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AIM will shut down after 20 years

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Re: AIM will shut down after 20 years

#91

Post by jcelerier »

antjanus wrote: post #56
dasil003 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm guessing the other responders might be from other countries. SMS was THE thing when I was younger (early 2000s) way before AIM, ICQ or anything else. Mainly because not everyone had a computer, but everyone had a cell phone. And then when mobile data became all the rage, everyone I know just installed ICQ on their phone because the data transfer for ICQ was less than the cost of an SMS. I grew up in Europe and wh…

European too, and had opposite experience: had access to internet quite young (around 8-9 years old I was already starting to bother my parents so that I could play on battle.net a bit and this meant they coudldn't receive phone calls! but it was max 20h of internet per months... until AOL and their wonderful unlimited dial-up of course). However I didn't get a cell phone until 15.

When I was in sixth and seventh grade most of the communications with my classmates were through AIM. Then it was MSN, then facebook...

Re: AIM will shut down after 20 years

#92

Post by jessriedel »

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.

Re: AIM will shut down after 20 years

#93

Post by zeveb »

brogrammernot wrote: post #76
empath75 wrote: post #28

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 eventua…

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.

Or gone with a free alternative like Mattermost & added the necessary bells & whistles.

Mattermost today is extremely competitive with Slack.

Re: AIM will shut down after 20 years

#94

Post by sgift »

snarf21 wrote: post #75
empath75 wrote: post #28

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 eventua…

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 not…

> 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.

Is there a an established term for this already? If not I'd like to call it stock market disease due to the usual reason for it.

Re: AIM will shut down after 20 years

#95

Post by manveru »

ChoGGi wrote: post #59

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, A…

You can kinda use http://meetfranz.com/ for that... unfortunately it's mostly wrappers around web clients, not a real client that unifies your contacts and such.

Re: AIM will shut down after 20 years

#97

Post by Macha »

brogrammernot wrote: post #76
empath75 wrote: post #28

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 eventua…

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.

It was less a intentional choice (early on at least) and more motivated by how painful using aim group chats for software development was. Slack wasn't even centrally managed for the early days of use.

(Although AIM itself started as kind of a unwanted skunkworks project, when there was an off the shelf solution available, people weren't that driven to build their own)

Re: AIM will shut down after 20 years

#99

Post by Angostura »

netsharc wrote: post #40
hackbinary wrote: post #26

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...

... that's exact;y why I don't use Whatsapp - the mandatory total contacts slurp.

Re: AIM will shut down after 20 years

#100

Post by sjdegraeve »

AIM will always hold special place in my heart. It had an ecosystem that allowed me to build two very successful (and profitable) side projects in 2002 and 2003: a Buddy Icon generator and a database of Witty Away Messages for AIM profiles that eventually grew into a little social network. BRB.
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