AIM will shut down after 20 years

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Oct 06, 2017, 4:17 PM UTC

Macha wrote: post #97

brogrammernot wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Post by dpark » Fri, Oct 06, 2017, 4:17 PM UTC

mistersquid wrote: post #66

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 can…

Post by dpark » Fri, Oct 06, 2017, 4:20 PM UTC

reaperducer wrote: post #90

old_relic_ wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It's a cultural thing. When I first started importing phones from overseas to the U.S., I showed a bunch of people at a party how cool it was that I could get e-mail and text messages on my phone. This was 1999. The majority of the people didn't know what e-mail was, though they did have AOL. Most knew about text messaging, but laughed at the idea of T9-ing a message to someone for 35¢, when you could just call them…

Post by dpark » Fri, Oct 06, 2017, 4:25 PM UTC

jessriedel wrote: post #92

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 bett…

Post by tritium » Fri, Oct 06, 2017, 4:28 PM UTC