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The Last Message Sent on AIM

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Re: The Last Message Sent on AIM

#41

Post by xwolfi »

agumonkey wrote: post #34
tinco wrote: post #20

It was such a senseless destruction. People miss AIM, people miss MSN Messenger and just a couple years later it turned out instant messaging platforms were worth billions. It's still insane to me these corporations shut down perfectly viable platforms that were still used by millions. The short sightedness and pettiness of these directors is something of legend, I hope there's a chapter about this in new management…

Another point of surprise is that these things grew somehow organically. Nobody went onto AIM or MSN because it's gonna revolutionize anything, it was just a simple need, simple programs.. no biggie. They're gone and now it's replaced by things that try to be grandiose and keep changing every year (or die ala Google) because the big new model is not right and they have a new big idea to chase.

Well there is a big innovation in the business model, something MS missed, that the internet could be cheap on good phones and that chat apps could replace expensive SMSes. In fact, in France where SMS were free very early,whatsapp failed to pierce for much longer than elsewhere to a point the EU blamed our telecom companies from blocking innovation by being too cheap.

MSN was a stupid senseless loss for a long while nonetheless, even in France, as Facebook took time to regrow the networks already made via MSN.

Re: The Last Message Sent on AIM

#43

Post by johnchristopher »

CGamesPlay wrote: post #8

I was browsing through a backup of an old computer that ran Pidgin and had chat logging on. One of the last AIM messages I ever received went like this: Conversation at Mon Jan 15 01:16:36 2007 (01:16:36) Megan: omg it's ryan. (01:17:41) Megan: and then in time... (01:17:53) Megan: the friends faded away (01:18:14) Megan: and the instanst IMs that'd open were deleted (01:18:28) Megan: and responses never came (01:18:…

This puts some perspective on the Signal/Matrix/whatever with their persistent history and the number of comments around here about how it's unacceptable to lose messages and history while in fact we are sometimes guilty of missing on them from our own negligence.

Connecting people is a great achievement of Internet. And it has been done many times.

Re: The Last Message Sent on AIM

#44

Post by robjan »

berkes wrote: post #25
gkoberger wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like someone stopping maintenance of a private server is way more likely than the most popular chat client at the time shutting down eventually. In your mind, who in 2017 was still using AIM, blissfully unaware of the shutdown, only to be met with an error page and the loss of their friends forever? I'm sure most people are like me... over a decade ago, my AIM friends mostly migrated to text messages (and a fe…

> like someone stopping maintenance of a private server is way more likely But the chance that thousands of someones all stop maintainance of their private servers (at the same time) is way more unlikely.

It's still inconvenient. The inconvenience ranges from slightly annoying to "I have lost all my messages and now have to find all of my friends/family/colleagues contact details again somehow".

Re: The Last Message Sent on AIM

#45

Post by meerita »

tinco wrote: post #20

It was such a senseless destruction. People miss AIM, people miss MSN Messenger and just a couple years later it turned out instant messaging platforms were worth billions. It's still insane to me these corporations shut down perfectly viable platforms that were still used by millions. The short sightedness and pettiness of these directors is something of legend, I hope there's a chapter about this in new management…

Truth is, there were chances to renew, rebuild, ressurrect old messaging ecosystems, like ICQ but they sucked so bad it's really hard to take chance.

Re: The Last Message Sent on AIM

#46

Post by phire »

batiudrami wrote: post #21
elcomet wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Then, I need to find a second to let them know of this (unless I either totally drop the ball or consciously decide to not reply). This seems strange to me. I view IM as asynchronous. If someone messages me while I'm busy, I'll just reply later. And I don't expect people to answer immediatly. No need to sync to chat together (of course if we're both available we can chat in sync).

IM didn't used to be like that because we didn't have clients on our phones. An "online" status meant that someone was sitting at their computer and happy to chat (or they'd have the client closed).

Or you would set your status to "appear offline"

From memory AIM/MSN didn't even have offline messaging. If someone was offline, you either waited for them to be online, or you would contact them via email/txt/landline.

Re: The Last Message Sent on AIM

#47

Post by Jenk »

tinco wrote: post #20

It was such a senseless destruction. People miss AIM, people miss MSN Messenger and just a couple years later it turned out instant messaging platforms were worth billions. It's still insane to me these corporations shut down perfectly viable platforms that were still used by millions. The short sightedness and pettiness of these directors is something of legend, I hope there's a chapter about this in new management…

They failed to monetise them. Most chat clients were placing ads to try and generate revenue but I doubt they ever made money from it. From what I remember of the blogs at the time, such as Martin Fowler's stuff on Yahoo! Messenger, the infrastructure was far from cheap, and the protocols were really insecure, too.

I think Facebook was hoovering up a shitton of the messenger traffic very quickly, too, and the traffic on AIM/MSN/etc was dominated by crappy bots sending phishing links.

All in all it wasn't a happy place and I doubt many actually missed them. This is the first link I've personally seen about the nostalgia of IM anyway.

Re: The Last Message Sent on AIM

#48

Post by a-dub »

ThePhysicist wrote: post #24
tinco wrote: post #20

It was such a senseless destruction. People miss AIM, people miss MSN Messenger and just a couple years later it turned out instant messaging platforms were worth billions. It's still insane to me these corporations shut down perfectly viable platforms that were still used by millions. The short sightedness and pettiness of these directors is something of legend, I hope there's a chapter about this in new management…

I think it's as you said, corporations didn't recognize the economic value of chat platforms back then. I think they were mostly focused on "Web 2.0" stuff so they probably tried putting all of their resources into that. You often see companies axe perfectly good business units just because they have a slightly lower margin or contribution to overall revenue, as they think putting the people from those units into the…

I think AIM is a little different... It was born out of the original AOL dial-up walled garden service where they built a bridge to the Internet where people could download standalone clients and communicate with themselves and old school AOL subscribers. I don't know the internals, but I do know that much of the original AOL backend existed at least through the early 2000s which provided the instant messenger and authentication services [0]. It wouldn't surprise me if they were shutting down all of that infrastructure which I'm sure had a non-trivial cost to operate.

I think the thing to keep in mind is that running centralized backend infrastructure (ie; store and forward, user state, directory) for an instant messaging service is not cheap and if the platform is open and allows for user supplied clients, there's almost zero direct monetization opportunity without stepping into unethical privacy breach territory. That means they're relegated to just pushing a brand, and it seems like a very expensive way to do that. Moreover, AOL transitioned in its later years into a digital journalism company, and as far as I know AOL itself as a consumer brand disappeared.

[0] Worked on a whitebox set top box browser platform (ala Android) in the early 00s specifically with AOL as a client. Amusingly, the big feature they were trying to push was onscreen chatrooms for people who were watching the same thing live, which I guess if you think about it may have led to ways to monetize chat.

Re: The Last Message Sent on AIM

#49

Post by 101008 »

spike021 wrote: post #16

I really miss AIM. It was the way you knew friends were available to chat. It was much closer to in-person conversation than most media we use nowadays. It's not uncommon for someone to {iMessage, SMS, FB Message, IG Message, etc.} me while I'm otherwise busy. Then, I need to find a second to let them know of this (unless I either totally drop the ball or consciously decide to not reply). I also need to let them know…

I really miss them too. I loved the fact that you had to organize with your friends to connect at the same time to to chat via MSN. I hate the fact that now I am reachable to wherever I am on my phone through Whatsapp. Of course, it has a lot of advantages, but the my nostalgic sides misses the point that I was able to receive messages only if I was on the computer (or if I left it turn it on with the monitor off, without my parents knowing it)

Re: The Last Message Sent on AIM

#50

Post by xenihn »

Jenk wrote: post #47
tinco wrote: post #20

It was such a senseless destruction. People miss AIM, people miss MSN Messenger and just a couple years later it turned out instant messaging platforms were worth billions. It's still insane to me these corporations shut down perfectly viable platforms that were still used by millions. The short sightedness and pettiness of these directors is something of legend, I hope there's a chapter about this in new management…

They failed to monetise them. Most chat clients were placing ads to try and generate revenue but I doubt they ever made money from it. From what I remember of the blogs at the time, such as Martin Fowler's stuff on Yahoo! Messenger, the infrastructure was far from cheap, and the protocols were really insecure, too. I think Facebook was hoovering up a shitton of the messenger traffic very quickly, too, and the traffic…

AIM was profitable until the day that it was shut down.
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