A Brief History of Chat Services [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

A Brief History of Chat Services [pdf]

cdn.sameroom.io

55 pointsTehnix25 comments

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What about Discord[0]? I believe it uses it's own protocol, however there are already many unofficial API clients.

IRC-esque text chat, with Mumble-esque voice chat, with the best UX I've seen yet in a chat program[1]

[0] https://discord.gg/

[1] https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/115226319603630086/11...

Edit: s/seen ever/seen yet/, discord link

I'm afraid it has nothing to do with Mumble, since it uses webrtc for voice calls

I meant from a purely feature perspective.

I don't know why we've not added Discord -- we've known about it for a long time. Will add!

Nice graph.

I found a small error, the entry about Microsoft Lync is wrong. It started as

Microsoft NetMeeting [1] & Windows Messenger [2] => Microsoft Office Communicator [3] => Microsoft Lync [3] => Microsoft Skype (Business) [3]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netmeeting

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Messenger

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Lync

Thanks for this! We will update the graph.

The graph is open source, btw, if you understand .ai (I don't): https://github.com/sameroom/history-of-chat

With the recent discussion of FastMail shutting down their XMPP chat server[0], I thought it'd be interesting to share the history of chat services that sameroom.io just sent out in an email.

Doing a ctrl-f/cmd-f for "XMPP" on the site only shows 6 matches, which says something about the lack of adoption of the standard. Not to imply causation through correlation, but it would indicate that the XMPP standard is lacking, seeing as everyone creates their own/uses another standard instead.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10572597

A few years ago, I tried and tried and tried to create my own native GUI chat client for Google Chat that used XMPP. It was dang near impossible. I don't know if it was because I was a terrible programmer or because the protocol was way too complex or because good documentation was just not there, or maybe a little of all of them. Either way, I never finished that app.

It's not just you: XMPP sucks. Just another example of Worse is Better meme where market is all over what they should've avoided instead of simpler, efficient, and effective alternatives.

http://about.psyc.eu/XMPP

Note: Some info is probably dated by now but the issues will be clear. I'm guessing, but unsure, that fixing some probably added complexity to XMPP. That would reinforce other points that focus on that problem.

Have been using IRC happily for more than 20 years. Still works fine!

Besides IRC, I recall using chat interfaces that were created as features on top of an app with an entirely different purpose, but ended up being widely used for social chat anyway.

WestWood Chat - originally intended for organizing C&C: Red Alert multiplayer games

DC++ - filesharing

What about Excalibur/XYZ? That was a home-grown chat running on Dartmouth mainframe computers in the 80's/early 90's. We users of XYZ were considered degenerates by the campus community at large, until a MacOS GUI chat app gained widespread popularity. Does anyone remember what that was called? I think it came with Blitzmail, which was the home grown email GUI on MacOS.

Did not see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SILC_(protocol)

or chatsecure.org

or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tox_(protocol)

or matrix.org

Very nice work though and valuable for many reasons, thank you.

Can't appease everyone. What about Hotline? http://www.macworld.com/article/2031816/hotline-revisited.ht...

Nice. Will add.

What about BITNET Relay?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BITNET_Relay

Didn't know about it - thanks! Will add.

Not sure what the qualifications for "dead" are, but I know of several companies that still use Zulip, and it was recently open-sourced by Dropbox.

My understanding is Zulip can now be only self-hosted, correct? If that's the case, it's disqualified from our criteria (cloud-based services).

(Please correct me if I'm wrong and we'll fix the graph)

We decided to count big IRC networks as "cloud-based services", because basically that's what they are.

Don't see FireChat on here, any reason why?

FireChat seems to be an app, not a service. We only listed services, so things like Trillian, Pigin, etc were excluded.

We can see a trend since 2006, with the vast majority of the services implementing their own protocol.

Probably should add SMS from mid-80s to present. It's the biggest, after all.

CompuServe CB Simulator (1980)?

Minitel (1981)?

I'm on the fence if you should include the Telegraph (1844).

This is nice, but isn't SIP/Simple missing from there?

Isn't Lync based on SIP?

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