It was the way you knew friends were available to chat. It was much closer to in-person conversation than most media we use nowadays.
It's not uncommon for someone to {iMessage, SMS, FB Message, IG Message, etc.} me while I'm otherwise busy. Then, I need to find a second to let them know of this (unless I either totally drop the ball or consciously decide to not reply). I also need to let them know I'll be free to chat after work, at lunch time, etc.
With AIM, you just logged in and set whether you were available, idle, away, or invisible. Friends knew whether they would disturb you or not.
Not only that but it was pretty much the singular form of instant communication that almost everybody used. Now I have people I reply to on multiple platforms such that we'll even branch off in separate conversations per platform, I only talk to on X, Y, or Z platform, etc.
I'm not one to <Old man yells at cloud> typically but this is one aspect of social media that I think we've lost over the past decade and it really sucks.
> Then, I need to find a second to let them know of this (unless I either totally drop the ball or consciously decide to not reply).
This seems strange to me. I view IM as asynchronous. If someone messages me while I'm busy, I'll just reply later. And I don't expect people to answer immediatly.
No need to sync to chat together (of course if we're both available we can chat in sync).
When you saw someone on AIM, at least during dialup days, it meant you will get his/her attention. They were logged into engage in real-time conversation. You just don’t have that level of communication anymore. Most online conversations are asynchronous.
I really miss them too. I loved the fact that you had to organize with your friends to connect at the same time to to chat via MSN. I hate the fact that now I am reachable to wherever I am on my phone through Whatsapp. Of course, it has a lot of advantages, but the my nostalgic sides misses the point that I was able to receive messages only if I was on the computer (or if I left it turn it on with the monitor off, without my parents knowing it)
I feel like this was more due to how we used computers at the time rather than AIM itself. You can still set your status on most messaging platforms, but we're now always online and people assume you'll respond later if you're too busy.
Up until the early 2000's, most people were still getting online using a dial-up connection on a PC. That meant you had to make a conscious decision to get online and block off your phone line for other purposes. At least for me, the very fact that I was online meant that I wasn't busy and was open to chatting with my friends.
I wonder how much AIM cost to operate? Did it really need to shut down? Last I checked AOL was still operating and offering various free services. AIM certainly had a user base that might have continued and even grown.
I was browsing through a backup of an old computer that ran Pidgin and had chat logging on. One of the last AIM messages I ever received went like this:
Conversation at Mon Jan 15 01:16:36 2007
(01:16:36) Megan: omg it's ryan.
(01:17:41) Megan: and then in time...
(01:17:53) Megan: the friends faded away
(01:18:14) Megan: and the instanst IMs that'd open were deleted
(01:18:28) Megan: and responses never came
(01:18:39) Megan: and then never even talked anymore
(01:18:50) Megan: and then hadn't hung out in forever
(01:19:02) Megan: ...but it was ok.
(01:19:09) Megan: because that is life.
(01:19:28) Megan: and she was thankful for the past they had,
(01:19:38) Megan: even if there was no present.
(02:31:57) Megan has signed off.
(best read while playing Vangelis - Tears in Rain)
This puts some perspective on the Signal/Matrix/whatever with their persistent history and the number of comments around here about how it's unacceptable to lose messages and history while in fact we are sometimes guilty of missing on them from our own negligence.
Connecting people is a great achievement of Internet. And it has been done many times.
It was such a senseless destruction. People miss AIM, people miss MSN Messenger and just a couple years later it turned out instant messaging platforms were worth billions.
It's still insane to me these corporations shut down perfectly viable platforms that were still used by millions. The short sightedness and pettiness of these directors is something of legend, I hope there's a chapter about this in new management textbooks, but who knows.
Anyone got a good explanation why it made sense to shut down these services?
I think it's as you said, corporations didn't recognize the economic value of chat platforms back then. I think they were mostly focused on "Web 2.0" stuff so they probably tried putting all of their resources into that. You often see companies axe perfectly good business units just because they have a slightly lower margin or contribution to overall revenue, as they think putting the people from those units into the "cash cow" units will be better for the profit line (and it often is). We can see Google doing this over and over: They actually create a lot of nice products that could be profitable on their own, but since the main Google products are just making much more money per employee it still makes sense for them to axe the small "winning products" and have almost everyone work on the big winners.
> It was such a senseless destruction. People miss AIM, people miss MSN Messenger and just a couple years later it turned out instant messaging platforms were worth billions.
> It's still insane to me these corporations shut down perfectly viable platforms that were still used by millions. The short sightedness and pettiness of these directors is something of legend, I hope there's a chapter about this in new management textbooks, but who knows.
It's not short sightedness. It was perfectly reasonnable to close these plateforms (in so much as they were closed - Microsoft folded MSN into the Lync and Skype brands and rather successfully sold it to pro users). They were never going to make money with them as they were. You are just missing that modern instant messassing plateforms have little in common with AIM and MSN.
If you look at what is valuable today, you have on one side WeChat and Whatsapp who took over the mobile space and are extremely valuable in emerging countries where text messaging became the main point of entry for conducting business and mobile payments. On the other side, you have Slack which use is centered around chat rooms and collaboration rather than direct messaging and whose popularity grew mainly on the shifting habits of a generation used to communicate via text, habits taken on smartphones. Then again, Microsoft was quick to reuse the infrastructure they already had to launch Teams which is very successful.
So, unless you could foresee the emergence of a mobile first world, it completely made sense to pivot these services towards paying customers.
Another point of surprise is that these things grew somehow organically. Nobody went onto AIM or MSN because it's gonna revolutionize anything, it was just a simple need, simple programs.. no biggie. They're gone and now it's replaced by things that try to be grandiose and keep changing every year (or die ala Google) because the big new model is not right and they have a new big idea to chase.
I’m still pissed that MSN Messenger died but the hot garbage of Skype continued. I wish the pick for in org chat was MSN and not Skype. Back in 2004 we had chat history, now MS had to come up with the behemoth of Teams to provide that feature.
All we needed was msn on Android and iPhone with cloud backup of chats, that’s if.
Agreed. AOL in particular pioneered stuff like E2E encryption, etc. imo, the early 2000s platforms like AIM, Yahoo, MSN were the pinnacle of the technology, and successors are all worse in material ways.
Today, iMessage is probably the best single messaging platform, which is pitiful because it has key design and UX flaws.
I think in the case of AIM, it existed by virtue of and thrived under corporate neglect. The others withered as the complimentary services withered (Yahoo) or the corporate strategies shifted in inscrutable ways (Microsoft, Google). It was a weird scenario where MS and Goog behaved similarly... Microsoft with their mysterious purchase and subsequent neglect of Skype and Google with their drunken monkey product management process.
They failed to monetise them. Most chat clients were placing ads to try and generate revenue but I doubt they ever made money from it. From what I remember of the blogs at the time, such as Martin Fowler's stuff on Yahoo! Messenger, the infrastructure was far from cheap, and the protocols were really insecure, too.
I think Facebook was hoovering up a shitton of the messenger traffic very quickly, too, and the traffic on AIM/MSN/etc was dominated by crappy bots sending phishing links.
All in all it wasn't a happy place and I doubt many actually missed them. This is the first link I've personally seen about the nostalgia of IM anyway.
I miss how anyone with a packet sniffer could pull entire AIM messages out of the air. Just filter by port number and you could read them like a live chat window. I demonstrated this to a class while at law school. Scared the heck out of everyone who had been using it to pass answers to people when they were called on. (Failure to give a reasonable answer would impact your grade very quickly.)
Reminds me of the time I read about someone inheriting six figures worth of Apple shares from their grandparents (who had an excellent cost basis, of course) and immediately selling it all to 'diversify'.
It's not always easy to understand the long term benefits of holding on to 'risky' positions, and conventional 'wisdom' often steers you away from it.
On the contrary, social media and messaging platforms live on trend popularity alone. Features or bulk accounts ever created are mostly meaningless. MySpace stopped mattering once everyone moved to Facebook. These aren't driven by technology, they're driven solely by popularity.
Once people move on, you might as well shut it down.
Maybe they couldn't monetize it, maybe it was losing to a competitor with no idea on how to reverse the trend.
Often you see things people think are worth billions. And when they try to capitalize on it, in the end it becomes less than worthless. Just look at how many startups Google bought just to kill the product shortly after, especially when it comes to social networking things. Maybe these managers took the right decision by saying "we are not good at that, we didn't find a way to sell it, let's kill it and invest our resources where we are good at instead of letting it become a burden". In the real world, you actually have to figure out the "???" before "profit".
And these messaging platforms did not require an exorbitant amount of computing resources to run. They were responsive to keyboard input (no signficant lag), and, as I recall, allowed one to keep a local log of messages sent and received.
One interesting (but probably creepy by todays standards) feature of AIM was that you could put %s anywhere in your profile and AIM would replace it with the screen name of whoever was looking at your profile. An example would be:
%s is my best friend! -> angelc408 is my best friend!
This also worked on links you added to your profile so you could make custom links that would send the user's name to your server to make a simple guest book.
I was a sophomore in college when I made a simple guest book service that blew up to over 3 million users in a year. I contemplated dropping out of college my junior year and making it into something more than 20 lines of PHP with a MySQL database. In the end I stayed in school and AIM removed profiles from the desktop client a year later. Dodged a bullet there...
The shutdown of AIM makes me sad, but I had maybe one holdout contact left (who I still speak with, but on other services).
I'm sure there's all sort of business lessons we could learn here. Among them that an early lead doesn't always lead to lasting success. AIM federated with Apple iChat, Facebook Messenger, and Google Talk, as well as ICQ after they purchased it over the years, but that didn't turn into anything lasting either.
It's probably my bias from working at WhatsApp; but I don't think they did a great job working with mobile, and that combined with lack of support from management killed them when smartphones took over the mobile market. They did have some support for AIM on feature phones, but I think it was all based on SMS, which was costly, and I don't know if they had made a compelling Android app (wikipedia says they did have an Android app; but who knows if it was good); I never ran iOS, so I don't know if their iPhone app was any good, but I never heard from friends with iPhones that they were using it, so I'm guessing not so great.
1) got rid of usernames/passwords. This was a surprisingly high barrier for non tech literate people to pass, and WhatsApp made it dead simple for them to download from app store, install, and start chatting with their contacts.
2) SMS verification eliminated spam
And the timing was perfect. Data plans and smartphones were just coming into the fore, and WhatsApp popped in as an alternative to the extremely inferior MMS option, and gave people a free way to communicate across borders.
I also remember having trouble sharing contacts prior to WhatsApp, and after WhatsApp, it didn't matter what mobileOS the other person was using, I could just send a contact, and they would be able to add it to theirs. Same with location. And the picture/video sharing was way nicer early on also, albeit heavily compressed, it just worked.
AIM truly became useless. Everyone got phones and texted instead of using computers. AIM was popular before every person had a mobile phone. It wasn’t really AIMs fault. Mobile phones came out and they were too slow to have a decent application. For a few years phones didn’t have the ability at all to download applications. In that span of time AIM was completely replaced by texting. They may have been starting from zero again by the time iPhone and Android popularized app downloads.
This is why it's important, as a group, to roll your server. Own the infrastructure of communication and discourse. To utilize open standards for which you or anyone else can create and run their own server, or client.
Protocols should also evolve, or have organized successors over time. If you do provide backward compatibility, please do the best reasonable effort at making backward features work.
This just reminded me of my first online girlfriend I met on AIM. I think I was 12-13 and I socially engineered an AT&T operator into letting me bill long-distance call charges directly to my parent's house by pretending to be a traveling salesman.
It was an enlightening moment about the fragility of human-fronted systems. $1,200 later and a disconnected phone line...let's just say they weren't thrilled.
Normally I happy to shutdown services or delete code, less stuff, less stuff to maintain, but something as dear as AIM might be harder.
It’s always a little sad to think of something like “the last message sent”, but there’s also someone, somewhere, with the last commit to the AIM server code. Writing the final AIM server bugfix cannot have been cheerful work, I mean want was the point, the developer most likely knew that the service would shutdown.
I recall Yahoo Chat finally shutting down in December of 2012. In a sense, you could see it coming: the messaging protocols were a mess, no real attempt had been made against the spambots, the property was poorly managed during that phase where Yahoo was attempting to date anyone, everyone, in order to fix their lives.
First they killed the user-made rooms, due to some senseless pedo-panic, then some special interest rooms, and finally the service itself, even as some put-upon employee named "Robin" had to write various upbeat missives about Yahoo improving the service on the Yahoo Messenger Chat blog.
You see, they had done one thing really right in the beginning with their chat rooms -- they made a series of location-based rooms, first by continent, then country, then (for the US) state and even occasionally city. So many people either want to talk about what is going on where they live or just talk to locals that this was a great success. And yet ... destroyed. It was indicative of what I had often heard about the company, that there were some brilliant engineers with some great insights, and also that there were just metric tons of business people businessing very hard and capable of driving absolutely anything into the ground because of their inability to leave well enough alone.
It is a little amazing to me that all of these corporations just decided to shutter messaging and chat rooms in lockstep. And I suppose one did it, so they all had to or fall behind something or another.
Very fun. AIM was a huge part of my high school existence.
I was absent from AIM for several years, but then my first job out of school (2009) used it as the official chat service. Eventually the corporate overlords brought in a series of other sanctioned chat tools, but most of us kept AIM going to have a backchannel we knew wasn't monitored.
I used AIM to create what had to be one of the earlier live-blogging proofs of concept. It supported live-blogging from my Nokia 3390 dumb phone by virtue of its AIM client (which was literally just an interface to AIM over SMS).
I coupled that with a custom plugin on Trillian (Astra?) to post to an API (API is generous, it was literally just a PHP script that knew to listen for a certain URL variable) which would post to the database, and update the page live. I even gave my friend a different prefix, and then we set up a dueling live-blog screen as we went on the same trip together: me on the left column, him on the right, timestamped, both of us contributing to this blog without easily being able to see the other's posts, since the phone itself didn't have any web capabilities.
I dug into the old database, which I still have banging around somewhere here, and sure enough, the first entry was January of 2005.
I remember my use of AIM fading through college. It being used through the message app on Mac made the experience of it going away pretty seemless. I use my text messages through essentially the same application, so in a way it still feels current
I remember the first time I saw my friend use AIM. It was similar to the first time I saw another friend play GTA III. Both times, we were all huddled together, trying to make sense of this mind-boggingly new experience. I miss that sense of wonder.
I have fond memories of the ICQ sound.. hell even mIRC was mind-blowing the first time I saw it... Really? You can talk to strangers in other countries in real time... Wow..
I remember being at work when we turned off Xbox 1 support for LIVE. We had one last Xbox console and we watched it start to be able to not connect. The end of an era.
True is the lesson that scale doesn’t represent success. I wonder how many of the current tech companies will learn the same lesson, or have we reached a period of maturity where products that don’t contribute to the bottom line aren’t allowed to linger like this did?
Did MSN Messenger make money for Microsoft before they bought Skype?
Brand awareness for "MSN" just from MSN Messenger alone must have been massive. I'd be surprised today if half of your average kids using WhatsApp have even heard of Bing or Office 365. Hell, if it wasn't for Xbox Live the same could probably be said for that
[+] [-] spike021|5 years ago|reply
It was the way you knew friends were available to chat. It was much closer to in-person conversation than most media we use nowadays.
It's not uncommon for someone to {iMessage, SMS, FB Message, IG Message, etc.} me while I'm otherwise busy. Then, I need to find a second to let them know of this (unless I either totally drop the ball or consciously decide to not reply). I also need to let them know I'll be free to chat after work, at lunch time, etc.
With AIM, you just logged in and set whether you were available, idle, away, or invisible. Friends knew whether they would disturb you or not.
Not only that but it was pretty much the singular form of instant communication that almost everybody used. Now I have people I reply to on multiple platforms such that we'll even branch off in separate conversations per platform, I only talk to on X, Y, or Z platform, etc.
I'm not one to <Old man yells at cloud> typically but this is one aspect of social media that I think we've lost over the past decade and it really sucks.
[+] [-] elcomet|5 years ago|reply
This seems strange to me. I view IM as asynchronous. If someone messages me while I'm busy, I'll just reply later. And I don't expect people to answer immediatly. No need to sync to chat together (of course if we're both available we can chat in sync).
[+] [-] hahahahe|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] agumonkey|5 years ago|reply
Also, I forgot how to register on aim but i'm pretty sure it wasn't tied to name or phone number :) such a wild life
[+] [-] 101008|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xerxesaa|5 years ago|reply
Up until the early 2000's, most people were still getting online using a dial-up connection on a PC. That meant you had to make a conscious decision to get online and block off your phone line for other purposes. At least for me, the very fact that I was online meant that I wasn't busy and was open to chatting with my friends.
[+] [-] musicale|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] timbo1642|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] CGamesPlay|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] saberdancer|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] volkl48|5 years ago|reply
It's basically an AIM nostalgia trip, particularly if you were in high school/college during the mid 2000s as well.
[+] [-] johnchristopher|5 years ago|reply
Connecting people is a great achievement of Internet. And it has been done many times.
[+] [-] voldacar|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] juststeve|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tinco|5 years ago|reply
It's still insane to me these corporations shut down perfectly viable platforms that were still used by millions. The short sightedness and pettiness of these directors is something of legend, I hope there's a chapter about this in new management textbooks, but who knows.
Anyone got a good explanation why it made sense to shut down these services?
[+] [-] ThePhysicist|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brmgb|5 years ago|reply
> It's still insane to me these corporations shut down perfectly viable platforms that were still used by millions. The short sightedness and pettiness of these directors is something of legend, I hope there's a chapter about this in new management textbooks, but who knows.
It's not short sightedness. It was perfectly reasonnable to close these plateforms (in so much as they were closed - Microsoft folded MSN into the Lync and Skype brands and rather successfully sold it to pro users). They were never going to make money with them as they were. You are just missing that modern instant messassing plateforms have little in common with AIM and MSN.
If you look at what is valuable today, you have on one side WeChat and Whatsapp who took over the mobile space and are extremely valuable in emerging countries where text messaging became the main point of entry for conducting business and mobile payments. On the other side, you have Slack which use is centered around chat rooms and collaboration rather than direct messaging and whose popularity grew mainly on the shifting habits of a generation used to communicate via text, habits taken on smartphones. Then again, Microsoft was quick to reuse the infrastructure they already had to launch Teams which is very successful.
So, unless you could foresee the emergence of a mobile first world, it completely made sense to pivot these services towards paying customers.
[+] [-] agumonkey|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] culopatin|5 years ago|reply
All we needed was msn on Android and iPhone with cloud backup of chats, that’s if.
[+] [-] Spooky23|5 years ago|reply
Today, iMessage is probably the best single messaging platform, which is pitiful because it has key design and UX flaws.
I think in the case of AIM, it existed by virtue of and thrived under corporate neglect. The others withered as the complimentary services withered (Yahoo) or the corporate strategies shifted in inscrutable ways (Microsoft, Google). It was a weird scenario where MS and Goog behaved similarly... Microsoft with their mysterious purchase and subsequent neglect of Skype and Google with their drunken monkey product management process.
[+] [-] Jenk|5 years ago|reply
I think Facebook was hoovering up a shitton of the messenger traffic very quickly, too, and the traffic on AIM/MSN/etc was dominated by crappy bots sending phishing links.
All in all it wasn't a happy place and I doubt many actually missed them. This is the first link I've personally seen about the nostalgia of IM anyway.
[+] [-] polynomial|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sandworm101|5 years ago|reply
I miss how anyone with a packet sniffer could pull entire AIM messages out of the air. Just filter by port number and you could read them like a live chat window. I demonstrated this to a class while at law school. Scared the heck out of everyone who had been using it to pass answers to people when they were called on. (Failure to give a reasonable answer would impact your grade very quickly.)
[+] [-] sombremesa|5 years ago|reply
It's not always easy to understand the long term benefits of holding on to 'risky' positions, and conventional 'wisdom' often steers you away from it.
[+] [-] ocdtrekkie|5 years ago|reply
Once people move on, you might as well shut it down.
[+] [-] GuB-42|5 years ago|reply
Often you see things people think are worth billions. And when they try to capitalize on it, in the end it becomes less than worthless. Just look at how many startups Google bought just to kill the product shortly after, especially when it comes to social networking things. Maybe these managers took the right decision by saying "we are not good at that, we didn't find a way to sell it, let's kill it and invest our resources where we are good at instead of letting it become a burden". In the real world, you actually have to figure out the "???" before "profit".
[+] [-] meerita|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] everdrive|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] u801e|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tppiotrowski|5 years ago|reply
%s is my best friend! -> angelc408 is my best friend!
This also worked on links you added to your profile so you could make custom links that would send the user's name to your server to make a simple guest book.
<a href="http://buddytracker.us/?user=%s">Sign my guestbook</a>
I was a sophomore in college when I made a simple guest book service that blew up to over 3 million users in a year. I contemplated dropping out of college my junior year and making it into something more than 20 lines of PHP with a MySQL database. In the end I stayed in school and AIM removed profiles from the desktop client a year later. Dodged a bullet there...
[+] [-] toast0|5 years ago|reply
I'm sure there's all sort of business lessons we could learn here. Among them that an early lead doesn't always lead to lasting success. AIM federated with Apple iChat, Facebook Messenger, and Google Talk, as well as ICQ after they purchased it over the years, but that didn't turn into anything lasting either.
It's probably my bias from working at WhatsApp; but I don't think they did a great job working with mobile, and that combined with lack of support from management killed them when smartphones took over the mobile market. They did have some support for AIM on feature phones, but I think it was all based on SMS, which was costly, and I don't know if they had made a compelling Android app (wikipedia says they did have an Android app; but who knows if it was good); I never ran iOS, so I don't know if their iPhone app was any good, but I never heard from friends with iPhones that they were using it, so I'm guessing not so great.
[+] [-] lotsofpulp|5 years ago|reply
1) got rid of usernames/passwords. This was a surprisingly high barrier for non tech literate people to pass, and WhatsApp made it dead simple for them to download from app store, install, and start chatting with their contacts.
2) SMS verification eliminated spam
And the timing was perfect. Data plans and smartphones were just coming into the fore, and WhatsApp popped in as an alternative to the extremely inferior MMS option, and gave people a free way to communicate across borders.
I also remember having trouble sharing contacts prior to WhatsApp, and after WhatsApp, it didn't matter what mobileOS the other person was using, I could just send a contact, and they would be able to add it to theirs. Same with location. And the picture/video sharing was way nicer early on also, albeit heavily compressed, it just worked.
[+] [-] smaryjerry|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mjevans|5 years ago|reply
Protocols should also evolve, or have organized successors over time. If you do provide backward compatibility, please do the best reasonable effort at making backward features work.
[+] [-] rglover|5 years ago|reply
It was an enlightening moment about the fragility of human-fronted systems. $1,200 later and a disconnected phone line...let's just say they weren't thrilled.
I also got my parent's AOL account suspended in 1995 when I decided to repeat this (https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=115&v=Erl-Uk8-Xr4&feature=yo...) in the AOL kids chat.
I really, really miss the early internet.
[+] [-] mrweasel|5 years ago|reply
It’s always a little sad to think of something like “the last message sent”, but there’s also someone, somewhere, with the last commit to the AIM server code. Writing the final AIM server bugfix cannot have been cheerful work, I mean want was the point, the developer most likely knew that the service would shutdown.
[+] [-] at_a_remove|5 years ago|reply
First they killed the user-made rooms, due to some senseless pedo-panic, then some special interest rooms, and finally the service itself, even as some put-upon employee named "Robin" had to write various upbeat missives about Yahoo improving the service on the Yahoo Messenger Chat blog.
You see, they had done one thing really right in the beginning with their chat rooms -- they made a series of location-based rooms, first by continent, then country, then (for the US) state and even occasionally city. So many people either want to talk about what is going on where they live or just talk to locals that this was a great success. And yet ... destroyed. It was indicative of what I had often heard about the company, that there were some brilliant engineers with some great insights, and also that there were just metric tons of business people businessing very hard and capable of driving absolutely anything into the ground because of their inability to leave well enough alone.
It is a little amazing to me that all of these corporations just decided to shutter messaging and chat rooms in lockstep. And I suppose one did it, so they all had to or fall behind something or another.
[+] [-] etherwaste|5 years ago|reply
http://iwarg.ddns.net/phoenix/index.php
[+] [-] marban|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] allan_s|5 years ago|reply
> This is Our Last Cry Before Our Eternal Silence
https://infostory.com/2012/01/31/this-is-our-last-cry-before...
[+] [-] FauxDemure|5 years ago|reply
I was absent from AIM for several years, but then my first job out of school (2009) used it as the official chat service. Eventually the corporate overlords brought in a series of other sanctioned chat tools, but most of us kept AIM going to have a backchannel we knew wasn't monitored.
[+] [-] disillusioned|5 years ago|reply
I coupled that with a custom plugin on Trillian (Astra?) to post to an API (API is generous, it was literally just a PHP script that knew to listen for a certain URL variable) which would post to the database, and update the page live. I even gave my friend a different prefix, and then we set up a dueling live-blog screen as we went on the same trip together: me on the left column, him on the right, timestamped, both of us contributing to this blog without easily being able to see the other's posts, since the phone itself didn't have any web capabilities.
I dug into the old database, which I still have banging around somewhere here, and sure enough, the first entry was January of 2005.
[+] [-] pts_|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] werber|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gnrlst|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] after_care|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dmingod666|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cbanek|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dan_m2k|5 years ago|reply
True is the lesson that scale doesn’t represent success. I wonder how many of the current tech companies will learn the same lesson, or have we reached a period of maturity where products that don’t contribute to the bottom line aren’t allowed to linger like this did?
[+] [-] nly|5 years ago|reply
Brand awareness for "MSN" just from MSN Messenger alone must have been massive. I'd be surprised today if half of your average kids using WhatsApp have even heard of Bing or Office 365. Hell, if it wasn't for Xbox Live the same could probably be said for that