Comment by amyjess

It's worse now.

Back then, we had Pidgin, Trillian, Kopete, etc. that would let us connect to all our messaging services with one client.

But nowadays nobody even tries to reverse-engineer protocols anymore. Where are all the people reverse-engineering Hangouts or Facebook Messenger? I wish we could teleport the people who reverse-engineered AIM, Yahoo!, and MSN to the present day, because they don't seem to exist anymore.