This is also the final death knell of ICQ.
AIM will shut down after 20 years
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Re: AIM will shut down after 20 years
#22I thought it were merged into ICQ, weren't it?
I was going to comment: this is the final death of ICQ as well.
Re: AIM will shut down after 20 years
#23Hopefully they open source the code for it. They have for so many other things: https://github.com/aol
Re: AIM will shut down after 20 years
#24AOL/AIM profiles were my first exposure to HTML. “What’s the code for that shade of neon green? How do I get that super cool Copperplate font on my profile?” RIP AIM 20/All/Our memories and our hearts
The "Subprofile" craze is what drove my exploration of PHP/MySQL back in high school. Everything about that Buddy4U site gave me that spiteful feeling of "I can do that, and better!"
Re: AIM will shut down after 20 years
#25AOL/AIM away messages were the original social media status update for my generation (at least in my social circle). So much drama went down in those short little notes.
AOL/AIM Buddy Info were the original social media profiles for my generation.
So much time wasted right-clicking on a user name and going to "Show Info"...
Re: AIM will shut down after 20 years
#26What 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.
Re: AIM will shut down after 20 years
#27Pity. 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,…
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.
You can send files P2P using WebRTC. I've never used it, but https://www.sharedrop.io/ came up in a quick search.
For something more in the vein of AIM, pretty sure Skype lets you send files too.
Re: AIM will shut down after 20 years
#285 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.
Re: AIM will shut down after 20 years
#29This is also the final death knell of ICQ.
Re: AIM will shut down after 20 years
#30AOL/AIM away messages were the original social media status update for my generation (at least in my social circle). So much drama went down in those short little notes.
It was text messaging before everyone had a computer in their pockets.
Not SMS? Funny how quickly the iPhone has erased the memory of earlier mobile technology. SMS is not only where the term text messaging comes from, but it's older than AIM, older than MSN, older than ICQ.