It was all about brand names 20 years ago too. None of the big IM services of the time were interoperable. The only reason Trillian worked was because its developers put enormous amounts of work into reverse-engineering proprietary, undocumented chat protocols. Periodically a protocol would change, and then Trillian would stop working with that service until the developers could crack it again. At one point AOL got serious enough about blocking Trillian access to AIM that they were changing the protocol every couple of days.
I guess what I’m saying is, things sucked just as much then as they do now. Maybe more! Sigh.
I still miss the few years where Trillian talked all instant messaging protocols. Jabber had a brief shot at unifying them, but no dotcom wants to be a commodity.
Back about 18y ago there was, er, Trillian (?) and you could have all your chats in one UI at least. If I were in charge chat apps would have to use federation with an open interchange format (RIP XMPP).
I think XMPP and Trillian might still be going but once Facebook, Microsoft and Google stopped playing nicely ...
Remember about 20 years ago, when it was about protocols and not about brand names? You could have all the chat services in one client, complete with merging contacts from different services.
Nowadays, you have to jump through hoops to get even a few of the messaging services in one program, it's clunky and barely works, and you'd be breaking terms of service of half of them. Also, it would break anyway in a week or two, because the service owner changed something in the proprietary protocol.
Fortunately, with Matrix and a few other pioneers, it's getting better again, but in the meantime, there is an entire generation used to having their communication hamstrung by american corporations.
The messaging services never opened their protocols. Trillian (& pidgin etc) has always played catch-up. It was just more difficult for the "major players" of the time because for a protocol update, you needed to release a new version of your software, and somehow have all your users seamlessly migrate to it before releasing breaking changes.
MSN/WLM, AIM, YIM, ICQ, Gadu-Gadu, Skype… all of them were reverse-engineered. The only open protocols it supported were IRC and Jabber.
> I'm defining closed networks as ones like Facebook Messenger and iMessage and such.
It's odd you put Facebook Messenger in the protocol group that killed off Trillian as it has always supported that. When Facebook Messenger launched it was XMPP compatible and nowadays when it has moved to be fully proprietary it has remained supported through reverse engineering (just like most protocols Trillian supports).
That example aside your further examples of "open protocols" Trillian supported are even less open and more hostile to 3rd party clients than Facebook Messenger:
> The "closed" networks that Trillian accessed still used open protocols. But my progression was AIM, then ICQ at the same time, then Trillian which could do both plus the few people on Yahoo messenger and GTalk and IRC
AIM used their proprietary OSCAR protocol, which ironically the "O" stood for "Open" but they never actually distributed a spec/standard and actually went through great effort to prevent other reverse engineered 3rd party clients from being compatible over time. OSCAR had to be reverse engineered no different than (newer) Facebook Messenger or Discord or so on today.
ICQ was where OSCAR was developed (under ownership of AOL). All of the above applies and it intentionally broke unauthorized 3rd party clients many times.
Yahoo Messenger used their proprietary YMSG, had to be reverse engineered, and was often hostilely changed to shake 3rd party clients.
GTalk was better but that's because it was intentionally XMPP compatible. Like I said though "I don't really remember anyone rushing to Trillian because it was the best XMPP client it was because it could speak to multiple closed networks.".
I guess you could throw IRC in as a non XMPP open protocol but, ignoring that these were normally just gatewayed, it doesn't explain either the success or decline of Trillian. All of the supported 3rd party chat clients do.
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Since the internet became consumer towards the end of the 90s there hasn't been a time the majority of people were on open protocol chat networks or a multiprotocol client got popular without support for popular closed protocols of the day. Many clients and bridges have come but they have all eventually run out of steam trying to catch up to the latest hostile changes or the latest proprietary protocol that is taking off while none have ever supported more than the basic feature set like plain text and maybe images across multiple platforms reliably. Not saying it's impossible or people should be using closed protocols just that's how it's been.
To say closed protocols and clients are a new thing that killed the old multiprotocol apps is false, they started to solve exactly that probably but just ran out of steam. Now Matrix has some of us nerdy folks exited about an easy way to glue such networks together via an open federated protocol (which XMPP folks never really liked doing for some reason) and 3rd party integrations are being maintained again. They are still going to run into hostility and lack of feature parity but as we know from the ~2000-~2010 era it can work okay for plain text if you're fine with the occasional missed message or temporary protocol outages from upstream changes.
Even when IM started to break because it was too awesome not to try to monopolize, Trillian (back in 2000!) showed how interoperability was superconvenient to rein in the nascent feudalism and give power back to the users... until the bigger players put a stop to that.
They did. It was called Trillian IM. Let you talk to people on many networks. Those networks started obfuscating where possible. The asymmetry of between reverse engineering and developing gave IM vendors an advantage. They collectively also had more developers. The result was lowest, common denominator experience with plenty breakage at times.
Most users voted against it by using competing offerings. Anyone doing this kind of thing needs a lot of labor. May be willing to operate at financial loss.
It was a golden age of instant messaging. You could talk to anybody on any network because multiprotocol clients just worked. I basically gave up on instant messaging because every company now digs deeper and deeper moats around their network.
I posit that things sucked less back then. Sure, there were some protocols whose owners would break things on purpose, but on the other hand, those times gave us libpurple.
Also, users weren't yet conditioned to expect proprietary chat apps and nothing else back then. Recently, I installed a small family Matrix server, for chatting and sharing photos. I had one heck of a time explaining that the client app (Riot) is named differently from the protocol (Matrix). And I'm glad I did not have to explain why the server software has yet another name (Synapse).
(In the end, I went with comparison to e-mail, which has different clients like Outlook or Thunderbird. That seems to have lit some overhead lightbulbs. :) )
Back in '99, I was working in the Instant-Messaging and Chat-On-Page sector. Let me tell you what I observed back then:
The IETF group working on IM was comprised of people from Netscape, Microsoft, AOL and a few others. At that point, AOL owned the IM world through AOL Messenger and (then recently acquired) ICQ. Microsoft was starting to make a dent with MSN Messenger after they started bundling it with the O/S and everything.
I was following the IETF discussions and mailing lists, and after a couple of months realised that the people on these lists had no reason to make things happen -- on the contrary. Everyone wanted AOL to open up the ICQ/AOL networks; they wouldn't. Everyone was already working on their own IM protocol, and didn't want to share it with the others -- they just wanted the OTHERS to share THEIRS. The discussions were long and pointless, revolving around semantics and irrelevant scenarios.
XMPP/Jabber developer was among the participants. The suggestions were full of flaws, complex and inefficient to implement, and no one liked them. But he was the only guy releasing code. And after a couple of years (sometime in 2001 IIRC -- I was no longer closely following it) it actually became usable.
It is still inefficient; it is still too complex for what it does; But for the last 9 years or so, it was the only option for a documented protocol with an open source implementation that you could find cross-platform clients for and install inside your own network.
ah didn't realize it had gone away. its successor appears to be [0]
now I'm reliving the chaos of the late-00s/early-10s instant messaging apocalypse when AOL sunsetted AIM. Clients like Trillian were absolutely necessary before AIM shut down. Everybuddy was a good linux-friendly client. When I still spent time on IRC, I really really liked Bitlbee [1] with ERC [2]. Gaim was one of the first open-source projects I ever contributed to.
(I'm not saying that there's a connection there, but rather that all the chat protocols started getting used less around the same time for the same reason, which was smartphones becoming commonplace in late-00s.)
Interesting question. I'd speculate that IM in particular was unified enough around AOL and SMS. (And clients like Trillium did work across systems.) And with smartphone apps and notifications, having a single universal messaging client was less important.
Email was quite fractured at one time but it did become pretty interoperable when it went mainstream.
I believe Trillian still continued to support other networks (as long as they could) after introducing "Astra" or whatever they called their own chat network. Most of them have died off over time or locked out 3rd party clients (AIM, Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc.).
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.
Do you remember back when Pidgin, Trillian, and others created clients that worked across AOL, MSN, and other messengers. They worked for a while, they'd stop working, they'd update and start working, and that went over and over again. I'm not really looking forward to having that experience again.
Twenty years ago was the year 2000. Trillian first shipped as freeware that year, and shipped its for-pay "Pro" version in 2002. Jabber/XMPP development only started in 1999, and didn't reach RFC status until 2004. Google Talk didn't ship until 2005, and didn't support federation until 2006. The heyday of "XMPP all the things" was from 2008-2012 or so, with the high water mark being the adoption of XMPP by Facebook Chat circa 2010. (A decision they eventually reversed a few years later.)
IRC was of course always open, but that's kind of orthogonal to this discussion as it never really had any traction with the general public the way AIM, ICQ, Yahoo! Messenger, etc. did.
The delusion that one app can be the only centre of your life continues to litter our phones with 9 chat apps.
Not making protocols interoperable allows the app to attempt to build their own walled garden.
Interoperability is a very old problem, and it has been reasonably solved a few times (jabber pre Cisco/xmpp/etc) and most recently technologies like matrix/riot are pretty well positioned.
While tools like pidgin exist today, software like trillian of old allowed one interface to log into everything.
I still had AIM and Yahoo on Pidgin up until maybe two or three years ago.
It amazes me how Facebook messenger became the dominant force with it's totally broken and garbage XMPP implementation (now gone), it's unreliable delivery and the fact that it was a total piece of garbage.
It's now finally up to the standard that AIM/Yahoo/MSN were, twenty years ago. For people who yell about it being proprietary, well so was AIM (Oscar)/Yahoo/MSN/etc. Today there are OSS devs doing the same thing they did back then with project like purple-hangouts and purple-facebook.
We have a lot of different chat services today, but we don't seem to see people developing things like Trillian/Audium/Pidgin the way those were developed back in the day. Today people are fine having multiple chat apps, all with their bloat and terribleness.
That's not necessarily true. Jabber was a huge protocol already and IRC was big too and those were not about brand names. Jabber was even so ubiquitous that Google Chat/Talk both used it as a backend. You could add Google Chat to any client that supported Jabber. It wasn't until AOL got wind of AIM being a way to grab more ads and cash that things changed.
I guess what I’m saying is, things sucked just as much then as they do now. Maybe more! Sigh.
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