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The Last Message Sent on AIM

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Re: The Last Message Sent on AIM

#121

Post by tinco »

soneca wrote: post #73
ThePhysicist wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 see Google also axing small winners in order to have people working on big bets . Undermining and then axing Orkut and then trying to create Google+ never made sense to me. A lot of non-brazilians non-indians (that didn’t use or even knew Orkut) defended the decision at the time, but I think history showed it was a bad bet.

For sure, I think directors simply didn't understand how online communities worked. Facebook must have been the first company to fully realise this, buying both Instagram and WhatsApp but not attempting to internalize their communities under the Facebook brand. It would've been pure capital destruction if they had done that.

I'm pretty sure they're going to have to write off the whatsapp investment. At least Instagram has a viable standalone business model. They'll lose the Whatsapp userbase at the drop of a hat, and it's already hard to monetize to begin with.

Re: The Last Message Sent on AIM

#122

Post by polynomial »

Macha wrote: post #119
jaywalk wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

JTBC, I meant revenue generating ads, not ads for other AOL products.

Re: The Last Message Sent on AIM

#123

Post by Macha »

polynomial wrote: post #122
Macha wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

JTBC, I meant revenue generating ads, not ads for other AOL products.

Maybe they had no inventory in your region, or you're remembering an earlier time? It definitely had auctioned ads in 2014.

Re: The Last Message Sent on AIM

#124

Post by Andrew_nenakhov »

ulfw wrote: post #112
Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

This 'product limitation' makes user experience worse. Actually, it makes it unusable for most users.

Whether this limitation is intentional is irrelevant, the UX is still bad.

Re: The Last Message Sent on AIM

#125

Post by okprod »

Izkata wrote: post #102
brmgb wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yea I used AOL chatrooms and then AIM chatrooms in the late 1990's into the 2000's. I liked that AIM allowed you to connect with strangers who may have had similar interests but were outside your network (unlike Facebook). A few people I met on AOL/AIM have become good friends IRL, and my cousin and a couple others I know met their future spouses on AIM.

Re: The Last Message Sent on AIM

#126

Post by ocdtrekkie »

after_care wrote: post #105
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And lost users every time. Also, you've merged a lot of unrelated products.

MSN was folded into Skype after they bought Skype, a separate company. Lync, a corporate offering with no commonality with MSN, got rebranded Skype for Business, despite no actual relation or compatibility with Skype. Teams has nothing in common with either of the previously described product lines, though Microsoft is going to sunset SfB and push everyone over to Teams, given the success of that product.

Renaming Lync as Skype for Business is actually the only "rebrand" Microsoft did here, and it did nothing to actually increase adoption of that platform, considering Microsoft chose to dump it less than five years later.

Re: The Last Message Sent on AIM

#127

Post by avh02 »

mrweasel wrote: post #6

Normally I happy to shutdown services or delete code, less stuff, less stuff to maintain, but something as dear as AIM might be harder. It’s always a little sad to think of something like “the last message sent”, but there’s also someone, somewhere, with the last commit to the AIM server code. Writing the final AIM server bugfix cannot have been cheerful work, I mean want was the point, the developer most likely knew…

One of the first products i worked on was put in to "maintenance" mode for most of my tenure at the same company (we were disbanded and moved to different teams).

I wanted to be the one to shut it down (we knew it was not successful, and i was the last remaining team member) - but the one day i was on sick leave somebody not associated with it was asked to do it.

I was slightly annoyed, but was happier to see it go than to be bothered by somebody else taking it out.

We still celebrated though.

Re: The Last Message Sent on AIM

#128

Post by roywiggins »

addicted wrote: post #74
george3d6 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You may not be the target audience though, the target audience are probably people that aren't yet "bough into" the google ecosystem. So they are unaware of this axing policy. Anyone logging into chromium, using gmail and google calendar and an android device is already "theirs". What they want is to increase the share of people that are in the MS ecosystem (and presumably also OSX ecosystem, but that's mostly a stat…

You will be surprised how many people are indeed aware of Google’s axing policy, if not even consciously. The reality is that so many of them have been burnt by Google. Picasa was an extremely popular photo management platform used by many. Google Play Music was extremely popular. Google Plus was not exactly popular but touched nearly every Google user, was highly promoted, and then disappeared. And then you come to…

My grandmother mourns Picasa and PicasaWeb to this day.

Re: The Last Message Sent on AIM

#129

Post by ModernMech »

cjrp wrote: post #55
iso1631 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, if I want synchronous chat, I'll make a phone call. If I want a response at some point I'll send a message.

This was talking on the phone for people who don't like talking on the phone. If that makes any sense.

This makes perfect sense to me. I don't know what it is about talking on the phone, but it's an extremely anxiety inducing experience for me. I'm generally fine with people, but if I have a choice of walking down the street to talk with them in person or call them on the phone, I will make the walk every time.

Best I can figure out it stems from being verbally abused as a teenager when I had a job making cold calls. People are vicious on the phone in a way they never are in person. Some people seem to use strangers on the phone as an opportunity to safely vent whatever pent-up rage they have. And even though people are just as vicious online, it just doesn't have the same bite as it does when it's a human voice filled with rage.

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