I never looked into the protocols in the background, but it was for most of the time very solid and reliable in delivering offline messages, with correct timestamps and all the stuff you would expect as normal.
But Skype was gaining popularity very quickly, and a lot of communication at work got switched from direct person-to-person ICQ or Yahoo Messenger messages, to Skype group chats and calls. Which was really frustrating given how messages were barely functional on Skype basically forever. It would regularly happen that I was offline for e.g. 30 min, someone would send me a message during that time, I would come back online, and then randomly receive that message 2 days later.
In any case - a really solid product, service and one of the big formative parts of my youth and early internet days. Thanks to all the people that made it happen.
Many fond memories.
I never looked into the protocols in the background, but it was for most of the time very solid and reliable in delivering offline messages, with correct timestamps and all the stuff you would expect as normal.
But Skype was gaining popularity very quickly, and a lot of communication at work got switched from direct person-to-person ICQ or Yahoo Messenger messages, to Skype group chats and calls. Which was really frustrating given how messages were barely functional on Skype basically forever. It would regularly happen that I was offline for e.g. 30 min, someone would send me a message during that time, I would come back online, and then randomly receive that message 2 days later.
In any case - a really solid product, service and one of the big formative parts of my youth and early internet days. Thanks to all the people that made it happen.