I miss the days of ICQ, MSN, AIM, Yahoo, Zephyr, Gtalk, Facebook&#x27;s XMPP, and all those other messengers. They had relatively open or decipherable protocols, and on almost all OSes there were at least a couple decent applications that allowed you to login to all messaging services using a single piece of software. I could even write gateways and plugins to use NLP and autoreply, encrypt messages, and all kinds of other awesome things which I can&#x27;t do anymore.<p>It seems like we&#x27;ve taken a step back in technology.