4 ms·
I'm amazed at people complaining about the fragmentation of IM clients and how it's going to kill instant messaging. IM has never been unified. In the mid-90s
by ig1 13y ago
I'm amazed at people complaining about the fragmentation of IM clients and how it's going to kill instant messaging.
IM has never been unified. In the mid-90s you had the war between AIM and ICQ, then came along the IM clients from MSN, Yahoo and Excite. That's what led to the rise of multi-protocol IM clients like Gaim, Jabber and IMVU and out of that rose XMPP (one of 5 major "cross-compatibilty" IM standards).
Then you had a new generation of IM wars as desktop clients died out and were replaced by browser chat like GTalk and Facebook Messenger. As the desktop IM clients died, Skype pretty much absorbed their desktop users into their voice chat platform.
But now web IM clients are being wiped out by a new generation of mobile IM apps like WhatsApp, Vibber, etc.
IM has never been unified, and given it's track record, I doubt that's going to change anytime soon.
- liotier 13y agoXMPP is standardized and works, right now.
- X-Istence 13y agoGtalk and Facebook messenger both used XMPP. XMPP is federated so it allowed many people to easily communicate. Even MSN messenger got on board: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/live/hh826554.aspx http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/live/hh826554.aspx AIM also has limited XMPP support (although that is just from a quick Google search, can't figure out if that is still the case). Either way more and more clients and chat protocols were beginning to converge onto a single standard, that allowed people to easily communicate across different "domains". That is now going away.
- ig1 13y agoMSN is dead, Microsoft migrated users over to Skype.
- clauretano 13y agoMicrosoft Lync has an XMPP gateway role as well. Unfortunately, Lync Online (Office 365) lacks this ability.