Even people like me that hated MS and AOL had chat clients that could communicate with their networks and Google Talk/Hangouts and MSN Messenger were both great for what they were. At the time I felt like we had lost something important by moving to "push" networks versus e-mail but I'd take those days now in a heartbeat. Maybe by 2030, something like Matrix will have us back to what XMPP was doing and I'll be able to send a message to someone's shitty Teams from whatever Google's fifth chat replacement is by then.
It's even worse when I'm traveling in east Asia and there are like 5 different Korean and several Chinese chat networks in addition to WhatsApp trying to be the next LINE and becoming the one-stop access point for nearly everything. I'm honestly expecting to see a 7-11 integrated messaging network at some point.
There were a few brief wonderful years when I had AIM, FB Messenger, GChat, and a few lesser known protocols all in different tabs in the same window.
It's not like they all needed different interfaces; same data, different wire-noise...
I didnt realize I had trillian setup to log all my conversations to file and I found the logs recently when going through a very, very old harddrive. Middleschool me was cringey as fuck
Upsides: I no longer had to care what messenger my friends used, it was all the same to me. Extensible and theme-able which was just the way I liked my software at the time. Growl integration.
Downsides: I made the mistake of installing and using a FFVII-themed sound pack that invoked a Pavlovian response in me every time I heard certain sound effects from that game. Took the better part of a decade after I stopped using Adium to shake that off.
Despite living in the US, I actually don't know what's dominant here...is it iMessage? WhatsApp?
Korea is dominated by KakaoTalk. I believe Japan is Line. China I believe has their own walled garden app ecosystems (WeChat & co.?)
Judging from what all my European friends use, WhatsApp dominates at least the UK and Western Europe?
I kind of miss XMPP, which seemed like the answer at one point. As it is, I need about six messaging apps (WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Signal, Telegram, a Matrix client, Slack, and I'm probably forgetting one) plus SMS/iMessage to keep in touch with everyone.
https://snikket.org/ is worth checking out as a (self-)hosted personal chat system.
WhatsApp seems to dominate in Europe and South America.
I have FB Messenger, WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram and Discord on my phone...
LINE and Ali/We chat are now more like platforms, for example, LINE has a wallet called LINE Pay that you can use in retail stores that grew out of selling virtual stickers for their chat client. They integrate to transit services and other things too.
Kakao utterly dominates the market for messaging there (as it does amongst the international Korean diaspora). Even government services use it.
Even still most in Asia also use WhatsApp.
Source: me, I've lived on all continents
I didn't use WhatsApp there. I had to SMS / tweet with my satellite device.
“Depending on your settings, you can also periodically back up your WhatsApp chats to Google Drive”
“You can use the export chat feature to export a copy of the chat history from an individual or group chat.”
I haven’t checked the full backup, but exports of individual chats are easily readable (zip with a .txt of all texts in the chat and individual images, IIRC)
The individual exports work fine, but it’s very tedious to go through every conversation individually.
So no, at least SMS is not a social network.
I don't like WhatsApp anymore but it was in its time my favourite social network. I had all my important groups there, used it exclusively to communicate with close friends and family.
It was the place were most images were shared and discussions were held and so on.
Even iMessage seems very much like a 1-1 messaging system.
Slight aside: keeping a TCP connection consomes almost nothing. In fact, that's how push notifications work today on Android: a TCP connection is kept open, and apps' server send a ping to Google to tell the mobile to wake up.
What prevents power-saving is if every app keeps a different socket open to a different server and pings the servers on different schedules. That forces the mobile to wake up constantly.
It would be interesting to see whether Facebook/WhatsApp and iMessage have made them desperate enough to reverse course on XMPP but I'm skeptical that they'd be trusted enough to be successful.
¹ https://mail.jabber.org/pipermail/operators/2013-February/00... and then https://mail.jabber.org/pipermail/operators/2013-May/001680....
Of course I'm talking about the QQ variant, which is probably so far from the original ICQ that I have no leg to stand on making the above claim. Still, a very interesting story to follow.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tencent_QQ
Acquired did a fantastic episode on Tencent (owner of QQ/WeChat)
https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/season-3-episode-10-tencent
[1] https://icq.com [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICQ [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiveJournal
Firms that make messaging products say they need to control the system for quality, innovation, spam control, etc. Yet, nobody questions that a Verizon customer can call a T-Mobile customer and vice versa. If all chat clients interoperated than there would be real competition to create the best client. As it is we have the pernicious pseudo-competition of two-sided markets where you install client X not because you want it or because it is good but because the person you want to talk to insists you install client X.
If the European Union wanted to make the internet better they should mandate that chat clients be interoperable the same way that telephone services are interoperable.
Perhaps some of the things like Slack that make money at the enterprise level can afford to keep free around and working well enough to function for longer.
One of the subtle problems with offering a traditional IM service is that there are some scaling aspects that are super-linear with the number of users. For instance, as the average number of users on your subscription list increases, more of them have status changes per unit time, and each of those status changes must also go out to more users on average. The scaling issues aren't necessarily a full O(n^2) but they're often larger than simply O(n log n). Even after a many-times-over drop in the price of computing power it's still pretty expensive to offer something like that for free.
If you look around, you can see how current solutions often work around that. For instance, Slack shards everyone simply by the nature of how it works, there isn't just a "Slack handle" that anyone can ping me at. We're not all in one big namespace. There's many fewer status updates it does, too, it's a lot more selective about what statuses you get.
Another solution is Matrix; with how cheap computing power is, if a few hundred people bring their own to the party it's no big deal anymore to run a server like that, and no one person necessarily has to bring the big bucks. But if one entity tried to run the whole network, they'd certainly notice the bill.
For some reason, Slack got this right, and then Discord did it wrong anyway.
Microsoft just kept making it slower, buggier, easier to eavesdrop on, and kept "refreshing" the UI over and over again until it became unbearable.
Same happened with Skype after it was bought by Microsoft, and I seem to recall this is relatively recent. There were (are?) two Skype clients - one for 'personal' (the original Skype) and another for 'enterprise' (rebranded Windows Live for Enterprise possibly?) and not compatible. Again, I recall trying to help confused Windows users figure out why the (incorrect) client wouldn't log-in with certain credentials.
Teams is supposed to completely replace Skype for Business
What are you saying? ICQ is still around.
Similarly, Microsoft would likely be a dominant player in the chat space today if they hadn't rebranded and renamed MSN Messenger several times and then abandoned it altogether.
MSN Messenger was frickin awesome. You could draw pictures into the chat window. You could play a game of checkers while you chatted. It had a thriving ecosystem of apps and plugins. Everyone I knew used MSN Messenger... and then one day, Microsoft just said screw it, everyone can move to slow and clunky Skype... and that was the end of it.
Hell, ICQ might still be around if AOL had put more development resources into it.
The chat space is so bloody fragmented now, but it has nothing to do with Apple. Any one of the above mentioned companies could be killing it in this space if they hadn't pissed away what they had.