsapp different from being intermediated by AT&T directly?
CydeWeys 11y ago
Did it feel very weird to anyone else that some of the most important chat protocols ever to have existed were not even mentioned once in the article, in favor of various startup apps that many people have never even heard of? Any history of chat networks needs to include BBSes, IRC, ICQ, and Google Talk (now Hangouts).
- condescendence 11y ago
  I skimmed it, didn't see IRC or ICQ and didn't read the rest. Just another filler article from Ars Tech...
  - digi_owl 11y ago
    ICQ get a mention in passing, but the story seems to begin with MSN Messenger. Not surprised, as i think MS was quite aggressive in pushing it. After all, the early version came bundled with Windows XP, iirc. And you were greeted with a signup/login dialog on first boot. This is not that different from how MS pushed IE back in the day, or grabbed the office network out from under Novell's nose back in the day. And btw, i feel to some degree MSN Messenger ruined the net. Before then there was thriving local IRC channels for the smallest of places. But come MSNM people started exchanging contact info for it, and the net turned "clique-y".
    - Outdoorsman 11y ago
      MSN Chat...looked for that...didn't see it... Had many memorable chats at "philosophy and absurdity" and "poetry shack".... All gone....all gone...
      - deleted 11y ago
        [deleted]
- LCDninja 11y ago
  I'm also surprised that IRC & instant messengers weren't mentioned... the dot com boom had a wonderful moment where the concept of "presence" was introduced by instant messengers. AOL instant messenger, MSN Messenger, ICQ vs. Jabber etc. Fun times!
jerf 11y ago
Chat sure has come a long way, yes indeed. Why, once it was a console app, which all look the same, then it made the huge transition to GUI apps, which once you look past rounded corners and profession emoticons, essentially all look the same and have nearly the same features. And in the future, we are sure to witness a variety of additional chat networks with pretty much the same features. Yes, what a journey it has taken... from... console app to GUI app. What a journey indeed.
- ryandrake 11y ago
  The most ridiculous thing about all these chat apps is not that they all essentially do the same simple thing as each other (send text), but that they each managed to do it in a way that was incompatible with every other chat app. It's almost as if there was some omniscient God of Incompatibility out there pulling the strings.
  - firasd 11y ago
    I think it's just the business model... whether ICQ in the 90s or Facebook Messenger today, there is no incentive for interoperability (especially if you're one of the bigger networks.)
  - pjbrunet 11y ago
    I don't disagree, but here are some links https://www.trillian.im/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jabber
    - DanBC 11y ago
      Those links would have been clickable if you hadn't put four spaces in front of them.
    - digi_owl 11y ago
      Jabber yes, Trillian no. Trillian is basically the same as Pidgin, one client implementing multiple incompatible protocols. Jabber is the originator of XMPP. Insanely both Google and Facebook used XMPP for a while, but then turned off federation (allowing someone on Facebook to message someone on Google).
jsilence 11y ago
Not a single word about lacking interoperability and encryption? What a crappy article.
raddad 11y ago
Some stats on chats https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant_messaging https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant_messaging Have to scroll down about 4/5 of the way.
- cpach 11y ago
  Here's a more granular URL for convenience: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant_messaging#Statistics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant_messaging#Statistics :)
oxplot 11y ago
Ah, nostalgia. I used MSN Messenger religiously until I started college at which point had to switch to Linux (thank goodness). Lots of fond memories. At some point I figured that since MSN lists the online "buddies" in unicode order, putting a space at the start of one's display name puts them at the top of everyone's list! Also, it's interesting to see how people corrected their typos back in 80s, "Er, " instead of "*". I like the former better actually.
livatlantis 11y ago
Okay, I have to ask: it's been years since I came across someone else who'd heard of (nevermind used) Odigo[1]. Anyone remember that? It was one of the most beautiful applications I'd used, one that mixed magical fantasy with something purely functional. It got affective design a decade before the industry started started getting interested in it gave it a name. If I remember correctly, it even had a beautiful on-boarding experience with lush imagery and sound effects. As a kid, I got to meet people from all around the world, imagined their lives (you created an avatar but everything else was just information you chose to disclose, or not) -- it was just fantastic. And then it vanished. Anyone? 1: Some images to give you an idea of what it was like: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=odigo+messenger&ia=images&iax=1 https://duckduckgo.com/?q=odigo+messenger&ia=images&iax=1
- alexvoda 11y ago
  I did not remember the name but that picture sure brought back memories. I remember trying it out. Never actually used it though because of network effects. Everyone I knew was on Y! Messenger or as we used to call it mess.
ritonlajoie 11y ago
My first contact with internet was Microsoft Chat. I didn't know, at the time, it was an IRC client. But I was like 13, and at this time it was great fun see those comics take life on the screen and react accordingly to keywords ! Screenshot : http://www.mermeliz.com/files/summary/comic.jpg http://www.mermeliz.com/files/summary/comic.jpg
mrdrozdov 11y ago
Thought that it'd be interesting to compare the usage numbers of a few chat networks, since this article missed a few: IRC - 1 million users around "peak" in 2003 (I don't actually know if this was the peak, but couldn't find numbers prior to 2003) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Relay_Chat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Relay_Chat) RC usage has been declining since 2003, losing 60% of its users (from 1 million to about 400,000 in 2014) and half of its channels (from half a million in 2003). Slack - 1 million users as of last year (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slack_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slack_(software)) In 2015, Slack passed more than a million daily active users. Kik - 240 million users as of last year (http://arstechnica.com/business/2016/02/the-fall-and-rise-and-rise-and-rise-of-chat-networks/ http://arstechnica.com/business/2016/02/the-fall-and-rise-an...) With an updated figure of 240 million users... WeChat - 570 million users as of last year (http://arstechnica.com/business/2016/02/the-fall-and-rise-and-rise-and-rise-of-chat-networks/ http://arstechnica.com/business/2016/02/the-fall-and-rise-an...) As of September 2015 there are now more than 570 million people on WeChat’s network...
niftich 11y ago
I got curious and researched the history of IM, the decline of the old networks, and the rise of the new. Anecdotally, I got into college (in the US) right as Facebook and Gmail opened up to everyone, and my peer group created a "professional presence" of Facebook and Gmail for our college lives, slowly leaving our myspace/AIM/WLM lives with the crazy hair and skinny jeans behind. My experience was not unique; this phenomenon has been researched by others [1][2][3][4]. Soon, Facebook and Google introduced chat, and nearly everyone I wanted to talk to was on one or both of those networks. During my research, I was surprised to learn that AIM was in fact present at the iOS appstore's launch, but I suppose there wasn't much overlap between a typical AIM user and a typical iOS user at the time. I also found an infographic from 2014 that charts some of these dates and compares the active user counts of the IM networks over the years [5]. Here's a chronological timeline of selected milestones in the IM/social space: 2005-09 - Meebo launches offering web access to AIM, WLM, Yahoo 2006-02-07 - Google Talk integration inside Gmail goes live 2006-03 - Nielsen/Netratings survey for active users: AIM 53M, WLM 27M, Yahoo 22M 2006-07-12 - seamless interop starts between Windows Live Messenger and Yahoo Messenger 2006-09 - Facebook opens up to everyone (not just colleges) 2007-07-07 - Gmail opens up to everyone (not just invite-only) 2007-05-09 - Windows Live Messenger released for Xbox 360 (with dashboard update) 2007-12-06 - Google Talk gets limited AIM interop 2008-04 - Facebook chat goes live 2008-04-19 - Facebook overtakes Myspace in Alexa ranking 2008-07-11 - iOS App Store launches, AIM for iOS released 2008-08-26 - Facebook hits 100 million active users 2008-09-23 - Android 1.0 launches 2008-11-11 - Google Talk introduces voice and video calling 2008-12-22 - Meebo integrates with Facebook chat and Myspace IM 2009-03-31 - Skype released for iOS, Skype network has 42 million active users 2009-04-08 - Facebook hits 200 million active users 2009-06 - iOS gets push notifications 2009-09-15 - Facebook hits 300 million active users 2009-11 - WhatsApp released for iOS 2010-01 - WhatsApp released for BlackBerry 2010-02-05 - Facebook hits 400 million active users 2010-05 - WhatsApp released for Symbian 2010-05-20 - Android gets push notifications 2010-06-21 - FaceTime released with iOS 4 2010-06-21 - Windows Live Messenger released for iOS 2010-07-21 - Facebook hits 500 million active users 2010-08 - WhatsApp released for Android 2010-09-30 - Windows Live Messenger starts interop with Facebook Chat 2010-10 - Kik released 2010-12-02 - Viber released for iOS 2011-01-05 - Facebook hits 600 million active users 2011-01 - WeChat released 2011-01 - Skype for iOS introduces video calling 2011-04 - Facebook introduces voice calling 2011-05 - Viber released for Android 2011-05-30 - Facebook hits 700 million active users 2011-06 - LINE released 2011-07 - Facebook introduces video calling 2011-07 - Snapchat released for iOS 2011-09-22 - Facebook hits 800 million active users 2011-10-12 - iMessage released with iOS 5 2011-10-13 - Microsoft finishes acquiring Skype 2012-04-24 - Facebook hits 900 million active users 2012-07-11 - Meebo is acquired by Google and shut down 2012-10-29 - Snapchat released for Android While it's tempting to accuse AIM, MSN, and Yahoo for being incompetent and not catching up to the "mobile era", they in fact did pursue this market as much as they were able. In truth, early iOS and Android were inferior platforms for a chat app. Push notifications were absent, data rates were expensive, and the average smartphone user at this time was not very likely to use those networks anyway. Based on this info, I reason that it was truly Facebook that killed incumbent IM networks, at least in the US. Between the release of the iOS App Store and the introduction of push notifications for Android, Facebook grew by more than 300 million active users. This coincided with exodus of users from Myspace to Facebook; many of those users likely having used AIM, MSN, or Yahoo messenger in the past, now found themselves in a much larger network that also offered chat. Since Facebook largely subsumed everyone a person knew in real life, these users only had to go back to the old IM networks to chat with people they didn't know in real life, setting the stage for the weakening of connections and these networks' decline. By 2010, Facebook, or at least awareness of it, was mainstream. At the end of 2008, the Webster's New World Dictionary named "overshare" as the word of the year [6], while in 2009, the New Oxford American Dictionary chose "unfriend" [7]. For people new to the IM landscape, the old networks were dying and full of "old people" now in their 20s and 30s, so new networks surfacing around this time were appealing. This contributed to the grown of Kik and Snapchat, while people for cheaper alternatives to texting and voice calls drove the adoption of Viber, WhatsApp, and Skype. iMessage went live in late 2011, offering with FaceTime a built-in rich chat on iOS, successfully capturing an audience that would've surely gotten a third-party app otherwise. Later, Hangouts on Android emulated this strategy. Skype is a remarkable special case. Microsoft managed to squander the popularity of MSN/WLM with its confusing product strategy, then it acquired a VOIP product that targeted a different customer base. Not content with running the two products separately, they deprecated WLM and encouraged everyone to migrate to Skype, which didn't happen. Later, they leveraged Skype as the built-in IM for their OS, while still committed to keeping it cross-platform. It could very well be a trojan-horse into the Microsoft ecosystem, but it's essentially entirely separate, completely unlike Google Hangouts. So now we're living in a time when smartphones come with IM out of the box, nearly every social network is gaining IM functionality (Instagram, Twitter, Tumblr, etc.), and the new wave of circa-2011 chat apps are diversifying into social networks (Snapchat) or platforms themselves (Kik, Viber, WeChat, LINE). You actively use more than product capable of IM, but rarely by choice and mostly by acclimation. Ironically, this situation benefits platforms the more closed they are, an intuition that's made clear by complete decline of interoperability between platforms in the past. IM is ubiquitious, leaving old "IM only" networks owned by corporations who can't figure out what they're doing (AOL, Yahoo) utterly irrelevant. Sources: [1] 2012 http://socialtext.dukejournals.org/content/30/2_111/99.full.pdf http://socialtext.dukejournals.org/content/30/2_111/99.full.... [2] 2011-06-22 http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/magazine/content/11_27/b4235053917570.htm http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/magazine/content/11_27/b42350539... [3] 2007-07-11 http://www.nbcnews.com/id/19717700/ http://www.nbcnews.com/id/19717700/ [4] 2009-03-16 http://www.newsfactor.com/news/Facebook-Traffic-More-Than-Doubles/story.xhtml?story_id=10000BCLMR0W&full_skip=1 http://www.newsfactor.com/news/Facebook-Traffic-More-Than-Do... [5] 2014-10-22 http://www.whoishostingthis.com/blog/2014/10/22/instant-messengers/ http://www.whoishostingthis.com/blog/2014/10/22/instant-mess... [6] 2008-12-01 https://wordoftheyear.wordpress.com/tag/websters-new-world/ https://wordoftheyear.wordpress.com/tag/websters-new-world/ [7] 2009-11-16 http://blog.oup.com/2009/11/unfriend/ http://blog.oup.com/2009/11/unfriend/

86 points by dineshp2 11y ago

I was just thinking about this. In 2010 (when many people were building GroupOn clones) I don't think people thinking about tech really saw this coming: that chat apps would not just be successful at such large scale but also subsume VOIP, ecommerce... Otherwise large companies would have valued and focused on their older chat apps like BlackBerry Messenger, MSN Messenger, AIM. Even actively used apps like Google Hangouts and Skype didn't really go aggressively after the user base now held by WhatsApp, WeChat, Facebook Messenger.

w1ntermute 11y ago
> I don't think people thinking about tech really saw this coming: that chat apps would not just be successful at such large scale but also subsume VOIP Because they couldn't have predicted how badly Skype would botch the transition to mobile: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10927899 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10927899 As for e-commerce, that's still controlled by Amazon, not any chatting apps (at least in the West).
- firasd 11y ago
  Yeah I was thinking in terms of the future, especially if FB integrates digital wallets like WeChat. Not the Amazon-like shopping part necessarily, but payments, talking to customers, stuff like that.
PakG1 11y ago
Blackberry's former co-CEO saw it coming. But he lost a battle to reposition the company in a way where he thought they could go for the opportunity. That being said, if he had won that battle, who knows whether or not he would have actually succeeded in his vision though. http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/the-inside-story-of-why-blackberry-is-failing/article14563602/?page=all http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/the-inside... Relevant quote: Inside RIM, the brash Mr. Balsillie had championed a bold strategy to re-establish the company’s place at the forefront of mobile communications. The plan was to push wireless carriers to adopt RIM’s popular BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) instant messaging service as a replacement for their short text messaging system (SMS) applications – no matter what kind of phone their customers used. It was a novel plan. If RIM could get BBM onto hundreds of millions of non-BlackBerry phones, and charge fees for it, the company would have an enormous new source of profit, Mr. Balsillie believed. “It was a really big idea,” said an employee who was involved in the project.
- firasd 11y ago
  Interesting. Also telling because of how their deployment and revenue model was tightly coupled to carriers (old school thinking) v.s. being consumer-driven from app stores.
- tomp 11y ago
  > If RIM could get BBM onto hundreds of millions of non-BlackBerry phones, and charge fees for it, Why would carriers want to get on board with it? Just take a look at heir resistance to free SMS replacement, now imagine they had to pay fees for it as well...

gsibble 11y ago

I find it very odd how chat apps (AIM, MSN, etc.) died and gave rise to.....chat apps (WhatsApp, WeChat, FBM). I'm still not sure what caused the mass migration.

fossuser 11y ago
I think it was mobile - I remember having a Nexus One and trying to get chat to work on my phone. Nothing really existed. The best option was Meebo which allowed you to sign into AIM and a few others, but push notifications were terrible and you often got logged out for no reason. People wanted chat on phones and FB, WhatsApp and WeChat filled that gap.
- computator 11y ago
  > I think it was mobile. Nothing really existed. But it would have been so easy to extend AIM and MSN Messenger to the mobile realm and carry along their hundreds of millions of users. If they had mounted even a half-assed attempt at a trivial cost to their overall budgets they would have been unstoppable due to the network effect. The only way they could have failed is if they didn't try a mobile version at all -- that's the part I find so surprising.
  - PakG1 11y ago
    None of those former chat companies (or parent companies) were mobile-focused at the time. Yeah, Microsoft had Windows CE, but they (like all other competitors) were unable to predict the monsters that iOS and Android would become and how much phones would change because of their ability to run big-feature 3rd-party software. So you have all these companies who don't expect phones to become powerful functional computers, seeing they have only crappy operating systems. Why would you make chat platforms for those crappy operating systems, especially when nobody saw any reason why SMS would die? Mobile bandwidth sucked too. Finally, in the case of Microsoft, if you're playing catchup, why make it for another platform instead of your own? You have to remember this is WAY before Microsoft changed its stripes and did things like release MS Office on iOS. In hindsight, it's all so obvious. I don't know many people who thought it was obvious at the time; yes, some people thought about it, but none of them did anything about it. I think a perfect storm of factors, including better mobile networks, better phone hardware, and new phone operating systems all collided to take everyone who was PC-centric by surprise.

MichaelBurge 11y ago

Most people I know use Skype for the same purpose that I used MSN Messenger for back in 2000. I think I pay $6 a month for a telephone number through Skype. The idea of valuing a cell phone chat app at billions of dollars seems silly, because if the cell phone companies made text messages free there would be no reason for the chat apps to exist.

mintplant 11y ago
It would take more than that. SMS delivery delays can be long, MMS is quirky and unreliable, and support for group messaging is bolted on at best and varies widely between carriers and handsets. Mobile chat apps are popular not only because of price but because they offer better UI and more reliable infrastructure than texting.
- MichaelBurge 11y ago
  I feel like these are solvable problems. Even if SMS isn't the right solution, it's clearly already technically possible to send text between phones in an efficient manner using the existing cell phone infrastructure. I could see some low-ranking Google engineer pushing out an update to the default chat app on my $50 Android that allows it to either use SMS or a Google-operated HTTP endpoint, without realizing that he accidentally caused tens of billions of dollars in chat app valuations to evaporate overnight, since the default app is now good enough for most people.
- digi_owl 11y ago
  Best i can tell, group MMS is something Apple drummed up that has no formal spec. Anyways, the reason why these chat systems can be more reliable is that they do not have to deal with crossing network boundaries. If you send and SMS or MMS, it may have to be handed between carrier networks. With a Whatsapp message, stays within their server farm.
  - thaumasiotes 11y ago
    Well, obviously, if I send a whatsapp message over my cell data connection and someone else receives it over their data connection, the message had to be handed between carrier networks (with the internet intermediating). Why is being intermediated by Whatsapp different from being intermediated by AT&T directly?

CydeWeys 11y ago

Did it feel very weird to anyone else that some of the most important chat protocols ever to have existed were not even mentioned once in the article, in favor of various startup apps that many people have never even heard of? Any history of chat networks needs to include BBSes, IRC, ICQ, and Google Talk (now Hangouts).

condescendence 11y ago
I skimmed it, didn't see IRC or ICQ and didn't read the rest. Just another filler article from Ars Tech...
- digi_owl 11y ago
  ICQ get a mention in passing, but the story seems to begin with MSN Messenger. Not surprised, as i think MS was quite aggressive in pushing it. After all, the early version came bundled with Windows XP, iirc. And you were greeted with a signup/login dialog on first boot. This is not that different from how MS pushed IE back in the day, or grabbed the office network out from under Novell's nose back in the day. And btw, i feel to some degree MSN Messenger ruined the net. Before then there was thriving local IRC channels for the smallest of places. But come MSNM people started exchanging contact info for it, and the net turned "clique-y".
  - Outdoorsman 11y ago
    MSN Chat...looked for that...didn't see it... Had many memorable chats at "philosophy and absurdity" and "poetry shack".... All gone....all gone...
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
LCDninja 11y ago
I'm also surprised that IRC & instant messengers weren't mentioned... the dot com boom had a wonderful moment where the concept of "presence" was introduced by instant messengers. AOL instant messenger, MSN Messenger, ICQ vs. Jabber etc. Fun times!

jerf 11y ago

Chat sure has come a long way, yes indeed. Why, once it was a console app, which all look the same, then it made the huge transition to GUI apps, which once you look past rounded corners and profession emoticons, essentially all look the same and have nearly the same features. And in the future, we are sure to witness a variety of additional chat networks with pretty much the same features. Yes, what a journey it has taken... from... console app to GUI app. What a journey indeed.

ryandrake 11y ago
The most ridiculous thing about all these chat apps is not that they all essentially do the same simple thing as each other (send text), but that they each managed to do it in a way that was incompatible with every other chat app. It's almost as if there was some omniscient God of Incompatibility out there pulling the strings.
- firasd 11y ago
  I think it's just the business model... whether ICQ in the 90s or Facebook Messenger today, there is no incentive for interoperability (especially if you're one of the bigger networks.)
- pjbrunet 11y ago
  I don't disagree, but here are some links https://www.trillian.im/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jabber
  - DanBC 11y ago
    Those links would have been clickable if you hadn't put four spaces in front of them.
  - digi_owl 11y ago
    Jabber yes, Trillian no. Trillian is basically the same as Pidgin, one client implementing multiple incompatible protocols. Jabber is the originator of XMPP. Insanely both Google and Facebook used XMPP for a while, but then turned off federation (allowing someone on Facebook to message someone on Google).

jsilence 11y ago

Not a single word about lacking interoperability and encryption? What a crappy article.

raddad 11y ago

Some stats on chats https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant_messaging https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant_messaging Have to scroll down about 4/5 of the way.

cpach 11y ago
Here's a more granular URL for convenience: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant_messaging#Statistics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant_messaging#Statistics :)

oxplot 11y ago

Ah, nostalgia. I used MSN Messenger religiously until I started college at which point had to switch to Linux (thank goodness). Lots of fond memories. At some point I figured that since MSN lists the online "buddies" in unicode order, putting a space at the start of one's display name puts them at the top of everyone's list! Also, it's interesting to see how people corrected their typos back in 80s, "Er, " instead of "*". I like the former better actually.

livatlantis 11y ago

Okay, I have to ask: it's been years since I came across someone else who'd heard of (nevermind used) Odigo[1]. Anyone remember that? It was one of the most beautiful applications I'd used, one that mixed magical fantasy with something purely functional. It got affective design a decade before the industry started started getting interested in it gave it a name. If I remember correctly, it even had a beautiful on-boarding experience with lush imagery and sound effects. As a kid, I got to meet people from all around the world, imagined their lives (you created an avatar but everything else was just information you chose to disclose, or not) -- it was just fantastic. And then it vanished. Anyone? 1: Some images to give you an idea of what it was like: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=odigo+messenger&ia=images&iax=1 https://duckduckgo.com/?q=odigo+messenger&ia=images&iax=1

alexvoda 11y ago
I did not remember the name but that picture sure brought back memories. I remember trying it out. Never actually used it though because of network effects. Everyone I knew was on Y! Messenger or as we used to call it mess.

ritonlajoie 11y ago

My first contact with internet was Microsoft Chat. I didn't know, at the time, it was an IRC client. But I was like 13, and at this time it was great fun see those comics take life on the screen and react accordingly to keywords ! Screenshot : http://www.mermeliz.com/files/summary/comic.jpg http://www.mermeliz.com/files/summary/comic.jpg

mrdrozdov 11y ago

Thought that it'd be interesting to compare the usage numbers of a few chat networks, since this article missed a few: IRC - 1 million users around "peak" in 2003 (I don't actually know if this was the peak, but couldn't find numbers prior to 2003) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Relay_Chat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Relay_Chat) RC usage has been declining since 2003, losing 60% of its users (from 1 million to about 400,000 in 2014) and half of its channels (from half a million in 2003). Slack - 1 million users as of last year (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slack_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slack_(software)) In 2015, Slack passed more than a million daily active users. Kik - 240 million users as of last year (http://arstechnica.com/business/2016/02/the-fall-and-rise-and-rise-and-rise-of-chat-networks/ http://arstechnica.com/business/2016/02/the-fall-and-rise-an...) With an updated figure of 240 million users... WeChat - 570 million users as of last year (http://arstechnica.com/business/2016/02/the-fall-and-rise-and-rise-and-rise-of-chat-networks/ http://arstechnica.com/business/2016/02/the-fall-and-rise-an...) As of September 2015 there are now more than 570 million people on WeChat’s network...

niftich 11y ago

I got curious and researched the history of IM, the decline of the old networks, and the rise of the new. Anecdotally, I got into college (in the US) right as Facebook and Gmail opened up to everyone, and my peer group created a "professional presence" of Facebook and Gmail for our college lives, slowly leaving our myspace/AIM/WLM lives with the crazy hair and skinny jeans behind. My experience was not unique; this phenomenon has been researched by others [1][2][3][4]. Soon, Facebook and Google introduced chat, and nearly everyone I wanted to talk to was on one or both of those networks. During my research, I was surprised to learn that AIM was in fact present at the iOS appstore's launch, but I suppose there wasn't much overlap between a typical AIM user and a typical iOS user at the time. I also found an infographic from 2014 that charts some of these dates and compares the active user counts of the IM networks over the years [5]. Here's a chronological timeline of selected milestones in the IM/social space: 2005-09 - Meebo launches offering web access to AIM, WLM, Yahoo 2006-02-07 - Google Talk integration inside Gmail goes live 2006-03 - Nielsen/Netratings survey for active users: AIM 53M, WLM 27M, Yahoo 22M 2006-07-12 - seamless interop starts between Windows Live Messenger and Yahoo Messenger 2006-09 - Facebook opens up to everyone (not just colleges) 2007-07-07 - Gmail opens up to everyone (not just invite-only) 2007-05-09 - Windows Live Messenger released for Xbox 360 (with dashboard update) 2007-12-06 - Google Talk gets limited AIM interop 2008-04 - Facebook chat goes live 2008-04-19 - Facebook overtakes Myspace in Alexa ranking 2008-07-11 - iOS App Store launches, AIM for iOS released 2008-08-26 - Facebook hits 100 million active users 2008-09-23 - Android 1.0 launches 2008-11-11 - Google Talk introduces voice and video calling 2008-12-22 - Meebo integrates with Facebook chat and Myspace IM 2009-03-31 - Skype released for iOS, Skype network has 42 million active users 2009-04-08 - Facebook hits 200 million active users 2009-06 - iOS gets push notifications 2009-09-15 - Facebook hits 300 million active users 2009-11 - WhatsApp released for iOS 2010-01 - WhatsApp released for BlackBerry 2010-02-05 - Facebook hits 400 million active users 2010-05 - WhatsApp released for Symbian 2010-05-20 - Android gets push notifications 2010-06-21 - FaceTime released with iOS 4 2010-06-21 - Windows Live Messenger released for iOS 2010-07-21 - Facebook hits 500 million active users 2010-08 - WhatsApp released for Android 2010-09-30 - Windows Live Messenger starts interop with Facebook Chat 2010-10 - Kik released 2010-12-02 - Viber released for iOS 2011-01-05 - Facebook hits 600 million active users 2011-01 - WeChat released 2011-01 - Skype for iOS introduces video calling 2011-04 - Facebook introduces voice calling 2011-05 - Viber released for Android 2011-05-30 - Facebook hits 700 million active users 2011-06 - LINE released 2011-07 - Facebook introduces video calling 2011-07 - Snapchat released for iOS 2011-09-22 - Facebook hits 800 million active users 2011-10-12 - iMessage released with iOS 5 2011-10-13 - Microsoft finishes acquiring Skype 2012-04-24 - Facebook hits 900 million active users 2012-07-11 - Meebo is acquired by Google and shut down 2012-10-29 - Snapchat released for Android While it's tempting to accuse AIM, MSN, and Yahoo for being incompetent and not catching up to the "mobile era", they in fact did pursue this market as much as they were able. In truth, early iOS and Android were inferior platforms for a chat app. Push notifications were absent, data rates were expensive, and the average smartphone user at this time was not very likely to use those networks anyway. Based on this info, I reason that it was truly Facebook that killed incumbent IM networks, at least in the US. Between the release of the iOS App Store and the introduction of push notifications for Android, Facebook grew by more than 300 million active users. This coincided with exodus of users from Myspace to Facebook; many of those users likely having used AIM, MSN, or Yahoo messenger in the past, now found themselves in a much larger network that also offered chat. Since Facebook largely subsumed everyone a person knew in real life, these users only had to go back to the old IM networks to chat with people they didn't know in real life, setting the stage for the weakening of connections and these networks' decline. By 2010, Facebook, or at least awareness of it, was mainstream. At the end of 2008, the Webster's New World Dictionary named "overshare" as the word of the year [6], while in 2009, the New Oxford American Dictionary chose "unfriend" [7]. For people new to the IM landscape, the old networks were dying and full of "old people" now in their 20s and 30s, so new networks surfacing around this time were appealing. This contributed to the grown of Kik and Snapchat, while people for cheaper alternatives to texting and voice calls drove the adoption of Viber, WhatsApp, and Skype. iMessage went live in late 2011, offering with FaceTime a built-in rich chat on iOS, successfully capturing an audience that would've surely gotten a third-party app otherwise. Later, Hangouts on Android emulated this strategy. Skype is a remarkable special case. Microsoft managed to squander the popularity of MSN/WLM with its confusing product strategy, then it acquired a VOIP product that targeted a different customer base. Not content with running the two products separately, they deprecated WLM and encouraged everyone to migrate to Skype, which didn't happen. Later, they leveraged Skype as the built-in IM for their OS, while still committed to keeping it cross-platform. It could very well be a trojan-horse into the Microsoft ecosystem, but it's essentially entirely separate, completely unlike Google Hangouts. So now we're living in a time when smartphones come with IM out of the box, nearly every social network is gaining IM functionality (Instagram, Twitter, Tumblr, etc.), and the new wave of circa-2011 chat apps are diversifying into social networks (Snapchat) or platforms themselves (Kik, Viber, WeChat, LINE). You actively use more than product capable of IM, but rarely by choice and mostly by acclimation. Ironically, this situation benefits platforms the more closed they are, an intuition that's made clear by complete decline of interoperability between platforms in the past. IM is ubiquitious, leaving old "IM only" networks owned by corporations who can't figure out what they're doing (AOL, Yahoo) utterly irrelevant. Sources: [1] 2012 http://socialtext.dukejournals.org/content/30/2_111/99.full.pdf http://socialtext.dukejournals.org/content/30/2_111/99.full.... [2] 2011-06-22 http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/magazine/content/11_27/b4235053917570.htm http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/magazine/content/11_27/b42350539... [3] 2007-07-11 http://www.nbcnews.com/id/19717700/ http://www.nbcnews.com/id/19717700/ [4] 2009-03-16 http://www.newsfactor.com/news/Facebook-Traffic-More-Than-Doubles/story.xhtml?story_id=10000BCLMR0W&full_skip=1 http://www.newsfactor.com/news/Facebook-Traffic-More-Than-Do... [5] 2014-10-22 http://www.whoishostingthis.com/blog/2014/10/22/instant-messengers/ http://www.whoishostingthis.com/blog/2014/10/22/instant-mess... [6] 2008-12-01 https://wordoftheyear.wordpress.com/tag/websters-new-world/ https://wordoftheyear.wordpress.com/tag/websters-new-world/ [7] 2009-11-16 http://blog.oup.com/2009/11/unfriend/ http://blog.oup.com/2009/11/unfriend/