[dheera]

I miss the days of ICQ, MSN, AIM, Yahoo, Zephyr, Gtalk, Facebook's XMPP, and all those other messengers. They had relatively open or decipherable protocols, and on almost all OSes there were at least a couple decent applications that allowed you to login to all messaging services using a single piece of software. I could even write gateways and plugins to use NLP and autoreply, encrypt messages, and all kinds of other awesome things which I can't do anymore.

It seems like we've taken a step back in technology.

[CaptSpify]

Me too. A lot of those open standards still exist, but everyone has walled off their garden. It's infuriating. I don't mind using whatever protocol my contactee wants, but I'm not going to install 10 different messaging apps with various permissions just to communicate with them. Inter-connectivity is the name of the game, not exclusiveness.