The fall and rise and rise of chat networks | Hacker News Reader

The fall and rise and rise of chat networks

arstechnica.com

86 pointsdineshp276 comments

Did it feel very weird to anyone else that some of the most important chat protocols ever to have existed were not even mentioned once in the article, in favor of various startup apps that many people have never even heard of?

Any history of chat networks needs to include BBSes, IRC, ICQ, and Google Talk (now Hangouts).

I skimmed it, didn't see IRC or ICQ and didn't read the rest. Just another filler article from Ars Tech...

ICQ get a mention in passing, but the story seems to begin with MSN Messenger.

Not surprised, as i think MS was quite aggressive in pushing it. After all, the early version came bundled with Windows XP, iirc. And you were greeted with a signup/login dialog on first boot.

This is not that different from how MS pushed IE back in the day, or grabbed the office network out from under Novell's nose back in the day.

And btw, i feel to some degree MSN Messenger ruined the net. Before then there was thriving local IRC channels for the smallest of places. But come MSNM people started exchanging contact info for it, and the net turned "clique-y".

MSN Chat...looked for that...didn't see it...

Had many memorable chats at "philosophy and absurdity" and "poetry shack"....

All gone....all gone...

I'm also surprised that IRC & instant messengers weren't mentioned... the dot com boom had a wonderful moment where the concept of "presence" was introduced by instant messengers. AOL instant messenger, MSN Messenger, ICQ vs. Jabber etc. Fun times!

I had almost forgotten that I had written (and sold) a fairly popular chat system for BBS's back in the day. I google'd "Multi-User Teleconference" and to my surprise it popped up on some sites listing old BBS warez. Downloaded, read the docs and order form; so cool. I can see how it would be easy for someone not familiar with the BBS scene to ignore chat. I was there and almost forgotten.

And XMPP.

Chat sure has come a long way, yes indeed. Why, once it was a console app, which all look the same, then it made the huge transition to GUI apps, which once you look past rounded corners and profession emoticons, essentially all look the same and have nearly the same features. And in the future, we are sure to witness a variety of additional chat networks with pretty much the same features.

Yes, what a journey it has taken... from... console app to GUI app. What a journey indeed.

The most ridiculous thing about all these chat apps is not that they all essentially do the same simple thing as each other (send text), but that they each managed to do it in a way that was incompatible with every other chat app. It's almost as if there was some omniscient God of Incompatibility out there pulling the strings.

I think it's just the business model... whether ICQ in the 90s or Facebook Messenger today, there is no incentive for interoperability (especially if you're one of the bigger networks.)

I don't disagree, but here are some links

    https://www.trillian.im/ 
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jabber

Those links would have been clickable if you hadn't put four spaces in front of them.

Jabber yes, Trillian no.

Trillian is basically the same as Pidgin, one client implementing multiple incompatible protocols.

Jabber is the originator of XMPP.

Insanely both Google and Facebook used XMPP for a while, but then turned off federation (allowing someone on Facebook to message someone on Google).

I connect to slack via IRC gateway through irssi and screen on my VPS. I can connect to it anywhere from any device, and I always have scrollback, history, and logging.

And, for some of us, back into a console app. :~)

Or, for others, into their favourite text editor :).

Genuine question, how do you use your text editor to chat?

As 'maus42 guessed, I IRC from Emacs. I used to chat with the built-in IRC client called ERC[0], but then I switched to leaving a Weechat session running on a VPS under `screen', and I use weechat.el[1] to connect to it from Emacs. As for IMs, there's jabber.el[2], which I used from time to time to talk over Facebook messenger and (pre-Hangouts) Google Talk.

Overall, it's surprisingly convenient to talk from your text editor. The context switch is much smaller, not to mention having available all the convenient text editing shortcuts and features you're used to.

[0] - https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/ERC

[1] - https://github.com/the-kenny/weechat.el/

[2] - https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/JabberEl

I think one can IRC from Emacs?

There probably exists a IRC plugin for Vim, too.

Thanks for the helpful response temporal, although I'm not sure if my productivity this afternoon is going to go up or down at finding out this new information. ;-)

In modern chat apps like FB Messenger or WeChat, you can hail a taxi, send money, send your current location, send a variety of stickers/gifs, send disappearing messages, send pixellated messages you have to pay to unpixelate (only in WeChat as far as I know), among other things.

Regardless of what you think of these features, modern chat apps are certainly very different from IRC.

Are all those actions considered "chat" features?

I am probably old fashioned, but I prefer separation of services. If a taxi driver was on IRC, sure, I could "hail" him. I could post my current GPS location to anyone I please. Gifs & vid (links) are just as easily shared.

Yeah, I understand integration, but... I curmudgeonly fight it. I hope I am being Unix-like by striving for separation of services, but I am probably just being stubborn. :(

I tried to ward off this exact sort of comment with the line "regardless of what you think of these features". I don't feel like getting into a debate about whether the millions of non-tech teenagers using chat apps should care about The UNIX Philosophy (TM). I just wanted to point out that, rightly or wrongly, they're very different now, contrary to popular HN belief.

>I hope I am being Unix-like ... but I am probably just being stubborn. :(

I am going to use this in future.

I remember writing a generic chat bot that took in commands and did arbitrary things with it circa 1998, and I was already following decades-old prior art.

I bet if we could magic up a list of all the things you could do from IRC in, say, 2000, by using the right chat bot, you'd be less impressed by hailing a taxi.

The rest of what you mention is just service-specific frippery. All the services have had frippery here and there. None of them are particularly important to text moving around, in the end.

I think the point that people are trying (but often failing) to make is that, in this "era" of chat, rather than there being global user-agnostic bots (e.g. Cleverbot) or bots you have to set up and run on some server yourself (e.g. a personal channel dice roller), bots are now also available as a thing you can consume through the service—in the same way that "addons" (third-party services) can be consumed through Heroku, or "service subscriptions" like Netflix can be consumed through a TV box. It's the discoverability and consumption-model of the functionality that's novel, rather than the functionality itself.

The novel model also sits at the intersection of "interesting enough to third-parties to incentivize them to create lots of these integrations", and "usable by non-technical people", allowing anyone to "have a bot" for anything they need without all the logistical implications that idea had previously.

you never heard of irc bots?

Yes of course I have. How easy it is to do something and how integrated it is with the app matters. Otherwise all chat apps are the same as a combination of telephone and postal mail.

... and from smilies, to emoticons to emojis.

I find it very odd how chat apps (AIM, MSN, etc.) died and gave rise to.....chat apps (WhatsApp, WeChat, FBM). I'm still not sure what caused the mass migration.

A number of other responses are suggesting that the explanation is all about the switch to mobile. I'd argue it was less about the platform transition itself and more that people misjudged what behavior that transition would enable. People generally thought the future was voice and video and text was of the past. Few people thought that one of the smartpjone's most powerful features would be a semi-decent typing experience.

When I think back to 2008, sure, geeks used irc, but for most people the thought of typing messages in a chat room seemed hopelessly anachronistic. It wasn't something you do on your fancy new iPhone. Siri, released in 2011, seems driven in part by this perspective, and a vision that the future will be voice-based.

The fact that a lot of people actually prefer texting kinda took the tech industry by surprise. People thought the more advanced technology that more accurately reproduced a conversation with another person would dominate. It turns out that the more psychologically comfortable technogy won, which I think is often the case.

Of course, there are a lot of other reasons why apps like WhatsApp and WeChat have succeeded in developing markets that more driven by local infrastructure and economics.

The fact that a lot of people actually prefer texting kinda took the tech industry by surprise.

And not for the first time, either. SMS was originally just a kind of afterthought, and the original GSM phone UIs de-emphasised it strongly (eg. hidden away several levels deep within menus, and some early Nokias I remember couldn't even send SMS at all - only receive!). The industry was entirely unprepared for how it took off.

I think it was mobile - I remember having a Nexus One and trying to get chat to work on my phone. Nothing really existed.

The best option was Meebo which allowed you to sign into AIM and a few others, but push notifications were terrible and you often got logged out for no reason.

People wanted chat on phones and FB, WhatsApp and WeChat filled that gap.

> I think it was mobile. Nothing really existed.

But it would have been so easy to extend AIM and MSN Messenger to the mobile realm and carry along their hundreds of millions of users. If they had mounted even a half-assed attempt at a trivial cost to their overall budgets they would have been unstoppable due to the network effect. The only way they could have failed is if they didn't try a mobile version at all -- that's the part I find so surprising.

I think it was in part technical.

Those networks were built when you were either online or offline.

but with the phones you were kinda both.

Note that the likes of Whatsapp only really happened after Apple introduced their push notification service. Thus allowing apps to behave comparably with SMS.

Before that you basically had to keep the data connection going 24/7 for the likes of AIM to make sense on mobile.

I haven't thought about this in a long time, but Google also successfully wooed a lot of AIM users around the mid-2000s by integrating AIM sign-in into Google Talk.

You could talk to your old AIM friends right from your Gmail tab, and your new friends probably had your Gmail address anyway, so you'd gradually stop giving out your AIM info at all...

None of those former chat companies (or parent companies) were mobile-focused at the time. Yeah, Microsoft had Windows CE, but they (like all other competitors) were unable to predict the monsters that iOS and Android would become and how much phones would change because of their ability to run big-feature 3rd-party software.

So you have all these companies who don't expect phones to become powerful functional computers, seeing they have only crappy operating systems. Why would you make chat platforms for those crappy operating systems, especially when nobody saw any reason why SMS would die? Mobile bandwidth sucked too. Finally, in the case of Microsoft, if you're playing catchup, why make it for another platform instead of your own? You have to remember this is WAY before Microsoft changed its stripes and did things like release MS Office on iOS.

In hindsight, it's all so obvious. I don't know many people who thought it was obvious at the time; yes, some people thought about it, but none of them did anything about it. I think a perfect storm of factors, including better mobile networks, better phone hardware, and new phone operating systems all collided to take everyone who was PC-centric by surprise.

Frankly both MS and Nokia was doing things with WCE/Mobile/Phone and Symbian that people are raving about doing today with iOS and Android.

For example, i recall a video from a Symbian convention where Nokia was showing off a phone. It was hooked up to a TV, and had a keyboard and mouse paired. You could navigate the phone UI as if it was a computer, but also operate it as a phone at the same time.

This was at a time when Android could barely do video out, and that would black out the built in screen for the duration.

Similarly, MS were looking into selling WCE PDAs as cheap computers for the rural poor at one point. This by proving a way to hook up inputs and an analog video out (NTSC/PAL) so they could use an available TV as screen.

Frankly to this day i am flabbergasted that iPhone got the attention it got. At launch there was no app store etc. The nearest thing you had to apps were special web sites that could leave a button in the phone's launcher. And they didn't even get a special instance of the browser, firing up one would clobber whatever you were browsing at the time.

Instead the Jobs sales pitch was visual voice mail, anyone remember that one?

I must really applaud whoever it was that managed to talk Jobs into not going sue happy on the jailbreakers, and instead co-opt their burgeoning apps ecosystem as Apple's own.

I anticipated it the moment I saw a Sony Ericsson P800i, a little over a decade ago. That one was a smartphone running Windows Mobile (not yet called smartphones back then).

I saw a lot if this coming; GPS with location sharing, high speed mobile Internet, chat, video, handheld computers with full touchscreens, apps with custom advanced interfaces adapted for their own set of features. But back then I was teenager without the focus and motivation to learn programming, etc, so unfortunately I'm not much better off today for having spotted that trend early... If I had a time machine, I would have taken that time learning programming when I first thought about if I should or not (I guess I failed to anticipate the commercialization of it all!). On the other hand I've always been an early adopter with broad knowledge about everything technical, which is better than nothing.

Actually the P800 ran Symbian, using a UI called UIQ.

And they were very much called smartphones back then. Hell, the media pundits had to contort the definition of the term massively so that the iPhone could fit for the first year or so.

MSN messenger did have a mobile version. It was in the early days before Facebook messenger existed but it didn't work well because there was no way to do push notifications at the time. They killed it, but in my opinion they should have stayed course and pushed it through.

None of the big chat networks (AIM, MSN) invested in converting to mobile for some reason. Either they were incapable or they bet on something else.

>But it would have been so easy to extend AIM and MSN Messenger to the mobile realm and carry along their hundreds of millions of users.

It was easy but no one did it. The only mobile device that did chat really well was the Sidekick. I owned one just because you could AIM/MSN on the go. However, (SMS) texting was so much easier and ubiquitous. For me, it went AIM -> SMS -> iMessage.

In any case, by the time smartphones became mainstream enough where to have a chat experience that was something other than $PROTOCOL wrapped on top of SMS, the majority had already moved onto SMS.

That's the problem with incumbents, they are often slow to react to change and are so wrapped up in their own worldview that they can't see when a massive change is coming/has already occurred.

I used AIM big time on my T-Mobile sidekick. It's something Danger did very well.

Given that the sidekick/hiptop was heavily reliant on servers (frankly the phone was dumb as a brick if the Danger servers were down), likely what they did was run a proxy of sorts that handled the actual AIM connection.

You could have something similar on IRC by running a bouncer on a shell account somewhere, and aiming your client at it rather than the IRC servers.

The bouncer would then stay connected as long as the shell server was running, and log any activity on the channels.

Offline delivery? WhatsApp seems to do offline delivery.

c.f. https://www.quora.com/Suppose-I-sent-a-text-on-WhatsApp-to-m...

Desktop to mobile

With slack it's it's reflection of being based mostly on a web approach to things vs. the other more message protocol releated approaches.

Okay, I have to ask: it's been years since I came across someone else who'd heard of (nevermind used) Odigo[1]. Anyone remember that?

It was one of the most beautiful applications I'd used, one that mixed magical fantasy with something purely functional. It got affective design a decade before the industry started started getting interested in it gave it a name. If I remember correctly, it even had a beautiful on-boarding experience with lush imagery and sound effects. As a kid, I got to meet people from all around the world, imagined their lives (you created an avatar but everything else was just information you chose to disclose, or not) -- it was just fantastic.

And then it vanished.

Anyone?

1: Some images to give you an idea of what it was like: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=odigo+messenger&ia=images&iax=1

I did not remember the name but that picture sure brought back memories. I remember trying it out. Never actually used it though because of network effects. Everyone I knew was on Y! Messenger or as we used to call it mess.

I was just thinking about this. In 2010 (when many people were building GroupOn clones) I don't think people thinking about tech really saw this coming: that chat apps would not just be successful at such large scale but also subsume VOIP, ecommerce... Otherwise large companies would have valued and focused on their older chat apps like BlackBerry Messenger, MSN Messenger, AIM. Even actively used apps like Google Hangouts and Skype didn't really go aggressively after the user base now held by WhatsApp, WeChat, Facebook Messenger.

Blackberry's former co-CEO saw it coming. But he lost a battle to reposition the company in a way where he thought they could go for the opportunity. That being said, if he had won that battle, who knows whether or not he would have actually succeeded in his vision though.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/the-inside...

Relevant quote:

Inside RIM, the brash Mr. Balsillie had championed a bold strategy to re-establish the company’s place at the forefront of mobile communications. The plan was to push wireless carriers to adopt RIM’s popular BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) instant messaging service as a replacement for their short text messaging system (SMS) applications – no matter what kind of phone their customers used.

It was a novel plan. If RIM could get BBM onto hundreds of millions of non-BlackBerry phones, and charge fees for it, the company would have an enormous new source of profit, Mr. Balsillie believed. “It was a really big idea,” said an employee who was involved in the project.

> If RIM could get BBM onto hundreds of millions of non-BlackBerry phones, and charge fees for it,

Why would carriers want to get on board with it? Just take a look at heir resistance to free SMS replacement, now imagine they had to pay fees for it as well...

Interesting. Also telling because of how their deployment and revenue model was tightly coupled to carriers (old school thinking) v.s. being consumer-driven from app stores.

> I don't think people thinking about tech really saw this coming: that chat apps would not just be successful at such large scale but also subsume VOIP

Because they couldn't have predicted how badly Skype would botch the transition to mobile: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10927899

As for e-commerce, that's still controlled by Amazon, not any chatting apps (at least in the West).

Yeah I was thinking in terms of the future, especially if FB integrates digital wallets like WeChat. Not the Amazon-like shopping part necessarily, but payments, talking to customers, stuff like that.

Thought that it'd be interesting to compare the usage numbers of a few chat networks, since this article missed a few:

IRC - 1 million users around "peak" in 2003 (I don't actually know if this was the peak, but couldn't find numbers prior to 2003) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Relay_Chat)

  RC usage has been declining since 2003, losing 60% of its users (from 1 million to about 400,000 in 2014) and half of its channels (from half a million in 2003).

Slack - 1 million users as of last year (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slack_(software))

  In 2015, Slack passed more than a million daily active users.

Kik - 240 million users as of last year (http://arstechnica.com/business/2016/02/the-fall-and-rise-an...)

  With an updated figure of 240 million users...

WeChat - 570 million users as of last year (http://arstechnica.com/business/2016/02/the-fall-and-rise-an...)

  As of September 2015 there are now more than 570 million people on WeChat’s network...

Ah, nostalgia. I used MSN Messenger religiously until I started college at which point had to switch to Linux (thank goodness). Lots of fond memories. At some point I figured that since MSN lists the online "buddies" in unicode order, putting a space at the start of one's display name puts them at the top of everyone's list!

Also, it's interesting to see how people corrected their typos back in 80s, "Er, " instead of "*". I like the former better actually.

My first contact with internet was Microsoft Chat. I didn't know, at the time, it was an IRC client. But I was like 13, and at this time it was great fun see those comics take life on the screen and react accordingly to keywords !

Screenshot : http://www.mermeliz.com/files/summary/comic.jpg

Some stats on chats https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant_messaging

Have to scroll down about 4/5 of the way.

Here's a more granular URL for convenience: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant_messaging#Statistics :)

Most people I know use Skype for the same purpose that I used MSN Messenger for back in 2000. I think I pay $6 a month for a telephone number through Skype.

The idea of valuing a cell phone chat app at billions of dollars seems silly, because if the cell phone companies made text messages free there would be no reason for the chat apps to exist.

It's not true that there's no reason for the chat apps if texting is free. For me and all of my friends text messaging is practically free (there's no unit cost, and every plan we would want has no unit cost), but we use WhatsApp and WeChat just as much.

The last two are super convenient when you want to send pictures, video, and location and they have indicators to tell you if people are online or not and if they've seen your message or not.

They have reliable group messaging unlike iMessage which only works with half your friends and is therefore useless, and Hangouts which switches views so slowly the conversation has gone right by you.

Oh, and the cost thing just makes things worse because these chat apps work internationally seamlessly with all features. I can be in an airport in Thailand and just need to find a WiFi point and I could just as well be sitting in SFO waiting for my plane.

> we use WhatsApp and WeChat just as much.

> The last two are super convenient when you want to send pictures, video, and location and they have indicators to tell you if people are online or not and if they've seen your message or not.

I use wechat heavily. I haven't noticed presence indicators or message status at all. Presence indicators actually contradict the basic premise of a phone messaging app, which is that the other person is always online. Your phone moves with you.

Where might I find these purported features of wechat?

Whoops sorry. I switch between the two (WhatsApp and WeChat) for different groups. That's a WhatsApp feature and it's great (says "last seen at" or "Online").

> For me and all of my friends text messaging is practically free (there's no unit cost, and every plan we would want has no unit cost)

I'm guessing you and your friends all reside in the same country.

SMS/text messaging can get very expensive, quite quickly, if you're regularly communicating with people in different countries. Eighteen months ago convinced just four of my most "messaged" contacts in different countries to switch to a messaging app (Telegram in this case) and I estimate savings in the region of £50-£75 per month.

It would take more than that. SMS delivery delays can be long, MMS is quirky and unreliable, and support for group messaging is bolted on at best and varies widely between carriers and handsets. Mobile chat apps are popular not only because of price but because they offer better UI and more reliable infrastructure than texting.

I feel like these are solvable problems. Even if SMS isn't the right solution, it's clearly already technically possible to send text between phones in an efficient manner using the existing cell phone infrastructure.

I could see some low-ranking Google engineer pushing out an update to the default chat app on my $50 Android that allows it to either use SMS or a Google-operated HTTP endpoint, without realizing that he accidentally caused tens of billions of dollars in chat app valuations to evaporate overnight, since the default app is now good enough for most people.

Best i can tell, group MMS is something Apple drummed up that has no formal spec.

Anyways, the reason why these chat systems can be more reliable is that they do not have to deal with crossing network boundaries.

If you send and SMS or MMS, it may have to be handed between carrier networks.

With a Whatsapp message, stays within their server farm.

Well, obviously, if I send a whatsapp message over my cell data connection and someone else receives it over their data connection, the message had to be handed between carrier networks (with the internet intermediating). Why is being intermediated by Whatsapp different from being intermediated by AT&T directly?

SMS and MMS is handled in a store and forward fashion, much like email. So if the connection between carriers are down, or saturated, or a million other reasons, it will stall for the duration. And the delivery can only happen over carrier mobile networks.

Whatsapp on the other hand can deliver as long as there is some kind of net connection present (wifi, cell, even USB to a PC with ethernet may work in a pinch).

AT&T is a lossy network and Whatsapp is designed to operate well over a lossy network. MMS is not.

Why is this not a problem for AT&T-cell-to-AT&T-cell messages?

> because if the cell phone companies made text messages free there would be no reason for the chat apps to exist.

That's a very big "if". About two years ago I met someone new in my life and suddenly starting sending text messages (I usually hadn't). That month's phone bill was about ~150 euros, while it was usually ~50 euros. The following month the same happened. That's when I decided that I should install Whatsapp after all and not overpay for this ridiculous over-charges on simple text messages. For people like me apps like Whatsapp actually added financial value to our lives.

What I'm trying to say is that I don't see mobile phone companies making SMS messages free anytime soon, that's how they still milk lots of people out of their money.

Nope, SMS is incredibly bad. Maybe if someone made an IM app that could interoperate with normal email clients that might be the case.

I got curious and researched the history of IM, the decline of the old networks, and the rise of the new.

Anecdotally, I got into college (in the US) right as Facebook and Gmail opened up to everyone, and my peer group created a "professional presence" of Facebook and Gmail for our college lives, slowly leaving our myspace/AIM/WLM lives with the crazy hair and skinny jeans behind. My experience was not unique; this phenomenon has been researched by others [1][2][3][4]. Soon, Facebook and Google introduced chat, and nearly everyone I wanted to talk to was on one or both of those networks.

During my research, I was surprised to learn that AIM was in fact present at the iOS appstore's launch, but I suppose there wasn't much overlap between a typical AIM user and a typical iOS user at the time.

I also found an infographic from 2014 that charts some of these dates and compares the active user counts of the IM networks over the years [5].

Here's a chronological timeline of selected milestones in the IM/social space:

2005-09 - Meebo launches offering web access to AIM, WLM, Yahoo

2006-02-07 - Google Talk integration inside Gmail goes live

2006-03 - Nielsen/Netratings survey for active users: AIM 53M, WLM 27M, Yahoo 22M

2006-07-12 - seamless interop starts between Windows Live Messenger and Yahoo Messenger

2006-09 - Facebook opens up to everyone (not just colleges)

2007-07-07 - Gmail opens up to everyone (not just invite-only)

2007-05-09 - Windows Live Messenger released for Xbox 360 (with dashboard update)

2007-12-06 - Google Talk gets limited AIM interop

2008-04 - Facebook chat goes live

2008-04-19 - Facebook overtakes Myspace in Alexa ranking

2008-07-11 - iOS App Store launches, AIM for iOS released

2008-08-26 - Facebook hits 100 million active users

2008-09-23 - Android 1.0 launches

2008-11-11 - Google Talk introduces voice and video calling

2008-12-22 - Meebo integrates with Facebook chat and Myspace IM

2009-03-31 - Skype released for iOS, Skype network has 42 million active users

2009-04-08 - Facebook hits 200 million active users

2009-06 - iOS gets push notifications

2009-09-15 - Facebook hits 300 million active users

2009-11 - WhatsApp released for iOS

2010-01 - WhatsApp released for BlackBerry

2010-02-05 - Facebook hits 400 million active users

2010-05 - WhatsApp released for Symbian

2010-05-20 - Android gets push notifications

2010-06-21 - FaceTime released with iOS 4

2010-06-21 - Windows Live Messenger released for iOS

2010-07-21 - Facebook hits 500 million active users

2010-08 - WhatsApp released for Android

2010-09-30 - Windows Live Messenger starts interop with Facebook Chat

2010-10 - Kik released

2010-12-02 - Viber released for iOS

2011-01-05 - Facebook hits 600 million active users

2011-01 - WeChat released

2011-01 - Skype for iOS introduces video calling

2011-04 - Facebook introduces voice calling

2011-05 - Viber released for Android

2011-05-30 - Facebook hits 700 million active users

2011-06 - LINE released

2011-07 - Facebook introduces video calling

2011-07 - Snapchat released for iOS

2011-09-22 - Facebook hits 800 million active users

2011-10-12 - iMessage released with iOS 5

2011-10-13 - Microsoft finishes acquiring Skype

2012-04-24 - Facebook hits 900 million active users

2012-07-11 - Meebo is acquired by Google and shut down

2012-10-29 - Snapchat released for Android

While it's tempting to accuse AIM, MSN, and Yahoo for being incompetent and not catching up to the "mobile era", they in fact did pursue this market as much as they were able. In truth, early iOS and Android were inferior platforms for a chat app. Push notifications were absent, data rates were expensive, and the average smartphone user at this time was not very likely to use those networks anyway.

Based on this info, I reason that it was truly Facebook that killed incumbent IM networks, at least in the US. Between the release of the iOS App Store and the introduction of push notifications for Android, Facebook grew by more than 300 million active users. This coincided with exodus of users from Myspace to Facebook; many of those users likely having used AIM, MSN, or Yahoo messenger in the past, now found themselves in a much larger network that also offered chat. Since Facebook largely subsumed everyone a person knew in real life, these users only had to go back to the old IM networks to chat with people they didn't know in real life, setting the stage for the weakening of connections and these networks' decline.

By 2010, Facebook, or at least awareness of it, was mainstream. At the end of 2008, the Webster's New World Dictionary named "overshare" as the word of the year [6], while in 2009, the New Oxford American Dictionary chose "unfriend" [7]. For people new to the IM landscape, the old networks were dying and full of "old people" now in their 20s and 30s, so new networks surfacing around this time were appealing. This contributed to the grown of Kik and Snapchat, while people for cheaper alternatives to texting and voice calls drove the adoption of Viber, WhatsApp, and Skype. iMessage went live in late 2011, offering with FaceTime a built-in rich chat on iOS, successfully capturing an audience that would've surely gotten a third-party app otherwise. Later, Hangouts on Android emulated this strategy.

Skype is a remarkable special case. Microsoft managed to squander the popularity of MSN/WLM with its confusing product strategy, then it acquired a VOIP product that targeted a different customer base. Not content with running the two products separately, they deprecated WLM and encouraged everyone to migrate to Skype, which didn't happen. Later, they leveraged Skype as the built-in IM for their OS, while still committed to keeping it cross-platform. It could very well be a trojan-horse into the Microsoft ecosystem, but it's essentially entirely separate, completely unlike Google Hangouts.

So now we're living in a time when smartphones come with IM out of the box, nearly every social network is gaining IM functionality (Instagram, Twitter, Tumblr, etc.), and the new wave of circa-2011 chat apps are diversifying into social networks (Snapchat) or platforms themselves (Kik, Viber, WeChat, LINE). You actively use more than product capable of IM, but rarely by choice and mostly by acclimation. Ironically, this situation benefits platforms the more closed they are, an intuition that's made clear by complete decline of interoperability between platforms in the past. IM is ubiquitious, leaving old "IM only" networks owned by corporations who can't figure out what they're doing (AOL, Yahoo) utterly irrelevant.

Sources:

[1] 2012 http://socialtext.dukejournals.org/content/30/2_111/99.full....

[2] 2011-06-22 http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/magazine/content/11_27/b42350539...

[3] 2007-07-11 http://www.nbcnews.com/id/19717700/

[4] 2009-03-16 http://www.newsfactor.com/news/Facebook-Traffic-More-Than-Do...

[5] 2014-10-22 http://www.whoishostingthis.com/blog/2014/10/22/instant-mess...

[6] 2008-12-01 https://wordoftheyear.wordpress.com/tag/websters-new-world/

[7] 2009-11-16 http://blog.oup.com/2009/11/unfriend/

Not a single word about lacking interoperability and encryption? What a crappy article.

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