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Comment by pwaivers | Hacker News Reader

I don't think the IM era is over. Now, there is Slack, Facebook Messenger, and Google Hangouts. These have some very cool features and you can easily set up a chat with all your friends.

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I think it's better to say, the desktop era has ended and the mobile era has begun. A lot of people don't sit in front of a computer popping online and offline anymore. Everyone is always online and I feel like that has fatigued people.

Yes, in the old days you might have been lucky enough to be post-dialup, but being AROUND meant you were actually interested in being somewhere, rather than being nowhere online and instead only brushing up against that.

Very much this. With always online mobile instant messaging I always feel like I'm bothering someone when writing them. For me I've solved it by treating it as an asynchronous chat and won't always reply immediately.

On desktop chat you would know that people would only be online if they made the conscious decision that they are up to chatting.

Slack is so bloated and annoying to use, unlike IM services back in the heyday.

So true. I used to have Trillian running on 3 or 4 networks, hardly taxing my late 90s computer. Every time I see Slack I get an urge to close the tab because I can almost feel the browser engine groaning in agony.

There's a Slack protocol plugin for Pidgin (and other libpurple clients).

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