Toying with the idea of building "SAIM", an AIM clone (As close as we can without getting sued by AOL). Anyone want to team up?
AIM will be discontinued today
161–170 of 274 posts
Re: AIM will be discontinued today
#162A few months ago I was playing around windows 98 in VM for fun. I installed an old version of Netscape that had AIM integration built right in. It still worked perfectly, and I even was able to talk to a few high school buddies.
RIP
Re: AIM will be discontinued today
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
1. Everyone that wrote the code has probably left the company, or is working on more important projects.
2. The code was written in 90s and 00s.
3. I wouldn't be surprised if AOL owns the hardware AIM is running on. Deploying on smaller servers would mean a complete system replacement, which always requires large amounts of regression testing.
4. Big services usually have more dependencies than small services. Each dependency adds complexity and costs.
It probably is as hard to down scale an old service as it is to upscale a new service. It's probably less hard to downscale a new service than upscale a new service.
Also, if your users are dwindling (and not paying) it's less important to give that software attention.
Re: AIM will be discontinued today
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not the same kind , though the difference was subtle, and maybe not an important distinction to most people. In ICQ, you sent discrete messages back and forth. You could (I believe) look at the last message while replying, but you didn't have a chat history integrated into the same window where you replied. I used both ICQ and AIM in the '90s and early 2000s, even talking to the same people, and the interactions felt…
I still have my ICQ number burned into my brain. There are other, more important, numbers I should be remembering and at times cannot, but that ICQ number is there.
I do too, but I have no idea what my password is.
Re: AIM will be discontinued today
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's amazing (disheartening?) to see Twitter evolve from the website where you could tell your friends that you were eating dinner, to a website where the President of the USA makes real policy announcements.
well, theres about the same amount of thought put into either tweet
Usually I spent at least 30 seconds deciding on where to go to dinner.
Re: AIM will be discontinued today
#166That's a last minute warning...
I never used AIM... is ICQ still being used...
Re: AIM will be discontinued today
#167The end of an era.
Re: AIM will be discontinued today
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's amazing (disheartening?) to see Twitter evolve from the website where you could tell your friends that you were eating dinner, to a website where the President of the USA makes real policy announcements.
well, theres about the same amount of thought put into either tweet
I dunno, I used to spend a lot of time making my status messages really clever.
Re: AIM will be discontinued today
#169Unfortunately 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 found an old hard drive the other day and booted it up out of curiosity. What I found were old MSN Messenger chat logs from when I was a teenager. I spent all night reading them. It was... magical. Lots of vivid memories returning, I cried and laughed.
It's a damn shame that an entire generation is growing up with their chat logs locked in the cloud.
Re: AIM will be discontinued today
#170Toying with the idea of building "SAIM", an AIM clone (As close as we can without getting sued by AOL). Anyone want to team up?
I suspect that if AOL still cares about their AIM trademark, "SAIM" would be too close.
Pidgin was originally called "GAIM".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pidgin_(software)#Naming_dispu...