7 ms·

Instant messaging is an example of something that used to work, and now doesn't. It used to be that everyone was basically on AIM, which functioned as an open e

Instant messaging is an example of something that used to work, and now doesn't. It used to be that everyone was basically on AIM, which functioned as an open enough network. Status information worked pretty well - you could fairly easily tell if someone was online, and so people could respond. And now - we have dozens of clients, such that there's no way of knowing which subset your contacts use. With the prevalence of phones, it's hard to tell if someone is available or not, so you just send messages in the ether, and get surprised if anyone responds. And the worst part is, there's no obvious fix, since any new system will just add to the fragmentation.

nikanj 9y ago
It’s really hard to build a billion dollar platform business from just staying out of the way, so apps layer on the complexity. Plus there’s always the VC around the corner hoping to fund the next Whatsapp, so we get a proliferation of me too-apps.
dmead 9y ago
So don't make new systems.. help dismantle old ones?
lobster_johnson 9y ago
I don't think that's accurate. There were a bunch of silos in the past, too. People used to be on AIM, MSN Messenger, ICQ, Jabber and IRC, and there were others. That's the reason chat apps like Adium and Trillian supporter multiple accounts. I had friends on all those networks, and nobody was on all of them. It was a mess back then, just as it is now, except now we have even more choices.
- CydeWeys 9y ago
  The difference was you'd fire up Pidgin and connect to all of those accounts simultaneously, at which point it really didn't matter which individual network any given contact was on. Now, in the smartphone era, there's nothing like that. There's a bunch of different completely siloed apps, and I can't talk to people all from one place.
  - slacka 9y ago
    Yes for over a decade I was able used Gaim/Pidgin as my one stop instant messenger. In the early days, I used it for MSN,AIM, and ICQ. And when Google Talk took off that worked too. Could even talk to my coworkers in China over the QQ network. And when I joined a company that used Skype, there was a plugin for that too. Life was good. The consumer really has been the loser now that Apple, Google, and Facebook have walled off their messengers.
    - kakarot 9y ago
      I miss those Pidgin days so much... Even Facebook was rocking XMPP for a while. Things were so simple back then.
    - thallium205 9y ago
      Franz is the modern day equivalent of Trillian/Pidgin.
      - TeMPOraL 9y ago
        Not really. That's just yet another instance of web browser, this time with chat-specific tab switching and - as I learned recently - a need to create yet another cloud account... In Pidgin, you actually had it all in one place, with the UX defined by Pidgin. That's another bad thing about current fragmentation. You have no way to unify the UX.
        Freak_NL 9y ago
        That's by design of course. The client side software is where the interfacing with the user happens, and if your business model is 'first become huge and indispensable, than figure out a way to monetize', you need absolute control over what the user sees and how they interact with your service.
        dTal 9y ago
        Let's not beat around the bush - if you "need absolute control over what the user sees" so that you can "figure out a way to monetize", then you have already decided that you are monetizing with ads. That is the only possible reason to maintain iron control over the user's eyeballs. This business practice of pushing the product unsustainably in order to drive out the competition was rightly condemned when WalMart did it. I don't see a similar public backlash in the tech sphere these days.
- craftyguy 9y ago
  I'm amused that IRC is the only one of those you listed that is still alive and doing well.
  - ekianjo 9y ago
    Openness and standards matter in the end.
    - craftyguy 9y ago
      I sure hope so!
  - freeflight 9y ago
    Afaik ICQ is still somewhat popular in eastern Europe.
    - thinkloop 9y ago
      I don't actually remember why ICQ died, it was the best then there was MSN Messenger for some reason...?
      - dvanduzer 9y ago
        AOL bought them. Slow burn.
        SyneRyder 9y ago
        ICQ is now owned by the Russian company behind Mail.RU. AOL sold it for $187.5 million, less than half what they paid for it: https://techcrunch.com/2010/04/28/aol-sells-instant-messaging-service-icq-to-dst-for-187-5-million/ https://techcrunch.com/2010/04/28/aol-sells-instant-messagin...
      - Al-Khwarizmi 9y ago
        I think the main reason is because Windows XP included a basic MSN Messenger client enabled by default in 2001. Indeed, ICQ was vastly superior. In fact, in my opinion, many of its features (such as the discovery features) have not been equalled since them. It was quite traumatic to me when it was replaced with MSN Messenger.
baddox 9y ago
Did presence ever really work though? I’ve been online since the late 90s and I don’t remember ever considering it reliable except perhaps for people on IRC who I knew had a transient internet connection (namely dialup). I’ve never really paid much attention to or trusted presence status, with the exception of statuses that are manually set (e.g. do not disturb in Slack and similar). It’s kind of funny, considering that presence is probably the most challenging technical requirement for large-scale messaging platforms. I will say that my two most-used messaging platforms, iMessage and Slack, both usually do a great job of delivering push notifications to only the ideal device (my phone, tablet, or computer). My intuition is that this logic is roughly the same as presence.
- ndespres 9y ago
  AIM handled presence quite well- custom "away" messages, easily editable "profiles" which were like a .plan file to include a note about where you were logged in, idle timers, icon to tell if an IM was forwarded to a cell phone. Finally while it lacked anything like Slack has to store your messages centrally and persistently, AIM would notify a user when you logged on to more than one location and allow remote logoff of your other sessions to ensure subsequent messages only went to your current session. I'm glad you've been blessed with whatever Apple Magic lets iMessage work across devices for you but between my iPad iPhone and MacBook all I can say is I follow up important messages with a phone call because it's one of the more unreliable and indecipherable systems I've never been able to figure out.
  - baddox 9y ago
    It’s interesting that your iMessage experience is much worse than mine. I’ve seen some weird behavior, but generally only on very spotty connections. Facebook Messenger definitely does the best job. I believe it shows the delivery status of every single message.
  - analogic 9y ago
    The best is when as an android user that has an iPad, texts sent to you from an iPhone will go to the iPad that gets opened maybe once a week and not to your phone. No going half-way into that ecosystem.
amelius 9y ago
> Instant messaging is an example of something that used to work, and now doesn't. It's a miracle that the web works the way it does. So perhaps we need a consortium (like W3C) for messaging too?
- drdaeman 9y ago
  Ugh. No. You need vendors having common interest banding together to standardize on some parts for everyone's profit (what WHATWG essentially was). Otherwise, no matter what the committee does, it's doomed to fail because there is no incentive to support them. And given that no one wants interop with their systems (except for some users, but who cares about them?), an interest group is unlikely to appear.
- zbentley 9y ago
  In the business space, there was a consortium of companies/contributors that got together to try to solve enterprise messaging (not IM/person-to-person messaging, but messaging computers/message buses/queues/etc.) That consortium created AMQP, which is a fucking abomination of a protocol. You can read through the spec and see the design-by-committee chimeric parts. I'm not convinced that it's a good approach, basically.
skrebbel 9y ago
> It used to be that everyone was basically on AIM, Given that the A in AIM stands for America, I'd call that a pretty damn narrow definition of "everyone".
- Semaphor 9y ago
  Yeah, pretty much no one here (Germany) used AIM, it was 80-90% ICQ and some using MSN.
  - jcelerier 9y ago
    As a french I spent countless hours chatting with my classmates on AIM when I was in junior high.
- abtinf 9y ago
  Pedantic nitpicking: The A in AIM stands for AOL. The A in AOL stands for America.
  - philwelch 9y ago
    The A in AOL used to stand for America, but now AOL doesn't stand for anything, much like the K in KFC used to stand for Kentucky.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - zimpenfish 9y ago
      > much like the K in KFC used to stand for Kentucky. It always did (they just weren't going to pay Kentucky for their fraudulent trademark) and still does - https://www.snopes.com/lost/kfc.asp https://www.snopes.com/lost/kfc.asp > In November 2006, KFC and the State of Kentucky finally reached an undisclosed settlement over the former’s use of the trademarked word “Kentucky,” and the restaurant chain announced it would be resuming its former name of “Kentucky Fried Chicken.”
Piskvorrr 9y ago
IIRC, AIM required you to have AOL as your ISP. Even where applicable (i.e. in USA), this was still inconvenient until they dropped this requirement sometime in 2000. Other, ISP-independent messengers existed before, but the pastoral idyll of "everyone at the same chat network" never existed in reality.
IshKebab 9y ago
Very US-centric view. In the UK everyone used MSN (well, people that actually used IM did) and now literally everyone uses WhatsApp. Even my technologically illiterate mum uses WhatsApp.
macspoofing 9y ago
>It used to be that everyone was basically on AIM That was never true. AIM was very popular in some places and had no foothold in others. In my area it was first ICQ and later MSN. Nobody, except one buddy from Seattle, used AIM.
tootie 9y ago
I also haven't seen any substantial innovation in chat for like 30 years. The main value prop hasn't changed since pre-internet days.

nikanj 9y ago

It’s really hard to build a billion dollar platform business from just staying out of the way, so apps layer on the complexity. Plus there’s always the VC around the corner hoping to fund the next Whatsapp, so we get a proliferation of me too-apps.

dmead 9y ago

So don't make new systems.. help dismantle old ones?

lobster_johnson 9y ago

I don't think that's accurate. There were a bunch of silos in the past, too. People used to be on AIM, MSN Messenger, ICQ, Jabber and IRC, and there were others. That's the reason chat apps like Adium and Trillian supporter multiple accounts. I had friends on all those networks, and nobody was on all of them. It was a mess back then, just as it is now, except now we have even more choices.

CydeWeys 9y ago
The difference was you'd fire up Pidgin and connect to all of those accounts simultaneously, at which point it really didn't matter which individual network any given contact was on. Now, in the smartphone era, there's nothing like that. There's a bunch of different completely siloed apps, and I can't talk to people all from one place.
- slacka 9y ago
  Yes for over a decade I was able used Gaim/Pidgin as my one stop instant messenger. In the early days, I used it for MSN,AIM, and ICQ. And when Google Talk took off that worked too. Could even talk to my coworkers in China over the QQ network. And when I joined a company that used Skype, there was a plugin for that too. Life was good. The consumer really has been the loser now that Apple, Google, and Facebook have walled off their messengers.
  - kakarot 9y ago
    I miss those Pidgin days so much... Even Facebook was rocking XMPP for a while. Things were so simple back then.
  - thallium205 9y ago
    Franz is the modern day equivalent of Trillian/Pidgin.
    - TeMPOraL 9y ago
      Not really. That's just yet another instance of web browser, this time with chat-specific tab switching and - as I learned recently - a need to create yet another cloud account... In Pidgin, you actually had it all in one place, with the UX defined by Pidgin. That's another bad thing about current fragmentation. You have no way to unify the UX.
      - Freak_NL 9y ago
        That's by design of course. The client side software is where the interfacing with the user happens, and if your business model is 'first become huge and indispensable, than figure out a way to monetize', you need absolute control over what the user sees and how they interact with your service.
        dTal 9y ago
        Let's not beat around the bush - if you "need absolute control over what the user sees" so that you can "figure out a way to monetize", then you have already decided that you are monetizing with ads. That is the only possible reason to maintain iron control over the user's eyeballs. This business practice of pushing the product unsustainably in order to drive out the competition was rightly condemned when WalMart did it. I don't see a similar public backlash in the tech sphere these days.
craftyguy 9y ago
I'm amused that IRC is the only one of those you listed that is still alive and doing well.
- ekianjo 9y ago
  Openness and standards matter in the end.
  - craftyguy 9y ago
    I sure hope so!
- freeflight 9y ago
  Afaik ICQ is still somewhat popular in eastern Europe.
  - thinkloop 9y ago
    I don't actually remember why ICQ died, it was the best then there was MSN Messenger for some reason...?
    - dvanduzer 9y ago
      AOL bought them. Slow burn.
      - SyneRyder 9y ago
        ICQ is now owned by the Russian company behind Mail.RU. AOL sold it for $187.5 million, less than half what they paid for it: https://techcrunch.com/2010/04/28/aol-sells-instant-messaging-service-icq-to-dst-for-187-5-million/ https://techcrunch.com/2010/04/28/aol-sells-instant-messagin...
    - Al-Khwarizmi 9y ago
      I think the main reason is because Windows XP included a basic MSN Messenger client enabled by default in 2001. Indeed, ICQ was vastly superior. In fact, in my opinion, many of its features (such as the discovery features) have not been equalled since them. It was quite traumatic to me when it was replaced with MSN Messenger.

baddox 9y ago

Did presence ever really work though? I’ve been online since the late 90s and I don’t remember ever considering it reliable except perhaps for people on IRC who I knew had a transient internet connection (namely dialup). I’ve never really paid much attention to or trusted presence status, with the exception of statuses that are manually set (e.g. do not disturb in Slack and similar). It’s kind of funny, considering that presence is probably the most challenging technical requirement for large-scale messaging platforms. I will say that my two most-used messaging platforms, iMessage and Slack, both usually do a great job of delivering push notifications to only the ideal device (my phone, tablet, or computer). My intuition is that this logic is roughly the same as presence.

ndespres 9y ago
AIM handled presence quite well- custom "away" messages, easily editable "profiles" which were like a .plan file to include a note about where you were logged in, idle timers, icon to tell if an IM was forwarded to a cell phone. Finally while it lacked anything like Slack has to store your messages centrally and persistently, AIM would notify a user when you logged on to more than one location and allow remote logoff of your other sessions to ensure subsequent messages only went to your current session. I'm glad you've been blessed with whatever Apple Magic lets iMessage work across devices for you but between my iPad iPhone and MacBook all I can say is I follow up important messages with a phone call because it's one of the more unreliable and indecipherable systems I've never been able to figure out.
- baddox 9y ago
  It’s interesting that your iMessage experience is much worse than mine. I’ve seen some weird behavior, but generally only on very spotty connections. Facebook Messenger definitely does the best job. I believe it shows the delivery status of every single message.
- analogic 9y ago
  The best is when as an android user that has an iPad, texts sent to you from an iPhone will go to the iPad that gets opened maybe once a week and not to your phone. No going half-way into that ecosystem.

amelius 9y ago

> Instant messaging is an example of something that used to work, and now doesn't. It's a miracle that the web works the way it does. So perhaps we need a consortium (like W3C) for messaging too?

drdaeman 9y ago
Ugh. No. You need vendors having common interest banding together to standardize on some parts for everyone's profit (what WHATWG essentially was). Otherwise, no matter what the committee does, it's doomed to fail because there is no incentive to support them. And given that no one wants interop with their systems (except for some users, but who cares about them?), an interest group is unlikely to appear.
zbentley 9y ago
In the business space, there was a consortium of companies/contributors that got together to try to solve enterprise messaging (not IM/person-to-person messaging, but messaging computers/message buses/queues/etc.) That consortium created AMQP, which is a fucking abomination of a protocol. You can read through the spec and see the design-by-committee chimeric parts. I'm not convinced that it's a good approach, basically.

skrebbel 9y ago

> It used to be that everyone was basically on AIM, Given that the A in AIM stands for America, I'd call that a pretty damn narrow definition of "everyone".

Semaphor 9y ago
Yeah, pretty much no one here (Germany) used AIM, it was 80-90% ICQ and some using MSN.
- jcelerier 9y ago
  As a french I spent countless hours chatting with my classmates on AIM when I was in junior high.
abtinf 9y ago
Pedantic nitpicking: The A in AIM stands for AOL. The A in AOL stands for America.
- philwelch 9y ago
  The A in AOL used to stand for America, but now AOL doesn't stand for anything, much like the K in KFC used to stand for Kentucky.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - zimpenfish 9y ago
    > much like the K in KFC used to stand for Kentucky. It always did (they just weren't going to pay Kentucky for their fraudulent trademark) and still does - https://www.snopes.com/lost/kfc.asp https://www.snopes.com/lost/kfc.asp > In November 2006, KFC and the State of Kentucky finally reached an undisclosed settlement over the former’s use of the trademarked word “Kentucky,” and the restaurant chain announced it would be resuming its former name of “Kentucky Fried Chicken.”

Piskvorrr 9y ago

IIRC, AIM required you to have AOL as your ISP. Even where applicable (i.e. in USA), this was still inconvenient until they dropped this requirement sometime in 2000. Other, ISP-independent messengers existed before, but the pastoral idyll of "everyone at the same chat network" never existed in reality.

IshKebab 9y ago

Very US-centric view. In the UK everyone used MSN (well, people that actually used IM did) and now literally everyone uses WhatsApp. Even my technologically illiterate mum uses WhatsApp.

macspoofing 9y ago

>It used to be that everyone was basically on AIM That was never true. AIM was very popular in some places and had no foothold in others. In my area it was first ICQ and later MSN. Nobody, except one buddy from Seattle, used AIM.

tootie 9y ago

I also haven't seen any substantial innovation in chat for like 30 years. The main value prop hasn't changed since pre-internet days.