The fall... and rise and rise and rise of chat networks

From CompuServe to Telegram, chat has come a long way—and it's just getting started.

Read the whole story

 

[mdporter]

I used to run a D-Dial. stuff an Apple IIe full of 300 baud modems and you have a local chat system. Then on nights and weekends you link to to other D-Dials for a nation wide system. Fun times.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diversi-Dial

 

[Argyris]

All this simply makes me feel old. Is this what the kids are doing these days?

Also, it just shows that everything in the world is cyclical. Instant messaging and chat were a big thing when I was a teenager, and then we all got into college and decided social networking was the next big thing. Now it's chat again, and I'll bet today's teenagers think they've plotted on something new and unique to their generation. There's only so many ways two or more people can talk to one another over a network, so it's not exactly a revolution somebody worked out how to put a chat client on a phone.

I predict sites where you set up a public profile and network with lots of other people will be the next big thing in 10 years or so....

 

[NeoMorpheus]

Adriano Petrosillo[/url]":34bsz0q7]

juanlucasrey[/url]":34bsz0q7]Also useful to know, this blog entry about Telegram's security:
http://www.cryptofails.com/post/7054672 ... is-contest

By the way, I've had a very weird experience. I was talking with a friend on Whatsapp a few weeks ago about a very specific subject, and the next day she was shown an ad on that very subject on Facebook. Now, it may just have been a coincidence (and it probably was), but, despite their assurances to the contrary, it would be plausible that Facebook is starting to capitalise on a chat network that cost them $19 billion and that has very little potential for profitability per se.

I experienced something like that. I chatted once with someone via whatsapp and right away, FB suggested that person as a friend.

Mind you, that person and i dont have any friend in common, neither groups.

So yes, looking more into either telegram or just sms.

 

[cadence]

Note to the author: Kik was founded by students of University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada. Not Ohio.
This also helps explain why they initially developed Kik on BlackBerry platform, and why BlackBerry was suing them: BlackBerry is based in the same Waterloo, Canada; and the people who founded Kik were previously working at BlackBerry, therefore BB alleged they stole their technology from BB Messenger.

 

[Momo24]

virtualkiwi[/url]":dnz5kri1]

mrseb[/url]":dnz5kri1]

Jabshimitsu[/url]":dnz5kri1]Wonder what happened to ICQ... we could send mass SMS at one point to all our guild members in WoW and kill world bosses, :shrug: those sleepless nights as a student.

I still remember my ICQ number, more than a decade after I last used it. God, I spent SO MANY HOURS on that service.

But eventually it actually became a bit much. I was chatting to so many people that I'd have dozens of offline messages when I logged in. Eventually I went on holiday for a couple of weeks, to France... and when I came back, I just didn't have the strength to open ICQ and receive all those hundreds of offline messages. And I never used it again.

That's a pretty cool way to organise WoW raids though. We just used IRC, plus I had everyone's phone number, so I could poke them if they didn't turn up.

Oh that's an amazing serendipitous You Got Mail story. I know a person who met his partner of 20 years on ICQ.


I remember my ICQ number too. And one particularly fateful offline message from some random person on the other side of the world because I'd accidentally left my computer on all night.
She's now my wife.
I saved the transcript of our conversations, but somehow they got lost during a hard drive upgrade, although I still have the actual ICQ database, but I haven't worked out a way of extracting the messages from it.
It was particularly amusing to look back on as we both spoke different languages, and Google Translate wasn't particularly accurate in those days, but as time went on we both became more proficient in each others language, and conversations got more interesting as we learnt to communicate better.

 

[Rockyroad]

mike3775[/url]":1qqfjsho]

Steve78[/url]":1qqfjsho]The biggest problem with all these chat/comms apps is fragmentation. If I wanted to keep in touch with all my friends, family & colleagues I'd need to install about 10 different Apps.

I had the same problem, until I heard about Trillian, which basically let me have the 3 I used most connected at the same time, and I didn't have to open all the other messengers individually.

I really miss ICQ though, I loved that program

Adium for OSX did the same for me by bringing multiple protocols together in the one dashboard. I think I still used Ircle though for IRC.

 

[SomeHandleThatStartsWithS]

For about seven years I've been using Google Talk/Hangouts and iMesaage. Hangouts is available on all my computers and mobile devices. My second most used is iMessage. It's available on iOS and Mac OS and I wish I could use it on Windows as well. Then it is Kik, and FB messenger tied.

I really wish I had one app that was used by everyone in my contacts and available on iOS, Android, Windows and Mac OS with presence.

EDIT: drinking beer before Deadpool, and typing on iPhone was a bad mix, apparently.

 

[neodorian]

mike3775[/url]":28m4vnfj]Texting may have hastened the demise of chatting through YIM, AIM, MSN, etc, but I had a Motorola cell phone that came pre-installed with AIM as the primary text service at the time in 2003. Texting itself as a standalone did not really take off until after 2005, which is about the time I actually got rid of my cell phone until 2012 or so.

I remember getting my first cell phone bill from T-Mobile for hundreds of dollars, because I did not sign up for unlimited text, and did not know that AIM actually was counted as texting. I was lucky though, T-Mobile was considerate of my situation and did wave 90% of the texts, but I did end up having to pay more a month for unlimited text.

Jesus, typing that up, reminds me what the internet on that V300 was like, all text internet.

For me, SMS was always a fallback measure. On my first Sanyo flip phone around '02 or '03 I would use the AIM "web" interface because at the time, unlimited data was cheaper than blocks of several hundred texts. The sucky part was that it wasn't useful unless you were signed onto the page in the crappy little mobile browser and there were no notifications. Still, that and email over mobile were my preferred way to send short messages since they didn't use expensive SMS.

Then with my first smartphones like my Treo and a couple of early PocketPCs I had something more like native IM apps, albeit without modern push notifications at first. I remember how one of the great things about early Gmail was that you could add AIM sign-in info to Gmail Chat so I could just keep a Gmail tab open in my browser at work and keep up with any friends or family whether they were Gmail users or just still used AIM (which was still fairly popular with people I knew in the mid-2000's). It was honestly a great "trojan" for Gmail that never got much press and would never fly in today's world of siloed chat networks. As a bonus, even when I was still working lower level jobs where I couldn't install programs on company computers, I could still use chat in the browser.

Over time, most everyone I knew switched from Hotmail or Yahoo or MSN to Gmail for their personal webmail (or at least had a Gmail account) so when AIM support was dropped, it didn't even register as I'd not used it in a year or two. To this day Gmail/Hangouts is my primary option because I can keep a Gmail tab open throughout the day at work and turn notifications on or off per chat depending on whether I want to be bugged by friends shooting the breeze at work. It's the default IM client on my phone and the phones of probably half of my friends and the chats stay synced up across mobile and browser. And for the people with iPhones, they can still install it as a free app. I'd have certainly considered iMessage or iChat or whichever one is the iOS/OSX IM client but they never followed through with porting it to other platforms.

I only really use SMS for one or two friends who have iPhones and don't use Gmail/Hangouts. It's a little annoying because of the character limits and the limits when attaching images via MMS. Getting added to a group message by an iPhone user is particularly irritating because it falls back to sending messages as attachments to MMS messages if you're not also using an iPhone and until recently, Hangouts or the more basic Messaging app didn't handle them well. It's gotten better but for a while I would get every reply to group messages as separate MMS attachments without being "threaded".

This all sorta comes back to the thing about siloed services. Sure, there are cross-platform apps and services but you have to convince people to use something other than the default on their phone or computer. Unless everyone uses the same thing, it's essentially useless (see also: Facebook versus all other challengers in that space). Hangouts/Gchat has been the solution in my circles since it's both cross-platform and default on at least many of our phones but it's still not perfect and it's not as nice as having something as standard as MMS that adds the benefits of IM with only IP/data usage and the ability to embed images and other media.

I'd love to see a modernized version of SMS that uses a single protocol and has universal support on all major platforms but there's no real benefit to Microsoft or Apple or Google or Facebook or anyone else in developing and supporting such a thing when they can use their own IM services as a way to keep you in their general ecosystem and making their other services more convenient to access and simpler to try out.

 

[macnews]

the University of Waterloo in Ohio

Ohio? Try a bit further North.

 

[mike3775]

neodorian[/url]":tt0g0ib8]

mike3775[/url]":tt0g0ib8]Texting may have hastened the demise of chatting through YIM, AIM, MSN, etc, but I had a Motorola cell phone that came pre-installed with AIM as the primary text service at the time in 2003. Texting itself as a standalone did not really take off until after 2005, which is about the time I actually got rid of my cell phone until 2012 or so.

I remember getting my first cell phone bill from T-Mobile for hundreds of dollars, because I did not sign up for unlimited text, and did not know that AIM actually was counted as texting. I was lucky though, T-Mobile was considerate of my situation and did wave 90% of the texts, but I did end up having to pay more a month for unlimited text.

Jesus, typing that up, reminds me what the internet on that V300 was like, all text internet.

For me, SMS was always a fallback measure. On my first Sanyo flip phone around '02 or '03 I would use the AIM "web" interface because at the time, unlimited data was cheaper than blocks of several hundred texts. The sucky part was that it wasn't useful unless you were signed onto the page in the crappy little mobile browser and there were no notifications. Still, that and email over mobile were my preferred way to send short messages since they didn't use expensive SMS.

Then with my first smartphones like my Treo and a couple of early PocketPCs I had something more like native IM apps, albeit without modern push notifications at first. I remember how one of the great things about early Gmail was that you could add AIM sign-in info to Gmail Chat so I could just keep a Gmail tab open in my browser at work and keep up with any friends or family whether they were Gmail users or just still used AIM (which was still fairly popular with people I knew in the mid-2000's). It was honestly a great "trojan" for Gmail that never got much press and would never fly in today's world of siloed chat networks. As a bonus, even when I was still working lower level jobs where I couldn't install programs on company computers, I could still use chat in the browser.

Over time, most everyone I knew switched from Hotmail or Yahoo or MSN to Gmail for their personal webmail (or at least had a Gmail account) so when AIM support was dropped, it didn't even register as I'd not used it in a year or two. To this day Gmail/Hangouts is my primary option because I can keep a Gmail tab open throughout the day at work and turn notifications on or off per chat depending on whether I want to be bugged by friends shooting the breeze at work. It's the default IM client on my phone and the phones of probably half of my friends and the chats stay synced up across mobile and browser. And for the people with iPhones, they can still install it as a free app. I'd have certainly considered iMessage or iChat or whichever one is the iOS/OSX IM client but they never followed through with porting it to other platforms.

I only really use SMS for one or two friends who have iPhones and don't use Gmail/Hangouts. It's a little annoying because of the character limits and the limits when attaching images via MMS. Getting added to a group message by an iPhone user is particularly irritating because it falls back to sending messages as attachments to MMS messages if you're not also using an iPhone and until recently, Hangouts or the more basic Messaging app didn't handle them well. It's gotten better but for a while I would get every reply to group messages as separate MMS attachments without being "threaded".

This all sorta comes back to the thing about siloed services. Sure, there are cross-platform apps and services but you have to convince people to use something other than the default on their phone or computer. Unless everyone uses the same thing, it's essentially useless (see also: Facebook versus all other challengers in that space). Hangouts/Gchat has been the solution in my circles since it's both cross-platform and default on at least many of our phones but it's still not perfect and it's not as nice as having something as standard as MMS that adds the benefits of IM with only IP/data usage and the ability to embed images and other media.

I'd love to see a modernized version of SMS that uses a single protocol and has universal support on all major platforms but there's no real benefit to Microsoft or Apple or Google or Facebook or anyone else in developing and supporting such a thing when they can use their own IM services as a way to keep you in their general ecosystem and making their other services more convenient to access and simpler to try out.

I agree about the perception of siloed services, but these days, with there only really being 2 or 3 platforms, the silo's are pretty much gone. With SMS, it doesn't matter if the ones I want to send a message to are on Android, Apple, or Blackberry, as long as I have the number, I can send them a message through the message app that came on my phone, whether its Android, Apple, or Blackberry.
As far as chatting goes, I still use mirc all the time, as I have been chatting with the same group of people on the same server and room for close to 15 years now.

 

[Fatesrider]

I completely bailed on chat around 2008. With a virtual keyboard on my phone, I hate texting (my infamous two letter replies tell my friends that), so chat apps on a smartphone would be like the third circle of hell for me. (I'm seriously considering an Android Blackberry next time around since thin and huge seem to be the fashion and neither support a physical keyboard).

I always liked chat, but it seemed I wasted a lot of time talking about nothing on it. At least texting connects me with people I know in real life about things that have meaning to both of us. If only I could keep my wife from ranting about her day via text, though... My replies are usually "!", "?", ":/" and other suitable expressions that indicate I'm paying attention, but I wait until we can talk before offering any other more nuanced feedback.

Given the proclivities on the part of chat app makers these days - the data mining that goes on for "relevant ads" - which was absent in the older programs, I'm less inclined to leap into chat now than before, assuming I had a reason to. Maybe if I get highly popular in my writing, I might start using Twitter or something like that, but real-time chat? It's too much of a time sink for me these days.

 

[mike3775]

Fatesrider[/url]":jp7ojx96]I completely bailed on chat around 2008. With a virtual keyboard on my phone, I hate texting (my infamous two letter replies tell my friends that), so chat apps on a smartphone would be like the third circle of hell for me. (I'm seriously considering an Android Blackberry next time around since thin and huge seem to be the fashion and neither support a physical keyboard).

I always liked chat, but it seemed I wasted a lot of time talking about nothing on it. At least texting connects me with people I know in real life about things that have meaning to both of us. If only I could keep my wife from ranting about her day via text, though... My replies are usually "!", "?", ":/" and other suitable expressions that indicate I'm paying attention, but I wait until we can talk before offering any other more nuanced feedback.

Given the proclivities on the part of chat app makers these days - the data mining that goes on for "relevant ads" - which was absent in the older programs, I'm less inclined to leap into chat now than before, assuming I had a reason to. Maybe if I get highly popular in my writing, I might start using Twitter or something like that, but real-time chat? It's too much of a time sink for me these days.

For texting on my phone, I tend to use the dictation option. I enable the mic and speak to the phone and it dictates what I say. I have my phone so well trained now, I rarely get typos anymore.

 

[AM16]

I'm still waiting for the resurgence of irc. The rest meh. If Facebook chat returns to open usage I'll be down, but between msn messenger and irc, that's pretty much what I would need (one for media and video and the other for plugins and text only)

 

[kuschku]

BloodyCactus[/url]":9ub03ywa]irc dominated online chat. no mention of it in the article, is very strange. breaking world events, it was happening live on irc. I remember there being so many chat services you needed chat apps that conflated everything to one app so you could aim+icq+msn+yahoo all in one app. ugh.

Those still exist today.

You can use bitlbee and some custom hacks to get Skype, Facebook, Google Hangouts, Telegram, Twitch (which is practically IRC) and normal IRC in one client.

And on QuakeNet #eurovision and #worldcup are full with tenthousands of users every time. And HackInt’s #32c3 also had thousands of users last december.

IRC is still going strong.

 

[NoWorriesEh]

"University of Waterloo in Ohio". You'll want to double check that. I think you meant Ontario Canada. Kik has their main office here in KW (Kitchener/Waterloo)

 

[Fritzr]

Programs li

Steve78[/url]":214rpn7k]The biggest problem with all these chat/comms apps is fragmentation. If I wanted to keep in touch with all my friends, family & colleagues I'd need to install about 10 different Apps.

Call me old school if you like, but I prefer to use iMessage/SMS. If people want to get hold of me and it's that important then they know my number.

There are multiple protocol chat clients like Pidgin and many can send & receive SMS to arbitrary phone numbers, a core feature of Yahoo Messenger for example. YM does not support all cell networks, but international texting is as simple as entering "+country code phone number" and typing your message. To send back to your YM account they enter a YM ID as the first words of the text and reply to the number they received the message from (add the number to contacts and you can use YM from the phone without an account)

YM can be usd with any phone that supports SMS texting and is on a network that does not block Yahoo. Most chat services should have similar SMS chat features.

 

[xaphod]

Waterloo, Ohio? Nice try America. Waterloo Ontario.

 

[Golgo1]

JPan[/url]":3k4y4qux]You wonder how the likes of MSN and yahoo could be so stupid not to make an early investment into mobile chat. They should have had the basic infrastructure and it's not THAT hard to write a decent chat app. Even if Google still doesn't seem able to.

To be fair to MSN, MS didn't really want to keep it alive long enough to invest in that. Skype is (was?) supposed to cover that.

As for Yahoo, I don't really 'wonder' about that. They have been on a determined, purposeful self-destruction for about a decade.

 

[isparavanje]

JPan[/url]":2gzzn0as]You wonder how the likes of MSN and yahoo could be so stupid not to make an early investment into mobile chat. They should have had the basic infrastructure and it's not THAT hard to write a decent chat app. Even if Google still doesn't seem able to.

Actually, hangouts has gotten pretty decent now. It is kinda surprising that Google didn't manage to capitalize on Android to make hangouts a big thing though.

 

[cadence]

AM16[/url]":3683cc4o]I'm still waiting for the resurgence of irc. The rest meh. If Facebook chat returns to open usage I'll be down, but between msn messenger and irc, that's pretty much what I would need (one for media and video and the other for plugins and text only)

Try Slack?

 

[metheglyn]

I'd like to point out that PLATO (and Talkomatic) was actually created at Illinois' flagship university, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, not in Chicago. The University of Illinois at Chicago's a different, and younger, institution, though home to the university system's med school. Urbana-Champaign is the major computing center with the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and the Blue Waters supercomputer, and is the home of the Mosaic web browser (later Netscape Navigator).

 

[Golgo1]

cadence[/url]":lshb75ax]

AM16[/url]":lshb75ax]I'm still waiting for the resurgence of irc. The rest meh. If Facebook chat returns to open usage I'll be down, but between msn messenger and irc, that's pretty much what I would need (one for media and video and the other for plugins and text only)

Try Slack?

Slack as a service isn't bad, but that interface, ouch.
The design is average, but the performance and stability is painful. I've used it on many different devices and platforms, however I admit, never on an Apple device.
Based on feedback from others, I suspect it was built primarily for Apple platforms... and it really shows if used elsewhere.

 

[isparavanje]

metheglyn[/url]":2f6k1p8k]I'd like to point out that PLATO (and Talkomatic) was actually created at Illinois' flagship university, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, not in Chicago. The University of Illinois at Chicago's a different, and younger, institution, though home to the university system's med school. Urbana-Champaign is the major computing center with the National Center for Supercomputing Aplications and the Blue Waters supercomputer, and is the home of the Mosaic web browser (later Netscape Navigator).

They're still one of the top CS research campuses, more recently being the founding institution of LLVM!

 

[sam_I_am_not]

The split is annoying, I have Hangouts, skype, yahoo messenger, kik, wechat and line. I culled Viber and Kakotalk. sigh (left Facebook about a year afrer i joined it along time ago, so no FB messenger, no one was on it at the time amd I thought 'this is useless'... hahaha) I used to live on IRC, loved mIRC.

ICQ User 262618 I haven't used it in a decade or so though... just going along with the 'I remember my ICQ number' old people meme.

 

[DireAuxDix]

How opportune – I've began considering a shift away from Telegram. It's became too bloated for my straightforward needs and a bit too high profile. All I need is a multiplatform (Android, iOS, OSX, Windows, Linux), multi-device, group chat for up to 4 people. I'm trying Bleep but the multi-device sync only works between Android devices. After so many decades, why is this so hard to find?

 

[Rris]

Heh, the Compuserve CB simulator was whipped together on a Sunday afternoon by a Compuserve employee (Sandy Trevor, by name) and the higher-ups in the company thought it would never amount to anything other than a curiosity. Little did they know!

 

[AM16]

cadence[/url]":3vy48qho]

AM16[/url]":3vy48qho]I'm still waiting for the resurgence of irc. The rest meh. If Facebook chat returns to open usage I'll be down, but between msn messenger and irc, that's pretty much what I would need (one for media and video and the other for plugins and text only)

Try Slack?

I haven't. Thank you very much! I hadn't even heard of it.

 

[afedon]

Great article so far, but I had to stop reading to comment on the Talkomatic screenshot: Peltz and Woolley are fools, Garcia's is (or at least was) way better than Papa Del's! Also, in case they are still wondering, I'm fairly certain that Garcia's still has at least one location open in Champaign, IL (though the quality seems to waiver from year to year).

 

[0010110SYN]

Still have 3 CDs for a free year of AOL dial-up somewhere.

 

[z0phi3l]

DireAuxDix[/url]":gdu0bbem]How opportune – I've began considering a shift away from Telegram. It's became too bloated for my straightforward needs and a bit too high profile. All I need is a multiplatform (Android, iOS, OSX, Windows, Linux), multi-device, group chat for up to 4 people. I'm trying Bleep but the multi-device sync only works between Android devices. After so many decades, why is this so hard to find?

Hangouts, pretty sure there's an iOS client

Group chats, sync, web client

 

[afedon]

z0phi3l[/url]":2pf4jdku]

DireAuxDix[/url]":2pf4jdku]How opportune – I've began considering a shift away from Telegram. It's became too bloated for my straightforward needs and a bit too high profile. All I need is a multiplatform (Android, iOS, OSX, Windows, Linux), multi-device, group chat for up to 4 people. I'm trying Bleep but the multi-device sync only works between Android devices. After so many decades, why is this so hard to find?

Hangouts, pretty sure there's an iOS client

Group chats, sync, web client

There is an iOS client. My wife recently switched to Android, and she walked her mom through installing it on her iPhone so that they can video chat (Grammy likes to see her granddaughter.).

 

[ampet]

z0phi3l[/url]":2rzfmcv2]

DireAuxDix[/url]":2rzfmcv2]How opportune – I've began considering a shift away from Telegram. It's became too bloated for my straightforward needs and a bit too high profile. All I need is a multiplatform (Android, iOS, OSX, Windows, Linux), multi-device, group chat for up to 4 people. I'm trying Bleep but the multi-device sync only works between Android devices. After so many decades, why is this so hard to find?

Hangouts, pretty sure there's an iOS client

Group chats, sync, web client

FWIW, I tried using Hangouts with my university work group. It was shite. Message transmission and reception seemed unreliable, you can't send files other than photos or videos (at least from the phone client), and the Hangouts app seems underdeveloped. I really wanted to give it a go (as I have it installed on my phone and it's one of those apps you can't remove, and instead of having all my group mates install Telegram it would have only been convenient for us - all Android users - to use an app we all have preinstalled) and we decided after a couple of days to switch.

Telegram may be implementing everything *and* the kitchen sink, but you don't have to use its features, and the apps don't feel bloated. On my crap phone, Whatsapp can stutter at times, but Telegram is always smooth.

 

[Doubletwist]

A whole article about online chat and nary a word about IRC? For shame!

I still use IRC almost every day. It's been an invaluable resource for work in addition to being a great place to talk to people from around the world.

 

[Dietz]

Indeed, I hang out on Arsclan IRC all the time. I use Pidgin and have my AOL and ICQ accounts loaded (and they still connect), but I haven't seen anyone else in my friends list log on in years. I used to have a six digit ICQ #, but couldn't remember or recover the password, and had to get a new one. 59347709

 

[Justin Credible]

Dietz[/url]":2lqmg233]Indeed, I hang out on Arsclan IRC all the time.

I cant seem to connect, always times out. Using XChat IRC.

 

[wesley96]

It's a bit worrying that the writer consistently misspells KakaoTalk as KakoaTalk. Hopefully, it'll be fixed by the editor.

An interesting tidbit about this instant messenger is that the company behind it (Kakao) grew so big that it took over the second biggest internet portal company in Korea, Daum. When the two company "merged" it was renamed Daum-Kakao, but it's now simply called Kakao.

Meanwhile, the biggest portal company in Korea, Naver, has seen much success with Line, which is made by its Japanese subsidiary and popularized there. Because of KakaoTalk's dominance, though, Line never really gained much traction in Korea. Instead, the company's sidestepping into the game with the closed (i.e. invite-only) social networking platform, Band.

 

[di0genic]

BloodyCactus[/url]":krrwag0l]irc dominated online chat. no mention of it in the article, is very strange. breaking world events, it was happening live on irc. I remember there being so many chat services you needed chat apps that conflated everything to one app so you could aim+icq+msn+yahoo all in one app. ugh.

I remember where I was as info on 9/11 was coming out - on IRC, getting constant updates, theories, etc with a channel full of people from around the world.

 

[tricorn]

afedon[/url]":3smoaw1n]Great article so far, but I had to stop reading to comment on the Talkomatic screenshot: Peltz and Woolley are fools, Garcia's is (or at least was) way better than Papa Del's! Also, in case they are still wondering, I'm fairly certain that Garcia's still has at least one location open in Champaign, IL (though the quality seems to waiver from year to year).

Yes, Garcia's still has a store, but it isn't all that good. I was talking about now, not back in the '70s (that screen shot is recent). Papa Del's is much better (and they're moving to a new location).

Garcia's was very good in 1974, but they eventually changed their sauce to be much sweeter. Del's became the pizza of choice.

Note the delta symbol as my pseudonym, I was being historical, I've been tricorn since 1974.

 

[phearnomore]

di0genic[/url]":n7tl3kh2]

GekkePrutser[/url]":n7tl3kh2]

neodorian[/url]":n7tl3kh2]IRC is still my favorite chat "experience" over the years. Had more enjoyable conversations and chats that way than any other, really. I've never really found a way to combine the features of IRC with the cross-platform mobile and browser experience of stuff I use today like Hangouts.

Currently me and several friends just have a long running group Hangout that we use for casual chitchat throughout the day and it's nice because I can keep notifications off but just pop in at work in my Gmail tab and look on my phone when I'm at home or around town. Sharing pictures and links is easy but I really miss a few features.

If I leave a Hangout because I'm annoyed or don't want to be distracted, a friend can always add me back to the Hangout to mess with me. You can change the title of the chat which is sort of like the old "message of the day" thing on IRC but you don't have too much other capability as far as scripting or bots to help manage the chat like you could in an IRC channel.

I know there are IRC apps for mobile but I'm not sure if any use push notifications so you don't have to keep an active battery-draining connection to a server running all the time. Would be nice to find one that has this feature as well as a way to mute push notifications so you can still open the app and read the backlog without getting pinged every time someone posts.

Guess it'll still be Hangouts for the time being since it does most of what we want, it's already the default IM client on half of our phones, and the other half can easily install it on theirs.

I use IRCCloud these days. Mainly because its cross platform, and the web interface is handy too. I need clients on both iOS and Android. I also have a znc bouncer with some push plugins but I couldn't find a cross platform one.

Irc is also still the arch chat for me and I'm surprised the article doesn't mention it as its still very much alive. I also like it means you don't have to share your data with a commercial party like Google or Microsoft.

I stopped using IRC when work started blocking it in 2011. These days, IT Security would send the SWAT team to my cube if I started talking on tcp/6667.

I'm also way more concerned about security these days, and stopped paying attention about how to protect your IP at some point. Guessing identd doesn't cut it these days.

Any recommendations for an Android client and security strategies would be appreciated. Also, what servers are people using these days? I was using freenode before I had to drop IRC, never found a mobile client and didn't suck battery, but I'm not sure I looked for one after switching to Android.

I loved IRC, made a lot of friends and spent way too much time on it between 1992 and 2008 or so. Still have friends - including my wife - there in #mafirc and #squeak on freenode.

http://www.irchelp.org

It's sort of up to date so it should help you.

Currently I use Irssi through Termux (https://termux.com) on Android. I visit Freenode. Sometimes IRCnet (where I ran #slackware since the late 90s). Protection? In the past I ran into servers which hid most parts of your IP but, honestly, I don't care whether someone sees my home IP or not. I can change it with a click. Also, it's quite cheap to get a VPS these days (DigitalOcean sells them for $5 a month). With it you can hide behind their IP.

 

[phearnomore]

di0genic[/url]":3cvvo2rk]

gozar[/url]":3cvvo2rk]Strange article, what with the University of Waterloo being in Ohio and no mention of talk, IRC, or Slack.

One of the first chat experiences I had was with talk in the NeXT computers with my at Miami University and my future wife at Ohio State. We used the NeXT computers because they weren't the most secure boxes in the world and could create accounts.

IRC has been around since what, 1988? I guess the steep learning curve keeps it from becoming mainstream, but then again, Twitter is having user issues because people think it's too complicated.

I do almost all of my chatting in Weechat (my IRC client of choice) except for Telegram. With Bitlbee I can bring in most chat networks, and Slack offers connections over IRC. And they all connect to a ZNC bouncer so I can use any IRC client I want. ZNC also is what sends out push notifications.

My IRC setup was a learning experience, one that I set up after IMO dropped support for multiple networks, but now I have a central location for chatting with the ability to keep logs and connect from any device that can.

These days, there are a lot of other things that will keep IRC from being more widely used. It leaves users vulnerable (visible IP by default), is blocked by a lot of corporate IT depts and flagged by IDS in the rest, and is widely used for various nefarious activities. At some point, in the minds of many, IRC became the sole domain of pedos, bitcoin drug dealers, and malicious groups running botnets of compromised PCs. It's got no huge company pushing it. It's got its own protocol, not HTTPS. It's never going to get big with the masses, for better or worse.

With this I have to disagree. IRC is still used many great, intelligent people. Freenode being the best example. Every medium can be used by assholes. Just as services like pastebin, paste2 may be used by criminals, it should be the reason to assume that cool people (programmers, etc.) don't/shouldn't use it anymore.

(edit) Also, Irssi supports SSL since version v0.8.6 (2002-11-17).