I guess this explains why AIM was removed from Messages app in Mac OS High Sierra.
AIM will shut down after 20 years
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Re: AIM will shut down after 20 years
#42This is also the final death knell of ICQ.
Aol sold icq to the Russians years ago.
"the Russians" makes it sound like it was sold to the Russian government or some other amorphous organization. Mail.Ru bought it in 2010:
Re: AIM will shut down after 20 years
#43Re: AIM will shut down after 20 years
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> Not SMS? Funny how quickly the iPhone has erased the memory of earlier mobile technology.
Not sure that's true. I used AIM before I had a cell phone (and therefore SMS). While the technology for SMS has been around since the early 90's it really didn't get widespread adoption in the US until the early to mid 00's.
For some SMS may pre-date AIM, but I don't believe that is true for the majority.
Re: AIM will shut down after 20 years
#45One of my first projects at my first job out of college was working on AIMPages, AOL's myspace competitor. This was in 2006 but many many people were still on AIM. AOL never promoted the AIMPages, but I think they might have had a chance with it, especially if they had released it in 2005.
Re: AIM will shut down after 20 years
#46I remember having a massive stack of CDROMs in the 90s, it was mostly comprised of AOL cds
Re: AIM will shut down after 20 years
#47Pity. 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.
IRC allows files to be sent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_Client-to-Client - it's not a great protocol however, particularly when used with firewalls.
Re: AIM will shut down after 20 years
#48Re: AIM will shut down after 20 years
#49What 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.
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
Re: AIM will shut down after 20 years
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
IRC allows files to be sent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_Client-to-Client - it's not a great protocol however, particularly when used with firewalls.
IRC file transfer is always a roll of the dice if you're going through NAT.