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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.
'90s kid me sheds a tear.
..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~
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.
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
When it shuts down, everyone better hear a door closing noise if they're logged in.