Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AIM will be discontinued today

help.aol.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 274 posts

Re: AIM will be discontinued today

#231

Post by scott_s »

nasredin wrote: post #220
scott_s wrote: post #54

Earlier 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…

Hmmm. I thought they were both instant messengers, just AIM was more popular in US and ICQ was more popular in Israel and Eastern Europe. One distinct feature AIM had were the IRC-like chat rooms. --- You may be confused WRT an ICQ "offline messaging" feature, which IIRC allowed one to send messages to offline contacts, who would see the message when they signed in. --- Also in case you didn't know: ICQ is a (too laz…

They were both "instant messengers." But their interface was different enough to lead to different behavior.

Re: AIM will be discontinued today

#232

Post by drdeadringer »

nasredin wrote: post #215
drdeadringer wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am again reminded that "youngsters these days" pretty much no longer have this option unless their online footprint is actively managed from Day One. A part of me can't wait to see the President whose entire life can be cherry-picked from various servers and datacenters.

>A part of me can't wait to see the President whose entire life can be cherry-picked from various servers and datacenters. So we can add porn preferences (Hi Senator Cruz!) to list of non-issues people use when choosing the leader of the free world!

Anthony Weiner is another example, albeit more "stupid" than "matter of course" given today's casual "life online" du jour.

Re: AIM will be discontinued today

#233

Post by wil421 »

tunesmith wrote: post #182

One thing I'll miss about AIM is that it's a communication modality that doesn't exist right now. It was everywhere, and on MacOS it was integrated into the OS. For most people I knew, they had it set to join when they got on the computer. So it meant that you knew when your friends were at the computer, and you knew when you could have long "in the background" conversations with your friends. It was just a different…

We have cellphones now no need to know when someone is online. AIM and AOL before it were great when you don’t have text. No one needs that now when you have texts app or snap chat.

The one thing I do miss are times when you could just find a random classmates username and message them. When you do this with text it can be a little more awkward if you don’t know each other.

Why do you need to know if a freind is only if you can text, iMessage or WhatsApp anyone in the world almost?

Re: AIM will be discontinued today

#234

Post by nasredin »

drdeadringer wrote: post #232
nasredin wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>A part of me can't wait to see the President whose entire life can be cherry-picked from various servers and datacenters. So we can add porn preferences (Hi Senator Cruz!) to list of non-issues people use when choosing the leader of the free world!

Anthony Weiner is another example, albeit more "stupid" than "matter of course" given today's casual "life online" du jour.

The documentary ("Wiener" IIRC) about his run for mayor is pretty good.

Like a train crash in slow motion - good.

Re: AIM will be discontinued today

#235

Post by ryukafalz »

tunesmith wrote: post #182

One thing I'll miss about AIM is that it's a communication modality that doesn't exist right now. It was everywhere, and on MacOS it was integrated into the OS. For most people I knew, they had it set to join when they got on the computer. So it meant that you knew when your friends were at the computer, and you knew when you could have long "in the background" conversations with your friends. It was just a different…

XMPP still supports this - mobile clients can self-report as such (most do), and desktop clients usually display whether someone's logged in from a mobile client or not.

Re: AIM will be discontinued today

#236

Post by nyolfen »

esotericsean wrote: post #224
veridies wrote: post #207

I still used AIM up until today. My friends and I just switched over to a private XMPP server, and we've been using Pidgin/Adium anyway, so it's not a huge change. AIM has been extremely reliable, I've been able to use it on every platform I've ever owned (usually with free software), and it's easy to end-to-end encrypt messages. My friends and I just never saw a reason to move away from AIM. Everyone just decided to…

You'll still be able to use AIM if you setup a private server? I need to look into this.

no, xmpp is not aim

Re: AIM will be discontinued today

#237

Post by Cknight70 »

nasredin wrote: post #218
Cknight70 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the reason I'm still using Winamp. Its aged surprisingly well and it has more features than a lot of modern media players.

Winamp 2 or 5? Version 5 kinda sucks.

Maybe its because I don't know what I'm missing, but I didn't start using Winamp until version 5, and I think its great. Sure it has a lot of unnecessary or even broken features (looking at you audio converter), but those are easy to ignore and you can even remove some of them.

Re: AIM will be discontinued today

#238

Post by wl »

wil421 wrote: post #233
tunesmith wrote: post #182

One thing I'll miss about AIM is that it's a communication modality that doesn't exist right now. It was everywhere, and on MacOS it was integrated into the OS. For most people I knew, they had it set to join when they got on the computer. So it meant that you knew when your friends were at the computer, and you knew when you could have long "in the background" conversations with your friends. It was just a different…

We have cellphones now no need to know when someone is online. AIM and AOL before it were great when you don’t have text. No one needs that now when you have texts app or snap chat. The one thing I do miss are times when you could just find a random classmates username and message them. When you do this with text it can be a little more awkward if you don’t know each other. Why do you need to know if a freind is only…

The point is that with AIM (or instant messenger, generally), you knew who was up for chatting. If someone wasn't up for chatting, they either would have an away message or wouldn't be signed on at all. Sure, I can text my friends at any hour. But they might be out at dinner. Or at a concert. Or trying to sleep.

Re: AIM will be discontinued today

#239

Post by veridies »

esotericsean wrote: post #224
veridies wrote: post #207

I still used AIM up until today. My friends and I just switched over to a private XMPP server, and we've been using Pidgin/Adium anyway, so it's not a huge change. AIM has been extremely reliable, I've been able to use it on every platform I've ever owned (usually with free software), and it's easy to end-to-end encrypt messages. My friends and I just never saw a reason to move away from AIM. Everyone just decided to…

You'll still be able to use AIM if you setup a private server? I need to look into this.

As nyolfen mentioned, XMPP is just a competing, decentralized protocol for AIM-like chat. It has a similar feature set and works with most third-party AIM clients.

Re: AIM will be discontinued today

#240

Post by bargl »

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…

This is interesting. Did you pay for your conversations? I mean yeah you generated them but I don't expect to get conversations I've had via phone back and I'm paying for that service.

I think the idea of ownership is interesting here. I don't disagree that you should own it but then wouldn't you need to pay for it? Or did you pay for it by letting them sell your data to third party vendors? In that case, yeah you paid for it. What about Hacker News? Can you export your conversations here? Should you be able to? Meh, sorry mid-day musings.

Post reply on HN