"The instant messenger revolution started around 1998 and 1999 with ICQ as the very first successful player. Then Yahoo!Messenger, AIM and MSN/WLM followed, as well as Gadu-Gadu, QQ, NateOn, LiveJournal, MySpaceIM, Google Talk, and many more, including the only open standard, XMPP or Jabber (not mentioning SIP/SIMPLE here). [...]" @via erlang-solutions.com