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AIM will shut down after 20 years
181–190 of 345 posts
Re: AIM will shut down after 20 years
#182It's very surprising to me that person-to-person text communication is divided into two completely different and incompatible types of service: short latency (~20 sec, "email") and very short latency (~1 sec, "instant messaging"). A priori, I'd have just imagined that the former would arrive first for technical reasons but then would be consumed by the latter, which has no fundamental technical barriers to being bett…
Email by its very nature is asynchronous and was standardized in a time when "always-on" didn't exist, and it is provider-agnostic because of the standard protocol.
Email's maturity by the time that businesses all came online pretty much guaranteed it as the standard for business communication, and personal use was just a small step from there.
Expecting 20s RTT for email is a modern phenomenon, when you could expect replies on the timescale of days before.
The closest attempt to a standard for IM is probably XMPP, which providers have pretty much all ignored in favour of lock-in to their respective platforms.
Re: AIM will shut down after 20 years
#183Back in the day I had to use a few different chat programs (AIM/ICQ/MSN), then came along Trillian, and I could just run the one program. I've since switched to Pidgin (or whatever they called themselves before the rename), it was quite nice not having to bother with all those separate programs. Now we have Discord/Slack/Whatsapp/A myriad of voice chat programs and I'm back where I started. Edit: For those curious, A…
You can kinda use http://meetfranz.com/ for that... unfortunately it's mostly wrappers around web clients, not a real client that unifies your contacts and such.
There's a native client for all of the above:
Re: AIM will shut down after 20 years
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
so isn't this capitalism working as it should? they literally killed their own golden goose with stupidity. why shouldn't others disrupt corrupt crap business?
He isn't saying others shouldn't come along to replace them. Only that the AOL people realized their mistakes too late.
Mostly this, or that they didn't even really care. It was all about preservation and riding out the gravy train.
Re: AIM will shut down after 20 years
#185I miss dedicated IM services like AIM. They had a certain dynamic that Facebook Messenger (or similar) and SMS lack. On AIM, logging in was an active choice and it signaled that you were up for a conversation. With Facebook Messenger, everyone who has the app is always "online." This means that: a) I get messages from people I don't want to have a conversation with at the moment and it seems rude if I ignore them, be…
What you are lamenting the lack of is the 'presence' indicator, where you can set yourself Available, Away, Busy, or simply Offline. Of the current crop of IM clients, only Skype still has it (I think). Of the older IM clients; Lync had it, so did Lotus Sametime, MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, ICQ, and of course AIM. Somewhere along the line the presence feature got dropped, and now we're always 'Available' even whe…
>Somewhere along the line the presence feature got dropped, and now we're always 'Available' even when we're not.
Before you were only available when you had your PC on, you were connected to the Internet, and your IM program was open. Now you carry your perpetually running IM program in your perpetually on and perpetually connected mobile in your pocket.
Re: AIM will shut down after 20 years
#186AOL/AIM away messages were the original social media status update for my generation (at least in my social circle). So much drama went down in those short little notes.
Kids these days with their AIM Away Messages. In my days, we had to "finger" people their .project/.plan files in VAX/VMS & Unix systems.
OK, I can't resist. Time for a story.
Once upon a time when the net was still new, a friend of mine (then a Unix newbie) was trying to catch up with another friends' current status. Unfortunately this other colleague had quite a lot of info in their .plan, and so many lines and lines of text scrolled by too fast for my friend to read.
Needing a reminder about the syntax of Unix pipes and the "less" command, she turns to the person next to her in the computer lab and asks, "When you're fingering someone, how do you make it go slow?"
This poor hapless bystander gives her an absolutely horrified look, backs away slowly, and makes some excuse for a hasty exit.
It was only sometime later that my friend realized what she'd asked... :)
Re: AIM will shut down after 20 years
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
so isn't this capitalism working as it should? they literally killed their own golden goose with stupidity. why shouldn't others disrupt corrupt crap business?
It's a strange feature of an economic system where the incentives require that successful participants blow themselves up. It requires that new=good and old=bad.
It doesn’t require that all. If anything, we are now seeing the opposite where top companies with considerable resources are remaining agile and innovative, effectively out-competing many new startups.
Re: AIM will shut down after 20 years
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
It was text messaging before everyone had a computer in their pockets.
Not SMS? Funny how quickly the iPhone has erased the memory of earlier mobile technology. SMS is not only where the term text messaging comes from, but it's older than AIM, older than MSN, older than ICQ.
No. Ironically, you're probably not old enough. AIM predated any meaningful adoption of SMS in the US by a long time. In the 90s, I was one of the youngest to carry a cell phone (13) -- I wasn't rich either, just a nerd. In the mid to late 90s that was really the nadir of cheap cell phone deals, you could get a phone for a penny and the monthly service for $15-20 for month if you paid $0.15 per minute or so. No SMS though, the phone didn't even support it (That was an all analog AMPS phone - The next year I got a shitty CDMA phone, but still no SMS).
I didn't have a text capable phone until after 2000.
Meanwhile, AIM well I carried the same ID since 1994 or so.
Re: AIM will shut down after 20 years
#189I wouldn't be married to my wonderful wife of 11 years, if it were not for AIM. We met at a college party, and before we parted ways the only thing I thought to ask was for her AIM ID. I'm shy and talking over AIM was much easier for me.
Thank you AIM.
*edited for more details
Re: AIM will shut down after 20 years
#190AOL/AIM away messages were the original social media status update for my generation (at least in my social circle). So much drama went down in those short little notes.
Same. I remember being in the college dorms and hearing all the AIM notification sounds all up and down the hallway. In the summer when everyone had their windows open you could hear it all over the quad.