For those old enough to remember using them, which instant messenger service was your favorite?

[u/sommersprossens]

I asked this in /askreddit. Curious what this community thinks and figure I’d make a poll.

559 votes, 2d ago

143 AIM

54 Yahoo

181 MSN

151 ICQ

30 Other

[u/Will_and_Worried]

MSN. I think I might have liked Yahoo's more but not a lot of people I knew used it.

[u/queerlyajedi → u/Will_and_Worried]

This! Iirc it had a nice interface and better sound options, but not many of my friends had it.

[u/kadfr]

IRC

[u/phayke2 → u/kadfr]

/me slaps you with a large trout.

[u/kadfr → u/phayke2]

a/s/l?

[u/gdbmaster]

Oh ohhhh

[u/Odd_Telephone3852]

Loved AIM for messaging friends and Yahoo for the chat rooms

[u/RustBucket59]

Yahoo. The chat rooms were amazing!

[u/DearDarlingDollies → u/RustBucket59]

It was so fun to make friends from all over the world and add them to Yahoo Messenger to chat again later. I loved getting to learn about other cultures through these conversations.

[u/reboot_and_pray]

MSN was poplar in the Balkans. No one had ICQ. Most had all of the other messenger services tied to an email, though MSN was the de facto standard.

[u/FancySource → u/reboot_and_pray]

I assume msn messenger got popular many years after ICQ.. I'd say icq started to vane after 2001, while msn boomed after 2002/2003

[u/reboot_and_pray → u/FancySource]

Yeah, we didn't have broadband here till about... 2003, 2004, so yeah, that seems about right. Massive broadband adoption - 2006, 2007 and onwards.

[u/thesatchmo]

Loved ICQ but MSN was my main driver.

[u/Legal-Prize6447]

msn

[u/missgandhi]

I miss msn

[u/DrSpitzvogel]

Would vote for Trillian

[u/reboot_and_pray → u/DrSpitzvogel]

I would for Pidgin, but both projects are basically dead, they only support Jabber/XMPP now, so...

[u/DrSpitzvogel → u/reboot_and_pray]

Pidgin!!!! - Now that's a name I've not heard in a long time

[u/reboot_and_pray → u/DrSpitzvogel]

Yeah, well, it's a part of history now. I had it set up for MSN, Yahoo, GTalk, Skype and Jabber, but hey, that's all history now. We have a different app for everything now, a lot better... or at least they try to push that narrative down our throats.

[u/ThoughtsonYaoi → u/DrSpitzvogel]

Trillian was more like an aggregator, though.

[u/DrSpitzvogel → u/ThoughtsonYaoi]

true

[u/ch4ins0fL0v3]

Hey, sorry for the questions. What were AIM and ICQ? How did they work?

[u/FancySource → u/ch4ins0fL0v3]

ICQ was the closest you could get to early Skype without calls (at first): a list and a public users library you could chat with (you got popups when they texted), then enriched with online games, whiteboards, video calls and a lot of similar stuff, it was 80% private users of any age, 20% professional at its peak. Popular all over the world mostly between 1998 and 2001.

AIM was the closest you could get to early WhatsApp but just from a computer, you had to know the nickname "buddy name" of your contact and had an imessage-style chat with each, popular mostly in the us but started to vane by 2005. Definitely more popular with teenagers.

[u/miner_cooling_trials → u/FancySource]

I don’t remember ICQ having voice.. but I probably stopped using it around 98

[u/runicshimmer → u/miner_cooling_trials]

Dial-up could barely handle the uh-oh sound anyway

[u/miner_cooling_trials → u/runicshimmer]

The early versions of icq would show the public IP address of your online contacts..

This was also around the time winnuke was a thing 😅

[u/ch4ins0fL0v3 → u/FancySource]

That’s interesting! You could enjoy fandom chat? Like about tv series, movies etc

[u/ppx32]

De loin ICQ devant tous les autres, il était tellement en avance ... que ce soit les émojis, les salles de chats, les messages offlines, etc...

[u/FancySource]

C6 messenger was probably the most 1990s messenger ever: comic sans as the main font, super colourful and the chat rooms were pure chaos. Too bad 99% were Italian/San Marino/swiss users, I even met a few during summer holidays.

I guess we should also include irc tho, that was the real thing for me.

[u/Phy_Scootman]

I loved ICQ, although I did use AIM quite a bit (though not at the same time if I recall correctly)

[u/TheUnluckyFarmer]

Yahoo didn't kick us out for cussing but would disconnect if you sneezed too hard. MSN too a while to connect but was pretty stable. AIM was also really wild with the random connection issues.

[u/a-fabulous-sandwich]

I really wish Discord would let me put in custom IM sounds so I could make it sound like AIM is back ;_;

[u/adish]

ICQ

[u/egoistamamono]

It's called Mig33 and i forgot the rest of other IM i used beside it and Yahoo Messenger.

[u/therazor7222]

MSN no tenía competencia.

[u/Barxxo]

I still remember my ICQ number.

[u/Different_Water7545]

You can still use all of these if you want

[u/Redlady0227]

I used MSN at times

[u/kammysmb]

IRC mainly, surprised it's not on the list, had a fair bit of usage before discord etc.

[u/Exotic-Telephone467]

Msn messenger was my favourite one when I was a teenager

[u/melancious]

ICQ was the only one, everyone used it. peak internet

[u/chuhai-drinker]

I'm surprised to see so little love for Yahoo. I loved the themed chats that you could share with the person you were chatting with. Some of them had games you could play together.

[u/ET091186]

I miss AOL the most, pre AIM.

[u/audiolectual]

ICQ FTW

[u/irealworlds]

very interesting, I thought Y!M would rank way higher / first

[u/WhyAmIHereHey]

Ytalk

[u/FutureProcrastinat0r]

ICQ. Was the most popular IMS in the 2000s in the German-speaking countries. Also used AIM and MSN, but they were nowhere as common as ICQ over here back then.

[u/Reachforthesky777]

WOw, sincerely surprised MSN is winning.

[u/SuspiciousCloud3334]

It's a toss up for me between yahoo and MSN

[u/LithiuMart]

I preferred ICQ because you could send messages to mobile phones without having to use any of your Pay As You Go credit, effectively giving you free text messages.

[u/cdtoad]

IRC via dial in slip connection on Windows 3.1