Technology

Microsoft pivoted to Skype. Saved you a click and reading about 1000 words.

Messenger-> Office Communicator -> Lync -> Skype for Business -> Teams. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skype_for_Business

Microsoft Teams is sorta like the all grown up version of MSN, with the colour drained from it and “fun” features out of the box feeling dead on the inside

I might have been 10 minutes too young for ICQ. I think that's what the college kids were playing with when I was in high school. For my cohort it was the big three: MSN, Yahoo! and AIM. You probably had all three installed on your computer and probably all running at once. They're probably why my entire generation can touch type. Vital tool for teenage social life at the turn of the century.

This was Microsoft's era, too. The main reason Apple survived the 90's was because Microsoft invested in them to counter anti-trust allegations. They paid Apple to keep existing so they couldn't be called a monopoly. Internet Explorer was the web browser, any others in use were a rounding error. No one had a Mac, a few people were still clinging to their Amigas. THE platform for personal/home computing and internet access was a Pentium PC with Windows ME or XP, which came with MSN Messenger out of the box.

Two things happened nearly simultaneously: Facebook Messenger and the iPhone. Graduating high school in 2005, your freshman year of college you probably started hearing about the cool new site that's kinda like MySpace except it's only for college kids. By your junior year all your new college friends were on Facebook and all your old high school friends that never logged on let alone talk to you were on MSN. And if you graduated in 2005, your junior year was in 2007, the year the iPhone was launched. MSN Messenger had been present as baked in "functions" of certain media phones at the time, but I don't think they ever made it to the App Store or even the Play Store on Android. Facebook was fast to adopt mobile apps, and for awhile there it was the one messenger service that interoperated between desktop on a web browser and smart phones across platforms. SMS didn't run on the desktop, iMessage is Apple-only, AIM, MSN and Yahoo were nowhere to be found and Telegram, Signal, Discord etc. weren't around yet. So everyone standardized on Facebook Messenger.

Meanwhile, Microsoft bought and ruined Skype.

That’s ok, we have teams now

I'm surprised no one mentioned Facebook.

I recall using MSN as far as in to 2009, but the friends I was connected with migrated to Facebook when their chat feature rolled out.

Anyone remember the short-lived Great War of the Messenger Apps? For a few months back around... '98? '99? MSN tried really hard to shoehorn its way into working with AIM. About every day there would be an update from MSM Messenger to allow it to work with AIM. Then AOL would fuck with their own protocol to ice out MSN users again.

I think these shenanigans also impacted the Trillium Messenger app too, which up until then had been flying under the radar of messenger interoperability.

I might be getting some of these details wrong.

Those were the days. 🥲

It was very popular within my friends up until the skype merger. At that point they went "i aint usin skype lmao"

Wonder who was the last of your friends to log on are they still there?

well, the same as the others really: Time.

I think once SMS and phone apps became the norm over having Messenger apps on our Desktops all the time, that was pretty much it for these applications over all. It was a long, slow death. But MSN was one of the firsts to call it quits if I recall right. Oddly the IM app I liked the most. It's just not many of my friends used it. They were all AIM/AOL users.

WhatsApp (& mobile internet in general) replaced it for me. It's no longer a requirement for both my friends and myself to be at our computers at the same time to talk shit to each other.