By the mid-2000s, AIM has the largest share of the instant messaging market in North America with 52%.ġ998 – Yahoo! Messenger launches, allowing users with a Yahoo! ID to connect.ġ999 – Microsoft releases MSN Messenger, a competitor to AIM and Yahoo. At its peak in 2001, ICQ had over 100 million accounts registered.ġ997 – AOL launches AOL Instant Messenger (AIM), which pioneers the “Buddy List” concept. in December.ġ996 – Israeli company Mirabilis launches ICQ, which allowed users to chat one-on-one or in groups, exchange files, and search for other users. The late 1990s sees the first major competing IM platforms arrive: ICQ, AIM, MSN, and Yahoo all fight for market share in the new instant messaging market.ġ992 – The first SMS message, “Merry Christmas”, is sent over the Vodafone GSM network in the U.K. IRC peaked in popularity in the 1990s, but still has hundreds of thousands of users today. The History of Instant Messagingġ961 – MIT’s Compatible Time-Sharing System (CTSS), along with other multi-user operating systems, helps to pioneer instant messaging by allowing up to 30 users to chat in real-time.ġ988 – Internet Relay Chat (IRC) allows users to connect to networks with client software to chat with groups in real-time. While messaging is commonplace today, it was only two decades ago that chatting with friends and strangers online was a revolutionary concept. It pays homage to the advancements made in the early days by apps such as ICQ or AIM, while also looking at the trends in IM that will surface in the coming years.

The following infographic from Hello Pal, a messaging app allowing for instant translation, shows the evolution of instant messaging. Instant Messaging: Past, Present, and Future However, despite the impressive features of dominant apps like Snapchat, Facebook Messenger, and Whatsapp, today’s technology would simply not be possible without the earlier breakthroughs of their more rudimentary predecessors. The present IM experience is seamless, and it intuitively integrates features like video, photos, voice, e-commerce, and gaming with plain-old messaging. Since then, instant messaging has revolutionized how we communicate, and today over 2.5 billion people are signed up for at least one messaging app. The concept of instant messaging crossed into the mainstream in the 1990s, allowing friends, acquaintances, colleagues, and like-minded thinkers from all over the world to connect in real-time.

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