Electronic Communication

Does anyone remember the days of AOL Instant Messenger, MSN Messenger, or Yahoo! Messenger? How about ICQ? It seems almost as if today everyone has forgotten those in favor of a rather primitive (if only the chat feature is looked at) version of the once dominant instant messengers?

That's right, I am talking about Facebook Chat. Facebook Chat reminds me a lot about the early days of IM where everyone would be having some issue, back when I was on BigBlueBall.com. However now it seems the only problems you hear about are from Facebook, and really the only problems you experience are on Facebook's Chat. Recently(ish) they have switched over to an XMPP protocol for their chat which improved the experience seven-fold. XMPP is also known as Jabber which Google Talk uses, for those of you who have seen it in Gmail.

Why care about Facebook Chat? Quite simply: People see that as the only instant messenger now. I can not remember the last time I had a conversation on AIM or MSN. It is a shame really as I prefer client based instant messengers, not web based. I like that notification on my desktop and not having to always have that browser window open.

AIM solved this for me as in their latest stuff, as I have probably said before now lets you connect to Facebook Chat. You can also do this with Pidgin, Trillian, and Digsby, although I have had less of a success rate with those.

But is it just me or do you miss the days of AIM/MSN/Y! and desktop IMing?