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AIM will shut down after 20 years

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Re: AIM will shut down after 20 years

#111

Post by tritium »

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…

Is there a word for what one might refer to as "institutional/organizational burnout"?

I feel like it's related to the age of leadership and trends in the current cult of personality du jour, and its interaction with promotion, branding and marketing. Shit happens, and the inertia of social groups is tough to steer over time, as sensibilities and fashions change, people get old, and graduating classes of the current generation ascend to power.

Re: AIM will shut down after 20 years

#112

Post by lightedman »

sarcasmic wrote: post #73
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,…

Out of the western networks, Kik, Telegram, and Viber still do usernames. Kik, notably, still has a fairly laissez-faire culture and a userbase that skews young, which makes it the most comparable modern network to the feel of something like AIM in its heyday; with the difference that so many people having overlapping identities, discourse is now fragmented between various platforms for reasons more than just network…

Telegram requires a phone number even for the desktop app - that's just mind-boggling and a turnoff for me trying to move to a new service.

Re: AIM will shut down after 20 years

#113

Post by drngdds »

I miss dedicated IM services like AIM. They had a certain dynamic that Facebook Messenger (or similar) and SMS lack.

On AIM, logging in was an active choice and it signaled that you were up for a conversation. With Facebook Messenger, everyone who has the app is always "online." This means that:

a) I get messages from people I don't want to have a conversation with at the moment and it seems rude if I ignore them, because there are read receipts.

b) If I send a message, I don't know if they're going to engage in a real-time conversation or if we're going to play phone tag. There's no way of signaling which I'm looking for.

Re: AIM will shut down after 20 years

#114

Post by gargarplex »

AIM was where I first found my passion for development. The first programming language I ever really learned, perl, was because I wanted to be better at making AIM bots.

Nostalgia:

- The TOC protocol and the OSCAR protocol. Net::AIM and Net::OSCAR. Aryeh Goldsmith, you beautiful soul.

- The first $300 I ever made online was in ~2002, when I wrote a chatroom flirt bot for an adult content affiliate. I was 14 or 15 years old.

- The first project I built that ever got traction was a bot that enabled offline messaging. I didn't even write it, it was open source, but I branded it well and it got traction and spread virally across the USA.

- Being part of the AIM scene...exploiting warn functionality (with parallel attacks!), profile vulns, and 3char screen names being the most legit.

Re: AIM will shut down after 20 years

#115

Post by mywittyname »

dpark wrote: post #105
reaperducer wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In 1999 people didn’t know what email was? How old were these people? Honest question. I’m extremely surprised by this claim.

You've Got Mail came out in 1998 and it was a box office hit.

People knew what email was for several years before that.

Re: AIM will shut down after 20 years

#116

Post by praneshp »

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…

> Aol and yahoo both use gmail internall

You couldn't be more wrong about Yahoo, unless something changed in the last six months.

Re: AIM will shut down after 20 years

#117

Post by menerva »

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…

so isn't this capitalism working as it should?

they literally killed their own golden goose with stupidity. why shouldn't others disrupt corrupt crap business?

Re: AIM will shut down after 20 years

#118

Post by dmitrygr »

Angostura wrote: post #99
netsharc wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not mandatory in Android. I denied the permission and it still works. Just had to add the few people I wish to write to manually

Re: AIM will shut down after 20 years

#119

Post by [deleted] »

drngdds wrote: post #113

I miss dedicated IM services like AIM. They had a certain dynamic that Facebook Messenger (or similar) and SMS lack. On AIM, logging in was an active choice and it signaled that you were up for a conversation. With Facebook Messenger, everyone who has the app is always "online." This means that: a) I get messages from people I don't want to have a conversation with at the moment and it seems rude if I ignore them, be…

[deleted]

Re: AIM will shut down after 20 years

#120

Post by tarentel »

praneshp wrote: post #116
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…

> Aol and yahoo both use gmail internall You couldn't be more wrong about Yahoo, unless something changed in the last six months.

I quit, yahoo, in the last 6 months and they were definitely using gmail prior to that.
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