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

111–120 of 215 posts

Re: The Last Message Sent on AIM

#111

Post by moistbar »

phire wrote: post #46
batiudrami wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I remember AIM having the ability to forward messages to SMS when you were offline, and Pidgin had the ability to "pounce" someone, which would queue up a message to send them next time they logged on.

Re: The Last Message Sent on AIM

#112

Post by ulfw »

Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #95
easton wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are your UX flaws with iMessage? The reason why I like it is because it’s got good UX (except when a message doesn’t send for no reason), but if there’s something I’m missing out on in other messenger apps...

I'd say not being able to message ~85% of smartphone users is a pretty big UX flaw.

That's not bad UX. That's a product limitation (a conscious one I might say).

Re: The Last Message Sent on AIM

#113

Post by lordlimecat »

easton wrote: post #87
Spooky23 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. AOL in particular pioneered stuff like E2E encryption, etc. imo, the early 2000s platforms like AIM, Yahoo, MSN were the pinnacle of the technology, and successors are all worse in material ways. Today, iMessage is probably the best single messaging platform, which is pitiful because it has key design and UX flaws. I think in the case of AIM, it existed by virtue of and thrived under corporate neglect. The ot…

What are your UX flaws with iMessage? The reason why I like it is because it’s got good UX (except when a message doesn’t send for no reason), but if there’s something I’m missing out on in other messenger apps...

Isn't there a significant UX trap in moving an imessage enabled SIM over to an android phone?

Re: The Last Message Sent on AIM

#114

Post by lordlimecat »

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…

Spam was a thing but the clients were lean and fast and ubiquitous across platforms.

Anyone who remembers the various clients can remember that even bloated MSN messenger was far, far faster than Facebook messenger or Teams.

Re: The Last Message Sent on AIM

#115

Post by unethical_ban »

xwolfi wrote: post #41
agumonkey wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>the EU blamed our telecom companies from blocking innovation by being too cheap.

A source would be nice, but I completely believe it - and it's infuriating. "The government is so effective, capitalists have nothing to improve in order to line their pockets!"

It's what the GOP wants to do to municipal broadband service in the US.

Re: The Last Message Sent on AIM

#116

Post by jaywalk »

polynomial wrote: post #106
numair wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 nee…

It's obviously been a long time so my memory could be faulty, but I distinctly remember ads in AIM and installing cracked versions of the client that removed the ads.

Re: The Last Message Sent on AIM

#117

Post by Macha »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #65
xenihn wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

How?

A lot of ads and not very much ongoing development.

I'm not sure "until the day it was shut down" is totally correct though. AOL were moving from their own data centers to AWS at that stage and AIM was one of the last apps left in, so I find it hard to believe that AIM would still have shown green near the end if the data center costs were spread across the services using them (we didn't have a chargeback model in those days).

I think the decision (I worked at AOL at the time, but far from AIM) to shut it down came down to:

1. There was no dedicated dev team

2. Consequently the tech was old and not up to then modern security practices

3. Even aside from security, it used a lot of in-house tech that other more actively maintained products like mail had migrated from and newer products never used.

4. Lots of the software it used like OS versions were going EOL

5. It needed an AWS migration as the data center was shutting down.

6. It didn't fit with the strategic direction (which was to use revenue from legacy but shrinking businesses like dialup/search/mail to pivot to owned content as a USP/headline piece for the adtech business)

So someone had to make a cost/benefit analysis of shutting it down versus investing enough to bring it up to speed and that's before you even consider the user facing improvements that would have been needed to reclaim market share from Facebook and Skype.

Also number 1 for the user facing improvements would have been "less ads, less intrusive ads" which also would have hurt revenue.

Re: The Last Message Sent on AIM

#118

Post by Macha »

everdrive wrote: post #62
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…

If AOL or MSN had figured out how to monetize these platforms, they would have ruined them anyhow. They would have been lost in a different way.

At least here the move to MSN to Facebook was largely driven by the move to monetise it more. More ads, more features which existed to give them places to show ads (I seem to remember it opening a today screen with news feeds at one point, think they did a twitter style thing with status updates too? Or was that imo?). The pull factor was everyone was on Facebook but the monetisation changes were a big push factor too

Re: The Last Message Sent on AIM

#119

Post by Macha »

jaywalk wrote: post #116
polynomial wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 nee…

It's obviously been a long time so my memory could be faulty, but I distinctly remember ads in AIM and installing cracked versions of the client that removed the ads.

Yeah, in the last few years there was a big permanent ad at the footer of the contact list, plenty of ads in the web client and I think at one point there were sidebar ads in chat (that last one could have been msn)

Re: The Last Message Sent on AIM

#120

Post by techrat »

bombcar wrote: post #57
lwhi wrote: post #52

This makes me think of ICQ .. whatever happened to that?

Seems it got sold into Russia where it’s still being used. https://icq.com/mobile/en#ios

With caveats. While my UID and password still work, I am unable to change my (horrendously insecure, attackable) password without first providing a phone number.

Given that ICQ's ownership and cooperation with governments both raise questions, I don't think I'm going to be offering up any further information just to preserve a piece of my internet history.

Post reply on HN