[United857]

Back in the 80s and the early 90s before the commercialization of the Internet, you had dial-up services like AOL, Compuserve, Prodigy. You could only email, message and communicate members within each service.

Back to the future...

[gcb0]

And then on the 90s you had icq, aol, yahoo and another dozen instant messagers. Then Google played the bait and switch with jabber support for gtalk and came social networks and everyone having a sms phone in their pockets and all that became irrelevant...

Did we just defined the instant messager life cycle in 10yrs?

[Zash]

All this has happened before, and all of it will happen again .. and again .. and again ...

[sgift]

IRC. Solving problems we shouldn't have in the first place since the dawn of the Internet.