> What did email do right that chat did wrong? Afaik, there was once a good standard for chat. Email is old enough to be grandfathered in. SMTP dates back to 1

> What did email do right that chat did wrong? Afaik, there was once a good standard for chat. Email is old enough to be grandfathered in. SMTP dates back to 1982, long before the commercialization of the Internet. Chat doesn't have that history. It was first popularized by proprietary apps like AIM/ICQ, Yahoo!, and MSN. When Jabber/XMPP came along and created an open standard, it was a reaction to the proprietary apps, which all had significant mindshare. Facebook and Google were the only major players to adopt XMPP, and that was just temporary until they managed to get their proprietary solutions off the ground.