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Comment by chankstein38 | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, what? I grew up (in the same era) using AIM and Yahoo, ICQ was a little before my prime. Everyone I talk to about those days used them as well. MSN was fine but AIM and Yahoo were where it was at for the bulk of my early years of instant messaging with friends. At one point a friend even made me an AIM account because I was using MSN and they wanted to chat with me but didn't want to do it through MSN.

Obviously just 1 anecdote but I just wanted to share that my experience and your experience were dramatically different.

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Like today, it was highly regional. The talk about Beeper Mini sounds ridiculous in the UK because literally nobody uses iMessage.

IIRC AIM was popular in America and MSN was popular in Europe.

Plenty of people implicitly (and likely unknowingly) use iMessage in the UK, because iPhones are quite popular here.

But indeed no one uses it for group chats. That's what WhatsApp is for.

Correct. Same with South America: everyone used MSN Messenger.

Perhaps it’s geographically correlated, I’m from The Netherlands, which would be West+Central Europe in terms of cultural zeitgeist. Would map neatly to the iMessage / WhatsApp divide too, if for different reasons.

Also from NL, was using ICQ at first then everyone switched to MSN. I do remember using AIM a little bit to chat with some Americans. This was the late 90's.

Back then the networks weren't so locked down to the clients, so it wasn't as big of an issue to have friends on various networks either. I have to call out IRC too.

I definitely look back on those as the "good old days" of chat.

Especially with software like Miranda IM or Trillian, you didn't have to care which network your friends were on, you just had the one client.

I definitely miss IRC too

> ICQ was a little before my prime

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.

Yeah honestly I wondered if my timeline was accurate when writing this. I just recall it being mentioned and people talking about ICQ numbers and never personally having one and thinking "Nah I've got AIM and Yahoo and MSN I'm good"

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