
I Used AIM for the Last Month to See If It's Still Good - guiseroom
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/i-used-aim-for-the-last-month-to-see-if-its-still-good
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niftich
This article posits that it was Google Talk (gChat) that caused the exodus
from AIM and the other "old" chat networks of the time. In my researched
opinion [1][2] it was Facebook (not solely Facebook Chat, but Facebook's
entire offering) which did this instead. Quote from my earlier post at [2]:

 _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._

 _By 2010, Facebook, or at least awareness of it, was mainstream. At the end
of 2008, the Webster 's New World Dictionary named "overshare" as the word of
the year, while in 2009, the New Oxford American Dictionary chose "unfriend".
For people new to the IM landscape, the old networks were dying and full of
"old people" now in their 20s and 30s, so new networks surfacing around this
time were appealing. This contributed to the grown of Kik and Snapchat, while
people for cheaper alternatives to texting and voice calls drove the adoption
of Viber, WhatsApp, and Skype. iMessage went live in late 2011, offering with
FaceTime a built-in rich chat on iOS, successfully capturing an audience that
would've surely gotten a third-party app otherwise. Later, Hangouts on Android
emulated this strategy._

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13952563](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13952563)
[2]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11114518](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11114518)

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miobrien
My friend and I still use AIM everyday. We don't know why people left!
Especially with Macs, there's no excuse if you're already using Messages to
send texts.

I never got into Google Talk. Too many of the people in my contacts list were
either work connections or college acquaintances. And I loathe Facebook so
f#ck FB Chat.

~~~
smt88
In the US, people left in favor of SMS, which was available on mobile phones
long before AIM was.

