Comment by jazzyjackson 7 days ago
MSN Messenger allowed me to login with any number of clients. I used Trillian back in the day, with MSN, Yahoo, AIM and IRC all from one chat client.
It was free as in beer, at least, and "lock in" and "walled gardens" were never a concern.
> You can also login today to $FAVORITE_IM_SERVICE with "unauthorized" 3rd party clients (or even often forgotten Jabber transports). Like today, there was a cat and mouse game between the server and the 3rd party clients, so they would not last long, and you'd run into many problems.
Nah. MSN tolerated Trillian and Gaim/Pidgin and what have you; breaking changes were once-a-year at most. Skype was the first to really seriously block out third party clients, and it was a sea change.
> definitely there was "lock in" and "walled gardens".
In theory, but not so much in practice. There were high-quality multi-protocol IM clients available for every platform. You could talk to all your friends no matter which network they were on. I guess you couldn't do a cross-network group chat, but that wasn't something that ever really came up.
No, that is a rose colored glasses view of the period. There are people today who still do multi network clients and Jabber transports and suffer the same issues that they suffered during the MSN era .
Heck, the cat and mouse game from the AIM days (much older) is well known and epic, and they were breaking (and suing) each other much more frequently than once per year. Skype was nowhere near to be the first.
> You could talk to all your friends no matter which network they were on.
Hahaha. Let me know how could you talk wih people on MSN without going through a MSN account. It is exactly the same situation (or even worse) than you have today, where you definitely need a Whatscrap account to talk to people on Whatscrap. Third party clients exist for both and they suck as much as they used to do in the past (unreliableness and lack of whatever new fancy useless feature the 1st party clients had just introduced but suddenly became indispensable for people on the network).
> the cat and mouse game from the AIM days (much older) is well known and epic, and they were breaking (and suing) each other much more frequently than once per year.
I did hear about AIM having a cat and mouse game with third-party clients, but that was before the MSN era, and they eventually calmed down. I don't know about any lawsuits, but the fact that there were companies openly offering multiplatform clients (heck, Trillian even sold a "pro" version) suggests they weren't particularly effective.
> Let me know how could you talk wih people on MSN without going through a MSN account. It is exactly the same situation (or even worse) than you have today, where you definitely need a Whatscrap account to talk to people on Whatscrap.
You needed an MSN account but you could sign up once, log in with your usual messenger program that you use for every other network, and then forget who was on MSN, who was on AIM and who was on whatever else. Whereas with WhatsApp you can't even sign up without a phone, and the third-party clients are unreliable enough that they're non-mainstream.
> I did hear about AIM having a cat and mouse game with third-party clients, but that was before the MSN era, and they eventually calmed down. I don't know about any lawsuits, but the fact that there were companies openly offering multiplatform clients (heck, Trillian even sold a "pro" version) suggests they weren't particularly effective.
_the same companies_ that were alive back then are still offering multiplatform clients as of today...
E.g. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/im-instant-messenger/id2856889... for Whatsapp and many others
Plus the resurrection of Pidgin. Or the new Jabber transports...
No matter how you put it, today's situation with 3rd party clients is quite similar as in the past. If you think they're unreliable today, think how it was in the famous Trillian 0.7x era, when a couple days/week downtime waiting for a client upgrade was _the norm_ (and yes I was a paying customer). When support for features that today would be considered uttermost critical (e.g. server stored offline messages) was non-working or added years later than the 1st party client.
I really don't think users today would have the patience for that. But the situation is objectively better today where 3rd party clients, if anything, miss bells & whistles (e.g. "picture/voice/gif sharing" instead of simple file sharing) rather than core features such as presence tracking, offline messaging, etc. (of course they are core now: they have been there for 20 years....). My last proselytizing effort was moving people to Conversations (conversations.im), so this is based on my own experience. Just look at what the average Whatscrap user will complain when moving to Conversations (and yes there is a Whatscrap <-> XMPP transport).
> and the third-party clients are unreliable enough that they're non-mainstream.
"Mainstream"? When have third-party clients ever been "Mainstream"?
> You needed an MSN account but you could sign up once, log in with your usual messenger program that you use for every other network, and then forget who was on MSN, who was on AIM and who was on whatever else
You are still entirely subject to the whims of MSN and AIM, and you cannot migrate your contacts at all if they decide to do an Elon. Or a GTalk (when they closed down federation). Or an Apple (when they promised federation that never materialized).
I see what you mean now. In my rose-colored usage, I was only ever doing one to one conversations, so never had to deal with bridges between services, it didn't even occur to me that there would be such a thing as talking to people with an MSN account without having an MSN account myself. The idea of 'federating' such that different servers could exchange messages was not within my imagination in 2004. I was just happy I wasn't forced to use a particular client.
Sorry, bullshit. You can also login today to $FAVORITE_IM_SERVICE with "unauthorized" 3rd party clients (or even often forgotten Jabber transports). Like today, there was a cat and mouse game between the server and the 3rd party clients, so they would not last long, and you'd run into many problems.
And definitely there was "lock in" and "walled gardens". MSN Messenger was the second "walled garden" service I've escaped ever since Internet was a thing. I literally remember the pain as it if was today. I would even claim the raison-d'etre for Jabber is precisely the IM walled gardens of this era.
And Jabber was then (ab)used (by Whatsapp, Google Talk, etc.) to create more centralized services..