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AIM will be discontinued today

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Re: AIM will be discontinued today

#131

Post by ouid »

jedberg wrote: post #126

Goodbye. :( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2Z2CklSxM0 Since everyone is sharing their AIM memories: When I was in college (1995-1998), AIM was the #1 way to flirt with people. Today the kids worry about whether they got a like or not. Back then, you'd sit and stare at your buddy list waiting for that person you liked to come online so you could say something witty, and then stew with worry if they didn't respond bu…

I was under the impression that in 1995-1998, flirting irl was still number 1.

Re: AIM will be discontinued today

#132

Post by reaperducer »

mrweasel wrote: post #101
Cknight70 wrote: post #64

Something I'll miss about AIM and older chat clients is how compact they were. Most of these newer chat programs seem to assume you're going to have their application take up the entire screen.

Most modern audio players have the same issue. WinAmp/XMMS took up very little of your screen, while most modern players will assume that full screen is what you want.

This is one of the (few?) things that iTunes gets right. Though it's a little hidden, the entire program can be minimized into a small floating album cover.

And if that's not small enough, you can minimize it altogether and just get updates and controls via Notification Center.

Re: AIM will be discontinued today

#133

Post by dunham »

nerdponx wrote: post #19

Unfortunately you are not able to save or export your Buddy List. Your data associated with AIM will be deleted after December 15, 2017. Yes, you can manually save images and files to your computer until the morning of December 15, 2017. Whatever you thought of AIM, it's stuff like this that makes you realize just how important software freedom is. Insane that there is just no way at all , without outright hacking th…

I'd rather AOL not keep permanent logs of everything. They would now be for sale to the highest bidder.

As for my own data, Adium kept logs that I zipped up before I stopped using it. (And I have logs from "gaim" that predate using OSX/Adium.) I don't think it did pictures / files back when I used it, but I'd hope Adium would keep local copies of that too.

Re: AIM will be discontinued today

#134

Post by ancarda »

aimthrowaway5 wrote: post #72
syntheticnature wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I expect it was thought through, and the thought was "a few hundred thousand people use this service still, it's running under one employee's desk* and is completely unfunded, no effort above the minimum is to be expended." *Not sure if this was explicitly said or someone's joking claim during a past discussion of the shutdown.

The final user numbers were way less than you would guess. It was a service built to handle tens of millions of users serving thousands. Scaling down that much is as labour intensive as scaling up. It's not just a launching all the services on a handful of VMs. The time had passed to make it a WhatsApp etc competitor.

>Scaling down that much is as labour intensive as scaling up.

Could you elaborate on this? I'm very interested to understand the challenges of downsizing a cloud service as I've never heard of that happening, and am surprised to hear it's difficult.

Re: AIM will be discontinued today

#135

Post by ImSkeptical »

Frondo wrote: post #130
acjohnson55 wrote: post #17

Truly sad. So much of my young social life was experienced through AIM. Screen names are still part of the identity of some of my friends. For some folks that have already passed, our last conversations are on AIM. Don't know what else to say, but it definitely feels like a link to another era of my life is fading away. Nothing is permanent. RIP running man!

Nothing is permanent, exactly so. Our ability to slog around drives full of data lets us gloss over this fact, but when we're dead, are our kids gonna keep slogging around our drives? Nah. Better way to get permanence in your life is to do things that people will remember you for, if permanence is what you're after. Crowd-sourced in other people's memories.

That's why you need to keep it on some kind of cloud storage drive arranging an annuity or trust to keep paying the bills. Then, you have a script on a cloud server that posts on Craigslist once a year or month, hiring someone to duplicate your setup on a new cloud provider, opening a port for one of your existing nodes to connect to and verify, and also ask that person to modify the reproduction script of the clone, so that it will post on a Craigslist equivalent but not Craigslist. You'd also need some logic so that the rate you add clones is limited to the rate at which your fund to pay for the clones increases.

Re: AIM will be discontinued today

#136

Post by cjsuk »

kodt wrote: post #74
nerdponx wrote: post #19

Unfortunately you are not able to save or export your Buddy List. Your data associated with AIM will be deleted after December 15, 2017. Yes, you can manually save images and files to your computer until the morning of December 15, 2017. Whatever you thought of AIM, it's stuff like this that makes you realize just how important software freedom is. Insane that there is just no way at all , without outright hacking th…

I, for one, am happy to see all my old AIM conversations deleted and lost forever.

Yes. Thousands of ASL's are gone forever.

Re: AIM will be discontinued today

#137

Post by yoz-y »

Cknight70 wrote: post #64

Something I'll miss about AIM and older chat clients is how compact they were. Most of these newer chat programs seem to assume you're going to have their application take up the entire screen.

True. This is probably due to the fact that many applications are "ported" from the web and web does not grok floating windows.

Re: AIM will be discontinued today

#138

Post by wuliwong »

acjohnson55 wrote: post #17

Truly sad. So much of my young social life was experienced through AIM. Screen names are still part of the identity of some of my friends. For some folks that have already passed, our last conversations are on AIM. Don't know what else to say, but it definitely feels like a link to another era of my life is fading away. Nothing is permanent. RIP running man!

I am also feeling really nostalgic about AIM shutting down. My HN screen name is the one I created for AIM many moons ago.

Re: AIM will be discontinued today

#139

Post by kuschku »

oblio wrote: post #125
Cknight70 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here! I'm really sad they never added anymore chat protocols, and now most of the ones I used are obsolete or don't work. I stopped when all my friends switched from Skype (which I used Trillian for) to Telegram, but I missed how compact Trillian was.

I get the impression that Pidgin, Trillian and the other one I can't really remember just gave up at some point. I'm using Pidgin, mostly out of nostalgia, but the default configuration basically can't connect to any mainstream messenger these days (Facebook, WhatsApp, Hangouts, Skype or Viber). Plus the UI is so dated, especially regarding emojis. Before anyone asks, it's in C and I'm nowhere competent (or intereste…

> I get the impression that Pidgin, Trillian and the other one I can't really just gave up at some point.

> I'm using Pidgin, mostly out of nostalgia, but the default configuration basically can't connect to any mainstream messenger these days (Facebook, WhatsApp, Hangouts, Skype or Viber). Plus the UI is so dated, especially regarding emojis.

Pidgin supports Telegram and Facebook. Well, it did support Facebook, Facebook is constantly changing their API to prevent that.

Someone also wrote a WhatsApp backend.

WhatsApp forced GitHub to take down the code, and sued the dev.

In this modern world, open chat software is impossible.

Re: AIM will be discontinued today

#140

Post by LeifCarrotson »

fragsworth wrote: post #83
kodt wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I, for one, am happy to see all my old AIM conversations deleted and lost forever.

I didn't even consider that. All those shitty things I said when I was a teenager...

For me, it's not the shitty things I said. It's the things that I thought were eloquent and insightful and informative and good, that now cause me to cringe. Kind of like looking at some old code, wondering what illiterate chimpanzee produced that mess, and realizing it was you...

That said, the first messages from my wife to me still make me smile, and I'm sure that my responses that make me cringe would make her smile.

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