AIM will shut down after 20 years • Hacker News Board

Re: AIM will shut down after 20 years

#251

Post by chiefalchemist » Fri, Oct 06, 2017, 10:46 PM UTC

wpietri wrote: post #212

jhayward wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they literally killed their own golden goose with stupidity I think this statement misleads readers. Was there organizational stupidity? Always, in every organization. What kept AOL from capitalizing on messaging and social media was lock-in to the subscriber business model, which when combined with market defined quarter-to-quarter EBIDTA driven board goals did not permit leaping at what the people at the core of…

Huh. Do you think investors are happy with how it turned out? Is there any significant interest group that's happy with how it turned out? If not, I'd have a hard time calling that smart. I get that the people with power may have maximized their personal short-term financial outcomes. Which is certainly one way to define smart. But it strikes me as a very narrow one. Look at Bezos, for example. He's spent the last co…

True. But aside from Amazon who has gotten away with that? Yes, it's a great example. But it's an outlier's outlier.

Re: AIM will shut down after 20 years

#252

Post by zanny » Fri, Oct 06, 2017, 10:48 PM UTC

micv wrote: post #192

jessriedel wrote: post #92

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…

I suspect the answer is money. Well-funded corporations can and do push their fancy, new messaging platforms hard enough to crowd out any emerging open standard, but they certainly have no intention of paying anything more than lip service to the idea of interoperability. They want to own all of this and turn it into cold, hard cash. Who's going to develop the next big, open standard when WhatsApp can turn into billi…

Matrix already exists and works really well. It has at least three homeserver implementations and at least four usable client apps.

Re: AIM will shut down after 20 years

#253

Post by chiefalchemist » Fri, Oct 06, 2017, 10:52 PM UTC

ImSkeptical wrote: post #152

SapphireSun wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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's not required that successful businesses blow themselves up, but if they do make poor choices, they will suffer, and perhaps pay with their existence, for those choices.

It's not required. But just the same it should always be a what-if possibility. I'd say the poor choices come from a tunnel vision approach to those decisions.

Ultimately, in the context ans scope they are made, they are probably great decisions. However, reality is more far reaching.

Re: AIM will shut down after 20 years

#254

Post by zanny » Fri, Oct 06, 2017, 10:56 PM UTC

donatj wrote: post #132

I'm fairly torn up about this. A lot of my friends today were "internet randos" I started up chats with on AOL in the late 90s. There is a pretty large number of additional internet rando's from my youth whom I haven't spoken to in years where my only connection is their AIM screenname. I still use Adium connected to AIM just waiting for any of them to pop on. For many of them, I never knew their real name, only thei…

This is what bums me out. I went down my AIM contact list when I got this news and realized I had fond memories of people from the 00s that I will never be able to find again because there is no name attached to their AIM.

But at the same time, that detachment was what made those interactions magical. I knew people by screen name, not real name. They weren't constrained by what their lives meant offline because all they were online was what they made that screenname out to be. Getting into the Internet i the late 90s / early 2000s was like another world because of how detached from boring reality it was.

That being said, the Internet has only really gotten better for weirdos. There is everything from decades old niche website forums to subreddits to new stuff like Matrix rooms for almost any subject.

Re: AIM will shut down after 20 years

#255

Post by zanny » Fri, Oct 06, 2017, 11:01 PM UTC

hackbinary wrote: post #26

What I do not understand is how has AOL Messenger, MSN Messenger, Skype, ICQ, and Google Chat all managed to be displaced by Whatsapp? I guess it is loss of 'business focus', but the idea of a "messenging app" is incredibly simple, so one would think it would be simple enough to do.

I know Whatsapp apparently has a ton of users but I honestly know nobody that has ever used it. A lot of Discord, Telegram, Facebook Messenger, a little Hangouts, and back in the day MSM, Yahoo Messenger, and AIM. I guess I missed that step in the ladder or something. Same with SMS - from the time I made the leap to Smartphones there were already enough general XMPP clients / Hangouts was good enough to never think about using a third party, especially proprietary, service like that.

My understanding is Whatsapp took off outside the US entirely because it seamlessly used SMS when data was unavailable and that was certainly a killer feature in many parts of the world.

Re: AIM will shut down after 20 years

#256

Post by Zarel » Fri, Oct 06, 2017, 11:01 PM UTC

th1nkdifferent wrote: post #244

dredmorbius wrote: post #238

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.

"correct horse battery staple" doesn't fit in 16 characters, and has has much better recall than basically all similarly-secure passwords that do.

Longer passwords let you optimize passwords for ease of recall and security, rather than fitting in arbitrary requirements.

Re: AIM will shut down after 20 years

#257

Post by zanny » Fri, Oct 06, 2017, 11:03 PM UTC

zghst wrote: post #6

Just imagine 20 years down the line, all of the products of today that will shut down.

I'm hoping Matrix at least might stay around and evolve into something pervasive like SMTP, but not as shitty. Right now its a great API to implement and use in my experience.

Re: AIM will shut down after 20 years

#258

Post by zanny » Fri, Oct 06, 2017, 11:05 PM UTC

sakebomb wrote: post #23

Hopefully they open source the code for it. They have for so many other things: https://github.com/aol

It would be really amazing to learn from, especially to see whatever kind of source control (or lack thereof) they were using in the 90s.

Re: AIM will shut down after 20 years

#259

Post by acdha » Fri, Oct 06, 2017, 11:10 PM UTC

astrodust wrote: post #193

jroseattle wrote: post #162

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.

It’s not just first mover: Flickr was doing great until they were bought by Yahoo, which was a decade into the management vacuum by that point, and AOL was doing their best to make Yahoo’s management look visionary and competent.

In both cases the message I take is that a good team can’t make up for executives who don’t know what their business model is. Management by oh-shiny! and laying off people until a spreadsheet column is positive will trump lower level competence every time.

Re: AIM will shut down after 20 years

#260

Post by lightedman » Fri, Oct 06, 2017, 11:13 PM UTC

choko wrote: post #79

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #14

Pity. I spent many, many hours on AIM in my youth. Cultivated friendships, relationships, and many other one-off contacts. I suppose it has been made obsolete now by Facebook and other social media apps, but those were never truly replacements for AIM in my mind, as most of them have eschewed the venerable screen name in favor of your real name or e-mail address. And for the vast majority of people I talk to online,…

ICQ lives on as well, though not under the original management. The account I created in the 90s still works.

Just fired up ICQ - looks like Telegram, actually has a usable buddy list and voice and video chats, but unless you were one to have signed up pre-smartphone life they now require you to use your phone number for registration. Thankfully I signed up long, long ago. Almost 20 years ago.