The death of instant messaging started, for many people, in March 2013 when Microsoft announced the shutdown of MSN Messenger, later known as Windows Live Messenger. It died when the companies that operated the various IM services simply shut those services down. This can be seen in the fact that 2019 has turned out to be the year in which instant messaging died for good. There was never any need for instant messaging because the Internet already had ample ways for people to communicate with each other using standards documented in freely-available RFCs (IRC is RFC1459) instead of proprietary standards that required users to connect to servers owned by a single company that controlled the entire communications network. Indeed, even today, I think these are valid points.

Why would you use such a system when IRC already existed and let you do that as well as so much more? Today, it's comparable to Twitter: The supposed 'benefit' of Twitter is that it limits posts to 140 characters (yes, I know they increased this limit since then), but if you consider that an advantage, then why not just use an existing blog platform which has been around for years, like LiveJournal or Blogger, and just limit your posts to 140 characters? Why switch to something less capable because that's 'all you need' if you already have something that can do more? So when instant messaging came out, I asked myself: Why bother? With ICQ, you can only send a message to one person at a time.

When you wanted to speak one-on-one with somebody, it was always possible to send a private message to someone, and IRC also had the benefits of being a well-documented, open protocol, active on several different networks. I had already been active on IRC for years, and IRC had (and still has) the benefit that you could talk to people in whole rooms containing hundreds of people. When ICQ first came out in the late 1990s, more or less beginning what would later be called 'instant messaging', I was skeptical at the time.

Close down icq account