Comment by dragontamer
9 hours ago
AOL instant messenger was bigger in USA, it was so big that AOL remained a major chat service even into the broadband years (though AIM clearly was under decline by that point)
My 90s and early 00s social circle was AIM, Yahoo Games, and Neopets.
I had AIM, ICQ, and a few others. Pidgin (originally GAIM) let you send and receive on all the services from one app, which was very handy.
By the time Pidgin existed I switched to something else. Maybe Jabber (today called XMPP). I don't quite remember though.
AIM and ICQ were the big ones back in the day, nothing ever was as big as that.
Pidgin also supported XMPP: it was a multi-protocol client. It was just a client, not a messaging system of its own. They'd abstracted the send/receive from the actual messages and built a bunch of backends that could handle pretty much any messaging protocol at the time.
ICQ was released 1996; Pidgin (as GAIM) was November 1998; Jabber was released in 1999. Those were good times.
Nah ICQ was pre AIM. AIM was popular with some people but ICQ was king for a while.
AIM was filled with script kiddies using spam to "hack" people's computers. It just crashed the app when they spammed you.
Then stuff like trillium came out which meant you didn't have to use AIM's awful client.
do you mean Trillian, the software that offered a (very themable) frontend to AIM, ICQ, yahoo and (i think) at least 3 more chat services? the awesomeness of Trillian made it obvious how useless it is for so many different services to coexist while they all offer the same value. still true today
Funny, that's always the impression I had of ICQ back in the day...
Surely we can agree that no one's experience is universal, and both regional and subcultural differences are likely to have materially shaped our views of the various chat services in the '90s and early '00s...?
Surely we all recognize that our own experience is not The Default Everyone Should Understand?
> even into the broadband years
I suspect part of that is because not everyone had broadband. I was still on dialup years after broadband ISPs were widely available.
AIM was not around when I was using ICQ. Like, it literally didn’t exist.
Once it did my local social circle used it. Gaming stuff stayed on IRC and ICQ.
ICQ was released only 6 months before AIM, not that big of a difference. :D
yes, I used AIM from 1999 until whenever it was shutdown (2017?) At several companies, we used AIM for what many use Slack for today. We even coordinated prod deployments in a private AIM chat room!