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After Meebo, and now this, as well as their dropped support for skype, and extreme pluralization of all IM / chat mediums, and dropping of most generally accessible protocols... the web really seems to be splitting into apps, and it's a sad frustrating reality.

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Currently, to talk to everyone I speak to regularly requires: Skype, Hangouts (multiple), IRC, AIM, WhatsApp, HipChat, Viber, Yahoo!, Facebook Chat...

Because I need 4x hangouts (1 per company I work with, contracting, my own business, personal, etc) and many of the other apps either won't work with other clients, or have crippled features or usefulness, I end up running 10 "chat" clients.

grumpy old man voice Back in my day, we used to be able to setup all our text based messaging in one pidgin client, or a bitlbee instance! Damned kids.

It's not as bad now, since most platforms these days insist on a push mechanism that is common to all the apps. You're stuck with different UIs, but the cost is still like running a single client. Even better, because now they cannot run continuously in the background.

To be fair Skype (MS) cut them off and without any warning. It wasn't their decision. That was actually one of the reasons they cited for doing this. Always at the mercy of external decision makers.

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