It was the late 90s, social media platforms like Facebook didn't yet exist, texting was in its infancy, email was very popular, instant messaging was up for...
The bottom of the article links to the history (individual features) of other IM programs from that era as well like ICQ and Yahoo Messenger.
The advent of social media and mobile devices couldn't be ignored either. These technologies were enabling new ways for people to stay in touch with friends and family that didn't involve a traditional computer.
From my ignorant point of view Microsoft had in its very own hands a solid competitor to Facebook but ended doing absolutely nothing with it.
I still can recall the MSN/Hotmail profiles - it was kind of a news feed that recorded all your statuses from MSN (or you could add your own there). Your contacts could add comments on those. I seem to recall at some point you could add posts with pictures too.
But all of that just disappeared when they ditched MSN.
They could've beat Facebook in its own game easily, as they had the advantage of their huge userbase - but somehow they missed on that too.
Anyone remember the short-lived Great War of the Messenger Apps? For a few months back around... '98? '99? MSN tried really hard to shoehorn its way into working with AIM. About every day there would be an update from MSM Messenger to allow it to work with AIM. Then AOL would fuck with their own protocol to ice out MSN users again.
I think these shenanigans also impacted the Trillium Messenger app too, which up until then had been flying under the radar of messenger interoperability.
And then Jabber came to fix it by introducing an open protocol, and Google started supporting it, and all was well. But when everybody was using Google Chat they severed the Jabber compatibility, locking everyone in to their platform. Now we're back wading around in enshittified shit and Jabber is dead.
Support matrix!! It already has international support, just needs to be a bit better with stickers and qol stuff. I've been using it for years. It's nice to know I don't have to worry about my privacy at all with chat rooms that can continue on without the original server.
I wouldn't say jabber is dead, xmpp is still pretty well used. Not enough IMO, but still in use and with readily available modern servers. Jitsi is xmpp+jingle (sip signalling) after all.
People blame Google for the death of jabber because of one blog post from a disgruntled contributor but the truth is jabber was never popular and Google chat died as well.
Jabber was a mess, most of the clients were barely compatible with Each other and it was a wild west of feature support. Some clients were well featured with the ability to send richer messages, but typically only worked with a specific server and the same clients. Jabber did a crap job at making sure clients and servers interacted properly with each other and didn't push the standards quickly enough, forcing clients to do their own thing.
Which is all Google did, they went their own way because nobody used jabber and the interoperability was causing more harm than good. It didn't work, Google talk died and many years later clients like WhatsApp took over instead.
I used that until they pay walled it. Then I found Pidgen I believe it was called. It was open source and could connect to pretty much every messenger and IRC and stuff. Then my friend just switched to texting lol
I think the article mentions it. AOL tried to block it and this to and fro went 21 times before finally coming to a stop. MSN and Yahoo later signed a deal, I think, so that the former will work with latter's contacts properly.
I might have been 10 minutes too young for ICQ. I think that's what the college kids were playing with when I was in high school. For my cohort it was the big three: MSN, Yahoo! and AIM. You probably had all three installed on your computer and probably all running at once. They're probably why my entire generation can touch type. Vital tool for teenage social life at the turn of the century.
This was Microsoft's era, too. The main reason Apple survived the 90's was because Microsoft invested in them to counter anti-trust allegations. They paid Apple to keep existing so they couldn't be called a monopoly. Internet Explorer was the web browser, any others in use were a rounding error. No one had a Mac, a few people were still clinging to their Amigas. THE platform for personal/home computing and internet access was a Pentium PC with Windows ME or XP, which came with MSN Messenger out of the box.
Two things happened nearly simultaneously: Facebook Messenger and the iPhone. Graduating high school in 2005, your freshman year of college you probably started hearing about the cool new site that's kinda like MySpace except it's only for college kids. By your junior year all your new college friends were on Facebook and all your old high school friends that never logged on let alone talk to you were on MSN. And if you graduated in 2005, your junior year was in 2007, the year the iPhone was launched. MSN Messenger had been present as baked in "functions" of certain media phones at the time, but I don't think they ever made it to the App Store or even the Play Store on Android. Facebook was fast to adopt mobile apps, and for awhile there it was the one messenger service that interoperated between desktop on a web browser and smart phones across platforms. SMS didn't run on the desktop, iMessage is Apple-only, AIM, MSN and Yahoo were nowhere to be found and Telegram, Signal, Discord etc. weren't around yet. So everyone standardized on Facebook Messenger.
I think that’s what the college kids were playing with when I was in high school.
Started college in 1995, and I indeed did have ICQ before too long. Still remember my number (6725571).
You probably had all three installed on your computer and probably all running at once.
I remember using a program called Trillian (which is still around!) in the late 90s/early 00s. It allowed you to connect multiple IM accounts in one app. It was sorta finicky, but it got the job done.
Microsoft Teams is sorta like the all grown up version of MSN, with the colour drained from it and “fun” features out of the box feeling dead on the inside
I think once SMS and phone apps became the norm over having Messenger apps on our Desktops all the time, that was pretty much it for these applications over all. It was a long, slow death. But MSN was one of the firsts to call it quits if I recall right. Oddly the IM app I liked the most. It's just not many of my friends used it. They were all AIM/AOL users.
The one thing these messengers had over texts was presence notifications. I remember jumping through hoops to get aim working on my Motorola v188 so that I could be notified every time my crush came online and I could send her a “hey what’s going on”… only for it to be ignored.
I think this is another one of those cases where the US does something different to the rest of the world: the majority of people were using msn messenger but the US was using aim.
AIM was released in 1997, MSN in 1999. AIM was at the time the biggest ISP in the United States, so AIM was pretty uniquely marketed to us.
It was my observation that you had two main camps: Those whose home was AIM, and those whose home was MSN. And the deciding factor was probably if you used AOL as your ISP. There were people who didn't know you could get an AIM account if you weren't an AOL customer. Those who didn't use AOL probably went the same way others did around the world, MSN messenger was built into Windows so it was the obvious one to use.
WhatsApp (& mobile internet in general) replaced it for me. It's no longer a requirement for both my friends and myself to be at our computers at the same time to talk shit to each other.