ICQ chat or go home!
Trillian was the superior MSN Messenger client.
Imagine deploying such an interoperable client today. Like something that lets you bridge Facebook, Reddit, X, etc. all in one and use the services however you see fit, seamlessly moving conversations between platforms depending on which features you want at a given moment.
You’d get sued so hard you’d discover new exotic states of matter.
Trillian itself was a proprietary knockoff of Gaim, which later became Pidgin. Surprisingly both Trillian and Pidgin are still alive and in use today.
EDIT: Decided to read a bit on the Wikipedia pages and it was a bit less cut and dry than I made it seem. History’s interesting.
Matrix chat has bridges that let you link a number of chat services like sms, facebook messenger, instagram messenger, slack, and a lot more. It’s no trillian but it’s as close to a modern equivalent that I think you’ll get.
I was on Linux so I used an MSN Messenger clone called aMSN. It was a decent enough experience, although the UI looked pretty dated since it used Tk. I learnt basic Tcl (programming language) so I could implement new features myself.
Fuck i feel old.
What year did that come out?
1954
Fuuuuuck
Not sure but it can’t have been more than a few years right?
Right?!?
Want to really feel old? How about when messages were hand written on little pink pre printed note pads?
Or when the priestesses woukd carve them for you and… Damn i miss the smell of clay in my library.
You are.
So am I.
Do you? I ended a relationship over MSN. An adult relationship. I feel like that was so many lives ago. Since msn ended the world was never the same
bever the same
It really wasn’t. Kind of the last corporate utility program that worked. The last messenger app designed for users, and desktop users, first. It was just about the time social networks took off, and i can’t imagine that exodus didn’t poush people scrambling to stay in touch. It was around the last of a lot of kinds of things that were good about old computet.
Not having friends got me out of so much trouble.
Ahh I remember this so well. My friend at school tried to set me up with a girl by getting her to add me on MSN. I never even knew what she looked like but my friend said she was cute. It was such a thrill to my ~15 year old self and I got such a warm and giddy feeling at the idea this girl liked me and that I was potentially going to get a girlfriend.
Eventually she sent me a low res picture of herself on a crappy webcam and I was in love.
After a while I met up with her and my friend + his girlfriend. Unfortunately she showed absolutely no interest in me when we met face to face, much to my disappointment. So that went nowhere.
MSN messenger was the shit in it’s day though!
The internet went to shit after this. The peak of human civilisation, just as Agent Smith said.
the peak was ICQ before AOL bought it and slowly killed it with cancer.
Omg, AOL. We all saw the AOL users herded into their walled-in proprietary chat rooms and felt contempt for them. Thirty years on, that’s called social media.
Remember when “afk” was a legit thing to write?
Now you’re leaving the bigger screen and can instantly reply with the small screen - no “afk” possible since you’ve got it always in your pocket.
I just this month realized that I really really really miss the ability to set a status like "On vacation, will reply on [date]. On Facebook Messenger I can set a status for at most 24 hours, anything beyond that is obviously not necessary… I wanted to put a message telling people I don’t use it anymore and yo contact me on [phone number]
I just put a banner on my facebook page announcing that im just off the platform.
Most of my friends don’t check Facebook, they just use Messenger, but I’ll do that too
You could use some text as your profile picture, maybe that would work?
Not a bad idea actually, thank you
Dopamine just flooded my brain
I am curious where you grew up.
In NYC everyone used AIM or AOL.
I know in the Philippines they used ICQ.
Actually, I am curious on what everyone was using at the time.
Ontario Canada, we all used MSN.
Tennessee here. AIM for most people, ICQ for nerds. MSN was for our parents.
Practically everyone in Australia used MSN Messenger. Once it died, most people switched to Google Talk, then to Facebook Messenger. Messenger is still the most popular by far - last I checked, it had around 2x the number of users as the second most popular (which I think was WhatsApp).
ICQ was popular too, but just for one feature: free SMS. In an era where every SMS cost $0.25, being able to send them for free was incredibly useful. (it never cost money to receive phone calls or SMS in Australia, only to send them)
-nudges your screen every 30 seconds-
The rate limit was only client-side, so you could patch it with Messenger Plus and spam the button to keep sending nudges over and over.
Damn, i never knew that.
I used ICQ in the min-late 90’s in the Midwest US.
Never had AIM or AOL.ICQ was the best. Didn’t it allow multiple app logins?
I need to look for the uh-oh! Soundbite.
