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.

I miss those Pidgin days so much... Even Facebook was rocking XMPP for a while. Things were so simple back then.

I remember setting up Trillian (later Pidgin) and setting up a bunch of accounts just in case I had a use for them - not sure I ever used AIM/ICQ, but I _could_.

Now it's just more trouble than it's worth.

Franz is the modern day equivalent of Trillian/Pidgin.

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.

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.

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.

I was a big fan of Meebo, personally. Since it was a web app, you could sign in once on any computer and all of your chat clients were there.

...Guess who bought it and killed it? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meebo

For a while, imo was meebo's successor, but they saw the writing on the wall for third party interoperability after Skype cut them off for the nth time and decided to focus on their own walled garden chat and Twitter service instead :(

the answer is... Google

> In June 2012, Google acquired Meebo to merge the company's staff with the Google+ developers team.

Yes, it was really good. It pretty much Just Worked(tm), had a good UI for a web app, and was relatively lightweight (I remember using it even at crappy airport computers).

It used libpurple to connect to the chat networks -- same as Pidgin :)

Yeah I really liked Meebo too

You might be forgetting that AIM would change their settings randomly for a few years to prevent unofficial clients from working.

Yeah but I doubt most Windows users use Pidgin. What happened back then ICQ, MSN and AIM dominated at different time and geographically, even though they co-existed since the 90s. Now, not so much.

I used Trillian back then on Windows.

Same. Messengers used to just work, now we have a bunch of walked off shit with no intercommunication. "Are you on Slack / Discord / Skype / Telegram?" question is getting pretty annoying.

I used Pidgin on Windows for years. Ah, the good old days...

This is the sad part about today. We lost user centricity with the dawn of mobile apps.

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.

It also had a tiny footprint.