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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.'"
He must have lived in a parallel universe. In the 90s it was IRC.
I had a 5 digit ICQ number, and was a regular on the Compuserve CB simulator... AIM being old school..... PfffT!
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
there was a stretch of time in the 90s and early 00s when AOL was a social requisite. "Everyone had an AIM handle
Bullshit. I bet the authors thought AOL invented Usenet in Sept. 1993 as well.
Trolling is a art,
Nostalgic about AIM are we?
My god, if I don't put a message in my .plan, people might wonder why I'm out of the office.
All requests to VMS PHONE will go unanswered.
--
BMO
AIM was powered by a server and protocol called OSCAR: the Open System for Communication in Realtime. Ironically, this protocol was about as closed and proprietary as you can get, and required reverse engineering over a span of years before AOL released TOC (Talk to Oscar) and TOC2 to developers.
Didn't Facebook just recently call their datacenter architecture "open" too?...
there was a stretch of time in the 90s and early 00s when AOL was a social requisite. "Everyone had an AIM handle,"
I think you misspelled "stigma". I was an ICQ user back when they were still just a small Russian outfit and became super-crappy. But I still didn't use AIM because it was associated with AOL, and figured that AIM users should just have a big "L" on their forehead. :)
Much later, I installed GAIM and then put into it my ICQ, Yahoo! and AIM account (reluctantly signed up). Then GAIM was renamed to something else... then I realized I didn't want or need instant messaging much anymore and uninstalled it.
These days the only IM I use is Google Talk (via browser) or Skype client. [oblig. get off my lawn]
I only post comments when someone on the internet is wrong.
Now you got your fancy computers, and your cellphones, and your automobiles. In MY day, if you wanted to socialize, you had to ride your mule to a barn dance. And you had to walk in smelling like a mule and actually *talk* with a bunch of illiterates who also smelled like mules. AND WE WE BETTER FOR IT!
I'll tell you damned kids the same thing my grandpa once told me: "Now you got your fancy barn dances, and your mules..."
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
people are rude and feel they have to rip everyone apart
Fuck off.
bR.
Trolling is a art,
That isn't the point of this article.
Of course AIM didn't invent messaging. But AIM is what made it accessible to non-geeks.
I was watching movies on my computer 8 years ago, but Netflix lets my Mom do it. In the same way, I hand an IRQ account in 1992 (which did *not* make me a pioneer) but it wall all computer voodoo to my friends and relatives until AIM arrived in their physical mail a couple years later as part of their AOL cd.
AOLers...and those who ruthlessly teased AOLers. Back then, anyone with a "real" reason to be on the internet had serviceable IT skills (and at least one other account than their home access). AOLers were the drooling masses so to speak. They were a clueless and rare sight, like a coyote darting across the highway on your drive to work and our minds, just as oblivious to disaster.
But, that era birthed one of my favorite memes:
</AOL>
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Just as I now shun having a facebook account, AIM was what I shunned back in the day.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Remember when talking to someone face-to-face was our facebook?
Yeah, it was much better back then. No constant worrying about our collective statuses and what we did over the weekend that was fun to do in real life. We just got together and did things TOGETHER, in real life.
Life was much more enriching when you actually looked the person in the eye you were talking to, and had an actual CONVERSATION.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
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!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Why is this on /.? For people who thought (like "Good Morning America") that AOL was synonymous with "Internet" it might be appropriate but for the rest of us (and the early adopters of Slashdot) it was IRC and ICQ. We laughed at AOL and most of us tried to get any friends off of it as quickly as possible. Some of us even started local ISPs just so they could actually get onto the Internet. This sort of article might be appropriate for the New Yorker or Wall Street Journal but for Slashdot it's drivel.
No one ever had to evacuate a city because the solar panels broke!
Nostalgic for Usenet? Why? Did they turn it off?
Damn! I was just on it half an hour ago.
Have gnu, will travel.
Facebook uses non-federated XMPP. Google Talk, in contrast, uses federated XMPP. The difference? I run my own XMPP server, and I can chat to anyone using Google Talk. I can't chat to any Facebook users.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Another american-centric, narrow visioned piece, DESPITE there's nothing barring even americans from learning what is, and has happened outside their own country :
while you were all 'growing up with aim', rest of the world was growing up with ICQ. and i mean, the world. not a mere country.
i know you americans do not like being disturbed in your self-indulgence and being called out on your self-centeredness, but hey - someone has to do it, so you can integrate with the rest of the WORLD. yeah, you heard right - i said WORLD - there is a whole world out there in which a lot of things happen outside america.
Read radical news here
This is pretty well the exact sort of thing I think of whenever anyone tries to convince me that Facebook is the absolute end-all be-all pinnacle of social computing, will never EVER go away or be replaced, has way too much momentum to be stopped or made irrelevant, and is teh EVARYTHING!!!1! about being online. I just think back to how MySpace was exactly as unstoppable. Same with Friendster. Or LiveJournal. Or Geocities. Or MSN Messenger. Or AIM. Or ICQ. Or IRC. Or...
Demanding constant attention will only lead to attention.
I remember when AOL joined the Net:
- Before it was a community of mostly well behaved university students and teachers. Anybody coming into an existing online community (which at the time where mostly Usenet groups and mailing lists) quickly learned to be polite and RTFM/RTFF before asking stupid questions.
- Afterwards such was the influx of noobs, asshats and generally ignorant people that wouldn't be bothered to RTFM that most online communities ended up swamped and eventually destroyed by the suddenly much worse SnR due too many lazy people asking questings before reading the FAQ, spamming, misbehaviour and overall asshatery.
While the Net nowadays is way beyond our wildest dreams back then, the "Polite community" spirit was gone when AOL openned the floodgates.
I don't know about OP, but facebook scares the shit out of me. People don't respect privacy anymore. Remember when Blizzard's Real ID fiasco hit, and the various employee's family member's facebooks were scraped for personal information?
AIM wasn't so bad. You could make yourself invisible from people you didn't want to talk to. There was no way to google people's AIM information, you pretty much had to know their screen name first. There was no "wall" where everyone could read your conversations, it was pretty much all one-on-one private discussion.
But facebook encourages you to splatter your personal life on the Internet for Google to crawl and low-lifes like Aaron Barr to scrape.
:(){
The main thing I recall about AOL and AIM are the hundreds and hundreds of floppies and later on cds that would appear in the mail or in every magazine on the news stand (even completely non computer oriented ones). We used to have contests to find innovative uses for our AOL disk stashes. The floppies made great coffee coasters (they made for a good and free supply of floppies too for the unimaginative, just format and store something REALLY useful on them) :) Later on the CDs made Christmas tree ornaments and they could be melted and warped into a number of interesting and light catching shapes. CD's also made great coffee coasters, even better than the floppies.
You mean to tell me that intelligent people used to actually USE the software to communicate? Really? ;)
The Matrix is real... but I'm only visiting!
Like others have pointed out, this article is referring to when the general masses first moved to instant messaging and is not indicative of the /. crowd. Along those same lines, AIM wasn't really replaced by Facebook or any other computer based system. It really laid the ground work for the telecom cash cow of text messaging. Since not everyone was behind a keyboard/monitor at all times, texting offered a true "instant message." The old online instant messengers only got people used to the concept of conversing in short messages rather than calling them up on the phone.