

1997 also saw the birth of new messenger clients from companies such as Excite, MSN and Yahoo!ĭevelopmentsSince then, it has gone through many developments such as having the ability to send files and photos, offline messages, introduction of icons (smilies and similar) group chat, voice over IP (VoIP), web cams, interactive features such as games.

AOL then acquired Mirabilis, the company behind ICQ who had been awarded two IM related patents from the United States patent office. Quantum Link changed its name in 1991 to become America Online (AOL), and launched AOL Instant Messenger six years later, still one of today’s most popular IM applications. In the mid 1990s, new modern, more visually appealing messaging clients such as ICQ and PowWow began to gain popularity. During the early 1990s Commodore 64 computer’s online service Quantum Link offered customers user-to-user messages which they called ‘On-Line Messages’ (OLM). During the 1980s, bulletin board systems (or discussion boards – see Communities) started to incorporate chat-like features. IM (also known and instant messaging) is a personal communication method, and is closer in nature to a telephone call or text conversation than it is to email (which it is often wrongly compared to).īackgroundIM actually pre-dates the internet, and was used in networked systems such as CTSS and Multics in the mid 1960s. WhatInstant messenger (IM) is an application that enables real-time text based chat between two or more people. SMP » About Instant Messenger Social Media Portal Landscape - Instant Messenger
