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Comment by jerf | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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?

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. ;-)

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

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

I am going to use this in future.

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.

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.

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.

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

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