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Comment by ghaff | Hacker News Reader

Interesting question. I'd speculate that IM in particular was unified enough around AOL and SMS. (And clients like Trillium did work across systems.) And with smartphone apps and notifications, having a single universal messaging client was less important.

Email was quite fractured at one time but it did become pretty interoperable when it went mainstream.

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AIM was not a unified IM system. For starters, they made it hard to sign up outside the US (the sign up form needed a valid zip code). As a result MSN was more popular in Western Europe, and I get the impression that ICQ took the lead in Eastern Europe.

(until Skype, Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp took over)

I can't comment on the situation in eastern-europe, but what essentially killed any chance of standardization here in west-europe was the dominance of MSN messenger that came bundled with Windows. Their embrace/extend/extinguish approach towards IRC didn't help either.

Msn messenger didn't become popular until XP shipped. At that point MS made it load on boot and nag you about signing up. And at that point ICQ had been around for years.

Apple's iChat was an AIM client, until they dropped it for iMessage and screwed the existing users.

(Am I seeing a pattern here?)

I don't think Apple so much as dropped support for AIM as much as AIM dropped support for its more-open OSCAR protocol -- the same thing that apps like Pidgin used to connect to AIM.

The trend is that the people running the IM services want control of the clients, and so they shut off outside access or create new services that never support open protocols (see also: Facebook Chat, Google Hangouts, Apple iMessage).

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