Hacker News Reader

Comment by sourcecodeplz | Hacker News Reader

ICQ was nice but everyone moved on to Yahoo Messenger. That was the bomb. Truly unbelievable Yahoo didn't capitalize on that. Everyone used it.

View on HN

I don't think everyone did. Maybe it's local to your circle of contacts. From what I remember yahoo barely made a dent here in Australia.

It was absolutely based on location.

after ICQ, from what I remember AOL Messenger was the dominant force in the US, MSN was very popular in many countries, but across Asia, Middle East, and many Eastern European countries, Yahoo Messenger was the de facto standard.

Not dissimilar to the situation we have today with WhatsApp and WeChat and iMessage. Except back then you could use pidgin or trillian as multi protocol clients which solved the issue. Somehow, we have regressed so much in this area in the last 20 years.

The reason no one needs a multiprotocol client now is we all have instant, intuitive multiprotocol devices in our pocket at all times. That's what's changed in the last 20 years.

It was MSN messenger that came preinstalled with any new pc that slowly killed it, because a lot of people got their first computer in that period and thus only knew the Microsoft one. ICQ users slowly started to have a secondary MSN Messenger account (the days of Trillian) but that was it, once people have 2 messengers apps AND most of their friends are on the new one, they just slowly abandonned the one with less contacts.

I personnally didn't even knew there was a Yahoo issued Messenger until this comment.

Pretty sure everyone went to msn mainly because you could use any image as emoji. Then the nightmare of one emoji per letter begun

MSN Messenger was like AOL/Yahoo but in Europe.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com