![]() It had already been the case for years that most ICQ users had long since abandoned the system and most of the remaining ICQ users were Russians, but it seems that even the Russians who'd been using ICQ for all these years don't want to use the official ICQ client, as even the few Russians I know on ICQ-the last people who seemed to be actively using ICQ-have stopped logging into it following this change-over. This means that third-party ICQ clients will no longer work the only program that works with ICQ now is the official ICQ client, which is a pretty bad program that nobody wants to use. However, in March of 2019, ICQ shut down their old servers as the service moved to a new set of servers running on a new protocol. The following year, Yahoo! shut down their own Yahoo! Messenger on July 17, 2018, but this was not as much of a loss, as Yahoo! Messenger had never been that active to begin with, and was always something of an underdog in the IM space.Īll of this left ICQ as the only one of the original IM systems that was still running at the beginning of 2019. ![]() Later that same year, AOL shut down their much-loved AIM (AOL Instant Messenger) service, the service by which a great many people became introduced to the concept of communicating with other people on the Internt, on December 15, 2017. This was, however, something of a misleading announcement, as the servers which this service ran on continued operating for several years the official software from Microsoft no longer worked, but it was still possible via third-party software that supported the MSN protocol to continue using the system until May 18, 2017, when Microsoft actually shut down the service, more than four years after they said they would. The death of instant messaging started, for many people, in March 2013 when Microsoft announced the shutdown of MSN Messenger, later known as Windows Live Messenger. It died when the companies that operated the various IM services simply shut those services down. This can be seen in the fact that 2019 has turned out to be the year in which instant messaging died for good. ![]() There was never any need for instant messaging because the Internet already had ample ways for people to communicate with each other using standards documented in freely-available RFCs (IRC is RFC1459) instead of proprietary standards that required users to connect to servers owned by a single company that controlled the entire communications network. Indeed, even today, I think these are valid points. Why would you use such a system when IRC already existed and let you do that as well as so much more? Today, it's comparable to Twitter: The supposed "benefit" of Twitter is that it limits posts to 140 characters (yes, I know they increased this limit since then), but if you consider that an advantage, then why not just use an existing blog platform which has been around for years, like LiveJournal or Blogger, and just limit your posts to 140 characters? Why switch to something less capable because that's "all you need" if you already have something that can do more? So when instant messaging came out, I asked myself: Why bother? With ICQ, you can only send a message to one person at a time. When you wanted to speak one-on-one with somebody, it was always possible to send a private message to someone, and IRC also had the benefits of being a well-documented, open protocol, active on several different networks. I had already been active on IRC for years, and IRC had (and still has) the benefit that you could talk to people in whole rooms containing hundreds of people. When ICQ first came out in the late 1990s, more or less beginning what would later be called "instant messaging", I was skeptical at the time.
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