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When AIM Was Our Facebook
Hugh Pickens writes "Gizmodo reports that there was a stretch of time in the 90s and early 00s when AOL was a social requisite. 'Everyone had an AIM handle,' write Adrian Covert and Sam Biddle. 'You didn't have to worry about who used what. Saying "what's your screenname" was tantamount to asking for someone's number — everyone owned it, everyone used it, it was simple, and it worked.' When we all finally got broadband, it was always on and your friends were always right there on your buddy list, around the clock. AIM was the first time that it felt like we had presences online, making it normal, for the first time ever, to make public what you were doing. 'Growing up with AIM, it became more than just a program we used. It turned into a culture all its own—long before we realized we'd been living it.'"
While something as ordinary as being on AIM might at first appear trivial(and indeed might well be), things like this can have subtle but profound effects on society at large.
The best examples of this come from around the turn of the last century. Various mechanical and electrical devices changed people's lives in small but significant ways, for example, the lightbulb(or gas lamp), and the sewing machine.
In the last ten years, the mass uptake of the Internet is certainly a socially and culturally significant invention; and--shallow as they are--services like AIM played a part in familiarising people with, and forming their expectations of, this new medium.
Personally, I think contrasting AIM and Facebook is important as AIM was a more straightforward, simple application. Its simplicity allowed it to be widely used, but also encouraged people to explore other parts of the web as it matured. Facebook by contrast is an all singing, all dancing Walled Garden, whose stated objective is to keep people on its site, and its site alone, for as long as possible.
Thus, the experiences of new internet users now are profoundly different to those of new users even 10 years ago. Todays internet is less like a multi-way chatroom where you choose the topic of the conversation, and more like a one way television channel, where you can happen to post the odd message in your own little sandboxed corner.
There is a deeper shift going on in the web, and while they may not seem useful to engineering mind, only "intellectuals" of the philosophical and sociological variety are equipped to understand, analyse and explain this shift and its implications. If there are any of course.
May the Maths Be with you!
There was no one technology in the nineties that dominated- many technologies achieved supremacy only to be replaced by a similar but different technology a year later.
IRC was never mainstream popular- its dominance was due to the tech-savvy adopting it, rather than because the masses used it. The masses wouldn't know what efnet or dalnet were, or how to find a good list or IRC servers for given networks. The tech-savvy also were the ones who adopted ICQ. The mainstream used AIM, Yahoo Pager, and later MSN Messenger, and that's why those took off- there was no number versus name, no obfuscated configuring or servers, it just required you to register for a username, then use that to log in.
Technology's success appears to be based on accessibility- Microsoft, and to an extent, Apple, see success because their OSes are preloaded so the average idiot user can unbox the new computer, plug it in, and just start playing. Linux doesn't enjoy that preloaded userbase, which explains why the various distributions still fit a niche market. This is also partially why during the antitrust suits against Microsoft, companies like AOL worked hard to get their main software and their other products like AIM preloaded as part of the agreement, and is also probably why Microsoft makes it damn difficult to get MSN Messenger to go away.
I'm guessing that accessibility is why Facebook is doing well at the moment. For awhile it was the place for college kids, which of course meant that high school kids wanted to be on. That drove demand, so when they opened it up to everyone, everyone tried it out, and finding everyone on, it was easy to get people to stay, at least for the moment. I'm sure that it'll change too, as they'll break something at an inopportune moment and a newer, "better" (and I use the term loosely) thing will come along and steal their userbase. That's what seems to always happen, after all.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
While I agree with what you say, I would like to point out that at its prime, AOL had almost 30 million subscribers in the US when our country's entire population was 270m (give or take a few).
In 1997, when AIM was released as a standalone application, AOL already had 11% of the US population use their service at a time when only 22% of that same population was online. That means that at it's peak AIM had 50% (15m) of active American internet users using it. Now compare that to Facebook's recent estimate of about 45% (115m), despite the 100million more users Facebook has, a lot of that can be attributed to penetration of 'net users.)
Just because you didn't use it, doesn't mean it wasn't the clear cut winner in the US for communication standard.