Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AIM will shut down after 20 years

theverge.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 345 posts

Re: AIM will shut down after 20 years

#171

Post by mschaef »

Sad to see AIM go for sentimental reasons, but I can't say it's too surprising. The world has moved on.

Technically, one of the more interesting aspects of AIM was that it was built on Boxely... one of the earlier (~2004-2006) markup based rendering engines. Boxely was a project by Joe Hewitt (FireBug, etc.) in which the UI was defined entirely in XML with stylesheets and Javascript to make it live. These days it's pretty standard to do this in a browser, but back then it was trendsetting.

Re: AIM will shut down after 20 years

#172

Post by chipx86 »

KGIII wrote: post #86
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…

Gaim, I believe it was AOL that made them change their name to Pidgin. Pidgin lives on and AIM is fading into history.

They tried for many years to get us to change the name, but it never came down to any real legal battles of any sort. The name change occurred after I left the project, but I think it was a conscious choice on the project's end to finally change the name, give it a new identity. (Someone from Pidgin correct me if I'm wrong -- I was pretty out of the loop during that time period.)

Re: AIM will shut down after 20 years

#175

Post by sfotm »

Jaruzel wrote: post #123
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…

What you are lamenting the lack of is the 'presence' indicator, where you can set yourself Available, Away, Busy, or simply Offline. Of the current crop of IM clients, only Skype still has it (I think). Of the older IM clients; Lync had it, so did Lotus Sametime, MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, ICQ, and of course AIM. Somewhere along the line the presence feature got dropped, and now we're always 'Available' even whe…

Discord has presence indicators and is fairly widespread.

Re: AIM will shut down after 20 years

#176

Post by amedvednikov »

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…

> We have a lot of different chat services today, but we don't seem to see people developing things like Trillian/Audium/Pidgin the way those were developed back in the day. Today people are fine having multiple chat apps, all with their bloat and terribleness.

There's eul, a modern day Trillian:

https://eul.im

It's a lightning fast native desktop app (~5 MB) for Skype, Slack, Facebook, Discord etc.

Re: AIM will shut down after 20 years

#177

Post by mozumder »

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.

Kids these days with their AIM Away Messages.

In my days, we had to "finger" people their .project/.plan files in VAX/VMS & Unix systems.

Re: AIM will shut down after 20 years

#178

Post by mgkimsal »

fencepost wrote: post #147
jedberg wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no data to back this up, but my gut tells me it happens a lot more at companies where the CEO isn't a founder, or doesn't have a high degree of ownership. When the CEO controls a lot of the stock, they seem to care a lot less about quarterly results, whereas when the CEO gets most of their money from bonuses tied to stock growth, that is when you see most of these games. If that's true, it seems the lesson her…

Just giving them stock or options doesn't really change things. Stock that vested over a 20 year period might be an incentive to look further down the line, but remember "look out for yourself first" and "be loyal to yourself not the company because the company isn't loyal to you?" All of that applies to CEOs as well.

Was thinking similarly. It feels like the issue is still more 'control'. While CEOs ostensibly have a lot of control, not all do (or feel they do), and perhaps not all actually want it. If you had control enough to feel like you were pretty sure you weren't going to be ousted next quarter for a down quarter or even a down year, you'd be more inclined to make strategic decisions that might be hard to make, but necessary for growth.

Re: AIM will shut down after 20 years

#179

Post by pishpash »

gh02t wrote: post #158
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…

> With Facebook Messenger, everyone who has the app is always "online." Not exactly, FBM lets you differentiate between people who are "active", as in they are currently using FBM, vs. "last seen x hours ago." The difference from AIM is that being active vs. inactive does not necessarily correspond to whether or not you are up for an engaged conversation, and also that you don't directly control your status since it'…

It is not convoluted, just hidden. After you mention it I searched and it takes two clicks to get to. What it doesn't do is let you snoop. You are either active and see everyone who is active, or not active and don't see anyone who is active, a weird type of "fairness" that doesn't really make sense.

All these social networks are definitely trying to use symmetry to push for engagement, which is not always the goal from the user's perspective.

Re: AIM will shut down after 20 years

#180

Post by mulletbum »

mschaef wrote: post #171

Sad to see AIM go for sentimental reasons, but I can't say it's too surprising. The world has moved on. Technically, one of the more interesting aspects of AIM was that it was built on Boxely... one of the earlier (~2004-2006) markup based rendering engines. Boxely was a project by Joe Hewitt (FireBug, etc.) in which the UI was defined entirely in XML with stylesheets and Javascript to make it live. These days it's p…

I am unsure how this is true considering AIM was around when I was in highschool back in 1999-2003. If Boxely didn't come around till 2004 that would be like the AIM reboot era.
Post reply on HN