Now, in the smartphone era, there's nothing like that. There's a bunch of different completely siloed apps, and I can't talk to people all from one place.
The consumer really has been the loser now that Apple, Google, and Facebook have walled off their messengers.
In Pidgin, you actually had it all in one place, with the UX defined by Pidgin.
That's another bad thing about current fragmentation. You have no way to unify the UX.
This business practice of pushing the product unsustainably in order to drive out the competition was rightly condemned when WalMart did it. I don't see a similar public backlash in the tech sphere these days.
Now it's just more trouble than it's worth.
...Guess who bought it and killed it? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meebo
> In June 2012, Google acquired Meebo to merge the company's staff with the Google+ developers team.
The web (http) and internet were conduits for information and communication. Now the pipe is a dumb channel each companies territory.
I miss pidgin where you had AIM, ICQ, IRC, Gtalk and whatever others. I also miss how companies are pushing their app instead of improving their mobile presence on the web.