How personal instant messaging platforms evolved over the years
Yesterday my team and I were discussing over lunch how communication platforms have evolved over time since early 2000's.
One of the very first platforms we can think of was MSN Live Messenger that used to come default on our Windows XP desktop. We've had our teenage conversations over there for a while with our friends. It was launched in 1999 as a simple text service by Microsoft as a rival to AOL's AIM service and ICQ. I didn't get a chance to use either. But back in those days, when we had to use the dial-up internet through our landline telephone line it essentially meant the household couldn’t receive calls and no one could use the phone. And we're busy MSNing with our schoolmates!
It wasn't long before we moved to Yahoo Messenger! It was launched by Yahoo back in 1997. In addition to instant messaging features between friends with yahoo IDs, it allowed you to customize your messaging windows. I remember the most entertaining part of the Y!M (that was its abbreviation) was its feature called Yahoo Chat Rooms! Chat rooms were fun, you could have joined any category Chat Room and chat anonymously with people around the world. It was really fun. One of my friends said he was talking to a professor from some university about string theory on Chat Rooms! Well not everyone used it in the same way. Here is a quick snap to rewind your memories.
Then came our favorite, Google Talk (or Gtalk)! Launched in 2005 by Google it was the clean, smooth and seamless instant messaging application across the desktop as well as with the product integration within Gmail.com. It was one of the most used and loved communication platforms in the late 2000s. Gtalk started with chat and call features and gradually launched send files, offline messaging, text formatting, and invisible modes. Gtalk worked like magic on the desktop and we used it throughout our +2 and early days of college. Even though Gtalk did launch with Nokia as a compatible VoIP client, but Google somehow lost the train of launching Gtalk as the mobile-first IM platform for all of us, on the smartphones.
With the growth of so many IM platforms, many of us switched to IM aggregators like Pidgin. Pidgin was a free open-sourced multi-platform IM client, which had over 3Mn users back in 2007. We had to link our IM accounts from AIM, Google Talk, Bonjour, MySpace, MSN, Yahoo! and more and they created Buddy Lists where we can chat with our friends across multiple IM platforms simultaneously. We used it for a while but soon moved on.
In early 2010's a mobile-first communication platform called WhatsApp was catching up in the west and we had just got our hands' on mobile phones in our college days. Data was still costly, hence SMS was a quicker alternative to chat and communicate with reasonable SMS packs. With the gradual decrease in the data cost, WhatsApp suddenly became a massive game changer in our personal communications across smartphone devices. It was free, super-fast, you just need your phone number to signup, and we can use it on the go (no need to sit in front of a laptop!).
The journey of WhatsApp has been inspiring. It started as a 1-1 chat and a group chat-based platform back in 2009. Even though it didn't have a lot of fancy features, which used to exist on the desktop-based communication platforms, or voice and video call features like some of its competitors, it just worked seamlessly across any mobile devices! With just a team of 32 engineers, it always remained focused on making their chat platform faster, efficient, meaningful and available across OS, platforms, and even lowest end smartphones. When this 5-year old product got acquired for a massive $19Bn by Facebook in 2014, it was clocking 400Mn MAUs globally, with 20Bn messages sent, 500Mn pictures shared and 1Mn users registering every day. It was still just a simple, powerful and instantaneous chat platform!
It has been 9 years, WhatsApp has been able to help family, friends and loved ones communicate by focusing on these 3 core principles of Simplicity, Reliability, and Security. WhatsApp is now an irreversible change in how we communicate online in our day-to-day lives. We, at PregBuddy, believe in these 3 core principles are able to build a simple, reliable and secure chat platform for over 60,000 expecting mothers across 27 states in India to seamlessly communicate in English and their own native languages and seek instant reassurance from each other, each day for those 280 days of pregnancy. Infact our journey of PregBuddy started a small proof-of-concept on a WhatsApp group back in 2016. We'll share that story sometime later.
So, what do you think is coming next after WhatsApp? Is WhatsApp is gonna stay for a decade more? Do you remember any of the other communication platforms you've used since your childhood, please do share them below?
Subhadeep Mondal
CEO & CoFounder, PregBuddy