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.
The consumer really has been the loser now that Apple, Google, and Facebook have walled off their messengers.
Now it's just more trouble than it's worth.
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.
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.
...Guess who bought it and killed it? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meebo
> In June 2012, Google acquired Meebo to merge the company's staff with the Google+ developers team.
The web (http) and internet were conduits for information and communication. Now the pipe is a dumb channel each companies territory.
I miss pidgin where you had AIM, ICQ, IRC, Gtalk and whatever others. I also miss how companies are pushing their app instead of improving their mobile presence on the web.
More and more often these days you'll find at the bottom of a community info page a discord rather than an IRC channel. Even big pirating communities are making the switch.
It doesn't start out that way. First you have a lot of people pushing their favourite barrows. Then they set up IRC gateways. Then they bleed users to IRC. I've been to a few conferences that keep actual statistics of messages published, and it's always the same.
But it's well hidden. No one gives up pushing their barrow, so if you just listen to the conference gossip you would never know it's happening.
Bug or feature?
It’s the sort of random encounter / friendship that you could have in the pre-2005 internet and that’s much harder today.
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.
https://techcrunch.com/2010/04/28/aol-sells-instant-messagin...
Given that the A in AIM stands for America, I'd call that a pretty damn narrow definition of "everyone".
The A in AIM stands for AOL. The A in AOL stands for America.
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
> 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.”
> You’ve just had an encounter with False Authority Syndrome.
> Everything in this section is a spoof.... As for Mississippi’s doing away with teaching fractions and decimals in its school systems because kids find them too hard to master, that’s no more true than Kentucky’s imposing a licensing fee on uses of its name
(Sadly I can no longer edit the original otherwise I would add a Mea Culpa.)
Plus there’s always the VC around the corner hoping to fund the next Whatsapp, so we get a proliferation of me too-apps.
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.
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.
No going half-way into that ecosystem.
Facebook Messenger definitely does the best job. I believe it shows the delivery status of every single message.
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.
It's a miracle that the web works the way it does. So perhaps we need a consortium (like W3C) for messaging too?
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.
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.
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.