Odigo Messenger

» see odigo.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

odigo launched in december 1999 out of herzliya pituah, an israeli messenger built for the late icq era. it offered the standard contact list and chat window, then layered on something nobody else had attempted at consumer scale. a 'people-search' that would surface other odigo users currently browsing the same webpage. you could open a chat with a stranger on the basis of being on the same url at the same second. that was the pitch.

by may 2000 it had been turned into a multi-protocol client. one odigo install could reach icq and yahoo messenger contacts from the same window. this was a real engineering effort against companies that did not want to be bridged. by november 2000 the service had around two million registered users. for a tel-aviv app in the third year of the consumer im wars, that was not nothing.

comverse technology, an israeli telecom infrastructure company, acquired odigo in 2002 for around twenty million dollars. they kept it running for two more years while they extracted what they actually wanted, which was the server-side im stack for their mobile carrier products. on the consumer side the free client was wound down in 2004 with no fanfare. i was on icq in those years, then msn after that. odigo did not show up where i lived in turkey. when junior wrote in describing the early versions, that was the first time the name had crossed my desk in twenty years.

~ the case file ~

~ the people-search ~

the feature you remember odigo for is the people-search, sometimes called 'people-finder'. you would be reading a webpage and a small icon would tell you other odigo users were on the same page right now. you could open a chat with them without knowing anything except that you had both landed on the same url. it was a precursor to all the 'discover users with similar interests' patterns that would later become standard on the social-network side of the web.

the version of this that worked at scale was facebook, which used the social graph rather than the page-view stream. odigo's version assumed the page url was a good enough proxy for shared interest. for niche sites that was probably true. for the homepage of yahoo it was not. by the time the social graph approach won, comverse had already decided the free product was not strategic.

~ what really happened ~

comverse did not kill odigo for being a bad product. they killed it because they did not want to run a consumer im business. their actual buyers were mobile carriers, and the odigo server code was an input to those carrier products. once the carrier deals were in motion, paying engineers to maintain a free desktop client for two million home users in the icq tail was a line item they could cut. in 2004 they cut it.

in the wider history of consumer im, odigo sits with the cluster of late-nineties bridges that tried to be the one client that talked to everyone. trillian and miranda im were the better-known examples in the english-language tech press. odigo had a shorter consumer run and a slightly weirder feature set. the multi-protocol idea kept being attempted for another decade until every messenger gave up on federation and built its own walled garden again.

credit to Junior, who remembered the early versions.

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