3 ms·
From a technical standpoint I don't see how there's much of a difference, given that devices are almost always connected to the Internet and almost all chat, me
by tshaddox 4y ago
From a technical standpoint I don't see how there's much of a difference, given that devices are almost always connected to the Internet and almost all chat, messaging, and email services people use have a third party server that persists a message regardless of the recipient's "presence" at the time the message is sent. These services have converged, apart from a few idiosyncrasies and perhaps some waning differences in the social expectations of a particular service.
- bee_rider 4y agoHuh. AIM wasn't able to do asynchronous, right? Maybe I'm showing my age, haha.
- tshaddox 4y agoAccording to my memory AIM didn't support that in the late 90s and early 2000s, and that was a key advantage of ICQ. But I mean in the last 15 years or so, corresponding roughly with the rise of ubiquitous smartphones (and foreshadowed by cell-connected PDAs and some feature phones).
- toast0 4y agoAIM added offline messages at some point, although I don't remember when. ICQ had it from the beginning (I think originally the client may have polled the server rather than running a persistent connection?, so the server had to store stuff a bit anyway; clients would do p2p messaging if both were online and could connect, otherwise would fall back to sending messages through the server)