I work with a team of people scattered around the world and we need to be in touch frequently. A friend has suggested we use some kind of chat program that will do just that. We are multi-system, multi-OS and need something that works on Mac OS, Linux and Windows. We do not need anything fancy such as voice or video, but I suppose it could be useful one day. I have heard about a lot of them such as ICQ, Yahoo! Messenger, AOL Instant Messenger (AIM), MSN Messenger, Jabba and Trillian. How did all this get started and what am I to make of these?
Rodger Causeway Bay
Almost from the beginnings of networked computers, people have wanted to contact others on the network instantaneously.
Various systems were employed on early computers but it was really in the mid-1990s when a group of Israeli programmers put together a company called Mirabilis that IM (instant messaging) really took off.
Mirabilis ultimately became ICQ (I seek you) and for a long time was the dominant IM player on the internet. There are many others now, as you point out, but in many ways ICQ is still king. One reason is that it supports a range of operating systems. The Mac version may be a bit behind the PC version and the Linux version may be further behind the Mac one, but they do exist.
If you go with MSN Messenger, you can imagine the choice of operating systems you will have (actually, they do have a Mac version).
The success of ICQ has meant the imitators, including AIM, MSN Messenger, and Yahoo! Messenger, try to offer services or something the others have not got. One of the biggest problems is that many are incompatible with each other. MSN Messenger has come in for criticism because Microsoft is being secretive about the protocol it is using. This has not stopped some companies from working it out. Trillian can let you communicate with almost all the major IM implementations and is an old favourite with many people I know. The only drawback is that it is PC only.