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The Last Message Sent on AIM

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Re: The Last Message Sent on AIM

#201

Post by techrat »

sn_master wrote: post #187
techrat wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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..

That enables whoever gets the number next to access my account. I'm not fond of leaving irrevocable details that aren't mine on an account that is.

Re: The Last Message Sent on AIM

#202

Post by WorldMaker »

int_19h wrote: post #196
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…

Lync itself was a rebranding of Office Communicator, by the way.

Yes, that factored in as another reason it was a good analogy.

Re: The Last Message Sent on AIM

#203

Post by harry8 »

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…

> tech influencers, almost necessarily, are almost certainly aware of googles tendencies.

This is huge, bigger than most acknowledge. Most people don't understand the tech and why should they?

"none of my nerd friends use it" vs "all of my nerd friends are on it" is a massive, massive signal about whether something is good or incredibly dangerous, dishonest and a foul trap. There's plenty of the latter about so we're talking about degrees of badness for most. The thinking resembles:

"I'm not super happy with any of this tech and definitely not something that my niece the computer-hacker and cousin the IT guy aren't using. I'll definitely draw a line there."

vs

"Have you heard about signal? It's whatsapp but no facebook tracking." From a family member, friend or acquaintance who you know knows more than you about this stuff.

Re: The Last Message Sent on AIM

#204

Post by harry8 »

deaddodo wrote: post #152
ballenf wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My father was so proud of having uploaded all his music to Google Play. It was the single largest source of loyalty for him to Android over iPhone. With the iPhone's missing back button being second. And since Hangout chat used to be integrated with gmail, many a gmail user saw deprecation notices for ages now. And terribly unhelpful deprecation notices at that. They basically said something like "I'm going to stop w…

To be fair, the music he uploaded does transfer to YouTube Music; but that doesn’t help that it’s a far inferior streaming platform.

To be fair to the customer who lacks anything like the power of one of the world's largest corporations:

he is the victim of a bait-and-switch.

Re: The Last Message Sent on AIM

#205

Post by a-dub »

icedchai wrote: post #200
a-dub wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AOL launched around 1991 if I recall. I remember watching with great interest (I think I may have been in some kind of beta program) as it was obvious (at least to me at the time) that digital communications with a graphical UI was the future. (At the time in the US, there were a few commercial information services that were textual, General Electric Network Information Exchange and CompuServe were the big ones... fo…

Digital Research (DRI), the creator of DR-DOS / GEM, was not at all related to Digital Equipment Corp (DEC), the producers of VAXen and the like, despite similar names.

live and learn!

Re: The Last Message Sent on AIM

#206

Post by GuB-42 »

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…

Maybe they couldn't monetize it, maybe it was losing to a competitor with no idea on how to reverse the trend.

Often you see things people think are worth billions. And when they try to capitalize on it, in the end it becomes less than worthless. Just look at how many startups Google bought just to kill the product shortly after, especially when it comes to social networking things. Maybe these managers took the right decision by saying "we are not good at that, we didn't find a way to sell it, let's kill it and invest our resources where we are good at instead of letting it become a burden". In the real world, you actually have to figure out the "???" before "profit".

Re: The Last Message Sent on AIM

#207

Post by comeonseriously »

toast0 wrote: post #167
comeonseriously wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Protocols should also evolve... This is why something like Delta Chat is a good thing. Almost everyone has email, so evolving email to include chat is a good thing. Also, it takes chat away from single entities.

> 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.

> 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

Would like to see the stats on this.

Re: The Last Message Sent on AIM

#208

Post by icedchai »

a-dub wrote: post #205
icedchai wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Digital Research (DRI), the creator of DR-DOS / GEM, was not at all related to Digital Equipment Corp (DEC), the producers of VAXen and the like, despite similar names.

live and learn!

Still, I would not be surprised if early AOL implementations used a VAX! Does anyone know what that stuff ran on?

Re: The Last Message Sent on AIM

#209

Post by kalleboo »

k__ wrote: post #64

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.

AIM dominated in the US.

Living in Europe, we were on ICQ to start with in like 1996, then IRC, and starting in like 2001 everyone coming online seemed to adopt MSN instead (I guess due to being preinstalled in Win XP?). But at the same time all my U.S. friends were on AIM.

Re: The Last Message Sent on AIM

#210

Post by sellyme »

deaddodo wrote: post #150
addicted wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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…

> 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.

I still can't work out how I'm supposed to listen to an mp3 on my phone now. YT Music has a "Device Only" button which I thought was simple enough, but then it just refuses to actually play anything I select.

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