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.
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.
I never knew anybody who used it. I had one contact on ICQ. Everybody else used AIM.
In the UK MSN was pretty ubiquitous.
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.
I was in highschool in the 2000s in Europe, and msn was our default way of communication with classmates.
Yep, early 2000s in the UK and everyone was using MSN. I didn’t know a single person using AIM or ICQ!
Ditto for us in Australia
Remember when icq could message aim users though? That was so badass.
remember trillian? or pidgin was it called? you could message every service.
that was badass.
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?
Pidgin still seems to active lol
https://keep.imfreedom.org/pidgin/
Wonder who still uses it.
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 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!
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.
Trillian ran on Windows but was closed source. Pidgin is foss.