Slashdot Mirror
AOL Locks Out AIM Screen Names
dshaw858 writes "According to a story on eWeek, AOL has mistakenly suspended a very large number of AOL Instant Messenger (one of the most widely used IM programs) accounts, by mistake. I don't know about you guys, but this happened to me and a large percentage of friends and coworkers. AOL says that a fix should be ready by Monday."
If they'd mistakenly suspended those accounts on purpose, I'd be really worried about it!
fish and pipes
I knew I should have opened the attachment on that e-mail which AOL was tracking to make sure my account was tracking :(
wtf? u2?
Bah, who needs AIM? I build my own IM clients out of Lego.
UTF-8: There and Back Again
I can vouch that this was indeed the case. Two of the handful of screenames I use on a regular basis were being punted at stage two of the sign in with an error about the account being suspended.
The box had a little "More Info" button that I clicked on that was supposed to explain why my account had been suspended. Two of them had to do with actual AOL accounts (mine are AIM only), the third had to do with being less than 13 (I can buy beer), and the last was a "you violated the TOS" option.
Dunno what happended, but as of last night, all of my screen namers were back up and running. The disconnections seemed to have no relation to the e-mail address they were registered to or when the last time I used them was.
*shrug*
Workplace productivity grows by leaps and bounds for a three day stretch.
Don't Crease the Weasel!
AIM users might be forced into interacting with real people for a whole weekend...
No, wait. There's still TV.
Around here (Iowa), we (and by that i mean my generation -- i'm 18 years old) started out on MSN Messenger. This was in, i don't know, maybe grade five for us 'early adopters' and then six or seven for everybody else. MSN was the thing in my area for all of my friends to use. I don't know why exactly we all started using it (because i'm pretty sure back then MSN wasn't bundled with Windows yet), but we did.
One of my friends went off and found some on-line friends, probably computer-game buddies or something, and because of those friends he started using AIM. After that, he slowly started converting everybody else he (and the rest of us) knew to AIM, and after that everybody pretty much used both.
In secondary school, all of us nerdy types started using Trillian, which pretty much made specific protocols meaningless. Today, most of my friends (both on-line and off-line) have both, whether they use Trillian/Miranda/whatever or not. Probably 3/4 of the ones who don't have AIM only. The other fourth have MSN only.
Currently, MSN is becoming really really popular with the people i'm friends with for some reason, probably because of all the fancy doo-dads they're including now like themes and custom emoticons and big avatars (and i suppose the latter two are actually kind of neat, from a having-fun perspective).
I don't know if this is the norm for my area, but (to generalise) it seems like the more intelligent people are starting to flock to MSN. Whereas a few years ago your typical MSN screen name would be (8)(8)(8)(8)ju$+in CRAWLING IN MY SKIN THESE WOUNDS THEY WILL NOT HEAL FEAR IS HOW I FALL CONFUSING WHAT IS REAL sandy i luv u(8)(8)(8)(8), people are actually starting to be, you know, not retarded about it. e.g., they'll just use their name or their handle instead of putting an entire song in it. I don't know, maybe that's just a sign of increased maturity. It applies to younger kids (still in high school) that i know, too, though, so who knows.
ON THE OTHER HAND, the trendy girls and all the boys who try to hit on them, the kind of people i'd call 'preps', who listen exclusively to top-40 radio and wear Abercrombie and Fitch, stick with Yahoo!'s messenger. I don't really know why -- Y!IM is hideous and bloated, but OK. My little brothers and sisters use Y!IM, and they have, you know, 9084058940809345 different buddies and every single one of them has a screen name like the ridiculous one i described above, except of course it's Nelly lyrics or something. These are the kids who can't spell 'you'.
I suppose maybe one factor that contributed to the adoption of Y!IM by the middle-schoolers and freshmen in my area was the fact that Y!IM has a built-in radio thing, which means they can sit there and listen to 50 Cent while they're chatting about LOL SHUTUP SUK MY KOK GURL.
Just thought you'd be interested in hearing about the social break-down in relation to instant messengers in my area!