I was on the beta testing team and have been using Beeper for a little over two years now.
The convenience of having an application to house all of your chat networks is amazing.
I was on the beta testing team and have been using Beeper for a little over two years now.
The convenience of having an application to house all of your chat networks is amazing.
I think they mostly died when GChat turned off XMPP support and became a walled garden.
If Beeper does become a successful business though, there’ll be a full time development team “playing catch-up” with money behind them. It’s interesting if you read this that they’re rolling out features ahead of the message providers in some cases!
They’re also leveraging some existing infrastructure. Beeper is built on Matrix which does a lot of the heavy lifting for them.
Most of the protocols supported by Trillian were walled gardens too - AIM, ICQ, MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, etc were all proprietary.
Trillian had paid full-time developers too. I’m not sure what’d they’d be doing differently to what Trillian did.
I think one difference is that the rate of change in chat apps has slowed down dramatically. When was the last time one of the major apps added a new feature you can’t live without anymore? So it might be easier now to keep up.