Remember twitter and the discussions when they nuked third-party clients?
And yes, messengers not working with other clients is one of the most user-unfriendly things they do and something many users consider a bug. And really only has taken off with the start of mobile messengers, before that most could be interfaced from different clients.
And yes, messengers not working with other clients is one of the most user-unfriendly things they do and something many users consider a bug. And really only has taken off with the start of mobile messengers, before that most could be interfaced from different clients.
I think that's somewhat misleading. MSN Messenger, Yahoo!, etc didn't use standard protocols, it's just that people would reverse engineer them. Third-party clients did just stop working from time to time whenever the providers changed something in the protocol.
They're still around - WhatsApp has had multiple unofficial clients pop up, for example, though the company is much more heavy-handed in taking them down (DMCA takedowns against libraries that use the API, banning users of unofficial apps, etc).
And yes, messengers not working with other clients is one of the most user-unfriendly things they do and something many users consider a bug. And really only has taken off with the start of mobile messengers, before that most could be interfaced from different clients.