
AIM will shut down after 20 years - rbanffy
https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/6/16435690/aim-shutting-down-after-20-years-aol-instant-messenger
======
empath75
5 years ago, aol still used aim internally for everything that people use
slack for today. Group chats, bots, notifications for builds, etc, etc.

Then gradually individual teams picked up slack and within maybe 18 months, we
went from 100% aim to a gigantic corporate slack team.

That was the end of AIM, I think. Aol and yahoo both use gmail internally so I
suspect they’re going to shitcan their email services eventually, too.

I think it’s remarkable how badly aol fumbled the ball on AIM twice — first by
not turning it into a social network, and second by not turning it into
enterprise chat.

All it would have taken was some investment instead of continuously laying off
everyone that worked on it.

~~~
brogrammernot
That’s fascinating that you guys ended up choosing Slack.

I’m surprised because it seems like with the infrastructure already setup, AOL
could’ve built an internal enterprise MVP and got a real leg-up on the rest of
the competition. Missed opportunity for sure.

~~~
Macha
It was less a intentional choice (early on at least) and more motivated by how
painful using aim group chats for software development was. Slack wasn't even
centrally managed for the early days of use.

(Although AIM itself started as kind of a unwanted skunkworks project, when
there was an off the shelf solution available, people weren't that driven to
build their own)

~~~
bsimpson
That was the brilliant part of their go-to market strategy. Rather than
negotiating with enterprise executives, they let each team start its own
microinstance and try it independently. It's much easier to get a 20 person
team to try it than a 10Ks of people organization; but word-of-mouth and a
quality product can get enough 20 person teams in a 10Ks organization to
switch that eventually the whole enterprise signs up.

------
AdmiralAsshat
Pity. I spent many, many hours on AIM in my youth. Cultivated friendships,
relationships, and many other one-off contacts.

I suppose it has been made obsolete now by Facebook and other social media
apps, but those were never truly replacements for AIM in my mind, as most of
them have eschewed the venerable screen name in favor of your real name or
e-mail address. And for the vast majority of people I talk to online, _I don
't want them to know my real name_. I suppose I am simply a relic from another
era.

At least IRC lives on.

~~~
mirkules
For me the killer feature of AIM was P2P file transfer. Is there even a
service today that does this? It was so easy to just click "send a file" and
it worked fairly reliably. Dropbox comes close, but, of course, it is not a
direct file transfer.

~~~
phit_
Skype used to do P2P until like 2 years ago, now all files shared are uploaded
to their servers.

~~~
amiga-workbench
We are sadly still using Skype at work, and due to the lack of P2P file
transfer I'm really sketched out sending database dumps, certificates, and
other sensitive content with it to colleagues.

------
drngdds
I miss dedicated IM services like AIM. They had a certain dynamic that
Facebook Messenger (or similar) and SMS lack.

On AIM, logging in was an active choice and it signaled that you were up for a
conversation. With Facebook Messenger, everyone who has the app is always
"online." This means that:

a) I get messages from people I don't want to have a conversation with at the
moment and it seems rude if I ignore them, because there are read receipts.

b) If I send a message, I don't know if they're going to engage in a real-time
conversation or if we're going to play phone tag. There's no way of signaling
which I'm looking for.

~~~
Jaruzel
What you are lamenting the lack of is the 'presence' indicator, where you can
set yourself Available, Away, Busy, or simply Offline. Of the current crop of
IM clients, only Skype still has it (I think).

Of the older IM clients; Lync had it, so did Lotus Sametime, MSN Messenger,
Yahoo Messenger, ICQ, and of course AIM.

Somewhere along the line the presence feature got dropped, and now we're
always 'Available' even when we're not.

~~~
snarkyturtle
Slack has an 'online indicator' and even AIM-style away messages.

~~~
daturkel
But slack also has no inherently established paradigm of real time vs
asynchronous communication.

------
tehwebguy
AOL/AIM away messages were the original social media status update for my
generation (at least in my social circle).

So much drama went down in those short little notes.

~~~
Alex3917
And that system wasted insane amounts of electricity since each user needed to
leave their computer on 24/7\. Say what you will about Facebook, but allowing
people to leave their computer in sleep mode at night has been an enormous
contribution that Zuck has made the world.

~~~
code_duck
We have moved to low power mobile phones that are always on anyhow, so those
days would be over regardless.

And, are you sure that facebook doesn't consume even more power with whole
data centers fir storage, analysis and serving of mountains of trivial data,
all to sell more ads?

------
cribbles
I'm still signed onto AIM - through Pidgin - whenever my personal laptop is
open. It's the primary way I stay in contact with friends I made through the
early-2000s internet.

Of course we're also connected to each other on more 'modern' social networks,
but there's a certain - undeniably nostalgic - appeal to the AIM chat,
continued unabated over the same protocol with the same handles for 15+ years.

Funnily enough, just a couple of nights ago someone I hadn't spoken to in at
least _10 years_ signed on and messaged me out of the blue. We reminisced on
our friendship on a now-forgotten AOL message board back in 2001, and
discussed the myriad ways our lives had since changed since then. A surreal
and touching exchange that's been running through my head since.

If you once had an AIM account and haven't signed on in a while - which,
gauging by the reactions to this thread, seems to describe most of us - log on
and see if anyone's still around. Your Buddy List hasn't gone anywhere.

~~~
skinnymuch
Sadly no one except one person who I already talk to has signed into my buddy
list for years. I have it sign in via Adium/Pidgin too.

------
jroseattle
I worked at AOL years ago when the company announced internally that the
product would not be extended, but that the service would remain online.

I was headed to the main campus (Dulles) when the announcement was made.
Internally, they dismissed the entire AIM product engineers and management,
and simply retained operational people to keep the lights on.

Walking up to the floor where the AIM crew was working was creepy. Product
plans on whiteboards and windows, with future dates written down everywhere.
All the cubes on the floor were vacant, save for maybe a small few on the
opposite side of the office (admin-type folks.) It was just straight-up
silent, and incredibly deflating. That team always seemed to have a fairly
good vibe, at least in observation.

I think they _really_ missed an opportunity with AIM.

~~~
astrodust
It's a shame, really, as AIM could have easily evolved into Slack for
family/friends connections all along a spectrum of casual to intimate.

It's like how Flickr couldn't make a mobile app and Instagram happened, or how
Digg fumbled so badly Reddit came out of nowhere.

First mover advantage is only important in the initial cycle. Once the market
matures it's a huge liability.

~~~
acdha
It’s not just first mover: Flickr was doing great until they were bought by
Yahoo, which was a decade into the management vacuum by that point, and AOL
was doing their best to make Yahoo’s management look visionary and competent.

In both cases the message I take is that a good team can’t make up for
executives who don’t know what their business model is. Management by oh-
shiny! and laying off people until a spreadsheet column is positive will trump
lower level competence every time.

~~~
astrodust
Sometimes first mover means first to achieve any significant valuation which
means first to be acquired. As you point out, acquisitions can often mean
death.

------
djsumdog
I still had AIM and Yahoo on Pidgin up until maybe two or three years ago.

It amazes me how Facebook messenger became the dominant force with it's
totally broken and garbage XMPP implementation (now gone), it's unreliable
delivery and the fact that it was a total piece of garbage.

It's now finally up to the standard that AIM/Yahoo/MSN were, twenty years ago.
For people who yell about it being proprietary, well so was AIM
(Oscar)/Yahoo/MSN/etc. Today there are OSS devs doing the same thing they did
back then with project like purple-hangouts and purple-facebook.

We have a lot of different chat services today, but we don't seem to see
people developing things like Trillian/Audium/Pidgin the way those were
developed back in the day. Today people are fine having multiple chat apps,
all with their bloat and terribleness.

~~~
niftich
Facebook Chat (now called Messenger) came out in April 2008, at a very
opportune time. Quote from my earlier post at [1]:

 _While it 's tempting to accuse AIM, MSN, and Yahoo for being incompetent and
not catching up to the "mobile era", they in fact did pursue this market as
much as they were able. In truth, early iOS and Android were inferior
platforms for a chat app. Push notifications were absent, data rates were
expensive, and the average smartphone user at this time was not very likely to
use those networks anyway._

 _Based on this info, I reason that it was truly Facebook that killed
incumbent IM networks, at least in the US. Between the release of the iOS App
Store and the introduction of push notifications for Android, Facebook grew by
more than 300 million active users. This coincided with exodus of users from
Myspace to Facebook; many of those users likely having used AIM, MSN, or Yahoo
messenger in the past, now found themselves in a much larger network that also
offered chat. Since Facebook largely subsumed everyone a person knew in real
life, these users only had to go back to the old IM networks to chat with
people they didn 't know in real life, setting the stage for the weakening of
connections and these networks' decline._

In my research, I've also prepared:

\- A timeline of messaging networks [1]

\- A timeline of Google's messaging rivalry with Facebook [2]

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11114518](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11114518)

[2]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13465483](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13465483)

------
gargarplex
AIM was where I first found my passion for development. The first programming
language I ever really learned, perl, was because I wanted to be better at
making AIM bots.

Nostalgia:

\- The TOC protocol and the OSCAR protocol. Net::AIM and Net::OSCAR. Aryeh
Goldsmith, you beautiful soul.

\- The first $300 I ever made online was in ~2002, when I wrote a chatroom
flirt bot for an adult content affiliate. I was 14 or 15 years old.

\- The first project I built that ever got traction was a bot that enabled
offline messaging. I didn't even write it, it was open source, but I branded
it well and it got traction and spread virally across the USA.

\- Being part of the AIM scene...exploiting warn functionality (with parallel
attacks!), profile vulns, and 3char screen names being the most legit.

~~~
eminkel
I vaguely remember the 3char screen names and the trading of accounts or
lists. If I recall correctly there was underground stuff going on with trading
those names. Thanks for hitting that memory switch for me.

------
jessriedel
It's very surprising to me that person-to-person text communication is divided
into two completely different and incompatible types of service: short latency
(~20 sec, "email") and very short latency (~1 sec, "instant messaging"). A
priori, I'd have just imagined that the former would arrive first for
technical reasons but then would be consumed by the latter, which has no
fundamental technical barriers to being better in every way. It's even more
surprising that, multiple decades after both services became available and
have had time to reach equilibrium, email is a single uniform standard and
instant messaging is hopelessly fragmented. (The existence of an email
standard and fragmented instant messaging does help explain why a division
between the two can persist, but not why they went opposite directions in the
first place.)

Was any of this predictable? Or could we just have easily ended up with
everything fragmented, or everything a uniform standard, conditional on
flipping a few minor historical events? The potential of very strong path
dependence for the quality of equilibrium services is very disheartening.

~~~
antiphase
Email by its very nature is asynchronous and was standardized in a time when
"always-on" didn't exist, and it is provider-agnostic because of the standard
protocol.

Email's maturity by the time that businesses all came online pretty much
guaranteed it as the standard for business communication, and personal use was
just a small step from there.

Expecting 20s RTT for email is a modern phenomenon, when you could expect
replies on the timescale of days before.

The closest attempt to a standard for IM is probably XMPP, which providers
have pretty much all ignored in favour of lock-in to their respective
platforms.

~~~
romwell
>Expecting 20s RTT for email is a modern phenomenon, when you could expect
replies on the timescale of days before.

I think the whole point of having email is for communication where you'd
expect responses on this timescale (for reasons outside of communication
protocol used). Some questions just take time. The immediacy of instant
messaging puts pressure to respond quickly.

Even for personal communication, if I want to write a longer letter, I don't
get to do it every day.

On that note, none of the current IM clients are suitable for long messages.
Even your comment is too long to be comfortably sent in an IM. There's a whole
infrastructure around emails that make them suitable for long messages: drafts
(so you can work on an email over the span of days), editing/formatting, and
so on.

Then there's flexibility of the _message_ being a unit of communication,
rather than the _chatroom_. Your response can selectively quote parts of a
message, being sent to a a part of the group, be forwarded. It's not easy to
do with IM's.

But in the end, I do think that the non-instantaneous nature of email is _the
reason_ why people use it: IM's for short, fast responses, and emails for
"...I'll answer it tomorrow".

------
rm999
Sad - I believe AIM is the oldest living account where I still know my
username/password. I just logged in for the first time in years and not a
single other person was logged in. There were people on there I haven't spoken
to in 18 years.

It's funny how 15 years feels so ancient in internet time.

~~~
kilroy123
Same here. Not a person was logged in. Did the same a few years back. Same
thing, not a person logged in.

------
throwaway2016a
I too am sad to hear this.

When I met my wife I asked her for her AIM screen name instead of her phone
number. AIM was more common than cell phones (and didn't charge $0.20 per
message like SMS).

At the same time, I am honestly surprised it was not sunset sooner. I wonder
how many active users there actually were in the end.

~~~
lwerdna
Same scenario with my wife, January 2003 :)

------
donatj
I'm fairly torn up about this. A lot of my friends today were "internet
randos" I started up chats with on AOL in the late 90s.

There is a pretty large number of additional internet rando's from my youth
whom I haven't spoken to in years where my only connection is their AIM
screenname. I still use Adium connected to AIM just waiting for any of them to
pop on.

For many of them, I never knew their real name, only their screen name. This
will be a total loss of the possibility of reconnecting.

I am honestly mildly devastated.

It was a different world then, people were much more excited and willing to
talk to weirdo's like me online.

~~~
zanny
This is what bums me out. I went down my AIM contact list when I got this news
and realized I had fond memories of people from the 00s that I will never be
able to find again because there is no name attached to their AIM.

But at the same time, that detachment was what made those interactions
magical. I knew people by screen name, not real name. They weren't constrained
by what their lives meant offline because all they were online was what they
made that screenname out to be. Getting into the Internet i the late 90s /
early 2000s was like another world because of how detached from boring reality
it was.

That being said, the Internet has only really gotten better for weirdos. There
is everything from decades old niche website forums to subreddits to new stuff
like Matrix rooms for almost any subject.

~~~
travmatt
I just did the same. Such a strong feeling of nostalgia

------
switchstance
I wouldn't be married to my wonderful wife of 11 years, if it were not for
AIM. We met at a college party, and before we parted ways the only thing I
thought to ask was for her AIM ID. I'm shy and talking over AIM was much
easier for me.

Thank you AIM.

*edited for more details

~~~
imsofuture
My wife and I met on AIM (mostly) too. My friend wanted me to chat up this
girl he knew to convince her he was cool and she should date him. It doesn't
seem like a great plan in hindsight from his perspective, and it really wasn't
in the end. We've been married 9 years.

------
tn_
Oh man, AIM was great. They nailed their UI/UX at the time.. . everything just
worked. There's so much overlap with contemporary companies and features they
rolled-out. They had weather-bots, integration with a ton of 3rd party apps (I
remember logging into Meebo on school computers cause we couldn't install
desktop apps), games, statuses, chat-rooms, file transfers.. Most apps are so
hyper-focused nowadays, I really do miss how creative companies were back in
the 90s.

------
hackbinary
What I do not understand is how has AOL Messenger, MSN Messenger, Skype, ICQ,
and Google Chat all managed to be displaced by Whatsapp? I guess it is loss of
'business focus', but the idea of a "messenging app" is incredibly simple, so
one would think it would be simple enough to do.

~~~
conceptme
what's even worse whatsapp is the only one without a desktop client even the
webclient requires your phone :(. I guess Line is the best alternative it
works on all platforms and without phone number as identifier except it's
mostly popular in Asia

~~~
avtar
There's an official Whatsapp Electron app for MacOS and Windows.

~~~
craigds
Which doesn't work unless your phone is on

------
ChoGGi
Back in the day I had to use a few different chat programs (AIM/ICQ/MSN), then
came along Trillian, and I could just run the one program. I've since switched
to Pidgin (or whatever they called themselves before the rename), it was quite
nice not having to bother with all those separate programs.

Now we have Discord/Slack/Whatsapp/A myriad of voice chat programs and I'm
back where I started.

Edit: For those curious, AIM for Counter-Strike, ICQ for random internets, and
MSN was pretty big here in Canada.

~~~
KGIII
Gaim, I believe it was AOL that made them change their name to Pidgin. Pidgin
lives on and AIM is fading into history.

~~~
chipx86
They tried for many years to get us to change the name, but it never came down
to any real legal battles of any sort. The name change occurred after I left
the project, but I think it was a conscious choice on the project's end to
finally change the name, give it a new identity. (Someone from Pidgin correct
me if I'm wrong -- I was pretty out of the loop during that time period.)

------
lightedman
Which now leaves me using Google Chat on Pidgin and Skype as my last instant
messaging services. I haven't moved to any other newer platform because the
mobile-based UI and huge amounts of whitespace are a huge turnoff for me (and
I almost tossed Skype when they went that direction.)

~~~
AdmiralAsshat
Indeed. Pidgin is so useful as far as the myriad IMing services it supports,
and yet so many of them have shut down or moved to a non-supported protocol.

------
zghst
Just imagine 20 years down the line, all of the products of today that will
shut down.

~~~
angersock
Use Google and find out in 5 years! </s>

------
linkmotif
> With AIM on its way out the door, now’s your last chance to write that
> perfect away message.

Interesting in hindsight then how some platforms adopted this one element,
turned it into a log of away messages, dropped the messaging, and created
"social media".

------
southphillyman
Aim was really an instrumental part of my youth, I'm actually sad to hear
this.

------
k__
End of an era.

Back in the days there was AIM, ICQ, MSN, YIM and IRC and everyone had their
own preferences.

I started with ICQ, because it was the thing gamers used and the shorter your
UIN, the cooler you were!

Later I had to install MSN and AIM, because all the girls were using them.

Then there were the occasional YIM contact, hehe.

Most of the day I was in IRC, but this was a whole different beast.

2005 or so I finally found Trillian to end the mess.

Today I only use WhatsApp and Signal for private stuff.

Now and then Skype for TelCos.

~~~
kylestlb
You can tell this is legit because they didn't mention using MSN. :)

------
emidln
I wonder if there is a chance the AIM server source code gets opened up. Would
be interesting to see and possibly somewhat useful for retrocomputing.

~~~
jhayward
One of the principle authors (who had long since left AOL) tried to get the
proprietary kernel and the distributed computing components open sourced 4-5
years ago, got almost to the finish line and then everyone in the executive
chain of approval was axed/moved on. I doubt anyone else has the will and
connections to try.

------
sakebomb
Hopefully they open source the code for it. They have for so many other
things: [https://github.com/aol](https://github.com/aol)

~~~
empath75
I spent two years trying to get qlink open sourced. I wouldn’t expect aim to
ever be open sourced.

------
neves
Just other day I heard a music that told "I would ICQ you". I laugh that when
the music was composed, the author wanted to look modern. There's another one
that mentions Orkut. Today nobody understand them.

Lesson: don't mention your favorit tech if you want your music to last.

------
slimshady94
What a golden thread. Something tells me I will be writing similar eulogies
after twenty years about facebook and whatsapp.

~~~
romwell
I don't think I have any fondness for either. Kind of missed the train when
they were still hip, and only use them because I have to.

But I'm already writing a eulogy for Skype. Skype is a zombie. The current
offering is wearing the skin of Skype, the real deal was P2P.

I still use Skype heavily for group chat with friends (we have a chat thread
that's not missed a day since 2010, and has people joining and leaving every
year) and videocalls (my family is spread across the continent). But I fear
that a stray update could take the functionality I need away. With how MS
kills their products, it can just happen one day.

------
mschaef
Sad to see AIM go for sentimental reasons, but I can't say it's too
surprising. The world has moved on.

Technically, one of the more interesting aspects of AIM was that it was built
on Boxely... one of the earlier (~2004-2006) markup based rendering engines.
Boxely was a project by Joe Hewitt (FireBug, etc.) in which the UI was defined
entirely in XML with stylesheets and Javascript to make it live. These days
it's pretty standard to do this in a browser, but back then it was
trendsetting.

~~~
mulletbum
I am unsure how this is true considering AIM was around when I was in
highschool back in 1999-2003. If Boxely didn't come around till 2004 that
would be like the AIM reboot era.

~~~
mschaef
AIM Triton. Not the original.

------
dalfonso
AOL/AIM profiles were my first exposure to HTML. “What’s the code for that
shade of neon green? How do I get that super cool Copperplate font on my
profile?”

RIP AIM

20/All/Our memories and our hearts

~~~
geeksunny
The "Subprofile" craze is what drove my exploration of PHP/MySQL back in high
school. Everything about that Buddy4U site gave me that spiteful feeling of "I
can do that, and better!"

------
wiredfool
Oh AIM. I back in the late 90's it was _the_ async/online communication method
for the startup I was working for. The boss would do the interruption thing
over aim, we'd have a morning 'standup'.

I remember hooking an Eliza bot to respond to the boss, and it took him far
longer than it should have for him to figure it out. Good times.

------
anonu
Always found it strange that AIM had found a niche use amongst financial
traders. Bloomberg is really just an expensive news and chat tool. So traders
found AIM to be a cheap alternative to chat with their colleagues. At some
point Bloomberg got aim integrated into bchat. I wonder what will fill the
void for traders... Symphony?

------
garfieldnate
This prompted me to recover my AOL account and backup my email, which I got
when I was in 6th grade and stopped using when I went to college (a friend
gave me a coveted invite for Gmail). I had to call them because I hadn't
accessed the account in 10 years, and use my parents' names and the name of a
pet that died 10 years ago as a security question. I was happy I got the
account back but... they purged all of my data because I hadn't used it in 180
days. Quite disappointing!

------
DoodleBuggy
AIM was the original social network, with status updates, messaging, profiles,
ubiquitous usage within social groups, chat rooms, etc. Plus it was widely
used for in-office communication. AIM was Facebook, and Slack, and more.

It's sort of amazing that AOL blew what they had.

------
paddy_m
One of my first projects at my first job out of college was working on
AIMPages, AOL's myspace competitor. This was in 2006 but many many people were
still on AIM. AOL never promoted the AIMPages, but I think they might have had
a chance with it, especially if they had released it in 2005.

------
kzisme
Dang - As most people I spent a lot of time on AIM. The first person (bot I
suppose) I always added was SmarterChild[1]

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SmarterChild](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SmarterChild)

------
ocodia
I guess this explains why AIM was removed from Messages app in Mac OS High
Sierra.

------
samfisher83
Aim was really the original social network. Your status page was your profile.
I mean all your friends were on it. The fact that Aol fell tells you tech
unless you are always innovating its hard to defend your moat.

------
bkohlmann
This displays the robustness of an relatively unconstrained innovation
ecosystem. Even near monopolies - and "sure things" \- are subject to
unanticipated, but powerful emergence.

As we worry about "monopolies" like Facebook, Twitter, and others, it's
comforting to look to the past and see once-monopolies like AIM and Microsoft
be challenged and overturned by upstarts. It bodes well for the future of our
society that entrepreneurs can redirect the course of history by successfully
challenging entrenched incumbents.

------
ambrosite
I never used AIM in its prime (I was never into instant messaging), but a
while back I played a free game called "Emily is Away" and it gave me a good
sense of the nostalgia that a lot of people are talking about in this thread.

[https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/6/16435796/emily-is-away-
ai...](https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/6/16435796/emily-is-away-aim-game-
steam)

------
joshmn
My first website was dedicated to AIM. That was 14 years ago in 2004. I was in
middle school. I got into development (vb5/vb6) so I could make things to boot
people off AIM. I learned web development so I could make cool things happen
in my profile with buddy4u.com. I learned Photoshop so I could create AIM
buddy icons. I wrote many a love story in my profile.

This hurts.

~~~
rainbowmverse
Relevant: [http://articles.marco.org/44](http://articles.marco.org/44)

I used to see people running these all over AOL chatrooms. I didn't see it on
AIM, but I'm not surprised it carried over.

~~~
joshmn
I didn't know such a thing even existed! (I would have been 4 years old
according to Marco) This is the coolest hack I've ever seen. I'm sitting here
in awe.

------
ryanb23
I spent way too much time in college trying to find the most profound quote
from Thoreau or whoever to put at the bottom of my AIM profile.

------
thriftwy
I thought it were merged into ICQ, weren't it?

~~~
VectorLock
I was going to comment: this is the final death of ICQ as well.

~~~
thriftwy
Doesn't look to be a case. I've just opened my web ICQ and there's no warnings
about potential closure.

~~~
badwolf
AOL sold ICQ to mail.ru a few years ago

------
rigormortiz
All things that were once great come to an end. I met my first longtime
girlfriend on AOL/AIM and used AIM to communicate with just about everyone,
including coworkers (OTR-enabled, of course, because we thought we were cool).
Now I just feel old thinking about how long ago that was! Thanks AIM!

------
pitzips
My first program was a visual basic registry editor that allowed me to add
more than 200 buddies. Thanks AIM!

------
sjdegraeve
AIM will always hold special place in my heart. It had an ecosystem that
allowed me to build two very successful (and profitable) side projects in 2002
and 2003: a Buddy Icon generator and a database of Witty Away Messages for AIM
profiles that eventually grew into a little social network. BRB.

------
Vadoff
I used to have dozens of people on my friend's list active at a time. After
Facebook, that number dropped to only a handful. The few stragglers left
eventually migrated to gmail chat. Now the only ones on it are those that
happen to use multi-login clients.

------
crsmith
A lot of hedge fund traders still use AIM. The sell side is going to use
whatever the buy side wants, and the buy side has some tech dinosaurs.

Symphony is trying to tap into that market.

Also interesting, Bloomberg is coming out with a cheap version of their
instant messenger ($10/month)

~~~
memossy
No way, a whole bunch of people have full terminals just for the instant
messaging service (sales people in particular)

------
stcredzero
As a matter of fact, the origin of my HN username is my AOL Instant Messenger
username!

------
dredmorbius
I'd be really interested in the dynamics behind the rise and fall, the life-
cycle, of various chat and communications systems and platforms.

What is it, specifically, that tends to precipitate the decline of a platform,
or the rise of a new one?

------
pkamb
A cheap AIM acquisition and app-based relaunch would be cool for whoever's
working on the next cool/quirky/ephemeral/nostalgic/teen app like snapchat or
"tbh".

------
jasonwelk
Some of the best jokes I ever made, I remember typing them into an AIM prompt.
That sounds a little sad, but it's true... it holds many social memories for
me.

------
forkLding
Interesting to see AIM's deep influences, I suspect given a decade, Facebook's
original website might suffer a similar fate and Facebook moves onto other
things.

------
marak830
Ahh, such a shame. I certainly understand why, but it does bring back fond
memories.

(Christ if I go any further I'll start waving a zimmer-frame around and begin
talking about my lawn).

------
mozumder
AIM worked so well for kids because the "Away Message" always deleted after
the next update. It was an early version of Snapchat's disappearing messages.

------
chrischen
I remember when iPhone was kicking off and MSN Messenger and other popular
desktop chat apps had crappy iPhone versions.

If only they kept at it they’d still be in play.

------
booleandilemma
I loved AIM. It was the first IM program I used back in the 90s.

Later on I would use it alongside Yahoo Messenger with Meebo, with Winamp
playing in the background of course.

Good times!

------
freedomben
Alternative headline: AIM still works after 20 years

------
rootsudo
Wow, AIM is dead.

That is sad.

My preteen/teenage existence.

Sad, the chat rooms were great. I made many a friend that helped me become the
person I am today.

------
VectorLock
This is also the final death knell of ICQ.

~~~
empath75
Aol sold icq to the Russians years ago.

~~~
grzm
"the Russians" makes it sound like it was sold to the Russian government or
some other amorphous organization. Mail.Ru bought it in 2010:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICQ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICQ)

~~~
FierceLog
That is due to their government with their hands on all things Russian.

------
porter
Shows how brittle the network effect really is. No such thing as a permanently
durable competitive advantage.

------
mmcru
i've used aim almost daily for almost the whole 20 years.

it is one of the first apps i set up when i get a new computer. when i get
home for the day, one of the first things i do is to sign on and chat with my
buddy list.

aim is a special piece of software to me and i am disappointed to see it go.

------
jlebrech
I remember having a massive stack of CDROMs in the 90s, it was mostly
comprised of AOL cds

~~~
lightedman
Every time I got one of those it'd go straight to the microwave.

------
ogre_magi
Thanks for the memories AOL.

------
mattbroekhuis
Cue door shut sound effect

------
smaili
RIP AIM, you were one of the first pieces of software I ever used.

------
tritium
Jesus christ. AOL isn't even trying anymore.

------
theseatoms
What will happen to all those chat logs?

------
tosstossy
TIL AIM was still operational.

------
dafrankenstein2
not that but used Yahoo! messanger in the past. it was cool in those days too.

------
lousken
so now from the oldschool services only ICQ will remain?

------
ggm
bsd talk improved on write much. nothing since.

------
aries1980
Phew, I thought LSE AIM is being shut down. Acronyms are fun.

------
IncRnd
OMG!!! How will I log onto the Internet without AIM???

This is terrible! If a VC purchased AIM they could integrate the Internet with
a blockchain, preserving it forever. Why let the Internet die without adding
the double sha security that comes with bitcoin continuous integration?

It is extremely shortsighted not to use ethereum gas to save AIM. Smart
contracts would definitely get AIM used by the entire startup community.

/sarc

