this post was submitted on 22 Oct 2024
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I never knew anybody who used it. I had one contact on ICQ. Everybody else used AIM.
I was in highschool in the 2000s in Europe, and msn was our default way of communication with classmates.
Yep, early 2000s in the UK and everyone was using MSN. I didn’t know a single person using AIM or ICQ!
I can see why AIM would be mostly an American phenomenon, given it was initially a feature specific to AOL. ICQ...I like to say I'm 10 minutes too young to have used ICQ, everybody who has wistful memories of it were like the seniors when I was a freshman. Yahoo! was the other one; the perpetual alsoran.
Ditto for us in Australia
Remember when icq could message aim users though? That was so badass.
remember trillian? or pidgin was it called? you could message every service.
that was badass.
Pidgin still seems to active lol
https://keep.imfreedom.org/pidgin/
Wonder who still uses it.
I actually forgot all about that, but yes I did use Trillian at one point. Can you imagine big tech companies letting you use third party apps that didn't lock you into their service or ad stream these days?
Both. Trillian was not Mac only (I made a mistake from memory), Pidgin was multi platform but started on Linux. Pidgin had every protocol. I still keep my .purple config folder and logs after over a decade. Not like I'll ever read the logs again, though.
Edit: Guys, relax. I made a mistake recounting from memory. I didn't run Windows back then. I assumed that because of the native Aqua interface, there wasn't a Windows port.
I remember having Trillian on Windows way back when.
I'll have you know I did go back and read my logs from like 2008. I think I cringed so hard I never recovered. You might have saved yourself by not looking at yours!
Trillian was not Mac only. I've never owned a Mac and used Trillian almost exclusively from 2002 until roughly 2009?? I can't remember when the transition from IM to texting happened for me, but it was around then. When I was running Linux at home I would use Gaim, which was developed by a friend of the main Trillian guy.
Trillian ran on Windows but was closed source. Pidgin is foss.
MSN could do the same with Yahoo Messenger users, for a while at least.
I think this is another one of those cases where the US does something different to the rest of the world: the majority of people were using msn messenger but the US was using aim.
AIM was released in 1997, MSN in 1999. AIM was at the time the biggest ISP in the United States, so AIM was pretty uniquely marketed to us.
It was my observation that you had two main camps: Those whose home was AIM, and those whose home was MSN. And the deciding factor was probably if you used AOL as your ISP. There were people who didn't know you could get an AIM account if you weren't an AOL customer. Those who didn't use AOL probably went the same way others did around the world, MSN messenger was built into Windows so it was the obvious one to use.
In the UK MSN was pretty ubiquitous.
I don't even know what AIM is, everyone in Brazil was on ICQ and MSN, if you were a kid or teen you were on MSN, if you were an adult you were on ICQ.
AOL Instant Messenger, ICQ's main rival in the 90's in North America.