AOL finally "won" that one by making a buffer exploit in their own client part of the required protocol. Later a court required them to allow messaging interop (as part of the Time Warner merger). They never implemented it.
Clients could probably hook/trap a fake buffer exploit for protocol compatibility without the security concerns. This ends up becoming a game of cat and mouse resulting in even more intricate technical workarounds and hacks.
My youth was in the late 90s and 2000s and I don’t know a single soul that used AOL, ICQ, or Yahoo. I imagine all of them must have been hoping for the reverse at that point, access to MSN.
Yeah, what? I grew up (in the same era) using AIM and Yahoo, ICQ was a little before my prime. Everyone I talk to about those days used them as well. MSN was fine but AIM and Yahoo were where it was at for the bulk of my early years of instant messaging with friends. At one point a friend even made me an AIM account because I was using MSN and they wanted to chat with me but didn't want to do it through MSN.
Obviously just 1 anecdote but I just wanted to share that my experience and your experience were dramatically different.
Perhaps it’s geographically correlated, I’m from The Netherlands, which would be West+Central Europe in terms of cultural zeitgeist. Would map neatly to the iMessage / WhatsApp divide too, if for different reasons.
Also from NL, was using ICQ at first then everyone switched to MSN. I do remember using AIM a little bit to chat with some Americans. This was the late 90's.
Back then the networks weren't so locked down to the clients, so it wasn't as big of an issue to have friends on various networks either. I have to call out IRC too.
I definitely look back on those as the "good old days" of chat.
Huh? Most people associating ICQ with the 90s is so strange to me. In Russia we used ICQ so much it pretty much became synonymous with the concept of instant messaging itself. That was in the late 00s. Skype was also prominent. Then everyone gradually switched to VKontakte, when they introduced instant messaging and group chats, and then Telegram. At no point did we even try to get into AIM, Yahoo, or MSN.
Fun fact about our ICQ use: almost no one used the crappy official client. For most people it was QIP or Miranda.
Yeah honestly I wondered if my timeline was accurate when writing this. I just recall it being mentioned and people talking about ICQ numbers and never personally having one and thinking "Nah I've got AIM and Yahoo and MSN I'm good"
Everybody was on all three for me. That being AIM and ICQ then later MSN. I don't remember much Yahoo messenger usage, just gaming on Yahoo, but everyone was on ICQ.
You must have been very young in the 90s because AOL dominated the late 90s. And it carried over into the early 00s with AIM even as people started to drop AOL as an ISP.
MSN was more of mid-00s thing. The 90s were all AOL though. I knew people who used ICQ (it was definitely more of a nerd thing) and Yahoo Messenger too.
AOL finally "won" that one by making a buffer exploit in their own client part of the required protocol. Later a court required them to allow messaging interop (as part of the Time Warner merger). They never implemented it.