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Comment by grandpoobah | Hacker News Reader

All Google had to do was to keep improving on their original messaging software, Google Talk.

Similarly, Microsoft would likely be a dominant player in the chat space today if they hadn't rebranded and renamed MSN Messenger several times and then abandoned it altogether.

MSN Messenger was frickin awesome. You could draw pictures into the chat window. You could play a game of checkers while you chatted. It had a thriving ecosystem of apps and plugins. Everyone I knew used MSN Messenger... and then one day, Microsoft just said screw it, everyone can move to slow and clunky Skype... and that was the end of it.

Hell, ICQ might still be around if AOL had put more development resources into it.

The chat space is so bloody fragmented now, but it has nothing to do with Apple. Any one of the above mentioned companies could be killing it in this space if they hadn't pissed away what they had.

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It's been a persistent source of black comedy that basic messaging across almost every platform with even some encryption, mixed media, workable audio and some experimental video chat was like a solved problem in 2008 and seemed like it would be totally in the bag and then a complete dumpster fire again by about 2016.

Even people like me that hated MS and AOL had chat clients that could communicate with their networks and Google Talk/Hangouts and MSN Messenger were both great for what they were. At the time I felt like we had lost something important by moving to "push" networks versus e-mail but I'd take those days now in a heartbeat. Maybe by 2030, something like Matrix will have us back to what XMPP was doing and I'll be able to send a message to someone's shitty Teams from whatever Google's fifth chat replacement is by then.

It's even worse when I'm traveling in east Asia and there are like 5 different Korean and several Chinese chat networks in addition to WhatsApp trying to be the next LINE and becoming the one-stop access point for nearly everything. I'm honestly expecting to see a 7-11 integrated messaging network at some point.

We need a new Pidgin https://www.pidgin.im/ :(

There were a few brief wonderful years when I had AIM, FB Messenger, GChat, and a few lesser known protocols all in different tabs in the same window.

It's not like they all needed different interfaces; same data, different wire-noise...

I'd forgotten about that era of my life! I used Adium on OS X and had customized so much about it, down to the individual sounds played when certain friends (and crushes) came online. And I was able to essentially ignore what platform I was using to talk on: AIM friends and GChat friends appeared side-by-side. What a dream.

Trillian here for me! That shit was AWESOME. So much customization too of the UI.

I didnt realize I had trillian setup to log all my conversations to file and I found the logs recently when going through a very, very old harddrive. Middleschool me was cringey as fuck

Loved Adium.

Upsides: I no longer had to care what messenger my friends used, it was all the same to me. Extensible and theme-able which was just the way I liked my software at the time. Growl integration.

Downsides: I made the mistake of installing and using a FFVII-themed sound pack that invoked a Pavlovian response in me every time I heard certain sound effects from that game. Took the better part of a decade after I stopped using Adium to shake that off.

For whatever reason enterprise was slow to adopt messaging. I think a lot of this floundering about by Microsoft was an attempt to get wide scale enterprise adoption of a messaging protocol, and make money off of it.

For cross service integration I recommend mattermost, too. It has plugins and a simple enough API you can use anything with almost anything else, even if you don't want to use mattermost clients.

I believe it's fragmented by country too.

Despite living in the US, I actually don't know what's dominant here...is it iMessage? WhatsApp?

Korea is dominated by KakaoTalk. I believe Japan is Line. China I believe has their own walled garden app ecosystems (WeChat & co.?)

Judging from what all my European friends use, WhatsApp dominates at least the UK and Western Europe?

China has WeChat and QQ (though WeChat is way more popular). Both are basically mini OSes at this point, with apps and other third party functionality able to be built on top of them. I'm not Chinese, but use both of these apps to stay in touch with Chinese friends and family.

Yep, WhatsApp for normal people in Europe; Telegram or Signal for those suspicious of Facebook.

I kind of miss XMPP, which seemed like the answer at one point. As it is, I need about six messaging apps (WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Signal, Telegram, a Matrix client, Slack, and I'm probably forgetting one) plus SMS/iMessage to keep in touch with everyone.

Despite what HN seems to think, XMPP is still alive and evolving.

https://snikket.org/ is worth checking out as a (self-)hosted personal chat system.

So true, XMPP is fantastic. I also use it for SMS and signal (I wrote some simple bridges for Prosody). We use it for work too. It's great to have it on all my devices. Group chats (MUC) also work well. The modularity is where it really shines. Conversations on Android keeps a long running TCP session open, it works better than push based solutions and is just as light on battery somehow.

I mean, it still exists, but approximately no-one uses it. There was a time when you could talk to people on Google and Facebook's chat systems with it.

In the U.S and Canada the dominant chat app is facebook messenger.

WhatsApp seems to dominate in Europe and South America.

I’m surprised. The younger generations (including my own, and I’m closer to 40 than 20…) seem to have abandoned the main Facebook product en masse in favor of first Instagram and then others. Are people still using FB Messenger stand-alone even if not using Facebook itself?

I still use FB Messenger to keep in contact with a group of friends. I would love to use something else, but we were never able to agree on another platform to switch too... I barely use Facebook, don't have the app installed, and would probably stop using it completely if that group chat moved elsewhere.

I have FB Messenger, WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram and Discord on my phone...

WhatsApp has 2 billion MAU. It dominates everywhere.

Everywhere except for the US and China.

In Asia, it's a mixture of whatsapp, LINE (Japan/Thailand/Korea), Alichat, Wechat. Australia is a mixture of FB messenger and Whatsapp for families. Kids use different services depending on how old, snapchat, tiktok, instagram, discord (very much so for kids in the "fortnite years").

LINE and Ali/We chat are now more like platforms, for example, LINE has a wallet called LINE Pay that you can use in retail stores that grew out of selling virtual stickers for their chat client. They integrate to transit services and other things too.

LINE, despite being a Korean company (AFAIK) doesn't seem to have gotten traction in its home country as it has in Japan and elsewhere in Asia.

Kakao utterly dominates the market for messaging there (as it does amongst the international Korean diaspora). Even government services use it.

Also Viber that used to be the main contender of WhatsApp in Western Europe up until a couple of years ago. I believe it's still beating WhatsApp on market share in a couple of markets like Israel iirc.

WhatsApp dominates most of the world. Yes in Asia there are a few heavily used apps. Line. WeChat etc.

Even still most in Asia also use WhatsApp.

Source: me, I've lived on all continents

India is very much a WhatsApp country. You can even access government services on WhatsApp!.

Even Antarctica?

It's the one I've spent the least time at. Ok, that one I didn't live on, but I did visit.

I didn't use WhatsApp there. I had to SMS / tweet with my satellite device.

US bases won't let you put your phone on WiFi typically, with a few exceptions I dare not name in case USAP is reading this.

It's funny how Google Talk and MSN were so much popular but weren't able to successfully transition to mobile and capture that market. WhatsApp is number one messaging app in the world right now and probably will stay for some time.

What I like about whatsapp is that they don't do any bullshit. Unlike Viber, when they tried to pivot into some sort of social network for celebs and what not.

I used to think that, until I realised it's impossible (well difficult, and not officially supported) to export your messages from WhatsApp. That's pretty bullshit.

https://faq.whatsapp.com/android/chats/how-to-save-your-chat...:

“Depending on your settings, you can also periodically back up your WhatsApp chats to Google Drive”

“You can use the export chat feature to export a copy of the chat history from an individual or group chat.”

I haven’t checked the full backup, but exports of individual chats are easily readable (zip with a .txt of all texts in the chat and individual images, IIRC)

The full backup is unfortunately not accessible! I can’t think why they’ve done this, but it’s incredibly user hostile!

The individual exports work fine, but it’s very tedious to go through every conversation individually.

If you have an Android phone, you can extract the SQLite DB that contains all your WhatsApp messages. When I switched from Android to iOS I backed up my DB and still use it when I need to read an old conversation.

WhatsApp is very much a social network

Then SMS is too, right?

SMS is communication protocol; you can only send text messages or reply to text messages, nothing beyond that. No profiles, status updates, friends etc.

SMS cannot do group chats in any meaningful way.

So no, at least SMS is not a social network.

I don't like WhatsApp anymore but it was in its time my favourite social network. I had all my important groups there, used it exclusively to communicate with close friends and family.

It was the place were most images were shared and discussions were held and so on.

No. Hard to do group threads. Not encrypted end to end (but WhatsApp is owned by FB so moot point).

Even iMessage seems very much like a 1-1 messaging system.

They did try and tie into FB more in India with disastrous results, and had to backtrack hard

Because Facebook and Apple built closed networks that locked Talk (XMPP) out.

This is highly revisionist history: Google shut down XMPP after years of neglect, and they were still late to the party implementing things like video chat even within their proprietary network. There was one legitimate technical concern — XMPP complicates push notifications for mobile clients since you don't want to prevent power-saving by keeping a TCP socket active — but that didn't force them to neglect everything else, or to close out 3rd-party clients. Trying to build their own closed network did that.

> you don't want to prevent power-saving by keeping a TCP socket active

Slight aside: keeping a TCP connection consomes almost nothing. In fact, that's how push notifications work today on Android: a TCP connection is kept open, and apps' server send a ping to Google to tell the mobile to wake up.

What prevents power-saving is if every app keeps a different socket open to a different server and pings the servers on different schedules. That forces the mobile to wake up constantly.

Note that I said “active” — if you're getting things like presence updates, you'd want to filter them to allow the client to avoid keeping the radio active and that wasn't built in to XMPP. It's definitely not an excuse given Google's level of resources — they could have had a very optimized Google Talk client and published a spec for third-party clients to use the same notifications framework so I don't consider this more than a speed bump.

This is already implemented in modern XMPP clients like Conversations. See https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0352.html

That's why I don't think it was more than a fig leaf for Google's true reasons for closing up their chat network. That was during the period where they were axing anything trying out-Facebook Facebook and I wouldn't trust the stated rationale for any of those decisions.

It would be interesting to see whether Facebook/WhatsApp and iMessage have made them desperate enough to reverse course on XMPP but I'm skeptical that they'd be trusted enough to be successful.

In fact, Google already had a precursor to XEP-0352 called `google:queue`, but as I remember the stated reason for shutting down XMPP as being "spam"¹. Google apparently can't deal with spam in a federated communication system ...

¹ https://mail.jabber.org/pipermail/operators/2013-February/00... and then https://mail.jabber.org/pipermail/operators/2013-May/001680....

Yeah, it’s sad. I can get not peering with the world but it’s not like they couldn’t do something like an open CA-style agreement to follow certain standards as a condition to peering. If they’d done that, they’d be in a much better position to ask governments to require federation with an open protocol.

Facebook Chat supported XMPP initially.

Even AOL Instant Messenger was awesome! I used it for almost 20 years. AOL could've turned it into Slack back in the 2000's. I used to work for startups that used private AIM chat rooms for ops issues, deployments, etc.

I miss it, used it since middle school. My wife and I used AIM until it shut down as our primary means of messaging even. RIP sweet prince.

I guess you might be able to say that ICQ is still around? And one of the largest messaging platforms around, if not the largest?

Of course I'm talking about the QQ variant, which is probably so far from the original ICQ that I have no leg to stand on making the above claim. Still, a very interesting story to follow.

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

Acquired did a fantastic episode on Tencent (owner of QQ/WeChat)

https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/season-3-episode-10-tencent

And another far-from-original variant is still kicking, aptly named ‘ICQ’ [1]. AOL sold off its ICQ assets to Digital Sky Technologies (now Mail.ru) group [2] which continues to develop and invest in it to this day. From what I understand, like LiveJournal (acquired similarly by a Russian company Rambler [3], ICQ continues to have a sizable user base in Eastern Europe from what I gather.

[1] https://icq.com [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICQ [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiveJournal

It's a generic problem that there is something like AOL, ICQ, Paltalk, Skype, etc. that is pretty good. The company behind it lets it rot, and then there is WebEx or Facebook Messenger or Slack or Discord or Zoom which is good for a while but it will rot too...

Firms that make messaging products say they need to control the system for quality, innovation, spam control, etc. Yet, nobody questions that a Verizon customer can call a T-Mobile customer and vice versa. If all chat clients interoperated than there would be real competition to create the best client. As it is we have the pernicious pseudo-competition of two-sided markets where you install client X not because you want it or because it is good but because the person you want to talk to insists you install client X.

If the European Union wanted to make the internet better they should mandate that chat clients be interoperable the same way that telephone services are interoperable.

The conclusion I come to is that it is unsustainable to offer IM for free.

Perhaps some of the things like Slack that make money at the enterprise level can afford to keep free around and working well enough to function for longer.

One of the subtle problems with offering a traditional IM service is that there are some scaling aspects that are super-linear with the number of users. For instance, as the average number of users on your subscription list increases, more of them have status changes per unit time, and each of those status changes must also go out to more users on average. The scaling issues aren't necessarily a full O(n^2) but they're often larger than simply O(n log n). Even after a many-times-over drop in the price of computing power it's still pretty expensive to offer something like that for free.

If you look around, you can see how current solutions often work around that. For instance, Slack shards everyone simply by the nature of how it works, there isn't just a "Slack handle" that anyone can ping me at. We're not all in one big namespace. There's many fewer status updates it does, too, it's a lot more selective about what statuses you get.

Another solution is Matrix; with how cheap computing power is, if a few hundred people bring their own to the party it's no big deal anymore to run a server like that, and no one person necessarily has to bring the big bucks. But if one entity tried to run the whole network, they'd certainly notice the bill.

> For instance, Slack shards everyone simply by the nature of how it works, there isn't just a "Slack handle" that anyone can ping me at. We're not all in one big namespace.

For some reason, Slack got this right, and then Discord did it wrong anyway.

P2P could be a solution. Skype, cough.

Skype before Microsoft was great. It was simple and reliable.

Microsoft just kept making it slower, buggier, easier to eavesdrop on, and kept "refreshing" the UI over and over again until it became unbearable.

And now it seem Microsoft is pushing Teams instead of Skype. There are even two different Teams Apps in Windows 11, one for personal use, one for work.

That sounds like how there were two versions of MSN Messenger/Windows Messenger/Windows Live - one for 'personal' and the other for 'enterprise'. Cannot quite recall the exact differentiation now but I do recall many folks having problems with log-in credentials for one not working with the other about 20 years ago!

Same happened with Skype after it was bought by Microsoft, and I seem to recall this is relatively recent. There were (are?) two Skype clients - one for 'personal' (the original Skype) and another for 'enterprise' (rebranded Windows Live for Enterprise possibly?) and not compatible. Again, I recall trying to help confused Windows users figure out why the (incorrect) client wouldn't log-in with certain credentials.

Not a messenger, obviously, but they've done the same thing with OneDrive as well. This seems to be some kind of in-house Microsoft antipattern.

Not an anti-pattern. Keeping work and personal stuff intentionally separate is a good thing.

Thats because there were also two different Skypes - Skype for Business (which was Lync) and Skype. Two totally different platforms with different code. God knows why they named them the same.

Teams is supposed to completely replace Skype for Business

Buying Skype for billions and then killing MSN to force people on to it is easily the worst decision I can think of by consumer-oriented big tech company after 2005. If anyone involved in the decision still works at Microsoft they're doing something wrong. People make mistakes but this was one that has ended up costing tens of billions in value (possibly 100+) and that even a child could've told you was an awful idea - I was pretty young and I sure could've! Maybe the failure to make Windows phones big is a bigger failure but that's more of a failure to produce a good product than one decision. You could name Yahoo "not buying" Facebook/Google but deciding not to do something is more understandable than throwing away a golden egg.

The same company buying Nokia (world's largest mobile phone company for years) only to let it rot completely wasn't much better.

> Hell, ICQ might still be around if AOL had put more development resources into it.

What are you saying? ICQ is still around.

I don't know anyone who uses it anymore, do you? :D

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