Damn, it's been a while since I've thought about Pidgin. I used to use it every day a decade or so ago.
I was thinking the other day how excited I got about Windows Phone 7 because of how they centralised chats and social feeds from multiple services under a single contact tile. Back then I could see a future where we wouldn't need to log onto Facebook to update our status, or sign into Skype to make a call, but we would instead have a single app which would aggregate all of our communication services into a single UI.
I don't know what happened to that vision. I seem to use so many different communication apps these days. On my desktop I normally have WhatsApp, Signal, MS Teams, Skype, Slack and Apple Mail open at all times and I also keep my phone near me for SMS and calls. Thankfully I don't use social media anymore, but if I did I guess I would also have at least one or two tabs open for Facebook and Twitter.
It seems in recent years platforms have been increasingly restrictive about what you can and can't do with their APIs and chat services such as Slack have ended their support for IRC and XMPP altogether. I understand the move from a business perspective, but it sucks as an end user of these services.
In a lot of ways it seems we've gone backwards from the days of XMPP and Pidgin.
I was thinking the other day how excited I got about Windows Phone 7 because of how they centralised chats and social feeds from multiple services under a single contact tile. Back then I could see a future where we wouldn't need to log onto Facebook to update our status, or sign into Skype to make a call, but we would instead have a single app which would aggregate all of our communication services into a single UI.
I don't know what happened to that vision. I seem to use so many different communication apps these days. On my desktop I normally have WhatsApp, Signal, MS Teams, Skype, Slack and Apple Mail open at all times and I also keep my phone near me for SMS and calls. Thankfully I don't use social media anymore, but if I did I guess I would also have at least one or two tabs open for Facebook and Twitter.
It seems in recent years platforms have been increasingly restrictive about what you can and can't do with their APIs and chat services such as Slack have ended their support for IRC and XMPP altogether. I understand the move from a business perspective, but it sucks as an end user of these services.
In a lot of ways it seems we've gone backwards from the days of XMPP and Pidgin.