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Circa 2000 or so, when AIM, MSN, Yahoo! and ICQ were all flourishing, Yahoo had already added offline messages. ICQ, I think also had them, though it was probably configurable, I recall the client having a half dozen screens of options. At that moment, neither MSN nor AIM had it yet. AIM eventually did add it, though I don't recall if it was added to AIM after ICQ de-merged from the AIM backend.


Then something like trillian to glue them all together.


There was also Meebo, which allowed you to login to all of them via a web interface (which I believe none of the messengers had natively) without installing the respective clients!


AOL had 'AOL Quick Buddy', a Java applet client and later AIM Express that used Adobe Flash.

I definitely used quick buddy from computers at my junior college (98-2000), but I don't remember using AIM express.


Ah, I never used AIM directly. Maybe that would have worked with ICQ too, though?

In any case, Meebo worked using the (back then) advanced, exciting magic of AJAX :)


I used the icq web interface for a few years. It was 'ok' it was missing a lot of features but worked in a pinch.


I think it did at some point, but I think it was quite a few years after ICQ was purchased before the infrastructure merged.


Meebo was sick. I remember they never made any money though as an IM webapp, and eventually fully pivoted to some kind of on-page ad toolbar that site owners would add to their sites...for some reason.


Adium! It really was a gem of an app. Much better than any other I’d used at the time (or that I have used since, actually).


Indeed. It was so nice to have a native app for work chat, since we could add Google Talk (XMPP) to Adium.

A pox on Slack.


Miranda was better.




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