gaim

Pidgin (formerly gaim) survived a very similar situation to yours and the Pidgin homepage is still the top google result for 'gaim'.

This reminds me of the days Gaim (now Pidgin) was playing catch-up with the Yahoo messenger protocol changes.

To go back to the Pidgin/Gaim example, it doesn't appear that they own any gaim related domain beside a way out of date sourceforge one and they still own all of the top spots for 'gaim'.

When gAIM, the open source AOL/ICQ messenger (and others), renamed to pidgin, I can't help but think this was deliberate....

So when I was on windows I was using pidgin (nee gaim), gimp, scite, Firefox...

Guess it's time to add a regex block feature to gaim.

Around the time Gaim was created there were AIM/ICQ, MSN, and YIM, each with its proprietary protocol, each lacking good official Linux support.

I was yelled at on the regular by folks using gaim because I didn't want to add whatever random feature they were asking for.

Perhaps my expectations were different - I'd like to have two different apps running at the same time and both play sound at the same time - pidgin/gaim would constantly lock the sound so that nothing else could play, causing no sounds and sometimes crashes.

The Pidgin (then "Gaim") developers had to reverse-engineer it.

Does anyone remember when you needed Trillian (or Pidgin/Gaim) to talk to all of your friends online?

Gaim (Pidgin), Kadu couldn't be made if the service provider like AIM, ICQ, Gadu-Gadu etc.

Fortunately the folks at ICQ were less hostile toward third-party clients than AOL was toward Gaim's reverse-engineer of AIM's protocol, as you note.