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RIP AIM: AOL Instant Messenger Dies in December (usatoday.com)
It's the end of an era: as of December 15, AOL's Instant Messenger will no longer exist. From a report: In a statement from Oath, the new entity formed under Verizon combining AOL with the recently-acquired Yahoo, the service will be discontinued. "AIM tapped into new digital technologies and ignited a cultural shift, but the way in which we communicate with each other has profoundly changed," said Michael Albers, VP of Communications Product at Oath. AIM was a staple of personal computers since first launching in 1997, serving as a precursor to popular apps like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. However, AIM couldn't make the seamless transition to mobile, where most users rely on instant messaging services. Users will be able to manually download any images or files on AIM before the service shuts down. However, users won't be able to export or save their Buddy List, the group of contacts available on AIM.
I honestly thought it had died years ago.
Where then?
A billion dollar company cant afford to keep a few pentium4 servers, but they could when it was a million dollar company ?
at least opensource it and let the domains go so others can carry on, or was the whole thing just a waste of a few million peoples lives and cash ?
I'll miss all my buddies.
Haven't used in almost a decade. Would've been nice if they'd spun it off instead of killing something still used by millions though. (quoted as single-digit millions by someone from AOL back in February)
There is no XUL, only WebExtensions...
i'd expected Verizon to kill it on Oath-Day-One in favor of their cool new 10ct/text plans...
Bury it under the prison.
'90s kid me sheds a tear.
"However, users won't be able to export or save their Buddy List
The point of being able to export or save a list of "screen names" for a service that no longer exists would be what exactly anyway? People who had contacts that were actual AOL users probably have them as e-mail contacts anyway in whatever e-mail app they use.
I mean I guess take a screenshot for posterity, if you feel like waxing nostalgic about all those conversations you had on AIM at some point in the future.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
..I am old. I remember ICQ and all the rest, too. Fuck, now I need some 18 year old scotch to help me forget. :-p
Dream as if you'll live forever.
Live as if you'll die tomorrow.
~Anonymous~
AIM was a staple of personal computers since first launching in 1997
Well... no. IRC started nearly 10 years before that, so AIM was a late comer. IRC was where all the cool people were. AIM was to IM what AOL was to the internet: a dumbed down non-federated service for the post-eternal-september crowd who didn't know any better, and mostly thought the internet was AOL. The intelligent discussion, and almost everything technical, was happening on IRC. Not to mention that anyone could start their own IRC server.
Coincidentally, IRC is still going, and AIM is now dead.
...the market they helped define got filled up by better or more ubiquitous options.
Personal messaging: Texting or social media. Everybody I know has a phone now. And if you use Facebook/Twitter, you're already connected to a majority of people you know.
Work messaging: Newer apps like Slack that management settles on for everyone.
I've used it within the past 2 years, and I still had people on my buddy list who would pop up from time to time that dated back 15-18 years.
Honestly the bad part for me, between this and YIM's effective closure between the horrible YIM change and the server hacking is that lots of people I had no other way to contact will have become impossible to contact now. Not that it is a huge loss since most of them were only contacting me when it convenienced them, but it is still a loss, especially since I am not on social media and have gone to a great deal of care to keep my RL and my OL lives separate making it almost impossible to find me without certain venues online, most of the others of which have already died out.
Do u cyber?
About the only people still using AIM are commodities traders. You heard that right. There are thousands of traders right now sending frantically typed emails to their IT department demanding they continue to support AIM. How do I know? I've gotten a few hundred of them. They don't care that the service is shutting down because they don't understand how these chat programs work. They just know that they broker million dollar deals over this free chat system. AOL lost the ability to monetize the system once third parties clients, which didn't display the ads AIM did, came out. I suspect, but have no evidence, some of the trading exchanges eventually started paying AOL to keep the service going since so many of their customers rely on it. There's been talk for years of moving to something else but the chicken and egg syndrome is a hard egg to crack. To switch, so do all of your contacts. That would require the industry and all the companies in it to switch simultaneously. When was the last time you saw any big company do anything swiftly and simultaneously with not one but thousands of other companies?
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
Why not Open Source this and Classic Yahoo? Allow people to start their own OSCAR Services the AIM or YIM Clients are compatible with, but, change the host name to whatever you want?
Currently, YIM is inoperative on Pidgin, soon AIM will be too. For Pidgin, this really doesn't matter. Some people liked the AIM and YIM Client software, a compatible "gateway" with connections to XMPP or Slack as a backend.
I get it AOL/Oath doesn't want to maintain the service. Open Source it, and let independent organizations host their own.
I've kept active on this service for many years now, through third party clients like Pidgin in Linux. I've never been a supporter of AOL, but use of the AIM service was almost standard for a while there, and I've since used it to converse with a number of friends who have thus far refused to embrace many other options. With the death of AIM, there's a real chance that my communication with some of these stubborn friends will take a step backward to indirect, less immediate interaction such as email. The only consolation of all of this, strangely, is that one of the main persons I've kept in most frequent contact with through AIM just got himself a prison sentence of a duration I'm not yet certain of (possibly multi year), so I've unexpectedly just lost one of my main needs for the service already this last month. So, strangely good timing, but really it is overall unfortunate, especially since they should just hand the service over to the open source crowd and let it grow in unexpected ways or die naturally, rather than just killing off something that not everyone has an acceptable alternative to.
https://imgflip.com/i/1x5wmf
#DeleteFacebook
AIM is essentially the last of the truly free services to go, at least services as widely used as this one was. Now you either pay up in cash, or essentially whore yourself out in the form of mined data.
....when they stopped allowing 3rd party applications (e.g Pidgin) to connect (yes, they actively started doing that) they pushed away the last remaining users.
I've had Pidgin on/off my 3 accounts over the last 15+ years. Haven't touched AOL's actual software in longer than that. Oh well...FB, G+/Hangouts and IRC FTW.
(I'd say Skype to...but I can't get into my Skype account since Microsoft linked it to their accounts...)
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
Wait... I thought AIM disappeared off of the planet when everyone switched from AIM to ICQ about 20 years ago. It was a very fast transition. Like ... one day everyone was on AIM, and then the next day nobody listed AIM in their sigs anymore, and everybody was using ICQ. It was eerie.
p.s. I assume ICQ still uses "Uh oh" as its new message sound, but it's been 16 years since I used ICQ, so things might have changed.
And in 1998 corporate IT departments were busy trying to eradicate AOL from office computers because the AOL installation process replaced many Windows drivers with their own AOL-eccentric drivers. To IT departments, AOL was more like malware in that it took over the computer, thus AOL was banned from most workplaces.
When Time-Warner and AOL merged back in 2000, one of the conditions forced on the merger by the FTC was that AOL had to make AIM compatible with other IM systems. Remember at the time of the merger, the majority of internet users (esp AOL) were still on dial up and TW cable was one of the few providers with an intact network poised to bring high speed internet to the masses. FTC officials feared that the merger of the world's largest internet company and the world's largest cable provider would put too much power in the hands of a single company. TW/AOL never did make a good faith effort to open AIM to IM rivals which was one reason they never made the transition to mobile - they resisted the urge to let AOL members to breach the "walled garden" of AOL, because advertising revenue inside that garden was their dominant monetizing strategy.
Another condition that the FTC imposed was that TW had to open their network to competitors like EarthLink before AOL could be made available on their cable pipelines. TW/AOL never made that compromise, so AOL was stuck in dial-up.
I was never fond of AOL because of their over-aggressive marketing, but I was never short on drink coasters from their CD-ROMs. They always arrived free in the mail and you could readily find them at the post office.
Eternity: will that be smoking, or non-smoking? I Corinthians 6:9-10
The only thing that's going to be left of AOL is a huge pile of CDs in a landfill somewhere just like the Atari E.T.
Anyone with an @aim address can continue using that email address: https://help.aol.com/articles/...
We usedat work until 6m ago when lur auditing software stopped supporting it
I just signed up for an account on AIM last night. I need a messenger program on the PC to chat with my woman in private. Microsoft has messed Skype up so badly it is now practically unusable.
Oh well, any recommendations? Something off the beaten trail but can do chat and send photographs? Maybe a few emojis tossed in as well.
Caution: Contents under pressure
I use my AIM account to talk to maybe 1-2 people on their cellphones when I'm at my desktop because Pidgin is running on a Linux distro on a netbook a buddy gave me. I could use my cell, but I hate screen typing when I can use a real keyboard as an alternative. It's faster and muuuuuch more accurate.
What other service that Pidgin connects to will allow me to effectively text said people as I have been doing?
So in December can we rename Pidgin back to GAIM?
I started using AIM in 1998, around the time I graduated from high school.
I did a study abroad while in college. It was the most cost effective way to have a semi real time chat with friends/family back here in the States.
AIM was to IM what AOL was to the internet: a dumbed down non-federated service [...] anyone could start their own IRC server.
But how easily can users on one network of IRC servers talk to users on another network, such as EFnet to Freenode?
A third-party plug-in for Pidgin supports Skype.
When it shuts down, everyone better hear a door closing noise if they're logged in.
I don't know how they are connected.
Could log into AIM with my e-mail but what I want to do is find my ICQ UIN and see if I can find an old friend there.
Teach an algorithm to read peoples contacts and buddy lists off screen on AIM and export information to text on users computer then put said algorithm in a python program and let people download and for the non programmer types out there a secure site that can do the same just saving the contacts ti clipboard & if chosen a cloud storage service
I run a private IRC network for about a dozen of my friends. I cannot do that with YIM or AIM or the others.
So how do "a dozen of [your] friends" communicate with others who don't use your network? As far as I can tell, they'd have to add another IRC server to their copies of Pidgin, just as they'd have to add Skype or whatever to Pidgin.
IRC handles multiple devices just fine.
I thought privileges in a channel were associated with a nickname, and only one connection to a server could use a particular nickname at once. What IRC server software doesn't have this limit? And what IRC server software stores and allows retrieval of a log of older messages, stores and allows retrieval of binary attachments, or allows the owner of a set of related channels (a "server" on Discord) to synchronize users' privileges across them? I ask because I'm trying to build a plan to move a few communities I'm in from proprietary stacks (Skype, Slack, Discord) to IRC without losing features on which we depend.