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AIM will shut down after 20 years

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Re: AIM will shut down after 20 years

#191

Post by dmpk2k »

zeveb wrote: post #93
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.

Or gone with a free alternative like Mattermost & added the necessary bells & whistles. Mattermost today is extremely competitive with Slack.

If Mattermost is competitive with Slack, that's a serious indictment against Slack.

Mattermost's clients are awful. Just awful. The phone apps are effectively unusable (incredibly buggy and suck down battery like no tomorrow), and the desktop electron app is a complete hog. It doesn't even handle its faux tabs properly (takes half a second to switch, and it resets the position to the end every time you change a tab, which is... dumb), and the scrollback handles high-volume channels very poorly (I have to click "Load more messages" at least 20x times every time I want to scroll back to the beginning of the day). Now imagine every time you switch tabs you have to click "Load more messages" a bunch of times to see earlier messages because it resets when you switched tabs.

If this is the future of messaging, then holy shit. It's almost a parody.

Re: AIM will shut down after 20 years

#192

Post by micv »

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…

I suspect the answer is money. Well-funded corporations can and do push their fancy, new messaging platforms hard enough to crowd out any emerging open standard, but they certainly have no intention of paying anything more than lip service to the idea of interoperability. They want to own all of this and turn it into cold, hard cash. Who's going to develop the next big, open standard when WhatsApp can turn into billions of dollars?

Re: AIM will shut down after 20 years

#193

Post by astrodust »

jroseattle wrote: post #162

I 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 cree…

It's a shame, really, as AIM could have easily evolved into Slack for family/friends connections all along a spectrum of casual to intimate.

It's like how Flickr couldn't make a mobile app and Instagram happened, or how Digg fumbled so badly Reddit came out of nowhere.

First mover advantage is only important in the initial cycle. Once the market matures it's a huge liability.

Re: AIM will shut down after 20 years

#194

Post by rando444 »

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…

You just assume that AIM would be better as a "social network".. but not everyone wants that, some people just want simple chat.

In fact many people think google's failure with gchat was trying to force people to use things they didn't want when all they really wanted was simple chat.

Re: AIM will shut down after 20 years

#195

Post by rando444 »

quotemstr wrote: post #167
mirkules wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

that's not p2p file transfer.

Re: AIM will shut down after 20 years

#196

Post by hackinthebochs »

rando444 wrote: post #194
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…

You just assume that AIM would be better as a "social network".. but not everyone wants that, some people just want simple chat. In fact many people think google's failure with gchat was trying to force people to use things they didn't want when all they really wanted was simple chat.

The point is that AIM was a social network before the idea was even conceptualized. The concept of a friend activity feed existed on AIM in an ad hoc manner before it was hard coded into facebook/twitter/etc: it was standard to go down your list of friends and see who was doing what based on their status message. If someone at Aol had any foresight they could have been on the ground floor of the rise of social networks.

Re: AIM will shut down after 20 years

#198

Post by Stratoscope »

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…

As dpark mentioned, code formatting doesn't work well for quotes here. I like to use this format which is about as good as we can do with the limited formatting options available here:

  > *A sentence or paragraph without line breaks.*
  
  > *Another paragraph of the quote*.
The blank line keeps the paragraphs from running together.

Since it's too late for you to edit, here's a mobile-friendly version of what your friend said:

> Somehow I really thought there would be an AIM emoji

and your reply:

> If any service should have an emoji standard, it’s AIM.

Re: AIM will shut down after 20 years

#199

Post by jhayward »

menerva wrote: post #117
snarf21 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> they literally killed their own golden goose with stupidity

I think this statement misleads readers.

Was there organizational stupidity? Always, in every organization. What kept AOL from capitalizing on messaging and social media was lock-in to the subscriber business model, which when combined with market defined quarter-to-quarter EBIDTA driven board goals did not permit leaping at what the people at the core of the (AIM) business knew were the possibilities.

About the only thing they could have reasonably got away with would have been some kind of spin-out, which was always opposed by the subscriber revenue side's logic. Guess what: the folks with the multi-billion $ revenue stream win those arguments.

So, not stupid. Bound by the market and biz model, and not managed by suicidal execs. So in the long run it took folks with tens of billions of dollars of private risk money to take that leap.

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