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PSA: AIM Will Be Discontinued Tomorrow (fortune.com)
Cutting_Crew writes: Along with Yahoo Messenger, MSN Messenger and ICQ, I used AIM extensively (without an AOL subscription of course). AIM will finally come to a halt on December 15th, 2017, as reported a few months ago and explained in AOL fashion over on their website.
I remember using AIM to keep in touch with friends, co-workers and yes, even tried dating back in the day using the "looking for love" feature not only available to AOL subscribers but also extended to AIM users as well. Any memories you want to share? Speak now, or forever hold your peace.
...that I bought for Trillian several years ago. After AIM shuts down, I'll only be using Trillian for ICQ and Facebook Messenger.
"A Bird In The Hand Will Poop On Your Wrist"-Benny Hill,1982
This is Trumps fault.
Along with CompuServe forums shutting down and the end of net neutrality, the web has changed for the worse.
... instead of migrating users to a different service, maybe with an AOL skin over it?
Here's the irony -- @verizon.net email accounts were actually migrated to AOL's servers last spring.
I had several SNs (visibility settings came along much, much later). Virtually all my internet contacts prior to 2000 were listed on AIM, now to be no more. I'll always have fond memories of learning basic HTML to make a neat profile and the atrocity that was You've Got Mail, but one of the lasting contributions of AIM was literally creating out of whole cloth what people expect the UX of an instant messaging service to be like. (ICQ tried, and failed, to get any traction here in the West.) Heck, it spawned an entire field of linguistic study by providing a "medium" between live conversation and written, one-way email.
Onward to greener pastures, I guess: I hear interesting things about XMPP/Jabber.
Back in the day, AIM was infamous for being the place all the kiddie diddlers would hang out and try to snare their pray.
AOL's constant battle to draw the bottom feeders to their network was a success in more ways then one.
Lawyers, MBA's, RIAA? A jedi fears not these things!
A/S/L
You can use it to chat with Twitch even. And there's Freenode and several other places. I guess it's time to learn.
18/F/CA
When in reality:
42/m/MA
Bye Felicia!
While I never used AOL's messaging service, I did use the Pidgin multi-protocol client back when it was called gaim. And I remember the project basically going dark for a year because of AOL's legal team. Screw you, AOL.
You were the start of a great many things.
I feel old.
CompuServe, my friend.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
It is sad that older messenger programs were much more efficient and clean than newer ones. When power (both state and corporate) catches up with technology, it cuts its wings
Avantgarde Hebrew science fiction
Chirp... Chirp,,,
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
We... knew him.
Also, this is why I should never be the one to write the eulogy.
There is no XUL, only WebExtensions...
As I recall, you could identify if someone was online by the ability to view their 'profile', regardless of their apparent status.
There is no XUL, only WebExtensions...
Now it hurts when I pee...
Pidgin is rough around the edges.
A/S/L?
or
me too!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Remember 3/4 of PHP documentation was piped down AIM 15 years ago..
everything is a shitty mobile-only app with no desktop version. why do all you retards all want to sit around only typing on your phone's touchscreen.
Massachusetts? gross!
Anyone want to have one last chat over AIM before it shuts down in half an hour, IM me @ NeoGeo64 on AIM!
It's nice to close another chapter on Internet Training-Wheels.
In a world of the blind, the one-eyed man is king--and the two-eyed man is a heretic.
AIM is still up!
I remember in the late 1990's being a teen and downloading punters for AOL and using those punters to kick off other users from the service and laughing when I saw their usernames disappear and reappear. For those who don't remember punters were simple visual basic programs that exploited simple html codes to boot targeted users from the service over instant messenger.
This is the end of an era, I feel so old.
I registered an account in 1998, I still have it.. and use it. Before it was main chat tool for the companies I worked for. The employees had to have an account. I still see the same people online, even though I'm not working in those companies anymore.
.. .but from my perspective as a user, I don't see it any worse or better than any others out there.
Frankly, I don't know what kind of protocol it is, what servers they have
I use some xmpp accounts, and have OTR on top of that... it's no better than ICQ in any way (from my perspective as a user) and in fact, ICQ seem to be faster.
REMEMBER THE MURDER OF IAN MURDOCH, creator of Debian Linux and leading member of the Free Software community, killed Christmas 2015 by the notoriously corrupt San Francisco police department.
(5:37:41 PM) AOL System Msg: Final reminder: Effective tomorrow, December 15, 2017, AIM will no longer work and you will not be able to sign into any AIM software or apps. Thank you for being an AIM user - we loved working on this product for you. Learn more here: https://help.aol.com/articles/aim-discontinued.
It was a part of my childhood. AOL's chime will forever haunt my nightmares.
Why are PSA announcing this? What have they got to do with AIM?
it was down at 1 AM EST - and never to return again.
"Received unexpected response from https://api.screenname.aol.com...: Invalid DevId"
AIM was originally designed in secret and AOL execs wanted to kill it"
AIM was outdone by MSN Messenger which was fucked into Skype which is outdone by Discord which is outdone by adding Better Discord and tweaking the UI so it's the size of old MSN messenger.
And IRC is superior to all of them because of its simplicity.
I remember the first time I used AIM on a jailbroken 1st gen iPhone, not even 10 years ago. Mobile phones have taken over in the meantime, with better messaging platforms, but AIM never made the jump very cleanly from old-world desktops.
I started on ICQ, then moved to WIndows Messenger when my colleagues did.
Windows Messenger shut down a couple of years ago, now AIM. Where do we go?
A few people at work use Skype, often identified by loud screaming. And not only is Skype crap, it's Microsoft only, and we all know where that leads (see Windows 10).
So where to go?
Ideally we would like an open protocol and a local server. Pidgin supports both XMPP and SIMPLE, but I haven't been able to find a server that can be installed on our department Windows server, the ones that kinda support Windows come with a huge installation guide usually requiring some insecure version of Java,and manually forcing the executable to be a service.
I wrote an AIM client for the Cybiko Handheld Computer for Teens back in 2001. The Cybiko was toy of the year in 2000. It was a handheld computer with a full keyboard and GameBoy quality display. It also had a 2Ghz wireless connection so that up to 50 Cybikos could communicate. If you connected one Cybiko to your PC through the serial port, you could use my software to do AIM communication on one or several other Cybikos remotely. When smartphones came on the market the following year, the Cybiko died a quiet death and all the Cybiko staff migrated to game programming for flip phones. Greg Smith "Devcybiko"
Didn't that come with the AOL software in the tin can or the many hundreds I got in the mail years ago? Folks, please come up from the basement, there is a whole new internet out there now.