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Comment by tabs_masterrace | Hacker News Reader

Remember when Instant Messaging protocols used to be open? When there was a multitude of clients for any given service to chose from?

Now IM has left its early adopter stage and became an integral part of everybody's life, but in doing so we became stuck with 100% proprietary WhatsApp. Not undeserved, it works very well with billions of users, and is probably the most usable IM service ever made.

But it became so big and "essential", that it doesn't seem right that a large part of human communication is bound exclusively through their apps.

I think in the long run there would be a real benefit to opening up their protocol.

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AOL did their best to lock everyone out of Oscar/AIM, such as requiring a checksum of (a random part of) the .exe -- and they were the WhatsApp-equivalent-800-lbs-gorilla of the time.

(And that's mostly why it didn't matter what anyone else did). In fact, the closest thing resembling an IM standard, XMPP, was chosen not on technical merit, but rather becase the IETF group set up to standardize was (essentially) sabotaged by the members each driving their own agenda -- and after 3 years with nothing to show, when the working group disbanded, Jabber -- which was mediocre, but actually had working servers and clients -- was adopted as a standard.

I was tangentially involved with that process at the time, it was a shitshow; I would guess that's common for many standardization processes, but to my young and naive eyes it looked almost unbelievable.

> Remember when Instant Messaging protocols used to be open? When there was a multitude of clients for any given service to chose from?

I remember the unofficial clients not being able to support the latest features, and being completely locked out as soon as a new major version of the mainline client being released.

When was that? I always remember them being reversed engineered.

I remember a short time after AIM, MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, ICQ, etc. had fallen out of favor and Google Chat used XMPP and I think even Facebook used it.

I never had any significant use of Google Chat or Hangouts among my circle of acquaintances.

Those that left ICQ and Yahoo moved into MSN messenger, followed by Skype.

And now there is an uniform distribution across Whatsapp, Skype and Viber.

However this is anecdote data.

I can't remember, because those times never existed. IRC was the only open one, before XMPP. The first one will stay forever.

All other protocols like ICQ, MSN, AIM were reversed so that you can use your Miranda/Trillian/XYZ, not what I would call "open".

Telegram protocol is open and the official clients are open source, unfortunately a lot of my contacts still use only WhatsApp, even if Telegram is superior in a lot of ways.

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