5 years ago, aol still used aim internally for everything that people use slack for today. Group chats, bots, notifications for builds, etc, etc.
Then gradually individual teams picked up slack and within maybe 18 months, we went from 100% aim to a gigantic corporate slack team.
That was the end of AIM, I think. Aol and yahoo both use gmail internally so I suspect they’re going to shitcan their email services eventually, too.
I think it’s remarkable how badly aol fumbled the ball on AIM twice — first by not turning it into a social network, and second by not turning it into enterprise chat.
All it would have taken was some investment instead of continuously laying off everyone that worked on it.
It is hard to move the ball forward when you reorg every year and have minor layoffs almost every year to keep OIBDA moving in the right direction so the execs get larger bonuses. So many people were in self preservation mode with no interest in anything that was "risky" and might put their bonus at risk. Similar things happened with how they managed MapQuest.
Also, if you think they missed a chance on AIM, it is nothing compared to what they missed on email. They could easily have made aol mail free and still kept charging for the client. Ted Leonsis admitted at a meeting once that this was his largest regret.
That’s fascinating that you guys ended up choosing Slack.
I’m surprised because it seems like with the infrastructure already setup, AOL could’ve built an internal enterprise MVP and got a real leg-up on the rest of the competition. Missed opportunity for sure.
Is there a word for what one might refer to as "institutional/organizational burnout"?
I feel like it's related to the age of leadership and trends in the current cult of personality du jour, and its interaction with promotion, branding and marketing. Shit happens, and the inertia of social groups is tough to steer over time, as sensibilities and fashions change, people get old, and graduating classes of the current generation ascend to power.
Pity. I spent many, many hours on AIM in my youth. Cultivated friendships, relationships, and many other one-off contacts.
I suppose it has been made obsolete now by Facebook and other social media apps, but those were never truly replacements for AIM in my mind, as most of them have eschewed the venerable screen name in favor of your real name or e-mail address. And for the vast majority of people I talk to online, I don't want them to know my real name. I suppose I am simply a relic from another era.
AIM really was the gold standard for instant notifications and ambient signaling. Away messages were fantastic and if you stayed logged in, non-experts (normals) could disclose and see availability and time idle.
The pseudonymous UIDs, AOL's chat rooms, contact management, image sharing, private messaging—this list of innovations introduced to mainstream users made AIM a giant success.
Alas, AOL Instant Messenger cannot compete in the age of smartphones.
One of my friends with whom I stayed touch first through AIM said
> Somehow I really thought there would be an AIM
> emoji <emoji of man running: UTF-8 \xf0\x9f\x8f\x83\xf0\x9f\x8f\xbb>
I replied
> If any service should have an emoji standard, it’s AIM.
For me the killer feature of AIM was P2P file transfer. Is there even a service today that does this? It was so easy to just click "send a file" and it worked fairly reliably. Dropbox comes close, but, of course, it is not a direct file transfer.
Out of the western networks, Kik, Telegram, and Viber still do usernames.
Kik, notably, still has a fairly laissez-faire culture and a userbase that skews young, which makes it the most comparable modern network to the feel of something like AIM in its heyday; with the difference that so many people having overlapping identities, discourse is now fragmented between various platforms for reasons more than just network effects.
I miss dedicated IM services like AIM. They had a certain dynamic that Facebook Messenger (or similar) and SMS lack.
On AIM, logging in was an active choice and it signaled that you were up for a conversation. With Facebook Messenger, everyone who has the app is always "online." This means that:
a) I get messages from people I don't want to have a conversation with at the moment and it seems rude if I ignore them, because there are read receipts.
b) If I send a message, I don't know if they're going to engage in a real-time conversation or if we're going to play phone tag. There's no way of signaling which I'm looking for.
What you are lamenting the lack of is the 'presence' indicator, where you can set yourself Available, Away, Busy, or simply Offline. Of the current crop of IM clients, only Skype still has it (I think).
Of the older IM clients; Lync had it, so did Lotus Sametime, MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, ICQ, and of course AIM.
Somewhere along the line the presence feature got dropped, and now we're always 'Available' even when we're not.
> With Facebook Messenger, everyone who has the app is always "online."
Not exactly, FBM lets you differentiate between people who are "active", as in they are currently using FBM, vs. "last seen x hours ago." The difference from AIM is that being active vs. inactive does not necessarily correspond to whether or not you are up for an engaged conversation, and also that you don't directly control your status since it's automatic. There is also a way to set yourself to appear offline, though it's kinda convoluted. I 100% agree though that finer controls over your status like back in the good old days of AIM would be really nice.
On top of that, I feel like many people view the chat as subservient to the main feature of Facebook (sharing and commenting on articles, pictures, and personal rants). The last few times I attempted to have conversations with people on Facebook chat, people seemed happy but somewhat surprised, chatted for a little bit, and then the conversation quickly died (and no attempt was made to revive it).
I'm still signed onto AIM - through Pidgin - whenever my personal laptop is open. It's the primary way I stay in contact with friends I made through the early-2000s internet.
Of course we're also connected to each other on more 'modern' social networks, but there's a certain - undeniably nostalgic - appeal to the AIM chat, continued unabated over the same protocol with the same handles for 15+ years.
Funnily enough, just a couple of nights ago someone I hadn't spoken to in at least _10 years_ signed on and messaged me out of the blue. We reminisced on our friendship on a now-forgotten AOL message board back in 2001, and discussed the myriad ways our lives had since changed since then. A surreal and touching exchange that's been running through my head since.
If you once had an AIM account and haven't signed on in a while - which, gauging by the reactions to this thread, seems to describe most of us - log on and see if anyone's still around. Your Buddy List hasn't gone anywhere.
I worked at AOL years ago when the company announced internally that the product would not be extended, but that the service would remain online.
I was headed to the main campus (Dulles) when the announcement was made. Internally, they dismissed the entire AIM product engineers and management, and simply retained operational people to keep the lights on.
Walking up to the floor where the AIM crew was working was creepy. Product plans on whiteboards and windows, with future dates written down everywhere. All the cubes on the floor were vacant, save for maybe a small few on the opposite side of the office (admin-type folks.) It was just straight-up silent, and incredibly deflating. That team always seemed to have a fairly good vibe, at least in observation.
I think they really missed an opportunity with AIM.
AIM was where I first found my passion for development. The first programming language I ever really learned, perl, was because I wanted to be better at making AIM bots.
Nostalgia:
- The TOC protocol and the OSCAR protocol. Net::AIM and Net::OSCAR. Aryeh Goldsmith, you beautiful soul.
- The first $300 I ever made online was in ~2002, when I wrote a chatroom flirt bot for an adult content affiliate. I was 14 or 15 years old.
- The first project I built that ever got traction was a bot that enabled offline messaging. I didn't even write it, it was open source, but I branded it well and it got traction and spread virally across the USA.
- Being part of the AIM scene...exploiting warn functionality (with parallel attacks!), profile vulns, and 3char screen names being the most legit.
I vaguely remember the 3char screen names and the trading of accounts or lists. If I recall correctly there was underground stuff going on with trading those names. Thanks for hitting that memory switch for me.
It's very surprising to me that person-to-person text communication is divided into two completely different and incompatible types of service: short latency (~20 sec, "email") and very short latency (~1 sec, "instant messaging"). A priori, I'd have just imagined that the former would arrive first for technical reasons but then would be consumed by the latter, which has no fundamental technical barriers to being better in every way. It's even more surprising that, multiple decades after both services became available and have had time to reach equilibrium, email is a single uniform standard and instant messaging is hopelessly fragmented. (The existence of an email standard and fragmented instant messaging does help explain why a division between the two can persist, but not why they went opposite directions in the first place.)
Was any of this predictable? Or could we just have easily ended up with everything fragmented, or everything a uniform standard, conditional on flipping a few minor historical events? The potential of very strong path dependence for the quality of equilibrium services is very disheartening.
Email by its very nature is asynchronous and was standardized in a time when "always-on" didn't exist, and it is provider-agnostic because of the standard protocol.
Email's maturity by the time that businesses all came online pretty much guaranteed it as the standard for business communication, and personal use was just a small step from there.
Expecting 20s RTT for email is a modern phenomenon, when you could expect replies on the timescale of days before.
The closest attempt to a standard for IM is probably XMPP, which providers have pretty much all ignored in favour of lock-in to their respective platforms.
I think instant messaging lends itself to fragmentation because it’s more of a social network than a general purpose communication medium. I specifically do not want most people/entities to message me. Whereas email I’m more lax about because it doesn’t demand my immediate attention.
I suspect the answer is money. Well-funded corporations can and do push their fancy, new messaging platforms hard enough to crowd out any emerging open standard, but they certainly have no intention of paying anything more than lip service to the idea of interoperability. They want to own all of this and turn it into cold, hard cash. Who's going to develop the next big, open standard when WhatsApp can turn into billions of dollars?
Major difference between email and IM is that email address is public - anyone can send you anything.
And IM address is more or less private and restricted - you need to approve other party in order to send you messages.
And this, not the latency, makes the difference.
People are using Skype for example in "email mode": sending messages even when they know that contact is offline - it will be read later anyway.
Yet there are more differences:
1. Uniqueness of address. You may have tons of email addresses. But other party cannot be sure what you are reading any of those. While in IM you have one address in their particular namespace.
2. Consequence of #2: Most of IMs keep conversation as single tape - you know that if you or your correspondent did ever say something you will find it in that particular place - on that tape.
3. More or less guarantied delivery and corresponding UI feedback ("his/her LED is green!"). If you see "message delivered" then it in magnitude of times is more probable that your correspondent have or will read it. With emails it is more like a gamble. How many times we heard advices to check spam folder to find someone's message?
> It's very surprising to me that person-to-person text communication is divided into two completely different and incompatible types of service: short latency (~20 sec, "email") and very short latency (~1 sec, "instant messaging").
Email, for network connected machines with delivery direct into the recipients inbox (this is how SMTP works if both sides are network connected and online, and in fact was how SMTP was designed to work for connected systems) is also sub 1 sec delivery latency (at least for normal sized emails, 2G of attached photos will take a moment to ship over).
20 seconds for delivery of email (ignoring intermittently disconnected systems, which email still supports) is only because most email clients work in a polling pull mode from a central server, and the polling delay in the client is what adds the apparent latency. It is a result of how most clients are designed, not an inherent built in latency of the system.
Sad - I believe AIM is the oldest living account where I still know my username/password. I just logged in for the first time in years and not a single other person was logged in. There were people on there I haven't spoken to in 18 years.
It's funny how 15 years feels so ancient in internet time.
When I met my wife I asked her for her AIM screen name instead of her phone number. AIM was more common than cell phones (and didn't charge $0.20 per message like SMS).
At the same time, I am honestly surprised it was not sunset sooner. I wonder how many active users there actually were in the end.
I'm fairly torn up about this. A lot of my friends today were "internet randos" I started up chats with on AOL in the late 90s.
There is a pretty large number of additional internet rando's from my youth whom I haven't spoken to in years where my only connection is their AIM screenname. I still use Adium connected to AIM just waiting for any of them to pop on.
For many of them, I never knew their real name, only their screen name. This will be a total loss of the possibility of reconnecting.
I am honestly mildly devastated.
It was a different world then, people were much more excited and willing to talk to weirdo's like me online.
This is what bums me out. I went down my AIM contact list when I got this news and realized I had fond memories of people from the 00s that I will never be able to find again because there is no name attached to their AIM.
But at the same time, that detachment was what made those interactions magical. I knew people by screen name, not real name. They weren't constrained by what their lives meant offline because all they were online was what they made that screenname out to be. Getting into the Internet i the late 90s / early 2000s was like another world because of how detached from boring reality it was.
That being said, the Internet has only really gotten better for weirdos. There is everything from decades old niche website forums to subreddits to new stuff like Matrix rooms for almost any subject.
Oh man, AIM was great. They nailed their UI/UX at the time.. . everything just worked. There's so much overlap with contemporary companies and features they rolled-out. They had weather-bots, integration with a ton of 3rd party apps (I remember logging into Meebo on school computers cause we couldn't install desktop apps), games, statuses, chat-rooms, file transfers.. Most apps are so hyper-focused nowadays, I really do miss how creative companies were back in the 90s.
I wouldn't be married to my wonderful wife of 11 years, if it were not for AIM. We met at a college party, and before we parted ways the only thing I thought to ask was for her AIM ID. I'm shy and talking over AIM was much easier for me.
My wife and I met on AIM (mostly) too. My friend wanted me to chat up this girl he knew to convince her he was cool and she should date him. It doesn't seem like a great plan in hindsight from his perspective, and it really wasn't in the end. We've been married 9 years.
What I do not understand is how has AOL Messenger, MSN Messenger, Skype, ICQ, and Google Chat all managed to be displaced by Whatsapp? I guess it is loss of 'business focus', but the idea of a "messenging app" is incredibly simple, so one would think it would be simple enough to do.
WhatsApp has the trick that it automatically connects you with everyone you already have in your phone's address book (even if the phone number they used to have belong to someone else now) , the other apps you mention don't do that. I suppose this feature helps, although according to a data protection officer who consulted my company he could sue all his friends for uploading his phone number to WhatsApp's server...
Usability. And if you look at all of the above none of those company really have a product or vision of messaging app.
At one point in time, All AOL, MSN and ICQ really did was try to prevent orders from working on their network. ( AIM / MSN )
And other point ICQ were trying to turn itself into Yahoo, an internet portal.
Google Chat? It couldn't even get the basic right.
MSN started to displace ICQ when it was faster, better and Icons pack ( before Emoji ). And ICQ somehow manage to react to this threat by keep boating itself.
At some point before 2007, MSN won. AIM were still being used in US but the trend was clear, people were slowing moving to MSN in US while the rest of the world has switched away from ICQ to MSN.
Being Microsoft who in my mind has never created any decent product, thought they won and decide not to do much about it. It was the era before iPhone. The era when everyone would question, what is going to bring down Microsoft?
Then came the iPhone that shocked the world. Well least in broad sense of it. The UI were revolutionary. But the tech or dreams wasn't. Pocket PC, Palm, all had similar idea before and HTC were ODM at the time. We had a lite, useless, slow Windows Mobile that couldn't do much at all.
Everyone thought, surely linking MSN Messenger between the Desktop and iPhone / Android would make perfect sense?
Not at Microsoft. And when they finally did? It was too late.
Whatsapp manage to became the dominant platform because it was good and simple. Somehow the tech industry took nearly two decade to figure out.
what's even worse whatsapp is the only one without a desktop client even the webclient requires your phone :(. I guess Line is the best alternative it works on all platforms and without phone number as identifier except it's mostly popular in Asia
I know Whatsapp apparently has a ton of users but I honestly know nobody that has ever used it. A lot of Discord, Telegram, Facebook Messenger, a little Hangouts, and back in the day MSM, Yahoo Messenger, and AIM. I guess I missed that step in the ladder or something. Same with SMS - from the time I made the leap to Smartphones there were already enough general XMPP clients / Hangouts was good enough to never think about using a third party, especially proprietary, service like that.
My understanding is Whatsapp took off outside the US entirely because it seamlessly used SMS when data was unavailable and that was certainly a killer feature in many parts of the world.
Well to be fair half of those were on their way out long before WhatsApp came on the scene.
Facebook replaced most of them.
I knew a large community of music producers who only used aim to send tracks to one another, Dropbox and soundcloud soon replaced that
Back in the day I had to use a few different chat programs (AIM/ICQ/MSN), then came along Trillian, and I could just run the one program. I've since switched to Pidgin (or whatever they called themselves before the rename), it was quite nice not having to bother with all those separate programs.
Now we have Discord/Slack/Whatsapp/A myriad of voice chat programs and I'm back where I started.
Edit: For those curious, AIM for Counter-Strike, ICQ for random internets, and MSN was pretty big here in Canada.
Which now leaves me using Google Chat on Pidgin and Skype as my last instant messaging services. I haven't moved to any other newer platform because the mobile-based UI and huge amounts of whitespace are a huge turnoff for me (and I almost tossed Skype when they went that direction.)
Indeed. Pidgin is so useful as far as the myriad IMing services it supports, and yet so many of them have shut down or moved to a non-supported protocol.
I'm hoping Matrix at least might stay around and evolve into something pervasive like SMTP, but not as shitty. Right now its a great API to implement and use in my experience.
> With AIM on its way out the door, now’s your last chance to write that perfect away message.
Interesting in hindsight then how some platforms adopted this one element, turned it into a log of away messages, dropped the messaging, and created "social media".
One of the principle authors (who had long since left AOL) tried to get the proprietary kernel and the distributed computing components open sourced 4-5 years ago, got almost to the finish line and then everyone in the executive chain of approval was axed/moved on. I doubt anyone else has the will and connections to try.
[+] [-] empath75|8 years ago|reply
Then gradually individual teams picked up slack and within maybe 18 months, we went from 100% aim to a gigantic corporate slack team.
That was the end of AIM, I think. Aol and yahoo both use gmail internally so I suspect they’re going to shitcan their email services eventually, too.
I think it’s remarkable how badly aol fumbled the ball on AIM twice — first by not turning it into a social network, and second by not turning it into enterprise chat.
All it would have taken was some investment instead of continuously laying off everyone that worked on it.
[+] [-] snarf21|8 years ago|reply
Also, if you think they missed a chance on AIM, it is nothing compared to what they missed on email. They could easily have made aol mail free and still kept charging for the client. Ted Leonsis admitted at a meeting once that this was his largest regret.
[+] [-] brogrammernot|8 years ago|reply
I’m surprised because it seems like with the infrastructure already setup, AOL could’ve built an internal enterprise MVP and got a real leg-up on the rest of the competition. Missed opportunity for sure.
[+] [-] tritium|8 years ago|reply
I feel like it's related to the age of leadership and trends in the current cult of personality du jour, and its interaction with promotion, branding and marketing. Shit happens, and the inertia of social groups is tough to steer over time, as sensibilities and fashions change, people get old, and graduating classes of the current generation ascend to power.
[+] [-] AdmiralAsshat|8 years ago|reply
I suppose it has been made obsolete now by Facebook and other social media apps, but those were never truly replacements for AIM in my mind, as most of them have eschewed the venerable screen name in favor of your real name or e-mail address. And for the vast majority of people I talk to online, I don't want them to know my real name. I suppose I am simply a relic from another era.
At least IRC lives on.
[+] [-] mistersquid|8 years ago|reply
The pseudonymous UIDs, AOL's chat rooms, contact management, image sharing, private messaging—this list of innovations introduced to mainstream users made AIM a giant success.
Alas, AOL Instant Messenger cannot compete in the age of smartphones.
One of my friends with whom I stayed touch first through AIM said
I replied EDIT: formatting, spelling, sense, fix quote, punctuation, proper noun instead of pronoun[+] [-] mirkules|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sarcasmic|8 years ago|reply
Kik, notably, still has a fairly laissez-faire culture and a userbase that skews young, which makes it the most comparable modern network to the feel of something like AIM in its heyday; with the difference that so many people having overlapping identities, discourse is now fragmented between various platforms for reasons more than just network effects.
[+] [-] choko|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drngdds|8 years ago|reply
On AIM, logging in was an active choice and it signaled that you were up for a conversation. With Facebook Messenger, everyone who has the app is always "online." This means that:
a) I get messages from people I don't want to have a conversation with at the moment and it seems rude if I ignore them, because there are read receipts.
b) If I send a message, I don't know if they're going to engage in a real-time conversation or if we're going to play phone tag. There's no way of signaling which I'm looking for.
[+] [-] Jaruzel|8 years ago|reply
Of the older IM clients; Lync had it, so did Lotus Sametime, MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, ICQ, and of course AIM.
Somewhere along the line the presence feature got dropped, and now we're always 'Available' even when we're not.
[+] [-] gh02t|8 years ago|reply
Not exactly, FBM lets you differentiate between people who are "active", as in they are currently using FBM, vs. "last seen x hours ago." The difference from AIM is that being active vs. inactive does not necessarily correspond to whether or not you are up for an engaged conversation, and also that you don't directly control your status since it's automatic. There is also a way to set yourself to appear offline, though it's kinda convoluted. I 100% agree though that finer controls over your status like back in the good old days of AIM would be really nice.
[+] [-] Chathamization|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] tehwebguy|8 years ago|reply
So much drama went down in those short little notes.
[+] [-] cribbles|8 years ago|reply
Of course we're also connected to each other on more 'modern' social networks, but there's a certain - undeniably nostalgic - appeal to the AIM chat, continued unabated over the same protocol with the same handles for 15+ years.
Funnily enough, just a couple of nights ago someone I hadn't spoken to in at least _10 years_ signed on and messaged me out of the blue. We reminisced on our friendship on a now-forgotten AOL message board back in 2001, and discussed the myriad ways our lives had since changed since then. A surreal and touching exchange that's been running through my head since.
If you once had an AIM account and haven't signed on in a while - which, gauging by the reactions to this thread, seems to describe most of us - log on and see if anyone's still around. Your Buddy List hasn't gone anywhere.
[+] [-] jroseattle|8 years ago|reply
I was headed to the main campus (Dulles) when the announcement was made. Internally, they dismissed the entire AIM product engineers and management, and simply retained operational people to keep the lights on.
Walking up to the floor where the AIM crew was working was creepy. Product plans on whiteboards and windows, with future dates written down everywhere. All the cubes on the floor were vacant, save for maybe a small few on the opposite side of the office (admin-type folks.) It was just straight-up silent, and incredibly deflating. That team always seemed to have a fairly good vibe, at least in observation.
I think they really missed an opportunity with AIM.
[+] [-] astrodust|8 years ago|reply
It's like how Flickr couldn't make a mobile app and Instagram happened, or how Digg fumbled so badly Reddit came out of nowhere.
First mover advantage is only important in the initial cycle. Once the market matures it's a huge liability.
[+] [-] gargarplex|8 years ago|reply
Nostalgia:
- The TOC protocol and the OSCAR protocol. Net::AIM and Net::OSCAR. Aryeh Goldsmith, you beautiful soul.
- The first $300 I ever made online was in ~2002, when I wrote a chatroom flirt bot for an adult content affiliate. I was 14 or 15 years old.
- The first project I built that ever got traction was a bot that enabled offline messaging. I didn't even write it, it was open source, but I branded it well and it got traction and spread virally across the USA.
- Being part of the AIM scene...exploiting warn functionality (with parallel attacks!), profile vulns, and 3char screen names being the most legit.
[+] [-] eminkel|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jessriedel|8 years ago|reply
Was any of this predictable? Or could we just have easily ended up with everything fragmented, or everything a uniform standard, conditional on flipping a few minor historical events? The potential of very strong path dependence for the quality of equilibrium services is very disheartening.
[+] [-] antiphase|8 years ago|reply
Email's maturity by the time that businesses all came online pretty much guaranteed it as the standard for business communication, and personal use was just a small step from there.
Expecting 20s RTT for email is a modern phenomenon, when you could expect replies on the timescale of days before.
The closest attempt to a standard for IM is probably XMPP, which providers have pretty much all ignored in favour of lock-in to their respective platforms.
[+] [-] dpark|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] micv|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] c-smile|8 years ago|reply
And IM address is more or less private and restricted - you need to approve other party in order to send you messages.
And this, not the latency, makes the difference.
People are using Skype for example in "email mode": sending messages even when they know that contact is offline - it will be read later anyway.
Yet there are more differences:
1. Uniqueness of address. You may have tons of email addresses. But other party cannot be sure what you are reading any of those. While in IM you have one address in their particular namespace.
2. Consequence of #2: Most of IMs keep conversation as single tape - you know that if you or your correspondent did ever say something you will find it in that particular place - on that tape.
3. More or less guarantied delivery and corresponding UI feedback ("his/her LED is green!"). If you see "message delivered" then it in magnitude of times is more probable that your correspondent have or will read it. With emails it is more like a gamble. How many times we heard advices to check spam folder to find someone's message?
[+] [-] pwg|8 years ago|reply
Email, for network connected machines with delivery direct into the recipients inbox (this is how SMTP works if both sides are network connected and online, and in fact was how SMTP was designed to work for connected systems) is also sub 1 sec delivery latency (at least for normal sized emails, 2G of attached photos will take a moment to ship over).
20 seconds for delivery of email (ignoring intermittently disconnected systems, which email still supports) is only because most email clients work in a polling pull mode from a central server, and the polling delay in the client is what adds the apparent latency. It is a result of how most clients are designed, not an inherent built in latency of the system.
[+] [-] rm999|8 years ago|reply
It's funny how 15 years feels so ancient in internet time.
[+] [-] throwaway2016a|8 years ago|reply
When I met my wife I asked her for her AIM screen name instead of her phone number. AIM was more common than cell phones (and didn't charge $0.20 per message like SMS).
At the same time, I am honestly surprised it was not sunset sooner. I wonder how many active users there actually were in the end.
[+] [-] donatj|8 years ago|reply
There is a pretty large number of additional internet rando's from my youth whom I haven't spoken to in years where my only connection is their AIM screenname. I still use Adium connected to AIM just waiting for any of them to pop on.
For many of them, I never knew their real name, only their screen name. This will be a total loss of the possibility of reconnecting.
I am honestly mildly devastated.
It was a different world then, people were much more excited and willing to talk to weirdo's like me online.
[+] [-] zanny|8 years ago|reply
But at the same time, that detachment was what made those interactions magical. I knew people by screen name, not real name. They weren't constrained by what their lives meant offline because all they were online was what they made that screenname out to be. Getting into the Internet i the late 90s / early 2000s was like another world because of how detached from boring reality it was.
That being said, the Internet has only really gotten better for weirdos. There is everything from decades old niche website forums to subreddits to new stuff like Matrix rooms for almost any subject.
[+] [-] tn_|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] switchstance|8 years ago|reply
Thank you AIM.
*edited for more details
[+] [-] imsofuture|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hackbinary|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] netsharc|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ksec|8 years ago|reply
At one point in time, All AOL, MSN and ICQ really did was try to prevent orders from working on their network. ( AIM / MSN )
And other point ICQ were trying to turn itself into Yahoo, an internet portal.
Google Chat? It couldn't even get the basic right.
MSN started to displace ICQ when it was faster, better and Icons pack ( before Emoji ). And ICQ somehow manage to react to this threat by keep boating itself.
At some point before 2007, MSN won. AIM were still being used in US but the trend was clear, people were slowing moving to MSN in US while the rest of the world has switched away from ICQ to MSN.
Being Microsoft who in my mind has never created any decent product, thought they won and decide not to do much about it. It was the era before iPhone. The era when everyone would question, what is going to bring down Microsoft?
Then came the iPhone that shocked the world. Well least in broad sense of it. The UI were revolutionary. But the tech or dreams wasn't. Pocket PC, Palm, all had similar idea before and HTC were ODM at the time. We had a lite, useless, slow Windows Mobile that couldn't do much at all.
Everyone thought, surely linking MSN Messenger between the Desktop and iPhone / Android would make perfect sense?
Not at Microsoft. And when they finally did? It was too late.
Whatsapp manage to became the dominant platform because it was good and simple. Somehow the tech industry took nearly two decade to figure out.
[+] [-] conceptme|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zanny|8 years ago|reply
My understanding is Whatsapp took off outside the US entirely because it seamlessly used SMS when data was unavailable and that was certainly a killer feature in many parts of the world.
[+] [-] jayflux|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pkamb|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ChoGGi|8 years ago|reply
Now we have Discord/Slack/Whatsapp/A myriad of voice chat programs and I'm back where I started.
Edit: For those curious, AIM for Counter-Strike, ICQ for random internets, and MSN was pretty big here in Canada.
[+] [-] lightedman|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AdmiralAsshat|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zghst|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] angersock|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zanny|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] linkmotif|8 years ago|reply
Interesting in hindsight then how some platforms adopted this one element, turned it into a log of away messages, dropped the messaging, and created "social media".
[+] [-] southphillyman|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] emidln|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jhayward|8 years ago|reply