AIM will be discontinued today

https://help.aol.com/articles/aim-discontinued

374 264 9 years ago

help.aol.com

taurath• 9 years ago

End of an era... I remember buying a helio ocean over an original iphone because it had support for AIM.

freehunter2• 9 years ago

I had AIM-to-SMS set up so I could keep my chats going even on my flip phone, and then on Windows Mobile even if I didn't have data service. These days I can't even check Facebook unless I have LTE, if the phone says 4G I know I have no service.

Man how things change.

majewsky• 9 years ago

LTE equals 4G.

hkmurakami• 9 years ago

RIP.

Browsing friends' creative AIM away messages were the precursor to that Snapchat status(?) feature I hear about.

lode• 9 years ago

AIM Status messages were the original inspiration for Twitter, then twttr. See : https://www.flickr.com/photos/jackdorsey/182613360 - twttr sketch by founder Jack Dorsey.

toomanybeersies3• 9 years ago

It's amazing (disheartening?) to see Twitter evolve from the website where you could tell your friends that you were eating dinner, to a website where the President of the USA makes real policy announcements.

reaperducer2• 9 years ago

I guess he never fingered a .plan.

danielvf• 9 years ago

I wrote to own code to scrape my friend’s aim status, look for changes, slap them in a DB and then build a timeline web page out of them with PHP. I had my own twitter/facebook in 2000.

toomanybeersies3• 9 years ago

I presume you mean Snapchat stories?

In that case, it's a bit different. Snapchat (and Instagram) stories are a gallery of photos and videos that you upload, where the photos and videos are removed from the gallery after 24 hours. Essentially giving you a rolling 24 hour window into peoples lives.

I've become a big fan of instagram stories as a way of keeping up with what my friends are doing, since I've moved overseas. It feels a lot more appropriate than using something like a Facebook status to share what you're doing.

tantalor• 9 years ago

gallery of photos and videos that you upload, where the photos and videos are removed from the gallery after 24 hours

Ugh, really? That sounds like a lot of work. Pass.

jrdnbwmn• 9 years ago

AIM had a surprisingly large effect on all of today's social web: https://medium.com/@jrdnbwmn/the-legacy-of-aim-4321761ec9ff

IntelMiner• 9 years ago

Goodbye, AIM

You're not dead. Just set to away

tfmatt• 9 years ago

List of product deaths of the 90s this year:

1. Hotmail.com

2. Half.com

3. AIM

4. ?

Rest easy old friends

shak772• 9 years ago

Hotmail died this year? How?

staticelf2• 9 years ago

It didn't, it became outlook.

ChickeNES• 9 years ago

It's a shame they couldn't open source the original client and server software, would be interesting to preserve.

nerdponx2• 9 years ago

I had the same thought. Now that it's dead, maybe releasing/leaking the source would be legally defensible as fair use in the name of historical preservation.

exikyut3• 9 years ago

I wish the original AOL and CompuServe access clients and the servers could be opened as well.

c22• 9 years ago

The source is pointless. You can build a much better chat system on modern technology in a weekend. The lost value is in their centralized servers with thousands of existing accounts. I'd always thought services like AIM would be replaced by more decentralized systems, but instead we have even more segmented walled garden chat apps where you don't even get to use your own client.

exikyut3• 9 years ago

For reference, AOLserver (https://aolserver.github.io/) is an open source Tcl-scripted _Web_ server.

empath753• 9 years ago

Really unlikely to ever happen. I tried to get AOL to open source Q-link software from the 80s, when it was a bulletin board for commodore 64s and legal just sat on it for years until i gave up.

colomon• 9 years ago

Ha! Was just thinking about Q-link this morning. (Though I had to do a Google search just to figure out the name.) I was on it a bit the first few years, uploaded some software I'd written there, and was thinking it would be fun to have it back if the archives are still out there somewhere...

lelandgaunt• 9 years ago

Goodbye AIM, you were the catalyst to my Information Security career. Good times.

acjohnson55• 9 years ago

Truly sad. So much of my young social life was experienced through AIM. Screen names are still part of the identity of some of my friends. For some folks that have already passed, our last conversations are on AIM. Don't know what else to say, but it definitely feels like a link to another era of my life is fading away. Nothing is permanent.

RIP running man!

forgueam• 9 years ago

You summed up my feelings perfectly. So many notable moments in my life played out over AIM conversations, especially discussions with my girlfriend (now wife) when we were geographically separated during our college years.

pythonaut_16• 9 years ago

You just reminded my that my main screen name I use for everything was the one I originally came up with for AIM in like 16+ years ago.

AccountCreated• 9 years ago

Truly sad. So much of my young social life was experienced through AIM.

This could be read in more than one way. I agree it is sad.

Frondo2• 9 years ago

Nothing is permanent, exactly so.

Our ability to slog around drives full of data lets us gloss over this fact, but when we're dead, are our kids gonna keep slogging around our drives? Nah.

Better way to get permanence in your life is to do things that people will remember you for, if permanence is what you're after. Crowd-sourced in other people's memories.

ImSkeptical2• 9 years ago

That's why you need to keep it on some kind of cloud storage drive arranging an annuity or trust to keep paying the bills. Then, you have a script on a cloud server that posts on Craigslist once a year or month, hiring someone to duplicate your setup on a new cloud provider, opening a port for one of your existing nodes to connect to and verify, and also ask that person to modify the reproduction script of the clone, so that it will post on a Craigslist equivalent but not Craigslist. You'd also need some logic so that the rate you add clones is limited to the rate at which your fund to pay for the clones increases.

wuliwong• 9 years ago

I am also feeling really nostalgic about AIM shutting down. My HN screen name is the one I created for AIM many moons ago.

exikyut3• 9 years ago

The part that was IMHO completely un-thought-through:

Can I save my Buddy List?
Unfortunately you are not able to save or export your Buddy List.

What happens to my data?
Your data associated with AIM will be deleted after December 15, 2017.

Can I save my images and files?
Yes, you can manually save images and files to your computer until the morning of December 15, 2017.
(Instructions to manually open each chat then scroll through looking for images and files)

syntheticnature7• 9 years ago

I expect it was thought through, and the thought was "a few hundred thousand people use this service still, it's running under one employee's desk* and is completely unfunded, no effort above the minimum is to be expended."

*Not sure if this was explicitly said or someone's joking claim during a past discussion of the shutdown.

aimthrowaway5• 9 years ago

The final user numbers were way less than you would guess. It was a service built to handle tens of millions of users serving thousands. Scaling down that much is as labour intensive as scaling up. It's not just a launching all the services on a handful of VMs. The time had passed to make it a WhatsApp etc competitor.

nerdponx2• 9 years ago

Unfortunately you are not able to save or export your Buddy List.

Your data associated with AIM will be deleted after December 15, 2017.

Yes, you can manually save images and files to your computer until the morning of December 15, 2017.

Whatever you thought of AIM, it's stuff like this that makes you realize just how important software freedom is. Insane that there is just no way at all, without outright hacking the program (to the extent that hacking it is possible), to export your data, that you generated, and should by rights be yours to at the very least save (and not have to comb through potentially decades of chat history to export pictures and files one-by-one).

da_chicken• 9 years ago

I'm pretty sure you can do this with Pidgin, which is the only chat program I used from like 2004 to 2010 or so.

syntheticnature7• 9 years ago

Yes, I have my logs because I used Pidgin since before they offered chat history within AIM.

orblivion• 9 years ago

Unfortunately

This is quickly becoming my least favorite corporate buzzword.

epicide• 9 years ago

"We realize this is bad as well and we are on your side. It's just that the cosmos (fortune) has cast this upon us all. Woe is us! ... Unfortunately, you'll need to buy our other product to do this."

Edit: a word.

mcgrath_sh• 9 years ago

I actually took screenshots of my buddy list for just this reason. I will eventually put it into a text document. Seeing all my friends’ old screen names brought back so many memories. Was well worth the ~15 minutes it took me.

erickj• 9 years ago

upload it to Google Drive for easy OCR to a doc

https://support.google.com/drive/answer/176692?co=GENIE.Plat...

kodt• 9 years ago

I, for one, am happy to see all my old AIM conversations deleted and lost forever.

klez• 9 years ago

Ok, but that should be your choice, not AOL's.

busterarm• 9 years ago

Holy shit, emphatically this, yes. Especially the conversations with exes.

fragsworth• 9 years ago

I didn't even consider that. All those shitty things I said when I was a teenager...

cjsuk• 9 years ago

Yes. Thousands of ASL's are gone forever.

nasredin10• 9 years ago

Roy Moore?

Sorry, couldn't resist ;)

stevenj• 9 years ago

Same with Zuck.

emerged• 9 years ago

I haven't used their official client in decades, didn't even know it still existed. Trillian keeps your buddylist (along with backups) in the user data folder on Windows.

dangoldin• 9 years ago

Agreed but in this case I took a stab at downloading the buddy list and with a bit of tech know-how it's not terrible: http://dangoldin.com/2017/10/09/downloading-your-aim-buddy-l...

herf• 9 years ago

Identity is super hard to export and it always has been.

There are privacy issues: do you disclose email addresses to establish identity?

Imagine exporting a Facebook group, it is incredibly hard to do.

dunham• 9 years ago

I'd rather AOL not keep permanent logs of everything. They would now be for sale to the highest bidder.

As for my own data, Adium kept logs that I zipped up before I stopped using it. (And I have logs from "gaim" that predate using OSX/Adium.) I don't think it did pictures / files back when I used it, but I'd hope Adium would keep local copies of that too.

linkedlist007• 9 years ago

Your data associated with AIM will be deleted after December 15, 2017.

Is it my data? If it is, why are you deciding for me what happens to it?

jbob2000• 9 years ago

I found an old hard drive the other day and booted it up out of curiosity. What I found were old MSN Messenger chat logs from when I was a teenager. I spent all night reading them. It was... magical. Lots of vivid memories returning, I cried and laughed.

It's a damn shame that an entire generation is growing up with their chat logs locked in the cloud.

bargl• 9 years ago

This is interesting. Did you pay for your conversations? I mean yeah you generated them but I don't expect to get conversations I've had via phone back and I'm paying for that service.

I think the idea of ownership is interesting here. I don't disagree that you should own it but then wouldn't you need to pay for it? Or did you pay for it by letting them sell your data to third party vendors? In that case, yeah you paid for it. What about Hacker News? Can you export your conversations here? Should you be able to? Meh, sorry mid-day musings.

herbst2• 9 years ago

Interestingly enough this should be illegal when you do a "Personal Data Request" they should be forced by law to give it out.

paulie_a• 9 years ago

I am one of the dozens of daily users that will be effected

jamix• 9 years ago

Why is AIM shutting down?
We know there are so many loyal fans who have used AIM for decades; and we loved working and building the first chat app of its kind since 1997. Our focus will always be on providing the kind of innovative experiences consumers want. We’re more excited than ever to focus on building the next generation of iconic brands and life-changing products.

Corporate BS-speak at its best. Three sentences and 0% answering the question.

0xJRS• 9 years ago

Speaking a lot and saying nothing.

paulryanrogers• 9 years ago

"...first chat app of its kind since 1997"

Wasn't ICQ the same kind of chat app?

scott_s2• 9 years ago

Not the same kind, though the difference was subtle, and maybe not an important distinction to most people. In ICQ, you sent discrete messages back and forth. You could (I believe) look at the last message while replying, but you didn't have a chat history integrated into the same window where you replied. I used both ICQ and AIM in the '90s and early 2000s, even talking to the same people, and the interactions felt very different. ICQ felt like it was between email and AIM in the communication spectrum: obviously interactive and real-time, but each person tended to say more in each message. AIM's style encouraged more call-response conversations.

I point this out because I think it's an interesting case of user-interface design influencing use, even though on the surface they're both "chat apps."

thiagooffm• 9 years ago

so shitty, they didn't give a SINGLE REASON

ghaff3• 9 years ago

Because it's pretty much the same single unspoken reason for just about any decision of this general type. It didn't make business sense any longer.

empath753• 9 years ago

I can give you the reason.

Everybody at aol stopped using it years ago for internal communication and switched to slack.

The team had also been cut down to a skeleton crew a long time ago and they stopped development on it.

The reason why they are killing it as opposed to letting it hang around for ever is that aol has been in a multi-year long process of moving everything to AWS and due to the way aim is architected, it would be a major development effort to make the move, and they just don't want to spend the money.

I'm going to guess the mail product will also face a similar end for similar reasons.

yashap• 9 years ago

This reads exactly like a politician getting asked a tough question, and dodging the answer. Except nobody asked, they’re dodging questions that THEY WROTE THEMSELVES. You know you’re a PR drone when ...

kinkrtyavimoodh• 9 years ago

The worst part is they didn't even have to include this question. Including it and then giving such a bullshit non-answer is like a slap on the reader's face.

dwighttk2• 9 years ago

You see what happens when you repeal title II!?!!

dwighttk2• 9 years ago

too soon?

tombert• 9 years ago

While I completely understand why this is being done, it feels bizarre to me. Since I was 11 years old, AIM was one of those universal constants to me, not radically different than death or taxes in my mind.

I will really miss the fad of `xXxXmYcOoLsCrEeNaMexXx`, and the cheesy-yet-charming profiles and away messages.

AIM, I sollute you farewell. Without you, I wouldn't have as many good memories of my teens, and I wouldn't have the nickname "tombert"

vollmond• 9 years ago

Away messages... haven't thought about those in years. Back when you might occasionally find yourself away from any internet connected devices. Truly the 00s were a strange time.

ghaff3• 9 years ago

I don't generally bother with away messages but I, for one, am routinely away from Internet devices for hours and even days at a time. Not everyone is plugged in 24/7.

rb808• 9 years ago

brb

pcunite• 9 years ago

I had one of the coolest experiences with AOL Instant Messenger. I think it was 1998 ... my dad and I could communicate over this new and virtual wave of the future. I could send him a short thought, and like magic, his thoughts would appear back on my screen accompanied by a cool sound. Even though he was all the way across town, I felt very close to my dad that day.

jakebasile2• 9 years ago

I remember a similar experience when my dad and I tried it out back in the day. We weren't even that far apart but I remember as a 10-12 year old (can't remember exact time) asking him to use it to talk to me from the next room over. I wish I had kept those AIM and other services' messages since they're mostly lost to me due to either the service shutting down, lost passwords, or my own mistake of deleting them around the time he died - in my grief I thought I'd never want to see them again.

It was one of the things that got me into computers. Although it doesn't directly affect my day to day as I no longer use AIM, it was the first place I registered my screen name that I still use everywhere. Yes, my screen name is just my name, but it has significance to me all the same.

decasteve• 9 years ago

I used AIM entirely through Trillian and that’s what I associate it with. I remember having it alongside ICQ, Microsoft Messenger, and Yahoo Messenger, all running under Trillian.

It gives me a “Those were the days...” moment.

Cknight705• 9 years ago

Same here! I'm really sad they never added anymore chat protocols, and now most of the ones I used are obsolete or don't work.

I stopped when all my friends switched from Skype (which I used Trillian for) to Telegram, but I missed how compact Trillian was.

oblio• 9 years ago

I get the impression that Pidgin, Trillian and the other one I can't really remember just gave up at some point.

I'm using Pidgin, mostly out of nostalgia, but the default configuration basically can't connect to any mainstream messenger these days (Facebook, WhatsApp, Hangouts, Skype or Viber). Plus the UI is so dated, especially regarding emojis.

Before anyone asks, it's in C and I'm nowhere competent (or interested enough in gaining the required competency) to contribute.

With stuff like Pidgin you notice what mindshare really means. A "crappy" Electron based app is nicer to use than the "native" one. In the end, it's all about coders polishing code. No hours put in, no end result coming out.

alien2003• 9 years ago

RIP

bonniemuffin• 9 years ago

I just tried to sign in via Adium and got "Received unexpected response from https://api.screenname.aol.com/auth/clientLogin: Invalid DevId" so I guess it's gone.

jetti2• 9 years ago

While I haven't used AIM in ages, I remember it fondly. There was a cool addon/hack for AIM that gave it more functionality such as combining all chats into one window and the ability to adjust the windows so that you could see through them. Does anybody know what I'm talking about? If you do, do you remember the name of the addon/hack?

goric• 9 years ago

DeadAIM [1] was one such hack. I remember it also provided the ability to manually change your status to anything, including invisible.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeadAIM

jetti2• 9 years ago

That's exactly what I was looking for, thanks! I remember that hack fondly. It made things so much easier.

scottcorgan• 9 years ago

sk8naked19

smaili• 9 years ago

RIP

On a side note, it would have been great if rather than discontinue AIM, they open sourced it and put it in the hands of the community. It feels somewhat wasteful to close the doors on such an iconic piece of software.

ghaff3• 9 years ago

It takes effort (ie $$) to open source software including making sure it doesn’t include libraries or other code licensed from third parties.

booleandilemma• 9 years ago

I remember when my friend introduced me to AIM (and “instant messaging”) in the 90s.

“It’s like email, but faster”

Cknight705• 9 years ago

Something I'll miss about AIM and older chat clients is how compact they were. Most of these newer chat programs seem to assume you're going to have their application take up the entire screen.

syntheticnature7• 9 years ago

Good point! Perhaps it's a holdover from smartphone chat apps, most of which were designed full-screen.

0x445442• 9 years ago

One thing I hate about most IM clients is the buddy/friend/roster list runs in a separate window from actual chat sessions.

I much prefer the one window paradigm of IRC.

jakebasile2• 9 years ago

Funny, I'm the exact opposite. Most of the chat programs I use (or have used) use the combined approach. Telegram, Facebook Messenger, and so on all have the "buddy list" permanently attached to the conversation window such that you can only see a single conversation at a time. I prefer the MDI of yore since I can have multiple conversations open at once (on desktop, I realize this isn't feasible on mobile).

ReverseCold2• 9 years ago

What chat apps use separate windows? The only one I can think of is Steam.

cortesoft• 9 years ago

They need all that room for ads.

mrweasel• 9 years ago

Most modern audio players have the same issue. WinAmp/XMMS took up very little of your screen, while most modern players will assume that full screen is what you want.

Cknight705• 9 years ago

That's the reason I'm still using Winamp. Its aged surprisingly well and it has more features than a lot of modern media players.

reaperducer2• 9 years ago

This is one of the (few?) things that iTunes gets right. Though it's a little hidden, the entire program can be minimized into a small floating album cover.

And if that's not small enough, you can minimize it altogether and just get updates and controls via Notification Center.

ReverseCold2• 9 years ago

Vox on MacOS does this by default. Very simple/fast/small music player.

digi_owl2• 9 years ago

Foobar2k on Windows and Deadbeef on Linux seems to do much the same job of playing music while staying minimal.

SilasX• 9 years ago

Yes, and will continually bloat with upgrades since "computers get faster, what's the problem?" (See: Electron platform.)

volkl48• 9 years ago

The main AIM client was notorious for this itself (at least in the 2000s when I used it), ads, growing installation size, bloat "features", etc.

It's what pushed a lot of users to use alternate clients or stick with old versions.

yoz-y• 9 years ago

True. This is probably due to the fact that many applications are "ported" from the web and web does not grok floating windows.

cat199• 9 years ago

meanwhile slack grows and requires a much heavier desktop client, and people use fb chat like wildfire

clearly the issue is product mismanagement rather than cultural shifts away from 'this type of service'

eric_h• 9 years ago

I don't think it was mismanagement - chat followed where people stored their identities online. One's online identity was for many years their aol screen name - now, for many, it's facebook.

jdlyga• 9 years ago

I tried to login with several of my old accounts months ago, but they blocked the reset password option.

kstrauser• 9 years ago

In 1998, I built a computer (her first) for my girlfriend so that she and I could chat while I was at work. We've been married 18 years now.

Thanks for the memories, AIM!

DarronWyke3• 9 years ago

I'm in a similar boat. I met my wife on a website with a mutual game interest, and we started chatting on AIM. Come to find out she's not too far from where I lived and I started visiting her once a month. Now we're married.

majortennis• 9 years ago

good i've been locked out of my account since 2002 anyway. my poor neopets are starving

strictnein• 9 years ago

When AOL bought ICQ, there was a lot of concern that they were cornering the IM market. And now AIM is dead.

acheron• 9 years ago

And on the pedestal these words appear: “My name is AOL Time Warner, king of kings. Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.” Nothing beside remains.

Seriously though, it is amazing to look back on the utter dominance of AOL in the late 90s-early 00s, and it’s almost complete disappearance shortly afterward.

danschumann3• 9 years ago

When I started using aim, my password was 4 characters, and was a dictionary word, and I never got hacked. I spent days chatting with friends, chasing girls. I feel sad.

danschumann3• 9 years ago

By the way it was "took" I thought that's how you spelled tukee (the exotic bird ). Hopefully no one can use this password against me.. Not sure if I ever changed it!

jwilk• 9 years ago

I wasn't sure what bird is that, so I googled for "tukee bird". Google says "Did you mean: turkey bird", but it shows me pictures of toucans. I'm confused.

jedberg3• 9 years ago

Goodbye. :(

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2Z2CklSxM0

Since everyone is sharing their AIM memories: When I was in college (1995-1998), AIM was the #1 way to flirt with people. Today the kids worry about whether they got a like or not.

Back then, you'd sit and stare at your buddy list waiting for that person you liked to come online so you could say something witty, and then stew with worry if they didn't respond but remained online.

ouid3• 9 years ago

I was under the impression that in 1995-1998, flirting irl was still number 1.

jedberg3• 9 years ago

Maybe in some places for some people, but for us Berkeley nerds it was definetly online. Of course you had to flirt in person to get their screen name.

kenjackson• 9 years ago

You couldn’t scale like you did with AIM.

DarronWyke3• 9 years ago

Back then, you'd sit and stare at your buddy list waiting for that person you liked to come online so you could say something witty, and then stew with worry if they didn't respond but remained online.

Or you'd get a friend/another account to IM them to see if they'd really blocked you or not.

jedberg3• 9 years ago

Yes! You had your alt account to check for blocks. I forgot about that.

wakkaflokka• 9 years ago

I wish I could be omniscient for a few minutes just to know what happened to all the people I've A/S/L'd during childhood. Or maybe I don't want to know - I imagine some of them probably died from old age.

segmondy• 9 years ago

You will be surprised how many died young. :-(

orthecreedence• 9 years ago

Checking in! I was a huge AIM user. I've had the same screenname since I was 12. Now the only two left in my circle who use it are me and my wife.

I'm really nostalgic about AIM. I met a lot of really cool people on there, but its time is definitely passed. Luckily having used Pidgin for years will make the transition for gchat or something similar pretty seamless.

Still sad, though.

royalghost• 9 years ago

Remembers 90's when I would hooked on AIM to chat and make friends....make me cry

phyzome• 9 years ago

As of yesterday, they were sending an announcement every 5 minutes about the impending shutdown. Now when you try to connect, they send the announcement and then disconnect you. I guess they want to see 0 traffic before they pull the plug.

greg5green• 9 years ago

Adium just got disconnected about 1:20am EST and shows an error when trying to connect. Were you using the official client?

knodi• 9 years ago

A/S/L?

metisploit• 9 years ago

Toying with the idea of building "SAIM", an AIM clone (As close as we can without getting sued by AOL). Anyone want to team up?

delecti• 9 years ago

I suspect that if AOL still cares about their AIM trademark, "SAIM" would be too close.

Pidgin was originally called "GAIM".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pidgin_(software)#Naming_dispu...

justin_• 9 years ago

A few months ago I was playing around windows 98 in VM for fun. I installed an old version of Netscape that had AIM integration built right in. It still worked perfectly, and I even was able to talk to a few high school buddies.

RIP

zeep• 9 years ago

That's a last minute warning...

I never used AIM... is ICQ still being used...

syntheticnature7• 9 years ago

They posted about it over a month ago (perhaps up to three), and if you used it you were getting regular pings about its upcoming demise.

As for ICQ, last I knew a Russian company bought it from AOL and it is still operational.

spike021• 9 years ago

The end of an era.

niftich• 9 years ago

I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of doors suddenly slammed shut, and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened.

3chelon• 9 years ago

I nearly crapped myself. I thought it meant the London AIM stock market (bang go my investments!).

DarronWyke3• 9 years ago

Has it already been pulled? I was hoping to do something tonight before it was shut down.

bobsgame• 9 years ago

Press F to Pay Respects

tunesmith• 9 years ago

One thing I'll miss about AIM is that it's a communication modality that doesn't exist right now.

It was everywhere, and on MacOS it was integrated into the OS. For most people I knew, they had it set to join when they got on the computer. So it meant that you knew when your friends were at the computer, and you knew when you could have long "in the background" conversations with your friends.

It was just a different level of intimacy - I had so many longer and interesting, sometimes deep conversations through AIM (or through iMessage hooked up with AIM).

On a Mac at least, that's unlike anything we have now with facebook and Messenger.app. Now when you look at your buddy list, you have no idea whether they're at their computer or if they're busy or running around with their phone. I try to get my friends to join a Slack room with me, but we don't always have it started, or we're in a different Slack room. At any rate there just isn't that critical mass where you know someone is online and chattable.

FreakyT• 9 years ago

I completely agree! Today, as far as I know, only Facebook Messenger comes even close to supporting it.

Specifically, Messenger can show you an "online now" tab, indicating who is currently at least using Messenger or Facebook, and can even show you "Active now" versus "Active 30m ago".

Jarwain• 9 years ago

I find Discord to fill this space in a slightly more effective way, although I don't believe they differentiate from mobile vs. computer use quite yet. However, I find a majority of my friends (and I personally) use discord mainly on desktop. I don't even have discord on my phone.

esotericsean2• 9 years ago

I use Discord, but I only have it installed on my phone. More convenient that way.

Andrenid• 9 years ago

Discord has absolutely replaced AIM/MSN/ICQ/IRC for my friends. Everyone I care to chat to uses it, and has it on all their devices, including phone, as our primary messenger. My circle of friends is admittedly nearly entirely techies (and some finance crowd who seem to love Discord too).

swalsh• 9 years ago

There was a rip of some techno song I'd listen to often with the AIM door sound, always made me check AIM for some reason.

cgag• 9 years ago

I still used it pretty regularly until today. I only had like 2 people I talked to on it, but I like that we were all on it all the time and I was on it when I was otherwise unavailable online to everyone but those couple close friends.

thex10• 9 years ago

Completely agree. I miss this capability so much. Now with cell phones we're 'always online' but in a weird way less available (well. way more of my messages get ignored now than did my AIM chats).

wil421• 9 years ago

We have cellphones now no need to know when someone is online. AIM and AOL before it were great when you don’t have text. No one needs that now when you have texts app or snap chat.

The one thing I do miss are times when you could just find a random classmates username and message them. When you do this with text it can be a little more awkward if you don’t know each other.

Why do you need to know if a freind is only if you can text, iMessage or WhatsApp anyone in the world almost?

wl• 9 years ago

The point is that with AIM (or instant messenger, generally), you knew who was up for chatting. If someone wasn't up for chatting, they either would have an away message or wouldn't be signed on at all. Sure, I can text my friends at any hour. But they might be out at dinner. Or at a concert. Or trying to sleep.

khedoros12• 9 years ago

Apples and oranges. I'd never use text on a phone for any kind of long conversation; it's just for quick messages, synchronizing meet-ups, and such. Part of it is that I don't enjoy reading or writing on a mobile device; it's a kind of second-class experience. Part of it is certainly that my patterns of availability have changed.

And part is because someone's status could give you insight into whether they'd like to talk or not before you sent a single message. Maybe some of the modern mobile-oriented systems still do that? I don't know; I don't have any friends that use them.

ryukafalz• 9 years ago

XMPP still supports this - mobile clients can self-report as such (most do), and desktop clients usually display whether someone's logged in from a mobile client or not.

et-al• 9 years ago

Yeah, there's a push towards asynchronous communication (e.g. Gchat -> Google Hangouts), but what makes real-time synchronous chat so great was the attention from both parties.

When messages have a lag in response, there's generally not as much excitement and before you know it, one person is preoccupied with something else.

LocutusOfBorges• 9 years ago

Telegram Desktop comes pretty close to this ideal.

cylinder• 9 years ago

It was just a totally different type of online conversation ("convo") which doesn't exist anymore. You always initiated with a "hey" or "sup." It was considered rude to not say "gtg, bye" before signing off or even "brb" when stepping away for 5 mins.

I will never know if the glory of my AIM days was due to being a teenager or just being a part of online chat during that special window of its history.

WhatsApp group chat with my closest friends is definitely incredible, but a different experience.

veridies2• 9 years ago

I still used AIM up until today. My friends and I just switched over to a private XMPP server, and we've been using Pidgin/Adium anyway, so it's not a huge change. AIM has been extremely reliable, I've been able to use it on every platform I've ever owned (usually with free software), and it's easy to end-to-end encrypt messages.

My friends and I just never saw a reason to move away from AIM. Everyone just decided to switch to things that were newer for novelty's sake, and transferred their friendships and conversations into non-private, non-free systems. Even Google, which at first used an open protocol, moved to a siloed system while adding nothing of much value (as evidenced by Google's low share of the messaging market). And now to talk to people I have to switch between Google, Skype, Apple, and Facebook, all of whom inter-compatible systems, all of whom reneged on their promises, and none of whom offer me any value whatsoever.

This is not a happy day for me.

esotericsean2• 9 years ago

You'll still be able to use AIM if you setup a private server? I need to look into this.

nyolfen• 9 years ago

no, xmpp is not aim

veridies2• 9 years ago

As nyolfen mentioned, XMPP is just a competing, decentralized protocol for AIM-like chat. It has a similar feature set and works with most third-party AIM clients.

aninteger• 9 years ago

If you ever get around to making a private OSCAR based server and publish the code somewhere please let us know.

yason• 9 years ago

It's amazing how temporary things are. I never used AIM much but if I had I would have a lot of history in my life with a particular service and now they would pull the plug. Ditto with Facebook these days. Or hosted software like Google Reader.

In contrast, I still have most what I grew up with. Disk images of my old computers, binaries of games and applications, fully usable in emulators. There's IRC -- while the networks I used then have died a long time ago IRC probably never dies. I still use IRC on some networks and interface some other chat services by using a proxy frontend that you can connect with an IRC client.

But most importantly, I can launch early computer games from my childhood. It's like having your old toys on a shelf at your parent's house. Not only I can still try out the game I never could finish (and observe that I still can't finish it because games in the 80's were often both stupid and ridiculously hard), but I can put my kids at the controls and tell them this is what their parent used to play at the same age. It's not just history and culture but an origin. This is where I came from. For a human being that is a very concrete, if not tangible, thing, and of value in itself. Now think that you can't fire up Instagram or Facebook or even Angry Birds in 2035 and tell someone hey this is how we shared pictures, messaged, and gamed back in the 10's.

matt_kantor• 9 years ago

I share your sentiments but I don't think AIM is an example of this. I haven't used AIM in 8+ years but there was an easy-to-find checkbox in the official client (and unofficial ones too) to save all history as simple text files on disk. I'm pretty sure I still have records of AIM conversations from back in ~1999 in my backups.

Actually the linked article mentions this. Look for "Can I view and save my chat history?". It sounds like the checkbox I mentioned is enabled by default.

stefantheard• 9 years ago

Well this was the actual only way of contacting one person I knew back from my counterstrike days. CSMario who invented surf maps in counterstrike if you're out there, drop me a line!

sosilkj• 9 years ago

Anyone else having troulbe connecting to ICQ?

TaylorGood• 9 years ago

Rolecall for your former screen name. Mine was:

Tdogg5388

Shows what age I was during peak of AIM.

avonmach• 9 years ago

R.I.P.

AIM will be discontinued today

Related Stories