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,' ',
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| | |_) | | | | |_) | |
| | _ < | | | __/ |
| |_| \_\ |___| |_| |
| |
| . s o . |
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|__________________________|
/____________________________\
/______________________________\
» dig up a name « search the catacombs
» wander by decade · the most mourned · the wake · visitors log
rest in peace, signed off
:: the digital graveyard ::
« back to all categories · 118 graves in this section, sorted newest first
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
Samsung Messages 📖 2009 - 2026 samsung messages was the stock sms client samsung shipped on galaxy phones from the touchwiz era onward. samsung announced its end-of-service in early 2026 and told users to migrate to google messages. the galaxy s26 line shipped without it on day one. after july 2026 the app was pulled from the gal |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
Messenger.com 📖 2015 - 2026 messenger.com was the standalone web client for facebook's chat product, spun out from facebook chat in 2015 and folded back into facebook.com eleven years later. the desktop apps for windows and mac were killed in december 2025. the website died in april 2026. the messenger app on phones is still a |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Guilded 📖 2017 - 2025 guilded launched on march 17 2017 from eli brown's pitch as the gaming-clan chat platform discord did not want to be. premium tier features were free from day one. 1080p 60fps streaming at 256 kbps audio, with kanban boards and tournament brackets layered on top of the chat client. competitive espor |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
NateOn 📖 2002 - 2025 dormant nateon was the korean instant messenger that overtook msn in its home country in may 2005 and stayed on top for the rest of the decade. sk communications built it as a bolt-on to the nate portal and welded it to the cyworld minihompy boom. by 2009 the subscriber count was ten million. kakaotalk holl |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
HeyTell 📖 2010 - 2025 two people ran heytell for fifteen years, which is longer than most funded messengers manage. steven hugg and jen harvey shipped it in february 2010 under the company name voxilate: you held a button down and talked, and letting go put a short audio file on somebody else's phone a second later. it p |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Skype 📖 2003 - 2025 blue logo, the boop boop ringtone, washed out video. how you called your grandma when she lived in another country. microsoft bought it for 8.5 billion dollars and slowly turned it off. |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Tinychat 📖 2009 - 2024 tinychat launched in february 2009 as a way to open a video chatroom inside a browser tab. by 2011 it was raising money from ashton kutcher and diddy. paltalk bought it in december 2014 and kept it running for another decade as a side property. the shutdown notice appeared on the site on december 16 |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Mail.ru Agent 📖 2003 - 2024 mail.ru agent was the messenger for the russian internet of the 2000s. it launched in may 2003 as an email notifier and grew into a full im client with voice, video, free sms and integration into the mail.ru email account. at peak it ran around 11 million monthly users with about 2 million online at |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
ICQ 📖 1996 - 2024 the original consumer instant messenger. four israeli developers in tel aviv built it in 1996. its uh-oh sound was the first text notification before texts existed. the 6-digit numbers were status symbols if you got in early. Mail.ru turned the lights off in june 2024 after 28 years. |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
HexChat 📖 2010 - 2024 hexchat started in 2010 as a windows patch set for xchat and took its own name in july 2012. for the decade after that it was the irc client most linux distributions installed for you, free where the windows build of xchat had started asking for twenty dollars. the previous release came out in 2021 |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2023-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Beeper Mini 📖 2023 - 2024 beeper mini reverse-engineered the imessage protocol and put blue bubbles on android. it launched on december 5 2023, apple blocked it three days later, beeper restored it, apple broke it again. after weeks of cat-and-mouse beeper gave up in january 2024. the doj cited the whole episode in its antit |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Wickr 📖 2012 - 2023 wickr was the snowden-era encrypted messenger for the people who wanted ephemeral self-destructing messages without going all the way to signal. it launched in 2012 with end-to-end encryption and message expiry timers, took in-q-tel funding in 2014, and got acquired by amazon web services in june 20 |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2023-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Nothing Chats 📖 2023 - 2023 the app lived one day. nothing announced it on 14 november 2023 as an imessage client for android and had a beta on google play by the 17th. it was gone on the 18th, after researchers found every message and every attachment sitting unencrypted in a firebase database anybody could open. sunbird, who |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Omegle 📖 2009 - 2023 the random-stranger video chat site. you opened the URL, you got paired with another random user somewhere on the internet, you talked or you hit "next." launched march 2009 by an 18-year-old in vermont. peak with teenagers in the early 2010s, second peak during covid lockdowns. shut down on 8 novem |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Facebook Messenger Lite 📖 2016 - 2023 messenger lite was facebook messenger with the weight cut off, made for the phones and networks the main app choked on. it was small and it ran on almost nothing, and across india and brazil it was how hundreds of millions of people actually messaged. meta killed it in 2023 to funnel everyone back i |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Microsoft Kaizala 📖 2017 - 2023 kaizala was a microsoft garage messaging app for india and the rest of microsoft's "next billion users" emerging markets. it shipped to the public out of india in summer 2017 with whatsapp-style group chat plus polls and surveys tuned for big workforces on slow 2g networks. in july 2019 microsoft st |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2020-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Exclu 📖 2020 - 2023 on 3 february 2023 police in four countries went through seventy nine addresses at the same hour and switched off exclu, an encrypted messaging service sold by subscription to roughly three thousand users. the encryption was never broken. a 2019 raid on a bulletproof hosting bunker in germany handed |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Google Talk / Hangouts (Classic) 📖 2005 - 2022 google's chat product. it started as Google Talk in 2005 (clean, simple, XMPP-compatible). became Hangouts in 2013. became Hangouts Chat in 2017. became Google Chat in 2020. became part of Google Workspace. each rename fragmented the audience further. by 2022 the original talk service was off. |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Google Duo 📖 2016 - 2022 google duo launched on august 16 2016 as the video-call half of the paired allo-duo messaging push, with end-to-end encryption by default and a knock knock live preview that showed the caller's camera feed before the recipient picked up. it survived allo by three years and peaked at around a hundred |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Google Hangouts 📖 2013 - 2022 hangouts was google's attempt to fold every one of its chat products into a single app, and for a while it worked. it grew out of google talk, the little chat bar inside gmail, and for a few years it was the simplest way to reach someone with a google account. then google lost interest and split it |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Fetion 📖 2007 - 2022 the carrier-owned messenger that everyone in china had to install because the carrier put it on the phone. for three years around 2010 it was the second internet of china after qq. then wechat showed up in 2011 and swallowed the category in eighteen months. fetion limped on for another decade becaus |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Surespot 📖 2013 - 2022 adam patacchiola and cherie berdovich ran surespot out of a tiny boulder operation called 2fours from 2013 onward. the messenger used 256-bit aes-gcm with 512-bit ecdh key exchange, on by default. it was free and open source with no account beyond a username. it never had group chat or forward secre |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2019-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
Threads (Instagram, 2019 app) 📖 2019 - 2021 instagram's first-attempt standalone messenger, tied strictly to your Close Friends list. shipped october 2019 as a private-share companion to the main app, aimed at the same "just my inner circle" behavior that snapchat owned. it never landed. lifetime downloads around 220,000, which is under 0.1% |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
Houseparty 📖 2016 - 2021 houseparty was a group video chat app that you joined casually, without scheduling. you opened the app and saw which friends were already in a "house" call, then dropped in. for a window of about six weeks during the early covid lockdown of march and april 2020 it was suddenly the biggest social app |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
Gadu-Gadu 📖 2000 - 2021 łukasz foltyn shipped the first version of gadu-gadu on 15 august 2000 from a small operation that grew into the company sms-express, later bought by o2.pl and folded into the wp.pl portfolio. the proprietary protocol carried over fifteen million registered accounts at peak with up to three hundred |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
Skype for Business 📖 2015 - 2021 Skype for Business was the corporate IM and conferencing product that lived inside Microsoft Office for fourteen years under three different names. it began as Office Communicator in 2007, became Lync in 2010, and was rebranded Skype for Business in 2015 after Microsoft's 8.5-billion-dollar Skype pu |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
MiTalk 📖 2010 - 2021 mitalk was xiaomi's messaging app, and its whole tragedy is timing. lei jun shipped it in december 2010, a full month before tencent shipped wechat, and for a moment xiaomi had china's first real mobile messenger. then wechat arrived and took the country, and by 2012 xiaomi's own ceo admitted mitalk |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
Hike Messenger 📖 2012 - 2021 hike was india's bet on a domestic messaging app, kavin bharti mittal's attempt to do for india what wechat did for china. it raised $250m+ from softbank and tencent. it crossed 100m users by january 2016 and unicorned that august. then whatsapp and reliance jio happened, and on 6 january 2021 it sh |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2019-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Squad 📖 2019 - 2020 squad was a mobile screen-sharing app from esther crawford and ethan sutin, the team that had previously built the failed faq app molly. it launched in january 2019 in san francisco. pandemic usage jumped about eleven-fold in early 2020. twitter bought the company on december 11, 2020 in an acquihir |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2019-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Cordless 📖 2019 - 2020 discord banned marcel schramm's account on 22 november 2020 for a terms of service violation, which he traced to the way his program opened a private message channel. the program was cordless, a discord client that ran inside a terminal, and the ban was the platform enforcing a rule everyone had ass |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Baidu Hi 📖 2008 - 2020 baidu hi was baidu's instant messenger for china, announced february 29 2008 and shipped that march. the launch pitch was an msn-style client tightly integrated with baidu search, baidu post bar and baidu space. it never broke the duopoly of tencent qq on the desktop and wechat on the phone. by the |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
FireChat 📖 2014 - 2020 firechat was the messenger you used when the network was off. it routed messages over bluetooth and peer-to-peer wifi, hopping device to device, no internet required. that pitch turned it into a protest tool the moment hong kong students figured out the cell network was being watched. open garden qu |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Skype Lite 📖 2017 - 2019 microsoft launched skype lite in mumbai in february 2017, a 13mb android build aimed at the cheap-phone-and-slow-network reality of indian users. satya nadella did the keynote at future decoded. the app was meant to be the skype that worked on 2g, with aadhaar integration for caller verification rol |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Peerio 📖 2015 - 2019 vincent drouin built peerio in montreal in 2014, with cryptocat's nadim kobeissi alongside him, as a messenger and file locker where the encryption happened before anything left your machine. the company could not read your files even if someone made it try. it shipped in january 2015 to a post snow |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
BlackBerry Messenger 📖 2005 - 2019 the messenger that came with every blackberry. for a few years, around 2009 to 2012, having a BBM PIN to share was a corporate status symbol. read receipts and delivery ticks were strict. the platform died slowly with blackberry itself. indonesia and nigeria kept it alive longer than anywhere. |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
BeeTalk 📖 2013 - 2019 beetalk was garena's attempt to own chat in southeast asia, launched out of singapore in 2013 with a shake-the-phone feature borrowed from wechat and a map of strangers within walking distance. it took ten million users in four months and spent real money on billboards in bangkok and taipei to get t |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Direct (Instagram standalone app) 📖 2017 - 2019 instagram built a second app that opened straight into the camera, so you could message people without ever seeing the feed. it was never released everywhere. it went out in december 2017 to six countries as a test, turkey among them, and turkey went on to account for more of its downloads than anyw |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Couple 📖 2012 - 2019 couple launched in march 2012 as pair, out of y combinator, and it was a messenger that only worked between two people. a hundred thousand users signed up in the first week and four million downloads followed, with a thumbkiss feature that buzzed both phones when two thumbs touched the same spot on |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2018-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Yahoo Squirrel / Yahoo Together 📖 2018 - 2019 squirrel was an invite-only group messaging app yahoo opened in closed beta on may 8, 2018, two months before pulling the plug on yahoo messenger itself. it was rebranded yahoo together that october and went offline for good on april 4, 2019, six months after the rename. the entire arc from yahoo me |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Google Allo 📖 2016 - 2019 google allo launched in september 2016 as the smart messenger that would make google assistant feel like a person you texted with. ten million people tried it in the first three months, then forgot about it. by february 2017 it had dropped out of the top 500 apps on the play store. google paused dev |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2018-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Bullet Messenger 📖 2018 - 2019 bullet messenger, later renamed liaotianbao, was a chinese chat app that luo yonghao of smartisan launched in august 2018 to take a run at wechat. it signed up 4 million users in its first nine days and topped the app store, which was enough for people to start calling it a wechat challenger. the mo |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Atlassian Stride 📖 2017 - 2019 stride was atlassian's rebuild-from-scratch answer to slack, the supposed future of team chat at the company that already owned hipchat. it launched in september 2017 and was already on the way out by july 2018, when atlassian sold the intellectual property to the company it was supposed to compete |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
HipChat 📖 2010 - 2019 hipchat was a chat room with green check marks for engineers, then a brand atlassian bought, then a brand atlassian replaced, then a brand atlassian sold to the company that beat it. the entire arc fits in nine years. by february 2019 every employee on it was already typing into slack on a second ta |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Cryptocat 📖 2011 - 2019 cryptocat launched may 19, 2011 as a browser-extension encrypted chat written in javascript by nadim kobeissi out of montreal. it spiked into mainstream press in 2012 after kobeissi was detained at a us border, then again in 2013 when glenn greenwald used it to meet edward snowden in hong kong. a 20 |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
2go 📖 2007 - 2019 2go launched in 2007 out of johannesburg, built by computer science students at the university of the witwatersrand. it ran on j2me feature phones at a time when those were the only mobile devices most of west and southern africa could afford. by the early 2010s the network had over fifty million re |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Nimbuzz 📖 2006 - 2019 nimbuzz was the app that promised to hold all your messengers at once, right when holding all your messengers stopped mattering. it arrived for the smartphone just as whatsapp was making the old protocols pointless. two hundred million people signed up, mostly outside the west, and then drifted to t |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
WebQQ 📖 2009 - 2019 tencent put qq inside a browser tab in september 2009, for everybody who could not install anything: school computer rooms, and the enormous chinese internet cafe economy behind them. the page grew a desktop of its own, then in 2014 it was cut back to plain messaging and renamed smartqq. tencent ann |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Yahoo! Messenger 📖 1998 - 2018 the messenger with the loudest possible attention-getter (the BUZZ feature shook your whole window with sound). its emoticon library was unmatched. yahoo turned it off in july 2018 after twenty years. nobody has matched the emoticons since. |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Chikka 📖 2000 - 2018 chikka was a philippine messenger that bridged the web and the phone network, letting you sit at a pc and send a free text to someone's mobile even when they were nowhere near a computer. it launched in 2000, in the country that texted more than anywhere on earth, and it moved billions of messages. |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Mig33 📖 2006 - 2018 mig33 was the mobile chat app indonesia ran on before whatsapp arrived. it peaked at 33 million monthly active users across southeast asia and the gulf-state foreign-worker corridors. the rebrand to migme in 2014 tried to make it a creator platform with in-app coins for streamers. the app went offli |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
WhatsApp for BlackBerry 📖 2010 - 2017 whatsapp launched in 2009 on iphone, then spent the next year shipping native clients for the platforms that owned the rest of the global phone market. the blackberry client landed for bbos around 2010 and a blackberry 10 build followed in 2013. for about five years the app was the cross-platform me |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
AOL Instant Messenger 📖 1997 - 2017 the AOL Instant Messenger. the running yellow guy was its mascot. it was the messenger of every american millennial after school in 2003. in turkey we mostly used MSN, so AIM was something i talked on with american pen-pals. AOL turned it off in december 2017. |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
ooVoo 📖 2007 - 2017 the group video chat people used because skype's free tier only worked for small calls. up to twelve callers at once on every platform that mattered, including a facebook embed. peaked with us teenagers between roughly 2012 and 2015 the way houseparty would later peak with the same demographic. krus |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Instantbird 📖 2007 - 2017 instantbird was a chat client built on the same engine as firefox, talking to twenty protocols at once through libpurple and through javascript plugins its own developers wrote. thunderbird could not use libpurple because of a license conflict, so the chat backend got rebuilt without it and shipped |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
indoona 📖 2011 - 2017 september 2011 is when tiscali decided italy should have its own skype, and 31 august 2017 is when it stopped paying for the idea. indoona did free calls and video between its own users, with cheap outbound minutes to real phone numbers on top. in 2014 tiscali opened it to developers so it could tal |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Empathy 📖 2007 - 2017 empathy was the chat client gnome shipped by default from version 2.24 onward, and ubuntu and fedora both made it the standard messenger in 2009. it did not speak a single protocol itself. everything ran through telepathy, a set of background services any other application on the desktop could also |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
pixiv Chat 📖 2009 - 2017 december 2009, and pixiv handed its paying members a white canvas with a timer on it. anybody could walk into the room and draw on the same surface as you, and the server kept every brushstroke as a file it could play back later. it ran seven and a half years and closed at noon on 15 june 2017, with |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Sina UC 📖 2002 - 2017 uc was built in 2002 by a small company in guizhou and got its opening when tencent closed free qq registration for the better part of a year. by november 2003 it had 80 million registered accounts and somewhere between two and three hundred thousand people online at once, which made it the third me |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Rounds 📖 2008 - 2017 rounds was a video-first social app out of tel aviv, built so that a video call was a place you did things together rather than just talked. you could watch youtube in sync or play little games on camera with friends. it launched in 2008, grew into millions of downloads, and in january 2017 kik boug |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Fring 📖 2006 - 2017 fring was an early mobile voip and video chat app founded in tel aviv in 2006. it ran on symbian, blackberry, and later iphone and android, and its trick was bundling skype, msn messenger, google talk, and aim into a single voip frontend on the phone. by 2010 it had pulled fifty million users and wa |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
UppTalk (Yuilop) 📖 2010 - 2017 yuilop was a free-calling and free-texting app out of barcelona, one of the wave of services that tried to make sms and phone minutes obsolete before whatsapp finished the job. it gave you a real cloud phone number and let you message people who did not have the app, which was clever and expensive. |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Yo 📖 2014 - 2016 yo was a one-button iphone app that sent the word "yo" to a friend as a push notification. there were no other features. it raised one and a half million dollars at a ten million dollar valuation in june 2014 and hit number four on the us app store. by 2016 it had drifted into skeleton-crew maintena |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Beejive 📖 2007 - 2016 fifteen dollars and ninety-nine cents, in 2008, for a chat program. beejive charged it because beejiveim did something the iphone could not yet do on its own: it held your connection to msn, aim, icq and the rest open on a server, so the conversation was still there when you came back. apple shipped |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Ya.Online 📖 2008 - 2016 mikhail pishchagin, one of the developers behind the psi jabber client, built yandex a messenger out of psi's own source code and shipped it in september 2008. it hung a russian search company's services off an open protocol: your mail login was your chat address, and the window showed you the mosco |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Mxit 📖 2005 - 2016 mxit was south africa's whatsapp before whatsapp arrived. it ran on the cheap feature phones a teenager could afford in johannesburg or cape town in 2008. it sent messages over data instead of sms back when sms was still per-message expensive. at peak in 2013 it had about 7.4 million monthly active |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Firefox Hello 📖 2014 - 2016 the video chat button that sat inside firefox itself. you opened a conversation in your browser, sent the link, and the other side joined with one click no account needed. it launched december 1 2014 in firefox 34 with telefonica running the rooms server. mozilla pulled it in firefox 49 on september |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Flipkart Ping 📖 2015 - 2016 punit soni came from google to be flipkart's chief product officer and put a messenger inside the shopping app, so you could send a friend a pair of shoes and argue about them without either of you leaving flipkart. it launched in august 2015 as the visible edge of a bet that indian shopping would h |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Tlen.pl 📖 2001 - 2016 tlen.pl launched in october 2001 from grupa o2 in poland as a desktop instant messenger meant to compete with the already-dominant gadu-gadu. the protocol was a modified jabberd build, customized enough to break compatibility with standard xmpp clients so people could not roam off to pidgin. the cli |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Xfire 📖 2004 - 2016 xfire was a free game-aware instant messenger that launched in april 2004 from a team led by quake legend dennis 'thresh' fong. it watched what game your pc was running and let your friends launch the same game with the right server address pre-filled. viacom bought it in 2006 for $102 million. by t |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Yahoo Livetext 📖 2015 - 2016 livetext was a video chat app where nobody was allowed to talk. you opened the camera and your friend opened the camera. you typed at each other while staring at each other's face. it shipped in late july 2015 and debuted in the app store top 150. it fell out of the top 1,000 in two weeks and was ki |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Skype Qik 📖 2014 - 2016 qik was the second life of a name microsoft already owned. the original qik was a 2006 live mobile broadcasting service skype bought in 2011, then sat on for three years. the relaunch as a separate skype-branded group video messaging app landed in october 2014, the same year vine and snapchat had al |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Talko 📖 2014 - 2016 talko was ray ozzie's second startup after lotus and groove networks. it was a voice-first messaging app for work teams, built on the premise that conference calls should become asynchronous threads you could rewind and bookmark. microsoft acquired talko on december 21, 2015 to fold the tech into sk |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
MessageMe 📖 2013 - 2015 messageme launched march 12, 2013 from a san francisco team of four founders. it reached one million users in ten days and five million in seventy five days. snapchat reportedly wanted to acquire it and was passed over for yahoo, which closed the deal in october 2014 for somewhere between $30 and $4 |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Facebook Slingshot 📖 2014 - 2015 slingshot was facebook's second swing at snapchat after the 2013 poke flop. the hook was reciprocity, a sling sat locked on your screen until you sent your own photo back. polite reviews followed. traction did not. creative labs got dissolved 18 months later with four apps pulled in one december wee |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
TextSecure 📖 2010 - 2015 an android app that encrypted your text messages, then stopped caring about text messages and encrypted your internet ones instead. built by moxie marlinspike's whisper systems in 2010, bought by twitter in 2011, open sourced on the way out. the key ratchet written for it became the signal protocol |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Emojli 📖 2014 - 2015 emojli was a messaging app with one rule taken to its silliest end: everything had to be emoji. your username was emoji and your messages were emoji, with no way to type an actual word anywhere in it. it was built by two british youtubers as a joke that they then actually shipped, and enough people |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
ChatON 📖 2011 - 2015 chaton was samsung's messenger answer to whatsapp and imessage, free, cross-platform, preinstalled on every galaxy device from 2011 to 2014. it signed up more than a hundred million users on paper. the daily engagement was closer to six seconds per user per month. samsung shut the service down on ma |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Rediff Bol 📖 2005 - 2015 rediff bol was the desktop instant messenger built by rediff.com india ltd, launched in alpha in early 2005 and pitched as a hindi-friendly answer to yahoo messenger for the indian market. its distinctive feature was free pc-to-mobile sms to most indian carriers, plus voip voice chat and webcam supp |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Relay 📖 2013 - 2014 twenty-six days separated the announcement from the shutdown. kik bought the toronto startup on 19 november 2014 and took both founders into waterloo. relay itself went dark on 15 december while still moving ten million gif messages a month, which made it one of the healthier things anyone ever swit |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
MSN Messenger 📖 1999 - 2014 the messenger of every Turkish high school student and university student from 2002 to 2010. the nudge shook your screen and your heart. appear-offline was a personality choice. your status message was your daily mood broadcast. Microsoft killed it slowly between 2013 and 2014, retiring it in favor |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
QIP 📖 2005 - 2014 qip stood for quiet internet pager and shipped its first build on november 1 2005 from ilgam zyulkorneev as a lightweight icq-compatible windows client. it spread through the russian-speaking internet as the de-facto third-party icq client, ad-free and skinnable, before adding xmpp, aim, mail.ru age |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
TorChat 📖 2007 - 2014 nothing was announced. the last commit landed on 20 january 2014 and nothing came after it, which is how a messenger with a thousand stars on github actually ends. bernd kreuss had published torchat in november 2007 as a python program that handed you a sixteen character onion address in place of an |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Miranda IM 📖 2000 - 2014 miranda was the client you ran when you were tired of keeping two messengers open. it started life as a lightweight icq clone and grew into a plugin box that spoke every protocol at once. it never had marketing, only a forum and a plugin list. the original project quietly stopped when its own develo |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
eBuddy 📖 2003 - 2013 ebuddy was the dutch web-based instant messenger that let you sign into msn, yahoo, aim, icq, and gtalk from any browser without installing anything. the company started as everywheremsn.com in september 2003, added the other protocols on the way to becoming the fallback client for anyone stuck on a |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Swapnote 📖 2011 - 2013 swapnote shipped free on the 3ds eshop in december 2011 and let you write a note by hand with a photo or a sound attached, then send it to a friend online or to a stranger's console by streetpass. nintendo cut the online delivery worldwide on 31 october 2013 after adults used it to send explicit ima |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Windows Live Messenger 📖 2005 - 2013 the new name for msn messenger after december 2005. same green icon, same contact list, longer string in the install wizard. peak of 330 million monthly users in 2009. retired into skype on april 8 2013 and nobody outside of microsoft press releases ever called it "windows live messenger" out loud. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Messenger Plus! 📖 2001 - 2013 cyril paciullo wrote an add-on for msn messenger in 2001 and 62 million people ended up installing it. it added colored nicknames and sound clips to a program microsoft was already giving away for free. when microsoft retired windows live messenger on 8 april 2013 the add-on had nothing left to atta |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Digsby 📖 2008 - 2013 digsby was a windows im aggregator that logged into eight chat networks at once. it started as an rit mba project, hit meebo/trillian territory, then got bought by tagged in 2011 and quietly parked. by 2012 it was on github as open source. by 2013 it had no owner at all. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Userplane 📖 2001 - 2013 userplane sold chat as a component. you dropped its widget into your own site, your own users talked to each other inside a box carrying your logo, and userplane ran the servers behind it. aol paid $40 million for the company in 2006, mostly for the dating sites it was already powering, then left it |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Yahoo! Chat 📖 1997 - 2012 yahoo chat was a separate product from yahoo messenger. it ran in the browser as a java applet and drew its own crowd of regulars, until a 2005 advertiser walkout after a houston tv station documented the user-created room names. yahoo cut user-room creation overnight without warning. it never recov |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
iChat 📖 2002 - 2012 ichat shipped in august 2002 with mac os x 10.2 jaguar as apple's first native aim client. ichat av added video conferencing in 2003, with four-way conferences by 2005. the protocol list later grew to include xmpp and yahoo messenger. mountain lion replaced it with messages on july 25, 2012. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Meebo 📖 2005 - 2012 meebo launched in september 2005 from a three-person founding team in palo alto. it was an in-browser front-end for every major instant messaging network at once. you could log into msn or aim or any of the other major im networks inside one webpage instead of running five desktop clients. monthly u |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
BuddyBuddy 📖 2000 - 2012 buddybuddy was the messenger of the south korean pc-cafe and high-school internet through the early 2000s. it launched january 13 2000 from buddy buddy co. ltd. and reached a dominant position among korean teenagers before nateon and msn took the office market. wemade entertainment bought it in 2004 |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
aMSN 📖 2002 - 2012 amsn was an open-source clone of msn messenger that ran everywhere the official client did not, mainly linux and mac. it copied the look and the features closely enough that your contact list came with you when you left windows. around forty million people downloaded it. when microsoft changed the m |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
MeBeam 📖 2007 - 2012 ashod apakian put mebeam up in november 2007 and the whole product was one idea: a video chat room that existed as soon as you typed a name after the slash. no signup and no client, just flash and a webcam and up to sixteen faces in a grid. it ran on advertising and got picked up through an adium pl |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
Beluga 📖 2010 - 2011 beluga was a december 2010 ex-googler side project that became the codebase facebook used to launch facebook messenger eight months later. lucy zhang, ben davenport, and jon perlow had left google with the goal of building a group-chat app that would handle ad-hoc friend groups better than sms could |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
Upoc 📖 1999 - 2011 in 1999 four people in new york built a way to text a group instead of a person. the groups that formed were fan clubs and celebrity-sighting networks rather than circles of friends, and because the american carriers would not pass messages to each other, upoc did the passing. dada bought it in 2006 |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
PictoChat 📖 2004 - 2011 ten meters was the whole network. pictochat came preloaded on every nintendo ds from november 2004, with no account and no server behind it, which meant it only worked when somebody else inside that radius also owned a ds. the 3ds arrived in 2011 without it. nothing had to be switched off, because t |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
Myspace IM 📖 2006 - 2010 myspace ran the most popular social network in the english speaking world from 2005 to 2008 and decided what its users really needed was a windows desktop messenger. it shipped one in 2006. it had voice calls and a feature called zaps that nobody used. the users kept using aim and msn anyway. by 201 |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
Windows Live Call 📖 2006 - 2010 the phone icon at the top of every messenger conversation. free computer-to-computer audio and video on one side, paid calls to real telephone numbers on the other, and microsoft never sold those minutes itself. verizon carried the american half until september 2008 and telefonica took over. messeng |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1993-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Ircle 📖 1993 - 2009 ircle was how you got onto irc from a macintosh. olaf titz wrote the first version in think pascal and released it in 1993 under the gpl through version 1.56, then walked away from it, and onno tijdgat picked it up, rewrote the thing in c and turned it into shareware with free upgrades for life. ver |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
MSN Web Messenger 📖 2004 - 2009 in august 2004 microsoft put msn messenger in a browser tab, for the very large number of people whose computer would not let them install anything. your contacts saw a small globe beside your name instead of the usual status icon. a rebuilt version called windows live web messenger went to internal |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Windows Live Agents 📖 2006 - 2009 on 25 november 2008 the windows live agents team shipped version 5.1 of its sdk and used the same post to announce that the whole platform was being retired. official support ended on 30 june 2009. the bots people had already added to their contact lists kept working out of windows live gallery unti |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
Caramail 📖 1997 - 2008 the french webmail and chat rooms service from 1997 to 2008. before MSN took over here, this is where french teenagers met strangers, sent first emails, and had small private chats with people they had never met. owned by Lycos at one point, then quietly killed by Lycos. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
TXTMob 📖 2004 - 2008 tad hirsch wrote it as an mit doctoral student so that protesters at the two american party conventions of 2004 could text each other in groups. about five thousand people were on it in the streets of new york that august. four years later the city subpoenaed him for every message and every name, an |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
Windows Live for TV 📖 2007 - 2008 codenamed nemo, then orbit, then shipped to the public as windows live for tv. the plan was to put messenger and spaces on the television through windows media center and steer the whole thing with a remote control, and the beta turned up in january 2007 for people running vista home premium. of eve |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
Meetro 📖 2005 - 2007 a location-aware messenger four years before foursquare and eight years before the location tab on every social app. meetro launched 1 june 2005 out of chicago, wound down through 2007, and was deadpooled in april 2008 when paul bragiel's team walked to lefora. it bridged aol and msn and yahoo and g |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2006|
|_____|
|
MSN Chat 📖 1995 - 2006 msn chat was the room next to the messenger everyone actually used. microsoft ran open chat rooms for years, then got scared of who was walking into them and started closing the doors country by country in 2003. the last rooms, kept alive as a paid subscription in a handful of places, went dark in o |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2006|
|_____|
|
Windows Messenger 📖 2001 - 2006 windows messenger was the one that came in the box and lost anyway. microsoft built it into windows xp as the clean, corporate-friendly version of msn messenger, without the winks and the custom emoticons, and the whole world downloaded the fuller one over it. it had good bones, sip support and file |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2005|
|_____|
|
Microsoft Threedegrees 📖 2003 - 2005 threedegrees was a 2003 microsoft p2p add-on to msn messenger built by the netgen team, an internal startup of recent college graduates working out of a downtown seattle office rather than the redmond campus. it let small groups of teen users share a buddy circle with picture sharing and synchronize |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2004|
|_____|
|
Odigo Messenger 📖 1999 - 2004 a 1999 israeli messenger that bridged icq and yahoo into one client. its 'people-search' would put you in a chat with strangers who happened to be on the same webpage at the same second. comverse technology bought it in 2002 for around twenty million dollars and quietly turned the free client off in |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2003|
|_____|
|
PIRCH 📖 1995 - 2003 pirch was the other irc client. northwest computer services shipped it as shareware, and the last build, pirch98, arrived in 1998 with nothing after it. the page at pirchat.com then stayed up for four more years without a single byte changing, carrying a copyright line that stopped at 1999. by the s |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
Microsoft Comic Chat 📖 1996 - 2001 microsoft comic chat was an irc client that turned your text conversation into a comic strip with cartoon avatars. david kurlander's team at microsoft research shipped it in august 1996 as part of the internet explorer 3 package. it was localized into 24 languages and briefly served as msn's officia |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
The Palace 📖 1995 - 2001 dormant the graphical chat platform from 1995. you joined a "palace," which was a set of 2D rooms with painted backgrounds. you saw yourself and other users as small avatars (called props). you walked around. you typed. messages appeared as comic-strip speech bubbles above your prop. the company died around |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1994-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
Tribal Voice PowWow 📖 1994 - 2001 powwow was a chat program built by tribal voice in woodland park, colorado in december 1994. john mcafee founded the company after stepping away from mcafee associates. by 1999 the client had around 2 million users grouped into 40,000 named tribes. cmgi bought tribal voice in 1999 and folded it into |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1994-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
Virtual Places 📖 1994 - 2001 virtual places was a presence-based chat overlay built by an israeli company called ubique, founded in 1994 in rehovot by ehud shapiro and avner shafrir. the client painted user avatars onto the top of any browser window, showed who else was on the same URL, let strangers chat and co-browse together |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
Firetalk 📖 1999 - 2001 firetalk came out of the voice code in a failed multiplayer game and became, for about two years, the friendliest way to talk to strangers over a modem. it was free and under a megabyte, and it let a group of people tour websites together while talking over the top of them. two million people signed |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
Gooey 📖 1999 - 2000 gooey was a small windows download that watched which page your browser was on and put you in a room with everybody else who was on it. forty six thousand people signed up in the first month and close to a million eventually downloaded it, which in 1999 was a real number. then the money stopped. the |