I think, on Habré there is no person who would not use messengers at least once. And at most likely - every day. We use IM clients on desktops, we use them on mobile phones. Phones have already changed ten times, and we still go online and hear tuk-tuk-tuk, oh-oh and notification sounds from more modern protocols such as Jabber. Do you know who makes your favorite jabber clients?
Messengers change - new ones appear, old ones are abandoned and old ones disappear, but one thing remains unchanged: Russians are in business. It is to one of our compatriots who develops IM, and this article is dedicated.
It is especially nice to meet people in foreign companies :) * we will call all Russians who come from the CIS, who know the language, Russian in this topic.

Miranda

Forum: forums.miranda-im.org
Conference: miranda-im@conference.jabber.ru
We all know Miranda. Initially, Miranda was developed by foreign programmers from around the world, but in the end, they moved away from development. Now Miranda, if associated with someone, then with the Russians.
See for yourself what the developers report on their wiki: the Yahoo! protocol plugin. was rewritten by Gennady Feldman, the jabber protocol was written by Georgy Khazan, Maxim Mlyukhov ( mlu ), Viktor Pavlychko ( nullbie ), Artyom Shpynov ( fyr ), Mikhail Stepura and Denis Rostovtsev, and ICQ the developer of the ICQ protocol is Vitaly Igonin ( persei ). The authorship of the MSN protocol belongs to Boris Krasnovsky.

Psi, Psi +, Ya. Online

Forum: forum.psi-plus.com (registration upon request in the conference)
Conference: psi-dev@conference.jabber.ru
The list of Russian developers Psi is quite extensive, I will not give it entirely, you yourself can always familiarize yourself with it. I will single out only the founders of Psi +: Vladimir Shelukhin aka zet, Maxim Yakovenko aka maj and Sergey Ilinikh aka rion. All of them are pretty easy to find on the net.
One of the developers of the Psi Team is Mikhail Pishchagin aka mblsha , who, as far as I can tell, is the developer of Ya.Online. Anyway, the story that Ya.Online is Psi with a reworked interface is quite publicly accessible to itself, and it can be stated unequivocally that the developers of the client from Yandex are Russians.
')

QIP

Forum: forum.qip.ru
Conference: qip@conference.qip.ru
In the 2004th year, Ilgam Zulkorneev had the idea that you should write your ICQ client. For several years, the development of QIP was done by Ilgam Zulkorneev aka INF, and in 2007 he proposed to the entire Internet public to replace QIP 2005 with QIP Infium. The initiative was picked up, developed and now the only QIP project program is QIP 2012. And the main developer is Sergey Galezdinov ( SegaZero ). Ilgam himself chose to rest for a while, and then to completely abandon the development of QIP.
The development of QIP Mobile is done by Alexander Smirnov and Danil Aseev, friends of Ilgam from St. Petersburg. Of course, there are other developers, but there is no public information about them. I think no one doubts that they are all Russians too.

Bimoid

Forum: forum.bimoid.com
To finish with the QIP theme, we’ll mention one more messenger: Bimoid. It was his development that the quip author Ilgam Zulkoriev took up after he stopped developing QIP Infium in 2007 (or 2008). This is not only an instant messenger, but also an open protocol to it, designed to replace ICQ for the internal needs of companies due to the simplicity of setting up your server.

qutIM

Forum: qutim.org/forum
Conference: talks@conference.qutim.org
Ruslan Nigmatullin ( EuroElessar ) and Alexey Sidorov ( Gorthauer87 ) are mainly engaged in the development of one of the most successful multi-protocol clients for unix-like systems. This is the only project that actively develops the direction of niche mobile devices for Maemo / Meego OS. And in some cases you really won't have a choice: qutIM or nothing.
Developers periodically write about their project on Habr (perhaps the only ones out of all!) And everyone can easily find the relevant topics, so here I am silent.

Are you still not dazzled by habrauser nicknames? :)

In fact, I propose to be proud.

And here is just the situation where we won't see the habrauser nicknames.

Tkabber

Conference: xmpp: tkabber@conference.jabber.ru
The official site of the project is all in English. However, it is located on tkabber.jabber.ru, a subdomain of the famous Russian Jabber server. But if you look closely, the names of the developers are written in simple transliteration. Russian Wikipedia mentions the following developers: Alexey Shchepin, Sergey Golovan, Mikhail Litvak, Konstantin Chomutov.
The project is rarely updated and the last 4 years is expected to release a new version. The main backbone of users uses a version of the source.

Vacuum IM, Rambler-Contacts

Forum: forum.jrudevels.org/viewforum.php?f=11
Another pure Russian messenger on Qt. The main developer is his and his name is Sergey Potapov ( Lion34 ), which follows from the news on the project website.
According to this client, I must make a reservation that my data could somehow become outdated.
The client himself is not bad, but does not represent anything special. But some really appreciate it.
Sergey also develops Rambler-Contacts in collaboration with Valentin Silvansky ( silvansky ).

Mail.ru Agent, ICQ

Forum: community in My World + Habr
Since Mail.ru Group began to manage ICQ, it is possible to say with absolute certainty that there are Russians in ICQ. However, it would be interesting to know whether the Russian employees were in ICQ before selling to Mail.ru, during the heyday of the service.
It is also worth noting that , recently, both services have been merged into one IM division, headed by Igor Ermakov ( shingrus ). Representatives of the company is on Habré calmly respond in the comments to the topics of the corporate blog.

Slowly two more projects are developing on the jabber path:

Rnq

Forum: http://rnq.ru/component/option,com_kunena/Itemid,48/
Since RnQ added the XMPP protocol some time ago, this client can be called a Jabber counterpart of QIP 2005. The project is updated quite often, has a forum, a good site (and still, ICQ support).

IMadering

Forum: www.imadering.com/forum
At the moment, the author has begun to create a new version of the program, which should become unlike QIP. Wanted icons, logo and other help. The program has become open source, so you can participate directly in its creation.
The author himself invites: "All who are interested in creating a new client from scratch, please contact me for discussions and participation in the creation process." Contacts on the site.

We turn to foreign messengers.
The most famous of them are Digsby, Trillian ... and the following two:

imo.im

Forum:
There is little information about the imo.im command, mainly due to the “About the Team” page. The team is international, with an office in Palo Alto, California.
But the list of Slavs in the team. All of them, mostly developers. Brain drain in action. They all live in Palo Alto. In brackets - hometown.
Nikola Borisov (Sofia)
Nikolay Ponyatovsky (Kiev)
Nikita Beloglazov (Minsk) (Upd: Nikelandjelo and already at home)
Sergey Vasilinets (St. Petersburg) (UPD: already at home)
As well as interface designer Maxim Kulakov (Minsk) and developer intern Timur Abishev.
So the latter is even present on Habré as ttim . It is a pity that Timur did not write anything about how he was an intern in imo. It would be interesting to read.

IM +

Forum: www.shapeservices.com/en/support/forum
One of the popular messengers on mobile devices is IM +. Completely foreign, at first glance.
However, one has only to write technical support in Russian - and the names Olga, Mikhail and Antonina appear in response :) The thing is that once the German Shape AG bought Ukrainian Warelex.
Also in February, the holding company “Finam” invested $ 10 million . to the company and announced plans to develop IM + messenger in Russia. The Techcrunch blog then reported on the preparation of a special Russian version plus.im, but so far no results have been seen. The Russian language was supported there a long time ago.

Skype

The only Russian Skype employee I know is Arseny Rastorguev aka catscrossing , who is the representative of the Skype press service in Russia. Of course, he is not a developer, but if you need to contact the company, here’s the Russian contact.
Skype also owns the qik messenger (which was already written on Habré), which also has Russian roots in the person of startup founder Nikolai Abkairov.

Mobile customers

I no longer have the strength to describe mobile clients, so I will simply list people, and you can easily find their contacts without any problems.
Bombus, Bombus Lime - Evgeny Stakhov aka evgs,
Bombus QD , one of the most man- oriented forks - Andrey Tikhonov aka Tishka17 ,
Jasmine IM by Ivan Kudryakov aka Ivansuper,
as well as jTalk from Igor Ustyugov aka karp
and emess from Vladimir Shapranov aka Equadiamond.
And, and also Talkonaut - Evgeny Korolenko aka ek, Ruslan Zalata aka zalata.

Well. Do you need help? Want to participate in the development of your client?
Now you know where to turn!

It is possible that I missed something after all, and in some ways you can add to the list of habrauser or interesting projects that are being conducted by our compatriots. It will be great.