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The Last Message Sent on AIM

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Re: The Last Message Sent on AIM

#181

Post by tppiotrowski »

One interesting (but probably creepy by todays standards) feature of AIM was that you could put %s anywhere in your profile and AIM would replace it with the screen name of whoever was looking at your profile. An example would be:

%s is my best friend! -> angelc408 is my best friend!

This also worked on links you added to your profile so you could make custom links that would send the user's name to your server to make a simple guest book.

Sign" rel="nofollow">http://buddytracker.us/?user=%s">Sign my guestbook

I was a sophomore in college when I made a simple guest book service that blew up to over 3 million users in a year. I contemplated dropping out of college my junior year and making it into something more than 20 lines of PHP with a MySQL database. In the end I stayed in school and AIM removed profiles from the desktop client a year later. Dodged a bullet there...

Re: The Last Message Sent on AIM

#182

Post by trhway »

brmgb wrote: post #90
user3939382 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You are just missing that modern instant messassing plateforms have little in common with AIM and MSN. I'm not sure I follow your reasoning. AIM could have created a great mobile app with new features a la whatsapp et al, a new OSCAR protocol that was backwards compatible, and had a huge base of mobile users. Hindsight is 20/20, but it sounds like you're saying that even with hindsight closing AIM was the right cal…

> Hindsight is 20/20, but it sounds like you're saying that even with hindsight closing AIM was the right call. It was the right call. AIM was losing money with no obvious way to monetize it. AOL was not in the same position than Microsoft was. They had little experience selling to pro customers and they were bleeding users to Google Talk and Facebook Messenger at the time. Even knowing that the mobile market would e…

>they were bleeding users to Google Talk and Facebook Messenger at the time.

it was basically explicit transfer of the core value - user graph - from AOL to FB which probably doubled or tripled the FB graph at the time. The "small deal" and the modest "linked" below are kind of euphemisms describing the full buddies list import and thus sucking AIM dry if i remember correctly:

https://marker.medium.com/the-untold-history-of-facebooks-mo...

"During his time there, AOL wound up doing a small deal with Facebook that linked AOL Instant Messenger to Facebook’s website. But the biggest outcome of the deal was the connection Palihapitiya formed with Mark Zuckerberg."

So the GP{3} saying "short sightedness and pettiness of these directors is something of legend" is very wrong. As you can see they played very long and successful game, just not the game you'd have expected them to play :)

Re: The Last Message Sent on AIM

#183

Post by phire »

toast0 wrote: post #166
phire wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

AIM eventually got offline messaging; I beleive with AIM 6.0 that launched in late 2006.

I think all my friends had moved to google talk and text messaging by 2006.

Re: The Last Message Sent on AIM

#184

Post by axaxs »

Terretta wrote: post #143
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.

You can message 100% of all smartphone users, it magically delivers as SMS. Also supports group chats with regular SMS users. Also supports MMS with them. Given this pretty graceful degradation, what do you mean by not being able to message 85% of smartphone users?

Eh, that's terrible UX for everyone involved.

I'm more or less OK with the idea of Apple not developing for other platforms. However, they are actively hostile to anyone who has offered and tried to get interop working on other platforms, which is really a shame.

Re: The Last Message Sent on AIM

#185

Post by Andrew_nenakhov »

Terretta wrote: post #161
Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It’s also not the case that there is such a limitation. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207006 A single contact / conversation can even mix and match.

Are you really suggesting that SMS fallback is a good enough way to message people in 2021? How about sending them a video? Location? Voice message? MMS? Does this crap ever work?? (In my country it doesn't work between operators and costs €.5 for one message)

Re: The Last Message Sent on AIM

#186

Post by Andrew_nenakhov »

Terretta wrote: post #143
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.

You can message 100% of all smartphone users, it magically delivers as SMS. Also supports group chats with regular SMS users. Also supports MMS with them. Given this pretty graceful degradation, what do you mean by not being able to message 85% of smartphone users?

You really can call SMS a 'graceful degradation' while keeping a straight face? I call it intentionally crippling communication capabilities. Also, just say no to walled gardens.

Re: The Last Message Sent on AIM

#187

Post by sn_master »

techrat wrote: post #120
bombcar wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

there are as many throwaway phone number sites now as the throwaway email ones..

Re: The Last Message Sent on AIM

#188

Post by lovegoblin »

guessbest wrote: post #180
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).

ICQ was like that since the mid 90's.

ICQ had offline messaging, though.

Re: The Last Message Sent on AIM

#189

Post by WorldMaker »

dragonwriter wrote: post #178
WorldMaker wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

My impression from second and third hand sources was still that YT Music implementation and brand was after GPM was asked to "code freeze" and the team directed to other projects (including some to YTM). That the products stood side-by-side for so long is only further indictment on the rewrite-the-world approach that it took them so long to reach "feature parity" enough that they felt comfortable sunsetting GPM, well after the writing had been on the wall, the development ended, and the marketing decision to change brands had been handed down.

The multiple parallel offerings thing is of course its own problem that seems to often indicate communications issues up/down the decision chains, but specifically with reference to GPM/YTM I heard it was more a symptom of a rewrite than one of those communication breakdowns. Though again, that's only from impressions I got from scuttlebutt I heard second and third hand.

Re: The Last Message Sent on AIM

#190

Post by _y5hn »

selestify wrote: post #160
tinco wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Instagra…

As someone who doesn't understand either, how do online communities work?

You build something addictive and "social".

Now how you sell user data is the Billion dollar question.

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