Where(or when?) was AIM a big thing? I only knew like 4 people personally who used it. Most people used IRC, MSN, and ICQ, back in the days.
In the US 2002 or so everyone of my friends was on AIM
The Last Message Sent on AIM
171–180 of 215 posts
Re: The Last Message Sent on AIM
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Almost everyone has email This is certainly not the case. A lot of people whose first and only internet enabled device is a smartphone don't end up creating an email.
Isn’t an email necessary for a smartphone? I know apple requires one and will create it for you if you don’t have it. On Android, do you need a google account with email?
You don't need to login to Google to use an Android. Only if you want to use Google Play.
Either way, you don't need to personally login with your own account. Often, whoever is setting up the phone (tech aware relative or phone store sales rep) for them will login with their account. For android phones, sometimes the people setting it up will just install customer selected apks from a usb drive; whatever version they happen to have, and when (if) those versions expire, come back to the store to update.
Re: The Last Message Sent on AIM
#173AIM was actually a proto-social network. You had your buddy list and friends group, and a profile you could fill out. Your away message could be used as your status or to tweet your mood.
Re: The Last Message Sent on AIM
#174Earlier 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...
(not the OP) two big UX gripes I have with iMessage:
1) For some reason, photos take forever to be received (and sometimes are not received at all) when I send them to certain people. Best I can tell is they're using older devices and/or are in poor reception.
This + I can't send a photo with a message attached means that I'll send the photo, then a message with context, but the person never receives the photo so it's confusing.
2) There is no clear way to dismiss messages from the list of conversations without deleting them. It makes it hard to find conversations later when I have to scroll through a bunch of stuff I don't care about, but may want to search later.
Re: The Last Message Sent on AIM
#175Earlier 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…
I was surprised when my Dad, someone completely detached from the tech world, brought up Google's tendency to cancel stuff. He was a Google Music subscriber and still uses Chromecast Audio. Last year he tried buying another Audio device to discover it was discontinued, and then over the summer got notifications related to Music being cancelled. He was super disappointed!
In January he started looking into getting some IoT cameras for his house (a doorbell and something for the backyard, nothing crazy). He was looking at Nest, but the moment I mentioned Nest is owned by Google, he stopped looking at their products.
Cancelling products and services that people use and rely on leaves a bad taste in people's mouths. I used to excuse it, but in the last 5-6 years Google has done away with about 4-5 services that I used daily. It's honestly too much and I won't put the time into using their products anymore.
Re: The Last Message Sent on AIM
#176I 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:…
There is a little game/visual novel-esque thing called "Emily Is Away" you may enjoy.
It's basically an AIM nostalgia trip, particularly if you were in high school/college during the mid 2000s as well.
Re: The Last Message Sent on AIM
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Google Play Music This one irritates me most. GPM was mature and required...what? Minimal maintenance at this point? But no, how about we completely rebuild a music service on top of YouTube, miss a bunch of minor simple features that every streaming service offers (you know, like save current playlist/radio as Playlist) and FORCE every user over to this far inferior service. At least with transitions like MOG->Bea…
This was the one digital service I was happy to pay google for and caused me a 100% ban on their consumer services going forward. Google music hadnt changed in a few years, so of course we need to get a promotion by destroying it and replacing it with something that might grow faster but definitely wont.
Microsoft gets a lot of flak for their endless rebrands, but its not like they rewrote Lync from scratch when they renamed it to Skype for Business. Google seems to have adopted a similar marketing-driven rebrand culture ("Google Play is a confusing brand and right now consumer confidence is in the YouTube brand, we should move our media streaming holdings to the YouTube brand") but confusingly adopted it as yet another excuse to generally rewrite the apple pie from scratch instead of just renaming things that aren't broken.
Re: The Last Message Sent on AIM
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
This was the one digital service I was happy to pay google for and caused me a 100% ban on their consumer services going forward. Google music hadnt changed in a few years, so of course we need to get a promotion by destroying it and replacing it with something that might grow faster but definitely wont.
Microsoft gets a lot of flak for their endless rebrands, but its not like they rewrote Lync from scratch when they renamed it to Skype for Business. Google seems to have adopted a similar marketing-driven rebrand culture ("Google Play is a confusing brand and right now consumer confidence is in the YouTube brand, we should move our media streaming holdings to the YouTube brand") but confusingly adopted it as yet anot…
> but confusingly adopted it as yet another excuse to generally rewrite the apple pie from scratch instead of just renaming things that aren't broken.
I think that inverts history. The YT Music implementation and brand existed long before the decision to replace GPM with it. The branding decision followed most of the reimplementation, it didn't provide an excuse for it.
Google has a strong tendency to have multiple parallel offerings in a field for a while before consolidating them (and, also, a history of botching the consolidation.)
Re: The Last Message Sent on AIM
#179Earlier 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.
In the US, Reader had a huge social community. It wasn't just Orkut that had a large existing social community they could have leveraged instead of alienated, but the folks in charge of Google+ did not understand (presumably because they weren't RSS readers, presumably because they weren't from the communities where Orkut became popular).
Re: The Last Message Sent on AIM
#180Earlier 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).
ICQ was like that since the mid 90's.