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AIM will shut down after 20 years

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Re: AIM will shut down after 20 years

#61

Post by niftich »

djsumdog wrote: post #52

I still had AIM and Yahoo on Pidgin up until maybe two or three years ago. It amazes me how Facebook messenger became the dominant force with it's totally broken and garbage XMPP implementation (now gone), it's unreliable delivery and the fact that it was a total piece of garbage. It's now finally up to the standard that AIM/Yahoo/MSN were, twenty years ago. For people who yell about it being proprietary, well so was…

Facebook Chat (now called Messenger) came out in April 2008, at a very opportune time. Quote from my earlier post at [1]:

While it's tempting to accuse AIM, MSN, and Yahoo for being incompetent and not catching up to the "mobile era", they in fact did pursue this market as much as they were able. In truth, early iOS and Android were inferior platforms for a chat app. Push notifications were absent, data rates were expensive, and the average smartphone user at this time was not very likely to use those networks anyway.

Based on this info, I reason that it was truly Facebook that killed incumbent IM networks, at least in the US. Between the release of the iOS App Store and the introduction of push notifications for Android, Facebook grew by more than 300 million active users. This coincided with exodus of users from Myspace to Facebook; many of those users likely having used AIM, MSN, or Yahoo messenger in the past, now found themselves in a much larger network that also offered chat. Since Facebook largely subsumed everyone a person knew in real life, these users only had to go back to the old IM networks to chat with people they didn't know in real life, setting the stage for the weakening of connections and these networks' decline.

In my research, I've also prepared:

- A timeline of messaging networks [1]

- A timeline of Google's messaging rivalry with Facebook [2]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11114518

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13465483

Re: AIM will shut down after 20 years

#62

Post by Alex3917 »

tehwebguy wrote: post #2

AOL/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.

And that system wasted insane amounts of electricity since each user needed to leave their computer on 24/7. Say what you will about Facebook, but allowing people to leave their computer in sleep mode at night has been an enormous contribution that Zuck has made the world.

Re: AIM will shut down after 20 years

#63

Post by rigormortiz »

All things that were once great come to an end. I met my first longtime girlfriend on AOL/AIM and used AIM to communicate with just about everyone, including coworkers (OTR-enabled, of course, because we thought we were cool). Now I just feel old thinking about how long ago that was! Thanks AIM!

Re: AIM will shut down after 20 years

#64

Post by cribbles »

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.

Re: AIM will shut down after 20 years

#65

Post by ceejayoz »

dasil003 wrote: post #30
bloaf wrote: post #3

Earlier 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.

In the late 1990s when I used AIM, SMS still cost $0.25/message, and few of my friends had any cell phone, let alone one capable of texting.

Re: AIM will shut down after 20 years

#66

Post by mistersquid »

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #14

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,…

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
I replied

  > If any service should have an emoji standard, it’s AIM.
EDIT: formatting, spelling, sense, fix quote, punctuation, proper noun instead of pronoun

Re: AIM will shut down after 20 years

#67

Post by wiredfool »

Oh AIM. I back in the late 90's it was _the_ async/online communication method for the startup I was working for. The boss would do the interruption thing over aim, we'd have a morning 'standup'.

I remember hooking an Eliza bot to respond to the boss, and it took him far longer than it should have for him to figure it out. Good times.

Re: AIM will shut down after 20 years

#68

Post by WorldMaker »

lightedman wrote: post #15
thriftwy wrote: post #4

I thought it were merged into ICQ, weren't it?

No, ICQ got merged into the AIM network after AOL acquired ICQ.

AOL never merged AIM and ICQ. They may have shared some server infrastructure at times, but the networks were always kept separate. I remember as a user of ICQ prior to AOL buying them [1] there was always fear that AOL would merge the two and make it the worst, lowest common denominator of the two. For a long time it felt like ICQ had the most features of the two. (Then eventually everyone was on AIM instead. Then eventually everyone was on Google Talk instead. Then eventually everyone was texting or FB messenger or Slack or something in this modern diaspora.)

[1] I recall I had a 5-digit number at one point as a kid and switched to a 7-digit number later to appear less "weird"/elitist on ICQ.

Re: AIM will shut down after 20 years

#69

Post by code_duck »

Alex3917 wrote: post #62
tehwebguy wrote: post #2

AOL/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.

And that system wasted insane amounts of electricity since each user needed to leave their computer on 24/7. Say what you will about Facebook, but allowing people to leave their computer in sleep mode at night has been an enormous contribution that Zuck has made the world.

We have moved to low power mobile phones that are always on anyhow, so those days would be over regardless.

And, are you sure that facebook doesn't consume even more power with whole data centers fir storage, analysis and serving of mountains of trivial data, all to sell more ads?

Re: AIM will shut down after 20 years

#70

Post by code_duck »

dasil003 wrote: post #30
bloaf wrote: post #3

Earlier 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.

Text messaging = SMS for many people in the US. The term SMS has never been used much by consumers here, that I have heard. People call it texting. It has only been popular enough to be useful since about 2002-2005, which is after the glory days of ICQ for me.
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