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They did. It was called Trillian IM. Let you talk to people on many networks. Those networks started obfuscating where possible. The asymmetry of between revers
by nickpsecurity 10y ago
They did. It was called Trillian IM. Let you talk to people on many networks. Those networks started obfuscating where possible. The asymmetry of between reverse engineering and developing gave IM vendors an advantage. They collectively also had more developers. The result was lowest, common denominator experience with plenty breakage at times.
Most users voted against it by using competing offerings. Anyone doing this kind of thing needs a lot of labor. May be willing to operate at financial loss.
- pyre 10y agoI remember when AOL kept trying to lock 3rd-party clients out of their Oscar protocol (for AOL IM). They resorted to requesting random chunks of the official AOL IM binary to verify that it was an official client. To keep up with this, 3rd party clients would have to distribute AOL's client with theirs, and then AOL could sue them for unauthorized distribution.
- nickpsecurity 10y agoOh yeah, I forgot all about that! Thanks for reminder. It was both ingenious and really screwed up.