I wish for open and federated protocols to gain recognition and adoption up to a point where we could just move on with the drama, ah!
- privacy in general, with asynchronous e2ee with forward secrecy and minimization of metadata
- reactions. They might sound childish but they're a good way of acknowledging something without polluting the chat itself
- proper support of files, including easy display of all media and search
- probably the biggest: voice/video calls. "Some support" clearly wasn't good enough.
Now it's a really hard place for Pidgin to sit in, because it can only follow what the protocols do, not push them to do more or to standardize.
Meebo too, back in high school we'd play cat and mouse with Meebo Repeater, and a few other fun sites (an image board for our school, a really rough freeware proxy) with the IT guys. All run out of old pcs we had in our closests. Highlight was when they redirected the free url we were using to Barney.com
We've all said yes to those kinds of deals at least once. I once did a website for a company full-stack from setting up the backend to design and frontend JS for ~$600. I wasn't as experienced so I didn't value my work as much as I should have.
I had friends of MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, GTalk and for a very limited time ICQ (Actually it was the same guys on all networks :) ). There weren't any network effort, people were willing to try out different IMs for their uniqueness.
Lots of companies were trying to produce integrated chat clients - Pidgin, Meebo, Trillian, Digsby and a whole lot of guys on Mobile targeting Symbian OS (could recollect only Nimbuzz though.) I loved Digsby because it acted as a POP client too.
I even worked for a company that forked Ignite Realtime Spark and tried adding Gtalk and MSN support. When I was freelancing one guy asked me to clone meebo for $500 .. and I accepted :facepalm.