ICQ came out in 1996, AIM in 1997, and MSN in 1999. I don't think it's fair to give the people working on this a pass by saying this is a new problem - working products have been shipping for over 20 years. Some of the devs working on Signal and Matrix were probably born after ICQ was released.
The reality is that all of these systems, including email, tend towards becoming walled gardens. Otherwise you end up with the same problem that email has which is that a huge percentage of it is spam. At this point email is basically a few connected walled gardens from the major providers. Before that the amount of spam was even larger.
Not sure what your work place back then was but we clearly had tons of emails sent in 2000 already. As to chat ICQ came out in 1996, as did AOL IM in 1997, Yahoo and MSN as well. They were very popular by 2000.
I think this was a big factor in why AIM trumped ICQ in America. ICQ had that "sending mail" icon that took a few seconds (or more) to "send" your message and it didn't quite feel instant.
ICQ get a mention in passing, but the story seems to begin with MSN Messenger.
Not surprised, as i think MS was quite aggressive in pushing it. After all, the early version came bundled with Windows XP, iirc. And you were greeted with a signup/login dialog on first boot.
This is not that different from how MS pushed IE back in the day, or grabbed the office network out from under Novell's nose back in the day.
And btw, i feel to some degree MSN Messenger ruined the net. Before then there was thriving local IRC channels for the smallest of places. But come MSNM people started exchanging contact info for it, and the net turned "clique-y".
You may have been one of the few using ICQ and MSN after AIM. ICQ was much earlier in the chronology (we used to play with it when we got bored on IRC) and no one used MSN. :-P
From what I remember ICQ was always fairly nerdy and once everyone's non-nerd friends started showing up on AIM they had to make the switch.
One thing I miss from ICQ was the ability to have messages stored on the server and delivered next time your friend logged in. None of the popular messaging apps today do that.
I also remember that ICQ made a huge mess of their webpage back in the dawn of the dotcom era.
"ICQ, short for the phrase “I Seek You,” laid the groundwork for standalone instant messaging clients when it arrived in November 1996. Think about how long ago that was...
Microsoft’s trailblazing Windows 95 was barely a year old, Nintendo had just introduced the N64, and those with a reason to have a cell phone actually used it to talk on.
Launched after less than two months of development from Israeli company Mirabilis, it predated and influenced many of the popular chat programs of the era including AOL Instant Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger and MSN Messenger."
Yeah, what? I grew up (in the same era) using AIM and Yahoo, ICQ was a little before my prime. Everyone I talk to about those days used them as well. MSN was fine but AIM and Yahoo were where it was at for the bulk of my early years of instant messaging with friends. At one point a friend even made me an AIM account because I was using MSN and they wanted to chat with me but didn't want to do it through MSN.
Obviously just 1 anecdote but I just wanted to share that my experience and your experience were dramatically different.
According to my memory AIM didn't support that in the late 90s and early 2000s, and that was a key advantage of ICQ. But I mean in the last 15 years or so, corresponding roughly with the rise of ubiquitous smartphones (and foreshadowed by cell-connected PDAs and some feature phones).
It was also a ui issue. ICQ originally had an interface which didn't show a running log of the conversation. It was more like sending email with presence indicators and a 450 character limit. Though it also had an IRC-like mode that was rarely used. I remember finding AIM and MSN so different when they emerged as the 'instant' aspect, typing indicator, and running log encouraged rapid-fire short messages and gave a conversation-like feel.
No icq? There was a time when the first thing you installed on your computer was instant messaging applications. It's how you kept in touch with friends online. Crazy how quickly it fell off.
The reality is that all of these systems, including email, tend towards becoming walled gardens. Otherwise you end up with the same problem that email has which is that a huge percentage of it is spam. At this point email is basically a few connected walled gardens from the major providers. Before that the amount of spam was even larger.
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