so now from the oldschool services only ICQ will remain?
AIM will shut down after 20 years
131–140 of 345 posts
Re: AIM will shut down after 20 years
#132I'm fairly torn up about this. A lot of my friends today were "internet randos" I started up chats with on AOL in the late 90s.
There is a pretty large number of additional internet rando's from my youth whom I haven't spoken to in years where my only connection is their AIM screenname. I still use Adium connected to AIM just waiting for any of them to pop on.
For many of them, I never knew their real name, only their screen name. This will be a total loss of the possibility of reconnecting.
I am honestly mildly devastated.
It was a different world then, people were much more excited and willing to talk to weirdo's like me online.
Re: AIM will shut down after 20 years
#133Thanks for the memories AOL.
Re: AIM will shut down after 20 years
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s fascinating that you guys ended up choosing Slack. I’m surprised because it seems like with the infrastructure already setup, AOL could’ve built an internal enterprise MVP and got a real leg-up on the rest of the competition. Missed opportunity for sure.
It was less a intentional choice (early on at least) and more motivated by how painful using aim group chats for software development was. Slack wasn't even centrally managed for the early days of use. (Although AIM itself started as kind of a unwanted skunkworks project, when there was an off the shelf solution available, people weren't that driven to build their own)
That was the brilliant part of their go-to market strategy. Rather than negotiating with enterprise executives, they let each team start its own microinstance and try it independently. It's much easier to get a 20 person team to try it than a 10Ks of people organization; but word-of-mouth and a quality product can get enough 20 person teams in a 10Ks organization to switch that eventually the whole enterprise signs up.
Re: AIM will shut down after 20 years
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
Aol sold icq to the Russians years ago.
"the Russians" makes it sound like it was sold to the Russian government or some other amorphous organization. Mail.Ru bought it in 2010: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICQ
That is due to their government with their hands on all things Russian.
Re: AIM will shut down after 20 years
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, ICQ got merged into the AIM network after AOL acquired ICQ.
AOL never merged AIM and ICQ. They may have shared some server infrastructure at times, but the networks were always kept separate. I remember as a user of ICQ prior to AOL buying them [1] there was always fear that AOL would merge the two and make it the worst, lowest common denominator of the two. For a long time it felt like ICQ had the most features of the two. (Then eventually everyone was on AIM instead. Then e…
AOL continued to develop both applications but did link the networks.
Re: AIM will shut down after 20 years
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Aol and yahoo both use gmail internall You couldn't be more wrong about Yahoo, unless something changed in the last six months.
I quit, yahoo, in the last 6 months and they were definitely using gmail prior to that.
When did they switch from forcing all employees to use Yahoo Mail? When I left in 2015, they had disabled POP for internal mail, so we were forced to use the actual Yahoo Mail website.
Re: AIM will shut down after 20 years
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which of the below do you mean: a) Employees of yahoo using gmail for personal purposes? b) Yahoo, the company, uses gmail c) @yahoo.com will be powered by gmail in the future as a white labeled product? (Each of the above is alarming in it's own way)
I don't know about Yahoo, but in other organizations I've seen employees using gmail, for work, because it's more convenient than the corporate/enterprise email platform.
Sure but it's usually against corporate policy and reason to fire the person. This has happened in companies I have worked in the past. People take print outs and take them outside office. This is against company policy for confidential documents).
Re: AIM will shut down after 20 years
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
I quit, yahoo, in the last 6 months and they were definitely using gmail prior to that.
When did they switch from forcing all employees to use Yahoo Mail? When I left in 2015, they had disabled POP for internal mail, so we were forced to use the actual Yahoo Mail website.
[deleted]
Re: AIM will shut down after 20 years
#140AIM was where I first found my passion for development. The first programming language I ever really learned, perl, was because I wanted to be better at making AIM bots. Nostalgia: - The TOC protocol and the OSCAR protocol. Net::AIM and Net::OSCAR. Aryeh Goldsmith, you beautiful soul. - The first $300 I ever made online was in ~2002, when I wrote a chatroom flirt bot for an adult content affiliate. I was 14 or 15 yea…
I vaguely remember the 3char screen names and the trading of accounts or lists. If I recall correctly there was underground stuff going on with trading those names. Thanks for hitting that memory switch for me.