The Dreadful State of IM Clients
Yesterday morning I noticed that ICQ wasn't connecting within Adium - it was failing to connect with the error:
Error: Unable to connect to BOS server: Connection refused
and nothing I could find was changing that error. Now, to be fair, I can't ever remember using ICQ for chatting with anyone, but when I got Adium all those years ago, I made sure to get accounts on all the supported platforms so that I could be available to anyone wanting to chat.
Sadly, one by one, they have fallen off... or shut down... or locked down the services to only allow proprietary client access. I guess I get it, I'm just seeing the monitization of all these chat clients - HipChat, then Slack and Google Hangouts... and those are the ones that are still alive. Hotmail went to Microsoft, and then they shut it down. AOL - gone. Yahoo! - gone.
I now have Adium that hasn't really been updated in about a year, and it's got one client: Gtalk. And we know that this is getting shut down soon by Google to force us all to use their Hangouts client. I guess it's just the pendulum swinging back to the "Give me my money!" - but for folks like Microsoft and Google - do they really need the money they'd get off me using Skype or Hangouts?
The truth is that I won't use either - except for work, and there I have to so it's a captive audience. But what they've really done is pushed me to use my phone. I can text all these folks, and make group texts, and I can use any phone I want.
It's just so very sad.
UPDATE: yup... I did a little searching on the net to see what's up, and it turns out the owners of ICQ have decided that 28-Dec-2018 was the cut-off date for the old protocol that was supported in libpurple - which is used by Adium. Just another case of trying to monetize the IM space. In this case, I'm OK with letting this one go. Not worth the tracking risks for ICQ.