Instant messaging actually came around before the Internet was fully used. The idea was to instantly communicate with someone who was far away. America Online, Prodigy, and CompuServe were the main hosts that people used to communicate online. The more people began to use the Internet, the more demand came for an easy way to communicate and to speak with one another through online resources. Software programmers began to create chat rooms that allowed multiple users, in different parts of the country, to come online and talk to one another. It was in November of 1996 that Instant Messaging (IM) became a big hit. Mirabilis came up with ICQ, which was a free, instant-messaging software that allowed anyone to communicate with another ICQ user. ICQ stood for I-seek-you and used a client to communicate to any other ICQ user. In 1998 AOL took over Mirabilis and became to pioneering engineer to create an IM in real-time data. Communication through the online world began to expand and boom. Nowadays there is hundreds of IM software. The most popular are Yahoo!, AIM, and MSN Messenger. As the IM industry continues to expand the demand for more emoticons (i.e. smiles that show the actual action), bigger noises, and faster response times will increase as well.
I remember using a text based protocol called talk (then later ytalk) on a Unix shell account before the graphical nature of the internet took over. Instant messaging is great communication tool which has evolved with technology. Society's need to communicate continues to drive innovations in IM technology. You can now have conference chats with multiple users, voice chats, as well as video chats. Some IM clients even allow you to play games, check email, read RSS/Twitter feeds. IM clients are not just for the computer now cell phone and PDA also support many of the popular IM clients. At my former job, we used Skype for text, voice, and video chats with local and off site employees to provide instant support. Personally, I use IM to connect (voice / video) with relatives in other states and chat with friends.
ReplyDeleteIt actually brings back memories to see ICQ mentioned in one of these blogs. I had a feeling that it would come up eventually but I wasn't quite sure where. I actually used to use ICQ to talk to some kids I played online games with, we all thought it was great at the time. As soon as AIM came out however we saw how much better it was then ICQ. ICQ's interface was extremely basic and a little ugly now that I look back at it. And the fact that they didn't let you choose your own screen name or anything was a big negative. But this is technology in its primitive state. ICQ creators saw a need for a program that did this, this can probably be called the origins of the text message. If they didn't come out with a program to instantly communicate with someone then it may have still been a couple of years before we saw one. We can all thank ICQ for making the world a smaller place.
ReplyDelete