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

The Last Message Sent on AIM

justanman.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 215 posts

Re: The Last Message Sent on AIM

#101

Post by polynomial »

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…

AIM shutdown on Dec 15, 2017. This doesn't seem all that short sighted to me. More like legally blind.

Re: The Last Message Sent on AIM

#102

Post by Izkata »

brmgb wrote: post #82
grumple wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would not have been very difficult to pivot AIM into making money. First you add social media style profiles, then ads, then integrations, then feeds... none of this would have relied on mobile. Facebook didn't rely on mobile for many years after formation - the iPhone came out a couple of years after facebook did, and it took a few more years before smartphones saturated the market. Of course, it's easy to say th…

Facebook didn't have chat functionnalities until four years after it's started. AOL might have been able to enter the social network market at the time but the link with instant messaging was far from obvious then.

Facebook chat seems to have been created in 2008, but I'm pretty sure AIM had chatrooms when I was in highschool, which would put it at pre-2006. Not exactly the same thing, but the foundation was already there - AIM already had user-made profiles as well.

Re: The Last Message Sent on AIM

#103

Post by ocdtrekkie »

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…

On the contrary, social media and messaging platforms live on trend popularity alone. Features or bulk accounts ever created are mostly meaningless. MySpace stopped mattering once everyone moved to Facebook. These aren't driven by technology, they're driven solely by popularity.

Once people move on, you might as well shut it down.

Re: The Last Message Sent on AIM

#104

Post by thesuitonym »

cmonagle wrote: post #85
grumple wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would not have been very difficult to pivot AIM into making money. First you add social media style profiles, then ads, then integrations, then feeds... none of this would have relied on mobile. Facebook didn't rely on mobile for many years after formation - the iPhone came out a couple of years after facebook did, and it took a few more years before smartphones saturated the market. Of course, it's easy to say th…

It's worth noting that AIM did make several attempts to integrate social media features, admittedly a bit late (the same year Facebook launched Chat). https://mashable.com/2008/05/19/aim-bebo-integration/

I believe AIM tried this more than once, and every time it was laughed out of the room. Nobody wanted it.

Re: The Last Message Sent on AIM

#105

Post by after_care »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #103
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…

On the contrary, social media and messaging platforms live on trend popularity alone. Features or bulk accounts ever created are mostly meaningless. MySpace stopped mattering once everyone moved to Facebook. These aren't driven by technology, they're driven solely by popularity. Once people move on, you might as well shut it down.

Microsoft rebranded MSN to Lync, Skype and finally to Teams.

AIM could have rebranded with the right product team behind it.

Re: The Last Message Sent on AIM

#106

Post by polynomial »

numair wrote: post #97
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…

Imagine there was an AOL executive in charge of AIM, and that Mark Zuckerberg offered the guy hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of Facebook stock to hobble efforts to keep the platform relevant. Sounds like a totally crazy conspiracy theory, right? After all, it would have been totally obviously suspicious if someone made hundreds of millions of dollars by simply jumping from one middle-management role to anothe…

Even if those rumors are true (and no one has ever seen fit to publish them, so there's that) it wasn't just a single executive that killed AIM, it was multiple points of failure, including keeping it ad-free, which meant it pretty much existed outside AOL's revenue ecosystem, out on its own. And when Appelman & team released their open source version, that was akin to declaring a mutiny at anti-OSS AOL.

Products need internal champions, without which, it doesn't take a conspiracy to kill them, they will just atrophy on their own.

Re: The Last Message Sent on AIM

#107

Post by after_care »

gnrlst wrote: post #96

I remember the first time I saw my friend use AIM. It was similar to the first time I saw another friend play GTA III. Both times, we were all huddled together, trying to make sense of this mind-boggingly new experience. I miss that sense of wonder.

Childhood is fantastic.

Re: The Last Message Sent on AIM

#108

Post by u801e »

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…

And these messaging platforms did not require an exorbitant amount of computing resources to run. They were responsive to keyboard input (no signficant lag), and, as I recall, allowed one to keep a local log of messages sent and received.

Re: The Last Message Sent on AIM

#109

Post by stevewodil »

hahahahe wrote: post #89
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…

When you saw someone on AIM, at least during dialup days, it meant you will get his/her attention. They were logged into engage in real-time conversation. You just don’t have that level of communication anymore. Most online conversations are asynchronous.

There's always https://honk.me/ if you're feeling youthful

Re: The Last Message Sent on AIM

#110

Post by jugg1es »

dmingod666 wrote: post #54

I have fond memories of the ICQ sound.. hell even mIRC was mind-blowing the first time I saw it... Really? You can talk to strangers in other countries in real time... Wow..

That is exactly what got me into computers in the first place - real time conversations with people across the world on AOL. Blew my little mind.
Post reply on HN