241–250 of 345 posts
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ICQ lives on as well, though not under the original management. The account I created in the 90s still works.
Isn't it hosted on the AIM server though?
It'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…
I think the whole point of having email is for communication where you'd expect responses on this timescale (for reasons outside of communication protocol used). Some questions just take time. The immediacy of instant messaging puts pressure to respond quickly.
Even for personal communication, if I want to write a longer letter, I don't get to do it every day.
On that note, none of the current IM clients are suitable for long messages. Even your comment is too long to be comfortably sent in an IM. There's a whole infrastructure around emails that make them suitable for long messages: drafts (so you can work on an email over the span of days), editing/formatting, and so on.
Then there's flexibility of the message being a unit of communication, rather than the chatroom. Your response can selectively quote parts of a message, being sent to a a part of the group, be forwarded. It's not easy to do with IM's.
But in the end, I do think that the non-instantaneous nature of email is the reason why people use it: IM's for short, fast responses, and emails for "...I'll answer it tomorrow".
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Unless you're using a very constrained character set then 16 characters is pretty strong in my books. What's your threat model?
NIST guidelines are for a minimum length of 8 characters and a maximum length of no fewer than 64 characters . What is your basis for suggesting anything less than those guidelines is sufficient? https://pages.nist.gov/800-63-3/ https://qz.com/981941/the-us-standards-office-wants-to-do-aw...
I worked at AOL years ago when the company announced internally that the product would not be extended, but that the service would remain online. I was headed to the main campus (Dulles) when the announcement was made. Internally, they dismissed the entire AIM product engineers and management, and simply retained operational people to keep the lights on. Walking up to the floor where the AIM crew was working was cree…
It's a shame, really, as AIM could have easily evolved into Slack for family/friends connections all along a spectrum of casual to intimate. It's like how Flickr couldn't make a mobile app and Instagram happened, or how Digg fumbled so badly Reddit came out of nowhere. First mover advantage is only important in the initial cycle. Once the market matures it's a huge liability.
What a golden thread. Something tells me I will be writing similar eulogies after twenty years about facebook and whatsapp.
But I'm already writing a eulogy for Skype. Skype is a zombie. The current offering is wearing the skin of Skype, the real deal was P2P.
I still use Skype heavily for group chat with friends (we have a chat thread that's not missed a day since 2010, and has people joining and leaving every year) and videocalls (my family is spread across the continent). But I fear that a stray update could take the functionality I need away. With how MS kills their products, it can just happen one day.
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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.
I left in 2016 and in practice we just didn't use email at all because it was so painful to use.
5 years ago, aol still used aim internally for everything that people use slack for today. Group chats, bots, notifications for builds, etc, etc. Then gradually individual teams picked up slack and within maybe 18 months, we went from 100% aim to a gigantic corporate slack team. That was the end of AIM, I think. Aol and yahoo both use gmail internally so I suspect they’re going to shitcan their email services eventua…
> That was the end of AIM, I think. Aol and yahoo both use gmail internally so I suspect they’re going to shitcan their email services eventually, too. Man, that would be an absolute disaster. I have so many contacts who I can only through Yahoo and AOL email addresses. I guess I should reach out to all of them before they are disappeared. ;- )
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It is hard to move the ball forward when you reorg every year and have minor layoffs almost every year to keep OIBDA moving in the right direction so the execs get larger bonuses. So many people were in self preservation mode with no interest in anything that was "risky" and might put their bonus at risk. Similar things happened with how they managed MapQuest. Also, if you think they missed a chance on AIM, it is not…
> It is hard to move the ball forward when you reorg every year and have minor layoffs almost every year to keep OIBDA moving in the right direction so the execs get larger bonuses. Is there a an established term for this already? If not I'd like to call it stock market disease due to the usual reason for it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
NIST guidelines are for a minimum length of 8 characters and a maximum length of no fewer than 64 characters . What is your basis for suggesting anything less than those guidelines is sufficient? https://pages.nist.gov/800-63-3/ https://qz.com/981941/the-us-standards-office-wants-to-do-aw...
You should try plotting ease of recall vs the size of password. You will quickly realize there is a long tail beyond 16 characters.