AOL finally "won" that one by making a buffer exploit in their own client part of the required protocol. Later a court required them to allow messaging interop (as part of the Time Warner merger). They never implemented it.
My youth was in the late 90s and 2000s and I don’t know a single soul that used AOL, ICQ, or Yahoo. I imagine all of them must have been hoping for the reverse at that point, access to MSN.
Obviously just 1 anecdote but I just wanted to share that my experience and your experience were dramatically different.
IIRC AIM was popular in America and MSN was popular in Europe.
But indeed no one uses it for group chats. That's what WhatsApp is for.
I definitely look back on those as the "good old days" of chat.
Huh? Most people associating ICQ with the 90s is so strange to me. In Russia we used ICQ so much it pretty much became synonymous with the concept of instant messaging itself. That was in the late 00s. Skype was also prominent. Then everyone gradually switched to VKontakte, when they introduced instant messaging and group chats, and then Telegram. At no point did we even try to get into AIM, Yahoo, or MSN.
Fun fact about our ICQ use: almost no one used the crappy official client. For most people it was QIP or Miranda.
Unless you actually sign up you tend not to find anyone using it. But when you do, it all appears out of nowhere.
Same as when you buy a car and suddenly everyone has the same colour/model.
I used Y!M for NeoPets stuff when I was 14, and MSN for school but never ICQ or AIM.
Those time's were specially magical.
MSN was more of mid-00s thing. The 90s were all AOL though. I knew people who used ICQ (it was definitely more of a nerd thing) and Yahoo Messenger too.