Alternatives
Products that do what I recreated AOL Instant Messenger in the browser does
What's under the hood: - Real-time messaging powered by Firebase - Buddy lists, groups & online presence - Away messages with auto-reply (and the classic %n, %d, %t variables) - Buddy icons & editable profiles - Group chat rooms - The actual AIM sounds - Full Windows 98 desktop UI — taskbar, desktop icons, start menu, the works. If you have any suggestions or feedback I would greatly appreciate hearing it. There's still more work to be done with it, but it's been a labor of love. Right now every user that logs on is automatically put on to your Buddy list. I thought this would be a great way…
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This is something fun I’ve been hacking on recently: ridiculously simple group chat. Go to http://faces.io and then get your friends to do the same. That’s it! :-D Currently works best in Chrome. It’s definitely beta status at best. Audio can get weird—be ready to mute. ;-) Let me know what you think!
2014
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Hey guys, so I've been building my own Gmail for the past few weeks and would like your feedback. Find a preview here: http://i.imgur.com/UDz2y.png (Mouse cursor is over the "REPLY" button, to show the hover-effect) The app you see in the screenshot is what I've been using in the past week and it starts to feel better than the gmail interface. Just a quick explanation: - It's conversation-based like Gmail. - Conversations with new emails are on the left. - Conversations may be labeled ... based on predefined filters or manually. - Every conversation stays in the left sidebar until marked…
2012
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2012 · hipmob.com
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I needed a couple of AOL Instant Messenger buddy icons for a project, and then that turned into a project and before you know it I was trying to scrape every single buddy icon off the internet. I have slightly over 500,000 of them live, browseable, and downloadable with a single click on my new totally non-commercial project site buddyiconarchive.com I think that I am perhaps 20% of the way to my goal of having a "complete" collection of all the buddy icons that ever appeared on the internet, a rough estimate based on the counts advertised by various period aggregators. I am looking to trade…
8d ago · buddyiconarchive.com
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2015 · chezapps.com
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2024 · github.com
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2014 · dropinchat.com
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Hey HN, I've been a long time HN reader and here is my first contribution. Hoodsup.me is a chat-based matchmaking app built on top of your Facebook social graph. It matchmakes you with people who are geographically close to you and with whom you share common points. You can optionally activate your webcam to talk face-to-face with your partner. Think of it as a Sonar meets a genital-free Chatroulette. I would love to get some feedback. It's only optimized for WebKit for now. No signup is required so just stop by and say hi! :) Clickable link: <a…
2011 · hoodsup.me
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2015 · gamechat.im
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2015 · github.com
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2019 · github.com
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2021 · github.com
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2017 · sudo.glitch.me
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Hi HN, For years I’ve missed the feeling of an always-on chatroom without the silos and social overhead of Discord. So I built Together: a single-room, no-signup group chat that you join with one click. No channels, no rules (yet), no onboarding flow. Everyone lands in the same place and can start talking in under a second. Why I made it - Forums and blog comments are great but slow; Discord/Slack feel heavy for casual drop-ins if you aren’t already a member of a community. - I wanted the simplest possible space where ~100 people could idle, share shower thoughts, and keep the…
Oct 2025 · together.lol
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2016 · msgus.io
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Sup HN, So a couple of months ago I posted my OSINT app ShadowBroker here and got WAY more attention than I expected. Some of the feedback was brutal, but honestly, a lot of it was right, and it made the project a lot better. And sure, I had a blast tracking billionaire jets and yachts or discovering GPS jamming in Ukraine was a thrill, and so was watching CCTV feeds from London, along with ships, satellites, conflict zones, etc., but eventually it dawned on me…where does my OSINT dashboard actually go from there? What good is all of the telemetry if people cannot communicate with each other…
May 2026 · github.com
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