>Find service/program, start using and loving it.
>Keeps getting better and better, growing in popularity
>Suddenly goes silent for a while, announcing that some tech giant aquired the project shortly afterwards.
>It's the last thing you will ever hear from them
What have you been through? I'd like to hear your stories and will tell one of mine:
I am still bitter about Meebo.
http://www.meebo.com/
Google literally sniped it.
Everyone I knew was using it. I don't know if it was a regional thing, but it was a service that was ridiculously common and popular at the time; and its disappearance caused a huge fragmentation of services, resulting in a decline in general IM activity.
Happening right at the time when smartphones and tablets became ubiquitous, this was another huge factor in said fragmentation.
>>54923378
Bump for interest.
>>54923378
Use bitlbee. Problem solved
>>54923378
I used meebo a lot. But during its last ~2 years they didn't fix shit with the messenger.
Now using Pidgin with XMPP alone, feels like I haven't lost much
>>54923378
(cont)
>Meebo was acquired by Google on June 4, 2012.
>Our team is now working just a few miles down the road with the Google+ team, where we continue to focus on creating delightful experiences for our users, developers, and publishers.
>Meebo's products are no longer available, but you can find all the latest and greatest things that we're working on at https://developers.google.com/+/.
>Thanks,
>The Meebo Team
There were a number of factors to the huge rise in WhatsApp's popularity, but that graph is just too entertaining when you look at the date of meebo's closing.
Multi-messengers on smartphones have been consistently shitty and faded away one after another in a futile attempt to become a WhatsApp competitor by implementing lock-in measures. That -of course- only resulted in a fight *between* competitors.
>>54923378
like microsoft shitting on 3rd party skype clients
>>54923378
Wakoopa.
BumpTop.
Would have been cool to see some development for tablets. I don't recall anything from Google apart from releasing the source, however.
