Sad to see, but I've been waiting for this moment for years.<p>My first "real" job was as an intern on the Yahoo! Messenger team where I worked on both the Windows and Mac versions more than ten years ago.<p>Back in those days while I had been sad that XMPP never took off, I had accepted that if you wanted to make cool IM client interfaces and get them in front of a lot of real people, you had to work on one of the big popular proprietary ones.<p>It was an amazing experience working on it. When I went back to school after the internship, I observed people at school who I never met using features I wrote during my internship! How cool is that? Given that experience, I've always had a soft spot for Yahoo! and dreaded the growing inevitability of today's announcement.<p>In the years since, my passion for IM has been a largely sad one. I promoted Google Talk heavily when it came out due to it being based on XMPP, only to see Google bait and switch us. Then I resigned myself back to proprietary IM hell for a while as getting people to use XMPP seemed increasingly ridiculous as its user experience lagged further and further behind Hangouts, iMessage, etc, etc...<p>Then eventually the Riot IM client came out and I got excited about IM again. One of many clients built atop the new Matrix protocol which styles itself as a successor to XMPP, Riot was the first IM client I'd ever used that felt like it rivaled the big players in IM in terms of user experience.<p>While my career has moved on from coding IM clients, I am glad to say I've helped the Matrix/Riot folks a small amount with coding and localization. And most importantly I cheer them on publicly and privately every chance I get.