Remembering Jabber, IRC, and Usenet
I really miss the days before mobile phones and social networks took overfor three reasons :Instant Messaging applications, Chat Rooms, and Newsgroups. Yes, I know we have apps such as KIK, WhatsApp, Voxer, Facebook Messenger, and so on for our mobile phones, but they are nowhere near as good as their ancestors. Yahoo Messenger, MSN Messenger, ICQ, AOL Instant Messenger. mIRC. Pirch. FreeAgent. The list goes on. The odd thing is, most of the software still existsonly MSN has completely vanished as far as I am aware.
The real shame with instant messaging was that nobody ended up playing nicely with each other. The internet was built on basic principalscommon protocolswhich is why you can use any browser to visit any website, and why anybody can send email to anybody else. Google triedto play nicely, and built the original version of Google Talk on top of the “Jabber” protocolwhich was already being widely used by techies all over the world. Of course nobody else wanted to play the same game, so Google threw their hands in the air, and that's why we now have Google Hangouts.
Facebook are bigger villains in the systematic destruction of open protocols than you might imagine, but that's another rant for another day. They should have a perpetual tabard hanging around their neck, with “Does not play nicely with others” written large across it.
Over the last decade, while everybody was getting used to smart phones, internet chat rooms and forums slowly and quietly died out. The internet became much more about “me”, and far less about “us”. I think it's a huge shame.
Just recently there has been a resurgence of chat rooms, in the form of sites like “Slack” (which is really just IRC dressed up in a new suit of clothes). For years IRC was the way people used to group together and hang outand it never really went awayit just became an underground thing that only techies seemed to know about. There are also free IRC interfaces on the webthat commonly get used by podcasts such as TWiT, and the British Tech Network.
Newsgroups continue to existwe just know them as “Google Groups” (Google acquired a company about 10 years ago that was crawling all of the usenet posts of the past, and making them available through a nice interface). It's worth thinking about thatGoogle Groups is a crawled copy of the usenet source. Usenet still exists, and it's far better than Google Groups, Yahoo Groups, Facebook Groups, or whatever other commercial walled gardens have aped it.
Maybe at some point the greater population of the internet will come full circle, and re-discover these long neglected protocols and technologies. Probably best not to wait thoughyou could be waiting for averylong time.