Did it feel very weird to anyone else that some of the most important chat protocols ever to have existed were not even mentioned once in the article, in favor of various startup apps that many people have never even heard of?
Any history of chat networks needs to include BBSes, IRC, ICQ, and Google Talk (now Hangouts).
I'm also surprised that IRC & instant messengers weren't mentioned... the dot com boom had a wonderful moment where the concept of "presence" was introduced by instant messengers. AOL instant messenger, MSN Messenger, ICQ vs. Jabber etc. Fun times!
I had almost forgotten that I had written (and sold) a fairly popular chat system for BBS's back in the day. I google'd "Multi-User Teleconference" and to my surprise it popped up on some sites listing old BBS warez. Downloaded, read the docs and order form; so cool. I can see how it would be easy for someone not familiar with the BBS scene to ignore chat. I was there and almost forgotten.
Chat sure has come a long way, yes indeed. Why, once it was a console app, which all look the same, then it made the huge transition to GUI apps, which once you look past rounded corners and profession emoticons, essentially all look the same and have nearly the same features. And in the future, we are sure to witness a variety of additional chat networks with pretty much the same features.
Yes, what a journey it has taken... from... console app to GUI app. What a journey indeed.
The most ridiculous thing about all these chat apps is not that they all essentially do the same simple thing as each other (send text), but that they each managed to do it in a way that was incompatible with every other chat app. It's almost as if there was some omniscient God of Incompatibility out there pulling the strings.
I connect to slack via IRC gateway through irssi and screen on my VPS. I can connect to it anywhere from any device, and I always have scrollback, history, and logging.
In modern chat apps like FB Messenger or WeChat, you can hail a taxi, send money, send your current location, send a variety of stickers/gifs, send disappearing messages, send pixellated messages you have to pay to unpixelate (only in WeChat as far as I know), among other things.
Regardless of what you think of these features, modern chat apps are certainly very different from IRC.
I find it very odd how chat apps (AIM, MSN, etc.) died and gave rise to.....chat apps (WhatsApp, WeChat, FBM). I'm still not sure what caused the mass migration.
A number of other responses are suggesting that the explanation is all about the switch to mobile. I'd argue it was less about the platform transition itself and more that people misjudged what behavior that transition would enable. People generally thought the future was voice and video and text was of the past. Few people thought that one of the smartpjone's most powerful features would be a semi-decent typing experience.
When I think back to 2008, sure, geeks used irc, but for most people the thought of typing messages in a chat room seemed hopelessly anachronistic. It wasn't something you do on your fancy new iPhone. Siri, released in 2011, seems driven in part by this perspective, and a vision that the future will be voice-based.
The fact that a lot of people actually prefer texting kinda took the tech industry by surprise. People thought the more advanced technology that more accurately reproduced a conversation with another person would dominate. It turns out that the more psychologically comfortable technogy won, which I think is often the case.
Of course, there are a lot of other reasons why apps like WhatsApp and WeChat have succeeded in developing markets that more driven by local infrastructure and economics.
I think it was mobile - I remember having a Nexus One and trying to get chat to work on my phone. Nothing really existed.
The best option was Meebo which allowed you to sign into AIM and a few others, but push notifications were terrible and you often got logged out for no reason.
People wanted chat on phones and FB, WhatsApp and WeChat filled that gap.
Okay, I have to ask: it's been years since I came across someone else who'd heard of (nevermind used) Odigo[1]. Anyone remember that?
It was one of the most beautiful applications I'd used, one that mixed magical fantasy with something purely functional. It got affective design a decade before the industry started started getting interested in it gave it a name. If I remember correctly, it even had a beautiful on-boarding experience with lush imagery and sound effects. As a kid, I got to meet people from all around the world, imagined their lives (you created an avatar but everything else was just information you chose to disclose, or not) -- it was just fantastic.
I did not remember the name but that picture sure brought back memories.
I remember trying it out. Never actually used it though because of network effects.
Everyone I knew was on Y! Messenger or as we used to call it mess.
I was just thinking about this. In 2010 (when many people were building GroupOn clones) I don't think people thinking about tech really saw this coming: that chat apps would not just be successful at such large scale but also subsume VOIP, ecommerce... Otherwise large companies would have valued and focused on their older chat apps like BlackBerry Messenger, MSN Messenger, AIM. Even actively used apps like Google Hangouts and Skype didn't really go aggressively after the user base now held by WhatsApp, WeChat, Facebook Messenger.
Blackberry's former co-CEO saw it coming. But he lost a battle to reposition the company in a way where he thought they could go for the opportunity. That being said, if he had won that battle, who knows whether or not he would have actually succeeded in his vision though.
Inside RIM, the brash Mr. Balsillie had championed a bold strategy to re-establish the company’s place at the forefront of mobile communications. The plan was to push wireless carriers to adopt RIM’s popular BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) instant messaging service as a replacement for their short text messaging system (SMS) applications – no matter what kind of phone their customers used.
It was a novel plan. If RIM could get BBM onto hundreds of millions of non-BlackBerry phones, and charge fees for it, the company would have an enormous new source of profit, Mr. Balsillie believed. “It was a really big idea,” said an employee who was involved in the project.
> I don't think people thinking about tech really saw this coming: that chat apps would not just be successful at such large scale but also subsume VOIP
RC usage has been declining since 2003, losing 60% of its users (from 1 million to about 400,000 in 2014) and half of its channels (from half a million in 2003).
Ah, nostalgia. I used MSN Messenger religiously until I started college at which point had to switch to Linux (thank goodness). Lots of fond memories. At some point I figured that since MSN lists the online "buddies" in unicode order, putting a space at the start of one's display name puts them at the top of everyone's list!
Also, it's interesting to see how people corrected their typos back in 80s, "Er, " instead of "*". I like the former better actually.
My first contact with internet was Microsoft Chat. I didn't know, at the time, it was an IRC client. But I was like 13, and at this time it was great fun see those comics take life on the screen and react accordingly to keywords !
Most people I know use Skype for the same purpose that I used MSN Messenger for back in 2000. I think I pay $6 a month for a telephone number through Skype.
The idea of valuing a cell phone chat app at billions of dollars seems silly, because if the cell phone companies made text messages free there would be no reason for the chat apps to exist.
It's not true that there's no reason for the chat apps if texting is free. For me and all of my friends text messaging is practically free (there's no unit cost, and every plan we would want has no unit cost), but we use WhatsApp and WeChat just as much.
The last two are super convenient when you want to send pictures, video, and location and they have indicators to tell you if people are online or not and if they've seen your message or not.
They have reliable group messaging unlike iMessage which only works with half your friends and is therefore useless, and Hangouts which switches views so slowly the conversation has gone right by you.
Oh, and the cost thing just makes things worse because these chat apps work internationally seamlessly with all features. I can be in an airport in Thailand and just need to find a WiFi point and I could just as well be sitting in SFO waiting for my plane.
It would take more than that. SMS delivery delays can be long, MMS is quirky and unreliable, and support for group messaging is bolted on at best and varies widely between carriers and handsets. Mobile chat apps are popular not only because of price but because they offer better UI and more reliable infrastructure than texting.
> because if the cell phone companies made text messages free there would be no reason for the chat apps to exist.
That's a very big "if". About two years ago I met someone new in my life and suddenly starting sending text messages (I usually hadn't). That month's phone bill was about ~150 euros, while it was usually ~50 euros. The following month the same happened. That's when I decided that I should install Whatsapp after all and not overpay for this ridiculous over-charges on simple text messages. For people like me apps like Whatsapp actually added financial value to our lives.
What I'm trying to say is that I don't see mobile phone companies making SMS messages free anytime soon, that's how they still milk lots of people out of their money.
I got curious and researched the history of IM, the decline of the old networks, and the rise of the new.
Anecdotally, I got into college (in the US) right as Facebook and Gmail opened up to everyone, and my peer group created a "professional presence" of Facebook and Gmail for our college lives, slowly leaving our myspace/AIM/WLM lives with the crazy hair and skinny jeans behind. My experience was not unique; this phenomenon has been researched by others [1][2][3][4]. Soon, Facebook and Google introduced chat, and nearly everyone I wanted to talk to was on one or both of those networks.
During my research, I was surprised to learn that AIM was in fact present at the iOS appstore's launch, but I suppose there wasn't much overlap between a typical AIM user and a typical iOS user at the time.
I also found an infographic from 2014 that charts some of these dates and compares the active user counts of the IM networks over the years [5].
Here's a chronological timeline of selected milestones in the IM/social space:
2005-09 - Meebo launches offering web access to AIM, WLM, Yahoo
2006-02-07 - Google Talk integration inside Gmail goes live
2006-03 - Nielsen/Netratings survey for active users: AIM 53M, WLM 27M, Yahoo 22M
2006-07-12 - seamless interop starts between Windows Live Messenger and Yahoo Messenger
2006-09 - Facebook opens up to everyone (not just colleges)
2007-07-07 - Gmail opens up to everyone (not just invite-only)
2007-05-09 - Windows Live Messenger released for Xbox 360 (with dashboard update)
2007-12-06 - Google Talk gets limited AIM interop
2008-04 - Facebook chat goes live
2008-04-19 - Facebook overtakes Myspace in Alexa ranking
2008-07-11 - iOS App Store launches, AIM for iOS released
2008-08-26 - Facebook hits 100 million active users
2008-09-23 - Android 1.0 launches
2008-11-11 - Google Talk introduces voice and video calling
2008-12-22 - Meebo integrates with Facebook chat and Myspace IM
2009-03-31 - Skype released for iOS, Skype network has 42 million active users
2009-04-08 - Facebook hits 200 million active users
2009-06 - iOS gets push notifications
2009-09-15 - Facebook hits 300 million active users
2009-11 - WhatsApp released for iOS
2010-01 - WhatsApp released for BlackBerry
2010-02-05 - Facebook hits 400 million active users
2010-05 - WhatsApp released for Symbian
2010-05-20 - Android gets push notifications
2010-06-21 - FaceTime released with iOS 4
2010-06-21 - Windows Live Messenger released for iOS
2010-07-21 - Facebook hits 500 million active users
2010-08 - WhatsApp released for Android
2010-09-30 - Windows Live Messenger starts interop with Facebook Chat
2010-10 - Kik released
2010-12-02 - Viber released for iOS
2011-01-05 - Facebook hits 600 million active users
2011-01 - WeChat released
2011-01 - Skype for iOS introduces video calling
2011-04 - Facebook introduces voice calling
2011-05 - Viber released for Android
2011-05-30 - Facebook hits 700 million active users
2011-06 - LINE released
2011-07 - Facebook introduces video calling
2011-07 - Snapchat released for iOS
2011-09-22 - Facebook hits 800 million active users
2011-10-12 - iMessage released with iOS 5
2011-10-13 - Microsoft finishes acquiring Skype
2012-04-24 - Facebook hits 900 million active users
2012-07-11 - Meebo is acquired by Google and shut down
2012-10-29 - Snapchat released for Android
While it's tempting to accuse AIM, MSN, and Yahoo for being incompetent and not catching up to the "mobile era", they in fact did pursue this market as much as they were able. In truth, early iOS and Android were inferior platforms for a chat app. Push notifications were absent, data rates were expensive, and the average smartphone user at this time was not very likely to use those networks anyway.
Based on this info, I reason that it was truly Facebook that killed incumbent IM networks, at least in the US. Between the release of the iOS App Store and the introduction of push notifications for Android, Facebook grew by more than 300 million active users. This coincided with exodus of users from Myspace to Facebook; many of those users likely having used AIM, MSN, or Yahoo messenger in the past, now found themselves in a much larger network that also offered chat. Since Facebook largely subsumed everyone a person knew in real life, these users only had to go back to the old IM networks to chat with people they didn't know in real life, setting the stage for the weakening of connections and these networks' decline.
By 2010, Facebook, or at least awareness of it, was mainstream. At the end of 2008, the Webster's New World Dictionary named "overshare" as the word of the year [6], while in 2009, the New Oxford American Dictionary chose "unfriend" [7]. For people new to the IM landscape, the old networks were dying and full of "old people" now in their 20s and 30s, so new networks surfacing around this time were appealing. This contributed to the grown of Kik and Snapchat, while people for cheaper alternatives to texting and voice calls drove the adoption of Viber, WhatsApp, and Skype. iMessage went live in late 2011, offering with FaceTime a built-in rich chat on iOS, successfully capturing an audience that would've surely gotten a third-party app otherwise. Later, Hangouts on Android emulated this strategy.
Skype is a remarkable special case. Microsoft managed to squander the popularity of MSN/WLM with its confusing product strategy, then it acquired a VOIP product that targeted a different customer base. Not content with running the two products separately, they deprecated WLM and encouraged everyone to migrate to Skype, which didn't happen. Later, they leveraged Skype as the built-in IM for their OS, while still committed to keeping it cross-platform. It could very well be a trojan-horse into the Microsoft ecosystem, but it's essentially entirely separate, completely unlike Google Hangouts.
So now we're living in a time when smartphones come with IM out of the box, nearly every social network is gaining IM functionality (Instagram, Twitter, Tumblr, etc.), and the new wave of circa-2011 chat apps are diversifying into social networks (Snapchat) or platforms themselves (Kik, Viber, WeChat, LINE). You actively use more than product capable of IM, but rarely by choice and mostly by acclimation. Ironically, this situation benefits platforms the more closed they are, an intuition that's made clear by complete decline of interoperability between platforms in the past. IM is ubiquitious, leaving old "IM only" networks owned by corporations who can't figure out what they're doing (AOL, Yahoo) utterly irrelevant.
[+] [-] CydeWeys|10 years ago|reply
Any history of chat networks needs to include BBSes, IRC, ICQ, and Google Talk (now Hangouts).
[+] [-] condescendence|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] LCDninja|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] troyk|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ngrilly|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jerf|10 years ago|reply
Yes, what a journey it has taken... from... console app to GUI app. What a journey indeed.
[+] [-] ryandrake|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] InclinedPlane|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hbosch|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] umanwizard|10 years ago|reply
Regardless of what you think of these features, modern chat apps are certainly very different from IRC.
[+] [-] return0|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gsibble|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] skewart|10 years ago|reply
When I think back to 2008, sure, geeks used irc, but for most people the thought of typing messages in a chat room seemed hopelessly anachronistic. It wasn't something you do on your fancy new iPhone. Siri, released in 2011, seems driven in part by this perspective, and a vision that the future will be voice-based.
The fact that a lot of people actually prefer texting kinda took the tech industry by surprise. People thought the more advanced technology that more accurately reproduced a conversation with another person would dominate. It turns out that the more psychologically comfortable technogy won, which I think is often the case.
Of course, there are a lot of other reasons why apps like WhatsApp and WeChat have succeeded in developing markets that more driven by local infrastructure and economics.
[+] [-] gonehome|10 years ago|reply
The best option was Meebo which allowed you to sign into AIM and a few others, but push notifications were terrible and you often got logged out for no reason.
People wanted chat on phones and FB, WhatsApp and WeChat filled that gap.
[+] [-] j1o1h1n|10 years ago|reply
c.f. https://www.quora.com/Suppose-I-sent-a-text-on-WhatsApp-to-m...
[+] [-] ThomPete|10 years ago|reply
With slack it's it's reflection of being based mostly on a web approach to things vs. the other more message protocol releated approaches.
[+] [-] livatlantis|10 years ago|reply
It was one of the most beautiful applications I'd used, one that mixed magical fantasy with something purely functional. It got affective design a decade before the industry started started getting interested in it gave it a name. If I remember correctly, it even had a beautiful on-boarding experience with lush imagery and sound effects. As a kid, I got to meet people from all around the world, imagined their lives (you created an avatar but everything else was just information you chose to disclose, or not) -- it was just fantastic.
And then it vanished.
Anyone?
1: Some images to give you an idea of what it was like: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=odigo+messenger&ia=images&iax=1
[+] [-] alexvoda|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] firasd|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PakG1|10 years ago|reply
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/the-inside...
Relevant quote:
Inside RIM, the brash Mr. Balsillie had championed a bold strategy to re-establish the company’s place at the forefront of mobile communications. The plan was to push wireless carriers to adopt RIM’s popular BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) instant messaging service as a replacement for their short text messaging system (SMS) applications – no matter what kind of phone their customers used.
It was a novel plan. If RIM could get BBM onto hundreds of millions of non-BlackBerry phones, and charge fees for it, the company would have an enormous new source of profit, Mr. Balsillie believed. “It was a really big idea,” said an employee who was involved in the project.
[+] [-] w1ntermute|10 years ago|reply
Because they couldn't have predicted how badly Skype would botch the transition to mobile: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10927899
As for e-commerce, that's still controlled by Amazon, not any chatting apps (at least in the West).
[+] [-] mrdrozdov|10 years ago|reply
IRC - 1 million users around "peak" in 2003 (I don't actually know if this was the peak, but couldn't find numbers prior to 2003) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Relay_Chat)
Slack - 1 million users as of last year (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slack_(software)) Kik - 240 million users as of last year (http://arstechnica.com/business/2016/02/the-fall-and-rise-an...) WeChat - 570 million users as of last year (http://arstechnica.com/business/2016/02/the-fall-and-rise-an...)[+] [-] oxplot|10 years ago|reply
Also, it's interesting to see how people corrected their typos back in 80s, "Er, " instead of "*". I like the former better actually.
[+] [-] ritonlajoie|10 years ago|reply
Screenshot : http://www.mermeliz.com/files/summary/comic.jpg
[+] [-] raddad|10 years ago|reply
Have to scroll down about 4/5 of the way.
[+] [-] cpach|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MichaelBurge|10 years ago|reply
The idea of valuing a cell phone chat app at billions of dollars seems silly, because if the cell phone companies made text messages free there would be no reason for the chat apps to exist.
[+] [-] arjie|10 years ago|reply
The last two are super convenient when you want to send pictures, video, and location and they have indicators to tell you if people are online or not and if they've seen your message or not.
They have reliable group messaging unlike iMessage which only works with half your friends and is therefore useless, and Hangouts which switches views so slowly the conversation has gone right by you.
Oh, and the cost thing just makes things worse because these chat apps work internationally seamlessly with all features. I can be in an airport in Thailand and just need to find a WiFi point and I could just as well be sitting in SFO waiting for my plane.
[+] [-] mintplant|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paganel|10 years ago|reply
That's a very big "if". About two years ago I met someone new in my life and suddenly starting sending text messages (I usually hadn't). That month's phone bill was about ~150 euros, while it was usually ~50 euros. The following month the same happened. That's when I decided that I should install Whatsapp after all and not overpay for this ridiculous over-charges on simple text messages. For people like me apps like Whatsapp actually added financial value to our lives.
What I'm trying to say is that I don't see mobile phone companies making SMS messages free anytime soon, that's how they still milk lots of people out of their money.
[+] [-] swiley|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] niftich|10 years ago|reply
Anecdotally, I got into college (in the US) right as Facebook and Gmail opened up to everyone, and my peer group created a "professional presence" of Facebook and Gmail for our college lives, slowly leaving our myspace/AIM/WLM lives with the crazy hair and skinny jeans behind. My experience was not unique; this phenomenon has been researched by others [1][2][3][4]. Soon, Facebook and Google introduced chat, and nearly everyone I wanted to talk to was on one or both of those networks.
During my research, I was surprised to learn that AIM was in fact present at the iOS appstore's launch, but I suppose there wasn't much overlap between a typical AIM user and a typical iOS user at the time.
I also found an infographic from 2014 that charts some of these dates and compares the active user counts of the IM networks over the years [5].
Here's a chronological timeline of selected milestones in the IM/social space:
2005-09 - Meebo launches offering web access to AIM, WLM, Yahoo
2006-02-07 - Google Talk integration inside Gmail goes live
2006-03 - Nielsen/Netratings survey for active users: AIM 53M, WLM 27M, Yahoo 22M
2006-07-12 - seamless interop starts between Windows Live Messenger and Yahoo Messenger
2006-09 - Facebook opens up to everyone (not just colleges)
2007-07-07 - Gmail opens up to everyone (not just invite-only)
2007-05-09 - Windows Live Messenger released for Xbox 360 (with dashboard update)
2007-12-06 - Google Talk gets limited AIM interop
2008-04 - Facebook chat goes live
2008-04-19 - Facebook overtakes Myspace in Alexa ranking
2008-07-11 - iOS App Store launches, AIM for iOS released
2008-08-26 - Facebook hits 100 million active users
2008-09-23 - Android 1.0 launches
2008-11-11 - Google Talk introduces voice and video calling
2008-12-22 - Meebo integrates with Facebook chat and Myspace IM
2009-03-31 - Skype released for iOS, Skype network has 42 million active users
2009-04-08 - Facebook hits 200 million active users
2009-06 - iOS gets push notifications
2009-09-15 - Facebook hits 300 million active users
2009-11 - WhatsApp released for iOS
2010-01 - WhatsApp released for BlackBerry
2010-02-05 - Facebook hits 400 million active users
2010-05 - WhatsApp released for Symbian
2010-05-20 - Android gets push notifications
2010-06-21 - FaceTime released with iOS 4
2010-06-21 - Windows Live Messenger released for iOS
2010-07-21 - Facebook hits 500 million active users
2010-08 - WhatsApp released for Android
2010-09-30 - Windows Live Messenger starts interop with Facebook Chat
2010-10 - Kik released
2010-12-02 - Viber released for iOS
2011-01-05 - Facebook hits 600 million active users
2011-01 - WeChat released
2011-01 - Skype for iOS introduces video calling
2011-04 - Facebook introduces voice calling
2011-05 - Viber released for Android
2011-05-30 - Facebook hits 700 million active users
2011-06 - LINE released
2011-07 - Facebook introduces video calling
2011-07 - Snapchat released for iOS
2011-09-22 - Facebook hits 800 million active users
2011-10-12 - iMessage released with iOS 5
2011-10-13 - Microsoft finishes acquiring Skype
2012-04-24 - Facebook hits 900 million active users
2012-07-11 - Meebo is acquired by Google and shut down
2012-10-29 - Snapchat released for Android
While it's tempting to accuse AIM, MSN, and Yahoo for being incompetent and not catching up to the "mobile era", they in fact did pursue this market as much as they were able. In truth, early iOS and Android were inferior platforms for a chat app. Push notifications were absent, data rates were expensive, and the average smartphone user at this time was not very likely to use those networks anyway.
Based on this info, I reason that it was truly Facebook that killed incumbent IM networks, at least in the US. Between the release of the iOS App Store and the introduction of push notifications for Android, Facebook grew by more than 300 million active users. This coincided with exodus of users from Myspace to Facebook; many of those users likely having used AIM, MSN, or Yahoo messenger in the past, now found themselves in a much larger network that also offered chat. Since Facebook largely subsumed everyone a person knew in real life, these users only had to go back to the old IM networks to chat with people they didn't know in real life, setting the stage for the weakening of connections and these networks' decline.
By 2010, Facebook, or at least awareness of it, was mainstream. At the end of 2008, the Webster's New World Dictionary named "overshare" as the word of the year [6], while in 2009, the New Oxford American Dictionary chose "unfriend" [7]. For people new to the IM landscape, the old networks were dying and full of "old people" now in their 20s and 30s, so new networks surfacing around this time were appealing. This contributed to the grown of Kik and Snapchat, while people for cheaper alternatives to texting and voice calls drove the adoption of Viber, WhatsApp, and Skype. iMessage went live in late 2011, offering with FaceTime a built-in rich chat on iOS, successfully capturing an audience that would've surely gotten a third-party app otherwise. Later, Hangouts on Android emulated this strategy.
Skype is a remarkable special case. Microsoft managed to squander the popularity of MSN/WLM with its confusing product strategy, then it acquired a VOIP product that targeted a different customer base. Not content with running the two products separately, they deprecated WLM and encouraged everyone to migrate to Skype, which didn't happen. Later, they leveraged Skype as the built-in IM for their OS, while still committed to keeping it cross-platform. It could very well be a trojan-horse into the Microsoft ecosystem, but it's essentially entirely separate, completely unlike Google Hangouts.
So now we're living in a time when smartphones come with IM out of the box, nearly every social network is gaining IM functionality (Instagram, Twitter, Tumblr, etc.), and the new wave of circa-2011 chat apps are diversifying into social networks (Snapchat) or platforms themselves (Kik, Viber, WeChat, LINE). You actively use more than product capable of IM, but rarely by choice and mostly by acclimation. Ironically, this situation benefits platforms the more closed they are, an intuition that's made clear by complete decline of interoperability between platforms in the past. IM is ubiquitious, leaving old "IM only" networks owned by corporations who can't figure out what they're doing (AOL, Yahoo) utterly irrelevant.
Sources:
[1] 2012 http://socialtext.dukejournals.org/content/30/2_111/99.full....
[2] 2011-06-22 http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/magazine/content/11_27/b42350539...
[3] 2007-07-11 http://www.nbcnews.com/id/19717700/
[4] 2009-03-16 http://www.newsfactor.com/news/Facebook-Traffic-More-Than-Do...
[5] 2014-10-22 http://www.whoishostingthis.com/blog/2014/10/22/instant-mess...
[6] 2008-12-01 https://wordoftheyear.wordpress.com/tag/websters-new-world/
[7] 2009-11-16 http://blog.oup.com/2009/11/unfriend/
[+] [-] jsilence|10 years ago|reply