Do you remember and still use AOL Instant Messenger (AIM), Yahoo, and ICQ ?
Now we talk about Viber, Whatsapp and KIK
Reading this article about Chat wars was funny and intressting.
In the summer of 1998 I graduated from college and went to work as a programmer at Microsoft in Redmond, Washington. I was put on the group that was building MSN Messenger Service, Microsoft’s instant messaging app. The terrible name came from Marketing, which had become something of a joke for always picking the clunkiest and least imaginative product names. Buddy List? C U C Me? MSN Messenger? No, MSN Messenger Service. I’ll call it Messenger for short.
At the time the big players in instant messaging were AOL Instant Messenger (AIM), Yahoo, and ICQ. AIM had tens of millions of users; AOL had become the country’s biggest dial-up provider in the mid-’90s by blitzing everyone’s mailboxes with CD-ROMs, and all AOL users instantly became AIM users. Yahoo and ICQeach had millions of users. Those were big numbers for the 1990s.
http://nplusonemag.com/chat-wars
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