Aim was really the original social network. Your status page was your profile. I mean all your friends were on it. The fact that Aol fell tells you tech unless you are always innovating its hard to defend your moat.
AIM will shut down after 20 years
161–170 of 345 posts
Re: AIM will shut down after 20 years
#162I worked at AOL years ago when the company announced internally that the product would not be extended, but that the service would remain online.
I was headed to the main campus (Dulles) when the announcement was made. Internally, they dismissed the entire AIM product engineers and management, and simply retained operational people to keep the lights on.
Walking up to the floor where the AIM crew was working was creepy. Product plans on whiteboards and windows, with future dates written down everywhere. All the cubes on the floor were vacant, save for maybe a small few on the opposite side of the office (admin-type folks.) It was just straight-up silent, and incredibly deflating. That team always seemed to have a fairly good vibe, at least in observation.
I think they really missed an opportunity with AIM.
Re: AIM will shut down after 20 years
#163Earlier 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…
When I was in Germany in '99, the calling party paid for phone calls. Incoming was free. I don't know what an SMS cost but it was reliable across carriers and borders.
When I moved back to the US in '01, SMS was free. If your phone and carrier supported it. If you sent an SMS to someone on a different carrier, in another country, or on a phone from last year, they probably wouldn't get it. When all these issues were solved and SMS usage started to explode, then the carriers decided to go for the money-grab... which was dumb and probably the direct impetus for iMessage.
Re: AIM will shut down after 20 years
#164Re: AIM will shut down after 20 years
#165Dang - As most people I spent a lot of time on AIM. The first person (bot I suppose) I always added was SmarterChild[1]
Re: AIM will shut down after 20 years
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I have my ICQ id The real important question is how many digits.
If I recall correctly, six digit icq id's were selling for thousands of dollars.
Really? I have a 6-digit one (below 250K actually). I just fired it up this morning for the first time in years after reading about AIM.
Re: AIM will shut down after 20 years
#167Pity. 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.
FB Messenger supports sending files
Re: AIM will shut down after 20 years
#168Earlier 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.
This was a group of about 30 people in their 20's and 30's, with maybe five or so in their 40's.
Average, every-day retail workers mostly. In a mid-sized city.
I know the date is right because I only lived there one year.
Re: AIM will shut down after 20 years
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
But "You've Got Mail" wasn't about e-mail. It was about AOL.
Remember it took years for people to realize that there was more out there than just AOL.
Re: AIM will shut down after 20 years
#170It'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…
Major difference between email and IM is that email address is public - anyone can send you anything. And IM address is more or less private and restricted - you need to approve other party in order to send you messages. And this, not the latency, makes the difference. People are using Skype for example in "email mode": sending messages even when they know that contact is offline - it will be read later anyway. Yet t…
But none of those things are logically linked or dominant. Why can't I just have zero latency email that defaults to a prominent instant-message-like UI for all emails without a subject line?
If desired, you could require approval from the recipient to reach this IM-level visibility if sent by a stranger, with unapproved messages appearing in the normal email box (sorta like FB does with non-friends). If someone is sending you too many, you can de-approve them, and you'll just respond slowly like email. The de-approved sender doesn't need to be told they have been de-approved, and the fact that we don't always reply instantly to IMs provides plausible deniability.