The bottom of the article links to the history (individual features) of other IM programs from that era as well like ICQ and Yahoo Messenger.
orclev 16 points 2 years ago
Yeah that was part of the brand reshuffling they did to obfuscate things. Lync was their shitty chat app they tried to convince businesses to use that everyone hated. They bought Skype, renamed it to Microsoft Teams, renamed Lync to Skype for Business, and killed MSN Messenger. When people still didn't want to use LyncSkype for Business, then they killed that as well, and now it's just MS Teams.
caoimhinr 16 points 2 years ago
Fun fact any developer working with the api can tell you, there is a clear distinction between de voip bit and the meeting/chat bit. They haven't bothered rewriting or integrating it in any way so the Skype for business backend is still very much alive.
ShunkW 9 points 2 years ago
Lync was such garbage. I used that for years at one of my old jobs. Teams just feels like discord with extra shittiness lol.
The worst part is that they had developed an in-house app that worked amazing but abandoned it for teams.
BeardedGingerWonder 2 points 2 years ago
If I remember correctly the Skype for business still identified as communicator on the about page.
Fredselfish 8 points 2 years ago
I have use teams at work and I hate it.
01189998819991197253 1 point 2 years ago
And the video chats were choppy and black and white and with delayed audio. Those were the days...
01189998819991197253 2 points 2 years ago
Actually, to Lync first. Then Teams. All three suck.
uninvitedguest 51 points 2 years ago
I'm surprised no one mentioned Facebook.
I recall using MSN as far as in to 2009, but the friends I was connected with migrated to Facebook when their chat feature rolled out.
blackn1ght 12 points 2 years ago
Same, it was pretty much an instant change too. Which sucked as Facebook chat was very unreliable at the time and obviously not very feature rich.
kevindqc 8 points 2 years ago
The article touches on that
The advent of social media and mobile devices couldn't be ignored either. These technologies were enabling new ways for people to stay in touch with friends and family that didn't involve a traditional computer.
ThePowerOfGeek 47 points 2 years ago
Anyone remember the short-lived Great War of the Messenger Apps? For a few months back around... '98? '99? MSN tried really hard to shoehorn its way into working with AIM. About every day there would be an update from MSM Messenger to allow it to work with AIM. Then AOL would fuck with their own protocol to ice out MSN users again.
I think these shenanigans also impacted the Trillium Messenger app too, which up until then had been flying under the radar of messenger interoperability.
I might be getting some of these details wrong.
tias 37 points 2 years ago
And then Jabber came to fix it by introducing an open protocol, and Google started supporting it, and all was well. But when everybody was using Google Chat they severed the Jabber compatibility, locking everyone in to their platform. Now we're back wading around in enshittified shit and Jabber is dead.
TarantulaFudge 10 points 2 years ago
Support matrix!! It already has international support, just needs to be a bit better with stickers and qol stuff. I've been using it for years. It's nice to know I don't have to worry about my privacy at all with chat rooms that can continue on without the original server.
curbstickle 5 points 2 years ago
I wouldn't say jabber is dead, xmpp is still pretty well used. Not enough IMO, but still in use and with readily available modern servers. Jitsi is xmpp+jingle (sip signalling) after all.
Kushan 3 points 2 years ago
People blame Google for the death of jabber because of one blog post from a disgruntled contributor but the truth is jabber was never popular and Google chat died as well.
Jabber was a mess, most of the clients were barely compatible with Each other and it was a wild west of feature support. Some clients were well featured with the ability to send richer messages, but typically only worked with a specific server and the same clients. Jabber did a crap job at making sure clients and servers interacted properly with each other and didn't push the standards quickly enough, forcing clients to do their own thing.
Which is all Google did, they went their own way because nobody used jabber and the interoperability was causing more harm than good. It didn't work, Google talk died and many years later clients like WhatsApp took over instead.
sibachian 5 points 2 years ago
facebook, google talk, etc. all relied on the XMPP protocol. you could add your facebook messenger friends to google talk or any of the open source clients like pidgin. it was the holy era of instant messaging. federated. solution. no bullshit lockdown to a specific system like in the days of ICQ, Skype, etc.
then both facebook and google talk locked down their XMPP server and i lost 80% of my friendlist on XMPP. and that was that. i had to get facebook. i had to get google mail. especially relevant when microsoft bought skype and it turned to shit.
guess what. today we're split on even more clients than we used to be. need signal, whatsapp, facebook messenger, telegram, discord, band, matrix, threema, session, irc, slack, and steam chat installed on my fucking device. and all because meta and google pulled the rug to isolate their systems and force user conversion.
no, thanks. open source federation is the only solution to unshitification and that's never going to happen as long as people do shit like leaving x for bluesky instead of mastodon etc. leaving facebook for band instead of literally any other fediverse platform (because facebook has devolved to ads and facebook groups - everything else is irrelevant or dead on there). etc etc.
projectmoon 2 points 2 years ago
Have you tried Matrix?
ShunkW 16 points 2 years ago
I used that until they pay walled it. Then I found Pidgen I believe it was called. It was open source and could connect to pretty much every messenger and IRC and stuff. Then my friend just switched to texting lol
toynbee 1 point 2 years ago
I used it all the way up until Google broke compatibility with it, then continued using it with a third party plug-in until that stopped being maintained.
Now I prefer Signal over Chat.
WildPalmTree 1 point 2 years ago
"A pidgin /ˈpɪdʒɪn/, or pidgin language, is a grammatically simplified means of communication that develops between two or more groups of people that do not have a language in common: typically, its vocabulary and grammar are limited and often drawn from several languages."
Saik0Shinigami 9 points 2 years ago
Trillium
Trillian, not trillium. And they're actually still around.
dogslayeggs 9 points 2 years ago
Trillian was definitely part of that war. I remember the daily patches to get things working again.
kirk781 4 points 2 years ago
I think the article mentions it. AOL tried to block it and this to and fro went 21 times before finally coming to a stop. MSN and Yahoo later signed a deal, I think, so that the former will work with latter's contacts properly.
captain_aggravated 37 points 2 years ago
I might have been 10 minutes too young for ICQ. I think that's what the college kids were playing with when I was in high school. For my cohort it was the big three: MSN, Yahoo! and AIM. You probably had all three installed on your computer and probably all running at once. They're probably why my entire generation can touch type. Vital tool for teenage social life at the turn of the century.
This was Microsoft's era, too. The main reason Apple survived the 90's was because Microsoft invested in them to counter anti-trust allegations. They paid Apple to keep existing so they couldn't be called a monopoly. Internet Explorer was the web browser, any others in use were a rounding error. No one had a Mac, a few people were still clinging to their Amigas. THE platform for personal/home computing and internet access was a Pentium PC with Windows ME or XP, which came with MSN Messenger out of the box.
Two things happened nearly simultaneously: Facebook Messenger and the iPhone. Graduating high school in 2005, your freshman year of college you probably started hearing about the cool new site that's kinda like MySpace except it's only for college kids. By your junior year all your new college friends were on Facebook and all your old high school friends that never logged on let alone talk to you were on MSN. And if you graduated in 2005, your junior year was in 2007, the year the iPhone was launched. MSN Messenger had been present as baked in "functions" of certain media phones at the time, but I don't think they ever made it to the App Store or even the Play Store on Android. Facebook was fast to adopt mobile apps, and for awhile there it was the one messenger service that interoperated between desktop on a web browser and smart phones across platforms. SMS didn't run on the desktop, iMessage is Apple-only, AIM, MSN and Yahoo were nowhere to be found and Telegram, Signal, Discord etc. weren't around yet. So everyone standardized on Facebook Messenger.
Meanwhile, Microsoft bought and ruined Skype.
radicalautonomy 19 points 2 years ago
I think that’s what the college kids were playing with when I was in high school.
Started college in 1995, and I indeed did have ICQ before too long. Still remember my number (6725571).
You probably had all three installed on your computer and probably all running at once.
I remember using a program called Trillian (which is still around!) in the late 90s/early 00s. It allowed you to connect multiple IM accounts in one app. It was sorta finicky, but it got the job done.
XaiwahBlue 11 points 2 years ago
I haven't thought of those apps for years, I used Pidgin! I had to look up the program name.
Evil_Shrubbery 3 points 2 years ago
Pidgin is still around too afaik.
Tin 3 points 2 years ago
I still use Pidgin, because I still have some old work related contacts who use Skype, and I'd much rather use Pidgin than keep Skype around. It will do discord too but it's a bit kludgey.
XaiwahBlue 2 points 2 years ago
It will do discord? That's amazing, I will have to look back into it. Discord has been awful for a while, but getting people to switch is impossible. 😩
GoOnASteamTrain 1 point 2 years ago
Emesene and pidgin were great! :)
01189998819991197253 1 point 2 years ago
Trillian was amazing, until it was overtaken by malware. At least that's what my antivirus at the time said. Also, proprietary, so I passed on it after finding pidgin.
captain_aggravated 2 points 2 years ago
In 2003, Internet Explorer had a 95% market share. Your running joke was demonstrably untrue.
Typhoonigator 4 points 2 years ago
Some of us are older than you think we are
captain_aggravated 3 points 2 years ago
I mean, you name dropped Netscape. Your next of kin is probably rehearsing the talk where they take your car keys away as we speak.
The topic of discussion is MSN Messenger, its popularity and demise, which puts us in the period between 1999 and ~2008. Especially during the first half of that decade, practically everyone was using IE. And not really liking it, but using it nevertheless.
Soapbox1858 3 points 2 years ago
You nailed my experience. Though AIM was preferred. I begrudgingly used MSN too for a couple people who weren't allowed to install AIM.
Jackthelad 28 points 2 years ago
Those were the days. 🥲
wise_pancake 15 points 2 years ago
Nudge
TheHobbyist 2 points 2 years ago
Wizz
TachyonTele 2 points 2 years ago
Oh what a relief it is
blackn1ght 10 points 2 years ago
It was awesome. Especially paired with the msn messenger plus mod.
Near the end of its time and also when WiFi was taking off, I had friends with everyone in a uni house, but their WiFi was quite unreliable, so every hour or so I'd get 6 "person is online" pop up toasts appear simultaneously, stacked up on top of each other.
01189998819991197253 6 points 2 years ago
Just like a real adult human
CaptainBasculin 20 points 2 years ago
It was very popular within my friends up until the skype merger. At that point they went "i aint usin skype lmao"
CrunkBy 20 points 2 years ago
well, the same as the others really: Time.
I think once SMS and phone apps became the norm over having Messenger apps on our Desktops all the time, that was pretty much it for these applications over all. It was a long, slow death. But MSN was one of the firsts to call it quits if I recall right. Oddly the IM app I liked the most. It's just not many of my friends used it. They were all AIM/AOL users.
fahfahfahfah 22 points 2 years ago
The one thing these messengers had over texts was presence notifications. I remember jumping through hoops to get aim working on my Motorola v188 so that I could be notified every time my crush came online and I could send her a “hey what’s going on”… only for it to be ignored.
wise_pancake 14 points 2 years ago
I miss Adium, I used it for a bunch of protocols, and I customized the CSS/html to make it look really awesome.
I had an app called snakeskin or something to skin my Mac OS X to be dark themed.
EleventhHour 6 points 2 years ago
Wow, that’s a name I haven’t heard in a long time.
wise_pancake 3 points 2 years ago
Adium was awesome, that was the golden age of computing and the internet in my opinion.
EleventhHour 4 points 2 years ago
With Linux and other FOSS projects surging in popularity, I dare say we’re in for another.
But, sadly, companies don’t seem too interested in making good software for that sake of it being good anymore. Now it’s all about getting you hooked on an eternal subscription.
captain_aggravated 4 points 2 years ago
I can see why AIM would be mostly an American phenomenon, given it was initially a feature specific to AOL. ICQ...I like to say I'm 10 minutes too young to have used ICQ, everybody who has wistful memories of it were like the seniors when I was a freshman. Yahoo! was the other one; the perpetual alsoran.
Imgonnatrythis 7 points 2 years ago
Remember when icq could message aim users though? That was so badass.
just_another_person 4 points 2 years ago
Pidgin still seems to active lol
https://keep.imfreedom.org/pidgin/
Wonder who still uses it.
Imgonnatrythis 2 points 2 years ago
I actually forgot all about that, but yes I did use Trillian at one point. Can you imagine big tech companies letting you use third party apps that didn't lock you into their service or ad stream these days?
Orbituary 0 points 2 years ago
Both. Trillian was not Mac only (I made a mistake from memory), Pidgin was multi platform but started on Linux. Pidgin had every protocol. I still keep my .purple config folder and logs after over a decade. Not like I'll ever read the logs again, though.
Edit: Guys, relax. I made a mistake recounting from memory. I didn't run Windows back then. I assumed that because of the native Aqua interface, there wasn't a Windows port.
i_dont_want_to 6 points 2 years ago
I remember having Trillian on Windows way back when.
I'll have you know I did go back and read my logs from like 2008. I think I cringed so hard I never recovered. You might have saved yourself by not looking at yours!
dogslayeggs 4 points 2 years ago
Trillian was not Mac only. I've never owned a Mac and used Trillian almost exclusively from 2002 until roughly 2009?? I can't remember when the transition from IM to texting happened for me, but it was around then. When I was running Linux at home I would use Gaim, which was developed by a friend of the main Trillian guy.
blackn1ght 6 points 2 years ago
I think this is another one of those cases where the US does something different to the rest of the world: the majority of people were using msn messenger but the US was using aim.
captain_aggravated 2 points 2 years ago
AIM was released in 1997, MSN in 1999. AIM was at the time the biggest ISP in the United States, so AIM was pretty uniquely marketed to us.
It was my observation that you had two main camps: Those whose home was AIM, and those whose home was MSN. And the deciding factor was probably if you used AOL as your ISP. There were people who didn't know you could get an AIM account if you weren't an AOL customer. Those who didn't use AOL probably went the same way others did around the world, MSN messenger was built into Windows so it was the obvious one to use.
captain_aggravated 3 points 2 years ago
AOL Instant Messenger, ICQ's main rival in the 90's in North America.
wildbus8979 11 points 2 years ago
No mentions of XMPP 😒
LunchMoneyThief -11 points 2 years ago
Thinking in terms of platforms is much easier for the knuckle draggers.
TheGrandNagus 8 points 2 years ago
Ah, sorry. Us peons aren't used to being in the presence of master intellects such as yours. Truly, we are not worthy of your attention, o wise one.
How silly of us to talk about MSN on a submission about MSN.
Oaksey 7 points 2 years ago
Messenger-> Office Communicator -> Lync -> Skype for Business -> Teams. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skype_for_Business
GreenKnight23 8 points 2 years ago path: 0 13049605 13052322, hotness: undefined, score: 8, children: 3
GreenKnight23 5 points 2 years ago path: 0 13049605 13052322 13052801 13053021, hotness: undefined, score: 5, children: 1
meneervana 2 points 2 years ago
oof :´(
SynopsisTantilize 2 points 2 years ago
Fuck all y'all....I like teams, for work.
RedditWanderer 1 point 2 years ago
In a way, i think we're all still there
MY_ANUS_IS_BLEEDING 1 point 2 years ago
WhatsApp (& mobile internet in general) replaced it for me. It's no longer a requirement for both my friends and myself to be at our computers at the same time to talk shit to each other.
parpol 5 points 2 years ago
The reason MSN stopped being used was because Microsoft started requiring Microsoft accounts for it to work, and started pushing people towards Skype. Which is why "Microsoft happened". I never really meant to imply that Microsoft bought it or anything, just that they are the reason it eventually died.
parpol 1 point 2 years ago
Yeah, but those Hotmail accounts were lightweight and simple. They weren't connected to a Microsoft metaverse of spyware like they are now. I had 3 of these Hotmail accounts but at some point I got locked out of all of them for not providing Microsoft with my phone number. That's how I personally stopped using MSN.
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Microsoft pivoted to Skype. Saved you a click and reading about 1000 words.
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