[HN Gopher] The Last Message Sent on AIM
___________________________________________________________________
The Last Message Sent on AIM
Author : luu
Score : 374 points
Date : 2021-03-01 06:40 UTC (16 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (justanman.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (justanman.org)
| gnrlst wrote:
| I remember the first time I saw my friend use AIM. It was similar
| to the first time I saw another friend play GTA III. Both times,
| we were all huddled together, trying to make sense of this mind-
| boggingly new experience. I miss that sense of wonder.
| after_care wrote:
| Childhood is fantastic.
| marban wrote:
| Just recently found that ICQ is still alive or back for what's it
| worth but after digging around I could still log in with my 5
| digit UIN. Nice.
| barry27 wrote:
| i always thought it was _Groucho_ Marx who said that line about
| fools. Goes to show what I know about the Marx brothers, I guess.
| Aeolun wrote:
| But did it arrive?!
| FauxDemure wrote:
| Very fun. AIM was a huge part of my high school existence.
|
| I was absent from AIM for several years, but then my first job
| out of school (2009) used it as the official chat service.
| Eventually the corporate overlords brought in a series of other
| sanctioned chat tools, but most of us kept AIM going to have a
| backchannel we knew wasn't monitored.
| oneweekwonder wrote:
| While not AIM, MSN or ICQ. I was surprised that QQ got its own
| song from a punk rock band in southern africa in 2003[0].
|
| [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0UhZJ_Tca0
| k__ wrote:
| Where(or when?) was AIM a big thing?
|
| I only knew like 4 people personally who used it. Most people
| used IRC, MSN, and ICQ, back in the days.
| betterunix2 wrote:
| Growing up in NYC, AIM was how I communicated with all my
| friends. It was very popular at the turn of the century (of the
| 21st century).
| swozey wrote:
| AIM was all my IRL friends, I met a few people from IRC over my
| 15+ years on it but ICQ and IRC were "internet friends" to me.
| AIM was huge when I was in middle/hs in the late 90/2000s.
| twobitshifter wrote:
| In the US 2002 or so everyone of my friends was on AIM
| icedchai wrote:
| AIM was big in the late 90's to early 2000's. I still had 2
| people I talked to on it through 2015 or so.
| egorfine wrote:
| Depends on the culture. For instance, it wasn't used at all in
| the ex-USSR back in the day.
| tppiotrowski wrote:
| One interesting (but probably creepy by todays standards) feature
| of AIM was that you could put %s anywhere in your profile and AIM
| would replace it with the screen name of whoever was looking at
| your profile. An example would be:
|
| %s is my best friend! -> angelc408 is my best friend!
|
| This also worked on links you added to your profile so you could
| make custom links that would send the user's name to your server
| to make a simple guest book.
|
| <a href="http://buddytracker.us/?user=%s">Sign my guestbook</a>
|
| I was a sophomore in college when I made a simple guest book
| service that blew up to over 3 million users in a year. I
| contemplated dropping out of college my junior year and making it
| into something more than 20 lines of PHP with a MySQL database.
| In the end I stayed in school and AIM removed profiles from the
| desktop client a year later. Dodged a bullet there...
| mjevans wrote:
| This is why it's important, as a group, to roll your server. Own
| the infrastructure of communication and discourse. To utilize
| open standards for which you or anyone else can create and run
| their own server, or client.
|
| Protocols should also evolve, or have organized successors over
| time. If you do provide backward compatibility, please do the
| best reasonable effort at making backward features work.
| gkoberger wrote:
| I feel like someone stopping maintenance of a private server is
| way more likely than the most popular chat client at the time
| shutting down eventually.
|
| In your mind, who in 2017 was still using AIM, blissfully
| unaware of the shutdown, only to be met with an error page and
| the loss of their friends forever?
|
| I'm sure most people are like me... over a decade ago, my AIM
| friends mostly migrated to text messages (and a few to FB
| Messenger), and any impending doom of those two protocols will
| be long-preceded by us having already gone somewhere else.
| jlkuester7 wrote:
| > I feel like someone stopping maintenance of a private
| server is way more likely than the most popular chat client
| at the time shutting down eventually.
|
| I have been hosting my own Matrix homeserver and my 4+ years
| of service life seems to be longer than 80% of Google
| services... :)
|
| (Admittedly I am just joking with this apples-to-oranges
| comparison, but sometimes it sure does feel like major
| corporations are trending towards shorter and shorter service
| lifetimes for their offerings... and this is coming from
| someone who rode the Google+ train all the way to the last
| station!)
| garbagetime wrote:
| I think GP was suggesting each person runs their own
| computer. So,
|
| >someone stopping maintenance of a private server
|
| Would only mean that that specific person was unreachable.
| Everyone else could carry on like nothing had happened.
| sp332 wrote:
| But the server would be less likely to shut down while there
| are poeple actively invested in it. With a smaller group, the
| maintainers can be held more accountable.
| berkes wrote:
| > like someone stopping maintenance of a private server is
| way more likely
|
| But the chance that thousands of someones all stop
| maintainance of their private servers (at the same time) is
| way more unlikely.
| robjan wrote:
| It's still inconvenient. The inconvenience ranges from
| slightly annoying to "I have lost all my messages and now
| have to find all of my friends/family/colleagues contact
| details again somehow".
| comeonseriously wrote:
| > Protocols should also evolve...
|
| This is why something like Delta Chat is a good thing. Almost
| everyone has email, so evolving email to include chat is a good
| thing. Also, it takes chat away from single entities.
| toast0 wrote:
| > Almost everyone has email
|
| This is certainly not the case. A lot of people whose first
| and only internet enabled device is a smartphone don't end up
| creating an email.
| twobitshifter wrote:
| Isn't an email necessary for a smartphone? I know apple
| requires one and will create it for you if you don't have
| it. On Android, do you need a google account with email?
| toast0 wrote:
| You don't need to login to Google to use an Android. Only
| if you want to use Google Play.
|
| Either way, you don't need to personally login with your
| own account. Often, whoever is setting up the phone (tech
| aware relative or phone store sales rep) for them will
| login with their account. For android phones, sometimes
| the people setting it up will just install customer
| selected apks from a usb drive; whatever version they
| happen to have, and when (if) those versions expire, come
| back to the store to update.
| at_a_remove wrote:
| I recall Yahoo Chat finally shutting down in December of 2012. In
| a sense, you could see it coming: the messaging protocols were a
| mess, no real attempt had been made against the spambots, the
| property was poorly managed during that phase where Yahoo was
| attempting to date anyone, everyone, in order to fix their lives.
|
| First they killed the user-made rooms, due to some senseless
| pedo-panic, then some special interest rooms, and finally the
| service itself, even as some put-upon employee named "Robin" had
| to write various upbeat missives about Yahoo _improving_ the
| service on the Yahoo Messenger Chat blog.
|
| You see, they had done one thing really _right_ in the beginning
| with their chat rooms -- they made a series of location-based
| rooms, first by continent, then country, then (for the US) state
| and even occasionally city. So many people either want to talk
| about what is going on where they live or just talk to locals
| that this was a great success. And yet ... destroyed. It was
| indicative of what I had often heard about the company, that
| there were some brilliant engineers with some great insights, and
| also that there were just metric tons of business people
| businessing very hard and capable of driving absolutely anything
| into the ground because of their inability to leave well enough
| alone.
|
| It is a little amazing to me that all of these corporations just
| decided to shutter messaging and chat rooms in lockstep. And I
| suppose one did it, so they all had to or fall behind something
| or another.
| pts_ wrote:
| Yahoo Messenger was my jam so much so that I wanted to be printed
| on my epitaph "You have been disconnected."
| lwhi wrote:
| This makes me think of ICQ .. whatever happened to that?
| bombcar wrote:
| Seems it got sold into Russia where it's still being used.
|
| https://icq.com/mobile/en#ios
| techrat wrote:
| With caveats. While my UID and password still work, I am
| unable to change my (horrendously insecure, attackable)
| password without first providing a phone number.
|
| Given that ICQ's ownership and cooperation with governments
| both raise questions, I don't think I'm going to be offering
| up any further information just to preserve a piece of my
| internet history.
| sn_master wrote:
| there are as many throwaway phone number sites now as the
| throwaway email ones..
| waspight wrote:
| Is there any good documentary out there to relive the msn
| messenger era? I mean the internet as it was 2005 was pretty
| different. Miss it.
| juststeve wrote:
| pour one out for AIM
| twobitshifter wrote:
| AIM was actually a proto-social network. You had your buddy list
| and friends group, and a profile you could fill out. Your away
| message could be used as your status or to tweet your mood.
| pmob241 wrote:
| Very nice
| toast0 wrote:
| The shutdown of AIM makes me sad, but I had maybe one holdout
| contact left (who I still speak with, but on other services).
|
| I'm sure there's all sort of business lessons we could learn
| here. Among them that an early lead doesn't always lead to
| lasting success. AIM federated with Apple iChat, Facebook
| Messenger, and Google Talk, as well as ICQ after they purchased
| it over the years, but that didn't turn into anything lasting
| either.
|
| It's probably my bias from working at WhatsApp; but I don't think
| they did a great job working with mobile, and that combined with
| lack of support from management killed them when smartphones took
| over the mobile market. They did have some support for AIM on
| feature phones, but I think it was all based on SMS, which was
| costly, and I don't know if they had made a compelling Android
| app (wikipedia says they did have an Android app; but who knows
| if it was good); I never ran iOS, so I don't know if their iPhone
| app was any good, but I never heard from friends with iPhones
| that they were using it, so I'm guessing not so great.
| smaryjerry wrote:
| AIM truly became useless. Everyone got phones and texted
| instead of using computers. AIM was popular before every person
| had a mobile phone. It wasn't really AIMs fault. Mobile phones
| came out and they were too slow to have a decent application.
| For a few years phones didn't have the ability at all to
| download applications. In that span of time AIM was completely
| replaced by texting. They may have been starting from zero
| again by the time iPhone and Android popularized app downloads.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| I was using AIM to send SMS to people at some point.
|
| https://www.tech-recipes.com/rx/116/send-sms-text-
| messages-f...
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| WhatsApp offered two things for my social graph:
|
| 1) got rid of usernames/passwords. This was a surprisingly high
| barrier for non tech literate people to pass, and WhatsApp made
| it dead simple for them to download from app store, install,
| and start chatting with their contacts.
|
| 2) SMS verification eliminated spam
|
| And the timing was perfect. Data plans and smartphones were
| just coming into the fore, and WhatsApp popped in as an
| alternative to the extremely inferior MMS option, and gave
| people a free way to communicate across borders.
|
| I also remember having trouble sharing contacts prior to
| WhatsApp, and after WhatsApp, it didn't matter what mobileOS
| the other person was using, I could just send a contact, and
| they would be able to add it to theirs. Same with location. And
| the picture/video sharing was way nicer early on also, albeit
| heavily compressed, it just worked.
| tda wrote:
| I recall having MSN on a symbian smartphone just before
| iPhones even existed. Really cool and all, but I could only
| communicate to a handful of people with it. SMS was the de-
| facto only way, always 1-1 and charged per message. Internet
| 2g/3g was being pushed for low prices (10 EUR/month for
| unlimited use) but there wasn't really a mass market yet. I
| could tether my laptop to my phone abut that was really
| something exceptional, but most people were like "who needs
| internet on a phone?" Had too look it up, this was just 14
| years ago.
|
| Then about 6? years ago almost overnight everyone (including
| mom) had a smartphone with Whatsapp and SMS/MMS was a thing
| of the past.
| taurath wrote:
| I bought a helio ocean keyboard phone over an iPhone
| because it had AIM MSN and YIM while the iPhone did not. I
| thought it was great.
| iso1631 wrote:
| > And the timing was perfect. Data plans and smartphones were
| just coming into the fore, and WhatsApp popped in as an
| alternative to the extremely inferior MMS option, and gave
| people a free way to communicate across borders.
|
| The creator of whatsapp built it to help with his
| globetrotting - so he could set a message saying what
| timezone he was in so people didn't expect an immediate
| response. Easy cheap/free method of facilitating cross-border
| communications was at the heart of whatsapp from the start.
| allan_s wrote:
| They should have use
|
| > This is Our Last Cry Before Our Eternal Silence
|
| https://infostory.com/2012/01/31/this-is-our-last-cry-before...
| swiley wrote:
| Do not invest in proprietary services. This is why.
| spike021 wrote:
| I really miss AIM.
|
| It was the way you knew friends were available to chat. It was
| much closer to in-person conversation than most media we use
| nowadays.
|
| It's not uncommon for someone to {iMessage, SMS, FB Message, IG
| Message, etc.} me while I'm otherwise busy. Then, I need to find
| a second to let them know of this (unless I either totally drop
| the ball or consciously decide to not reply). I also need to let
| them know I'll be free to chat after work, at lunch time, etc.
|
| With AIM, you just logged in and set whether you were available,
| idle, away, or invisible. Friends knew whether they would disturb
| you or not.
|
| Not only that but it was pretty much the singular form of instant
| communication that almost everybody used. Now I have people I
| reply to on multiple platforms such that we'll even branch off in
| separate conversations per platform, I only talk to on X, Y, or Z
| platform, etc.
|
| I'm not one to <Old man yells at cloud> typically but this is one
| aspect of social media that I think we've lost over the past
| decade and it really sucks.
| agumonkey wrote:
| the AIM era suffered from the duplication of messengers. I
| remember using Trillian to merge aim/icq/msn and later Pidgin.
|
| Also, I forgot how to register on aim but i'm pretty sure it
| wasn't tied to name or phone number :) such a wild life
| 101008 wrote:
| I really miss them too. I loved the fact that you had to
| organize with your friends to connect at the same time to to
| chat via MSN. I hate the fact that now I am reachable to
| wherever I am on my phone through Whatsapp. Of course, it has a
| lot of advantages, but the my nostalgic sides misses the point
| that I was able to receive messages only if I was on the
| computer (or if I left it turn it on with the monitor off,
| without my parents knowing it)
| elcomet wrote:
| > Then, I need to find a second to let them know of this
| (unless I either totally drop the ball or consciously decide to
| not reply).
|
| This seems strange to me. I view IM as asynchronous. If someone
| messages me while I'm busy, I'll just reply later. And I don't
| expect people to answer immediatly. No need to sync to chat
| together (of course if we're both available we can chat in
| sync).
| beowulfey wrote:
| yeah, for me treating im as asynchronous is redundant. that's
| why we had email. aim was a phone call. but i also treat it
| asynchronous these days and might even step away from a
| conversation mid thought. i hate when i do it but it's a very
| bad habit encouraged by the apps. ah well
| foldr wrote:
| The thing is that this makes it almost impossible to chat to
| people over text these days. If you try it, it's an
| infuriating experience where you wait several minutes for a
| reply every time. In the old days, you could actually have a
| text conversation with someone on MSN messenger.
| eznzt wrote:
| I hate that it is asynchronous now. I liked it back before
| when you talked to someone who was online and you knew he was
| engaged in the conversation. Now all of that is gone. As you
| say "I'll just reply later"--I hate that.
| spike021 wrote:
| Honestly that's my point (and perhaps I should have been more
| clear about it).
|
| I think in hindsight I vastly prefer synchronous chat- which
| is why I pointed out in the beginning that AIM was the
| closest online communication to in-person communication.
|
| With asynchronous communication you do need to be much more
| proactive in how you handle your 'threads'. As I mentioned
| before, you need to remember or decide to reply _eventually_.
| It's also possible that in the meantime your thread
| (basically 1:1 communication with a person) will fork off
| (i.e. you share a tweet with someone in Twitter while
| simultaneously having an asynchronous conversation about some
| other topic in iMessages).
| addicted wrote:
| The "asynchronous" chat apps are designed to basically be
| synchronous. And aggressively so.
|
| That's why you have that aggressive red notification badge
| with the number of unread messages that your brain requires
| you to get rid of. That's why when someone sends you a
| message, the default is to aggressively slide a
| notification with the message no matter what you're doing.
| batiudrami wrote:
| IM didn't used to be like that because we didn't have clients
| on our phones. An "online" status meant that someone was
| sitting at their computer and happy to chat (or they'd have
| the client closed).
| guessbest wrote:
| ICQ was like that since the mid 90's.
| lovegoblin wrote:
| ICQ had offline messaging, though.
| phire wrote:
| Or you would set your status to "appear offline"
|
| From memory AIM/MSN didn't even have offline messaging. If
| someone was offline, you either waited for them to be
| online, or you would contact them via email/txt/landline.
| toast0 wrote:
| AIM eventually got offline messaging; I beleive with AIM
| 6.0 that launched in late 2006.
| phire wrote:
| I think all my friends had moved to google talk and text
| messaging by 2006.
| moistbar wrote:
| I remember AIM having the ability to forward messages to
| SMS when you were offline, and Pidgin had the ability to
| "pounce" someone, which would queue up a message to send
| them next time they logged on.
| breakfastduck wrote:
| Pidgin - now that's a name I haven't heard in a long
| time!
|
| Made me immediately think of Adium, which I used to talk
| on MSM via my mac because the official client was woeful.
| moistbar wrote:
| Libpurple was friggin excellent.
| iso1631 wrote:
| Indeed, if I want synchronous chat, I'll make a phone call.
| If I want a response at some point I'll send a message.
| cjrp wrote:
| This was talking on the phone for people who don't like
| talking on the phone. If that makes any sense.
| ModernMech wrote:
| This makes perfect sense to me. I don't know what it is
| about talking on the phone, but it's an extremely anxiety
| inducing experience for me. I'm generally fine with
| people, but if I have a choice of walking down the street
| to talk with them in person or call them on the phone, I
| will make the walk every time.
|
| Best I can figure out it stems from being verbally abused
| as a teenager when I had a job making cold calls. People
| are vicious on the phone in a way they never are in
| person. Some people seem to use strangers on the phone as
| an opportunity to safely vent whatever pent-up rage they
| have. And even though people are just as vicious online,
| it just doesn't have the same bite as it does when it's a
| human voice filled with rage.
| progman32 wrote:
| I'm the same way, sans the cold calling experience. Would
| much rather drive down to talk to someone at the counter
| vs. calling the business from home.
| hahahahe wrote:
| When you saw someone on AIM, at least during dialup days, it
| meant you will get his/her attention. They were logged into
| engage in real-time conversation. You just don't have that
| level of communication anymore. Most online conversations are
| asynchronous.
| stevewodil wrote:
| There's always https://honk.me/ if you're feeling youthful
| xerxesaa wrote:
| I feel like this was more due to how we used computers at the
| time rather than AIM itself. You can still set your status on
| most messaging platforms, but we're now always online and
| people assume you'll respond later if you're too busy.
|
| Up until the early 2000's, most people were still getting
| online using a dial-up connection on a PC. That meant you had
| to make a conscious decision to get online and block off your
| phone line for other purposes. At least for me, the very fact
| that I was online meant that I wasn't busy and was open to
| chatting with my friends.
| disillusioned wrote:
| I used AIM to create what had to be one of the earlier live-
| blogging proofs of concept. It supported live-blogging from my
| Nokia 3390 dumb phone by virtue of its AIM client (which was
| literally just an interface to AIM over SMS).
|
| I coupled that with a custom plugin on Trillian (Astra?) to post
| to an API (API is generous, it was literally just a PHP script
| that knew to listen for a certain URL variable) which would post
| to the database, and update the page live. I even gave my friend
| a different prefix, and then we set up a dueling live-blog screen
| as we went on the same trip together: me on the left column, him
| on the right, timestamped, both of us contributing to this blog
| without easily being able to see the other's posts, since the
| phone itself didn't have any web capabilities.
|
| I dug into the old database, which I still have banging around
| somewhere here, and sure enough, the first entry was January of
| 2005.
| mhd wrote:
| "@GrimReaper: A/S/L?"
| cbanek wrote:
| I remember being at work when we turned off Xbox 1 support for
| LIVE. We had one last Xbox console and we watched it start to be
| able to not connect. The end of an era.
| dan_m2k wrote:
| A nice little slice of internet history.
|
| True is the lesson that scale doesn't represent success. I wonder
| how many of the current tech companies will learn the same
| lesson, or have we reached a period of maturity where products
| that don't contribute to the bottom line aren't allowed to linger
| like this did?
| nly wrote:
| Did MSN Messenger make money for Microsoft before they bought
| Skype?
|
| Brand awareness for "MSN" just from MSN Messenger alone must
| have been massive. I'd be surprised today if half of your
| average kids using WhatsApp have even heard of Bing or Office
| 365. Hell, if it wasn't for Xbox Live the same could probably
| be said for that
| dan_m2k wrote:
| No idea, but I bet the brand equity created for the MSN brand
| via MSN messenger was indeed huge across a boatload of
| international markets.
|
| Seems like a huge amount of wasted traction and momentum for
| the generation that grew up on MSN messenger, and now might
| be making purchase decisions where that traction could've
| been leveraged. It's what any other (non tech) brands do very
| successfully.
|
| I saw someone repost something from msn.com the other day,
| and was genuinely surprised to see it was still live.
|
| But, the way that the brand was migrated MSN
| Messenger -> Windows Live Messenger -> Bing (?) -> etc etc
|
| was a shitshow and made death a sweet relief for it.
| nly wrote:
| I mean the same could be said for the 'Live' brand
| dmingod666 wrote:
| I have fond memories of the ICQ sound.. hell even mIRC was mind-
| blowing the first time I saw it... Really? You can talk to
| strangers in other countries in real time... Wow..
| jugg1es wrote:
| That is exactly what got me into computers in the first place -
| real time conversations with people across the world on AOL.
| Blew my little mind.
| mrweasel wrote:
| Normally I happy to shutdown services or delete code, less stuff,
| less stuff to maintain, but something as dear as AIM might be
| harder.
|
| It's always a little sad to think of something like "the last
| message sent", but there's also someone, somewhere, with the last
| commit to the AIM server code. Writing the final AIM server
| bugfix cannot have been cheerful work, I mean want was the point,
| the developer most likely knew that the service would shutdown.
| avh02 wrote:
| One of the first products i worked on was put in to
| "maintenance" mode for most of my tenure at the same company
| (we were disbanded and moved to different teams).
|
| I wanted to be the one to shut it down (we knew it was not
| successful, and i was the last remaining team member) - but the
| one day i was on sick leave somebody not associated with it was
| asked to do it.
|
| I was slightly annoyed, but was happier to see it go than to be
| bothered by somebody else taking it out.
|
| We still celebrated though.
| werber wrote:
| I remember my use of AIM fading through college. It being used
| through the message app on Mac made the experience of it going
| away pretty seemless. I use my text messages through essentially
| the same application, so in a way it still feels current
| tinco wrote:
| It was such a senseless destruction. People miss AIM, people miss
| MSN Messenger and just a couple years later it turned out instant
| messaging platforms were worth billions.
|
| It's still insane to me these corporations shut down perfectly
| viable platforms that were still used by millions. The short
| sightedness and pettiness of these directors is something of
| legend, I hope there's a chapter about this in new management
| textbooks, but who knows.
|
| Anyone got a good explanation why it made sense to shut down
| these services?
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| On the contrary, social media and messaging platforms live on
| trend popularity alone. Features or bulk accounts ever created
| are mostly meaningless. MySpace stopped mattering once everyone
| moved to Facebook. These aren't driven by technology, they're
| driven solely by popularity.
|
| Once people move on, you might as well shut it down.
| after_care wrote:
| Microsoft rebranded MSN to Lync, Skype and finally to Teams.
|
| AIM could have rebranded with the right product team behind
| it.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| And lost users every time. Also, you've merged a lot of
| unrelated products.
|
| MSN was folded into Skype after they bought Skype, a
| separate company. Lync, a corporate offering with no
| commonality with MSN, got rebranded Skype for Business,
| despite no actual relation or compatibility with Skype.
| Teams has nothing in common with either of the previously
| described product lines, though Microsoft is going to
| sunset SfB and push everyone over to Teams, given the
| success of that product.
|
| Renaming Lync as Skype for Business is actually the only
| "rebrand" Microsoft did here, and it did nothing to
| actually increase adoption of that platform, considering
| Microsoft chose to dump it less than five years later.
| meerita wrote:
| Truth is, there were chances to renew, rebuild, ressurrect old
| messaging ecosystems, like ICQ but they sucked so bad it's
| really hard to take chance.
| adrianN wrote:
| It was a golden age of instant messaging. You could talk to
| anybody on any network because multiprotocol clients just
| worked. I basically gave up on instant messaging because
| every company now digs deeper and deeper moats around their
| network.
| loopz wrote:
| I think the true answer is pretty cut & dry: They didn't sell
| your data to everyone.
| Jenk wrote:
| They failed to monetise them. Most chat clients were placing
| ads to try and generate revenue but I doubt they ever made
| money from it. From what I remember of the blogs at the time,
| such as Martin Fowler's stuff on Yahoo! Messenger, the
| infrastructure was far from cheap, and the protocols were
| really insecure, too.
|
| I think Facebook was hoovering up a shitton of the messenger
| traffic very quickly, too, and the traffic on AIM/MSN/etc was
| dominated by crappy bots sending phishing links.
|
| All in all it wasn't a happy place and I doubt many actually
| missed them. This is the first link I've personally seen about
| the nostalgia of IM anyway.
| lordlimecat wrote:
| Spam was a thing but the clients were lean and fast and
| ubiquitous across platforms.
|
| Anyone who remembers the various clients can remember that
| even bloated MSN messenger was far, far faster than Facebook
| messenger or Teams.
| xenihn wrote:
| AIM was profitable until the day that it was shut down.
| Jenk wrote:
| AOL was profitable. I can't find any source that states AIM
| was profitable.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| How?
| [deleted]
| Macha wrote:
| A lot of ads and not very much ongoing development.
|
| I'm not sure "until the day it was shut down" is totally
| correct though. AOL were moving from their own data
| centers to AWS at that stage and AIM was one of the last
| apps left in, so I find it hard to believe that AIM would
| still have shown green near the end if the data center
| costs were spread across the services using them (we
| didn't have a chargeback model in those days).
|
| I think the decision (I worked at AOL at the time, but
| far from AIM) to shut it down came down to:
|
| 1. There was no dedicated dev team
|
| 2. Consequently the tech was old and not up to then
| modern security practices
|
| 3. Even aside from security, it used a lot of in-house
| tech that other more actively maintained products like
| mail had migrated from and newer products never used.
|
| 4. Lots of the software it used like OS versions were
| going EOL
|
| 5. It needed an AWS migration as the data center was
| shutting down.
|
| 6. It didn't fit with the strategic direction (which was
| to use revenue from legacy but shrinking businesses like
| dialup/search/mail to pivot to owned content as a
| USP/headline piece for the adtech business)
|
| So someone had to make a cost/benefit analysis of
| shutting it down versus investing enough to bring it up
| to speed and that's before you even consider the user
| facing improvements that would have been needed to
| reclaim market share from Facebook and Skype.
|
| Also number 1 for the user facing improvements would have
| been "less ads, less intrusive ads" which also would have
| hurt revenue.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| >> People miss AIM
|
| I miss how anyone with a packet sniffer could pull entire AIM
| messages out of the air. Just filter by port number and you
| could read them like a live chat window. I demonstrated this to
| a class while at law school. Scared the heck out of everyone
| who had been using it to pass answers to people when they were
| called on. (Failure to give a reasonable answer would impact
| your grade very quickly.)
| everdrive wrote:
| If AOL or MSN had figured out how to monetize these platforms,
| they would have ruined them anyhow. They would have been lost
| in a different way.
| Macha wrote:
| At least here the move to MSN to Facebook was largely driven
| by the move to monetise it more. More ads, more features
| which existed to give them places to show ads (I seem to
| remember it opening a today screen with news feeds at one
| point, think they did a twitter style thing with status
| updates too? Or was that imo?). The pull factor was everyone
| was on Facebook but the monetisation changes were a big push
| factor too
| numair wrote:
| Imagine there was an AOL executive in charge of AIM, and that
| Mark Zuckerberg offered the guy hundreds of millions of
| dollars' worth of Facebook stock to hobble efforts to keep the
| platform relevant. Sounds like a totally crazy conspiracy
| theory, right? After all, it would have been totally obviously
| suspicious if someone made hundreds of millions of dollars by
| simply jumping from one middle-management role to another,
| right?
| mikeodds wrote:
| Are you referencing someone specific here?
| polynomial wrote:
| Even if those rumors are true (and no one has ever seen fit
| to publish them, so there's that) it wasn't just a single
| executive that killed AIM, it was multiple points of failure,
| including keeping it ad-free, which meant it pretty much
| existed outside AOL's revenue ecosystem, out on its own. And
| when Appelman & team released their open source version, that
| was akin to declaring a mutiny at anti-OSS AOL.
|
| Products need internal champions, without which, it doesn't
| take a conspiracy to kill them, they will just atrophy on
| their own.
| jaywalk wrote:
| It's obviously been a long time so my memory could be
| faulty, but I distinctly remember ads in AIM and installing
| cracked versions of the client that removed the ads.
| Macha wrote:
| Yeah, in the last few years there was a big permanent ad
| at the footer of the contact list, plenty of ads in the
| web client and I think at one point there were sidebar
| ads in chat (that last one could have been msn)
| polynomial wrote:
| JTBC, I meant revenue generating ads, not ads for other
| AOL products.
| Macha wrote:
| Maybe they had no inventory in your region, or you're
| remembering an earlier time? It definitely had auctioned
| ads in 2014.
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| Generally speaking, they were shut down because they were
| designed in a way that they were centrally controlled by one
| entity which had the ability to shut them down, just like that.
| dmingod666 wrote:
| Discord, google chat, WhatsApp slack, Telegram, MsTeams,
| almost all commonly used chat clients are centrally managed..
| [deleted]
| olivierestsage wrote:
| Yes, and they work fine for now, but their long-term
| viability is far from guaranteed for this reason.
| dmingod666 wrote:
| On a lighter note, "In the long term, we are all dead"
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Agreed. AOL in particular pioneered stuff like E2E encryption,
| etc. imo, the early 2000s platforms like AIM, Yahoo, MSN were
| the pinnacle of the technology, and successors are all worse in
| material ways.
|
| Today, iMessage is probably the best single messaging platform,
| which is pitiful because it has key design and UX flaws.
|
| I think in the case of AIM, it existed by virtue of and thrived
| under corporate neglect. The others withered as the
| complimentary services withered (Yahoo) or the corporate
| strategies shifted in inscrutable ways (Microsoft, Google). It
| was a weird scenario where MS and Goog behaved similarly...
| Microsoft with their mysterious purchase and subsequent neglect
| of Skype and Google with their drunken monkey product
| management process.
| easton wrote:
| What are your UX flaws with iMessage? The reason why I like
| it is because it's got good UX (except when a message doesn't
| send for no reason), but if there's something I'm missing out
| on in other messenger apps...
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Notable gaps:
|
| - Only available on iOS and MacOS
|
| - Copy and paste is unreliable on both iOS and MacOS
|
| - Plugins don't exist on MacOS
|
| - Lots of fail scenarios for phone number switching.
|
| - You cannot control encryption outside of the AppleID
| ecosystem (AIM supported user certificates)
|
| - You cannot control identity for a corporate device,
| unless you use Azure AD.
|
| That said, it's a great service that I use every day. But
| it could be better. Facetime is way worse and more
| disappointing from an Apple POV.
| lilactown wrote:
| (not the OP) two big UX gripes I have with iMessage:
|
| 1) For some reason, photos take forever to be received (and
| sometimes are not received at all) when I send them to
| certain people. Best I can tell is they're using older
| devices and/or are in poor reception.
|
| This + I can't send a photo with a message attached means
| that I'll send the photo, then a message with context, but
| the person never receives the photo so it's confusing.
|
| 2) There is no clear way to dismiss messages from the list
| of conversations without deleting them. It makes it hard to
| find conversations later when I have to scroll through a
| bunch of stuff I don't care about, but may want to search
| later.
| tantalor wrote:
| As an Android user, the most obvious flaw of iMessage is
| incompatibility.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| I'd say not being able to message ~85% of smartphone users
| is a pretty big UX flaw.
| ulfw wrote:
| That's not bad UX. That's a product limitation (a
| conscious one I might say).
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| This 'product limitation' makes user experience worse.
| Actually, it makes it unusable for most users.
|
| Whether this limitation is intentional is irrelevant, the
| UX is still bad.
| Terretta wrote:
| It's also not the case that there is such a limitation.
|
| https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207006
|
| A single contact / conversation can even mix and match.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| Are you really suggesting that SMS fallback is a good
| enough way to message people in 2021? How about sending
| them a video? Location? Voice message? MMS? Does this
| crap ever work?? (In my country it doesn't work between
| operators and costs EUR.5 for one message)
| Terretta wrote:
| You can message 100% of all smartphone users, it
| magically delivers as SMS. Also supports group chats with
| regular SMS users. Also supports MMS with them.
|
| Given this pretty graceful degradation, what do you mean
| by not being able to message 85% of smartphone users?
| axaxs wrote:
| Eh, that's terrible UX for everyone involved.
|
| I'm more or less OK with the idea of Apple not developing
| for other platforms. However, they are actively hostile
| to anyone who has offered and tried to get interop
| working on other platforms, which is really a shame.
| kumarharsh wrote:
| I don't know about other countries, but in India at
| least, SMS's are generally paid and won't send if you
| don't have balance.
|
| While WhatsApp/Telegram messages are actually free if you
| have got data.
|
| And nowadays I get absolutely zero SMS's from people. All
| senders are now just bots and notification services.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| You really can call SMS a 'graceful degradation' while
| keeping a straight face? I call it intentionally
| crippling communication capabilities. Also, just say no
| to walled gardens.
| lordlimecat wrote:
| Isn't there a significant UX trap in moving an imessage
| enabled SIM over to an android phone?
| Terretta wrote:
| The SIM isn't iMessage enabled. The number is registered
| as a symbolic iMessage ID. That can be fixed.
|
| Here's how to handle that before you move:
|
| https://support.google.com/android/answer/6156081?hl=en
|
| Here's how to deregister that later:
|
| https://selfsolve.apple.com/deregister-imessage/
|
| Basically just SMS 2FA showing you control the number to
| deregister.
| [deleted]
| ThePhysicist wrote:
| I think it's as you said, corporations didn't recognize the
| economic value of chat platforms back then. I think they were
| mostly focused on "Web 2.0" stuff so they probably tried
| putting all of their resources into that. You often see
| companies axe perfectly good business units just because they
| have a slightly lower margin or contribution to overall
| revenue, as they think putting the people from those units into
| the "cash cow" units will be better for the profit line (and it
| often is). We can see Google doing this over and over: They
| actually create a lot of nice products that could be profitable
| on their own, but since the main Google products are just
| making much more money per employee it still makes sense for
| them to axe the small "winning products" and have almost
| everyone work on the big winners.
| a-dub wrote:
| I think AIM is a little different... It was born out of the
| original AOL dial-up walled garden service where they built a
| bridge to the Internet where people could download standalone
| clients and communicate with themselves and old school AOL
| subscribers. I don't know the internals, but I do know that
| much of the original AOL backend existed at least through the
| early 2000s which provided the instant messenger and
| authentication services [0]. It wouldn't surprise me if they
| were shutting down all of that infrastructure which I'm sure
| had a non-trivial cost to operate.
|
| I think the thing to keep in mind is that running centralized
| backend infrastructure (ie; store and forward, user state,
| directory) for an instant messaging service is not cheap and
| if the platform is open and allows for user supplied clients,
| there's almost zero direct monetization opportunity without
| stepping into unethical privacy breach territory. That means
| they're relegated to just pushing a brand, and it seems like
| a very expensive way to do that. Moreover, AOL transitioned
| in its later years into a digital journalism company, and as
| far as I know AOL itself as a consumer brand disappeared.
|
| [0] Worked on a whitebox set top box browser platform (ala
| Android) in the early 00s specifically with AOL as a client.
| Amusingly, the big feature they were trying to push was
| onscreen chatrooms for people who were watching the same
| thing live, which I guess if you think about it may have led
| to ways to monetize chat.
| ballenf wrote:
| > stepping into unethical privacy breach territory
|
| Given oath's laughable privacy policy, I'm not sure any
| stepping would be required.
|
| Granted the shutdown came before the Verizon/Oath takeover,
| but somehow I doubt the decision came down to "we could
| make a lot of money off this, but it will require
| relaxation of privacy practices, so we'll just shut it down
| instead."
| icedchai wrote:
| Too bad they didn't open source it. I'm sure most of the
| costs were in the employees required to operate and
| maintain the system. I am skeptical the infrastructure
| itself was that expensive, unless they were forced to keep
| it running on obsolete hardware. 90's tech is generally
| pretty light weight...
| deaddodo wrote:
| > unless they were forced to keep it running on obsolete
| hardware.
|
| If you read blog posts and the like from people involved
| in those projects (MSN Messenger and AIM/ICQ,
| specifically); the companies would take advantage of
| protocol updates or other scheduled downtime to failover
| to newer hardware. So I doubt they were ever stuck on any
| "obsolete hardware".
| josephg wrote:
| > We can see Google doing this over and over: They actually
| create a lot of nice products that could be profitable on
| their own, but since the main Google products are just making
| much more money per employee it still makes sense for them to
| axe the small "winning products" and have almost everyone
| work on the big winners.
|
| Even 10 years ago they've been very explicit about this
| strategy internally. Management talks about it as "putting
| more wood behind fewer arrows".
|
| Its somewhat self reinforcing. I didn't try Google Inbox
| because I was sure it would be axed in a couple years anyway.
| (And I was right.) The more people make that same assumption,
| the fewer people try anything new from Google. And the worse
| any new products' metrics are - which in turn makes google
| axe more otherwise good products.
| [deleted]
| george3d6 wrote:
| You may not be the target audience though, the target
| audience are probably people that aren't yet "bough into"
| the google ecosystem. So they are unaware of this axing
| policy. Anyone logging into chromium, using gmail and
| google calendar and an android device is already "theirs".
|
| What they want is to increase the share of people that are
| in the MS ecosystem (and presumably also OSX ecosystem, but
| that's mostly a status signaling thing, so the strategy
| there is probably different).
| addicted wrote:
| You will be surprised how many people are indeed aware of
| Google's axing policy, if not even consciously.
|
| The reality is that so many of them have been burnt by
| Google. Picasa was an extremely popular photo management
| platform used by many. Google Play Music was extremely
| popular. Google Plus was not exactly popular but touched
| nearly every Google user, was highly promoted, and then
| disappeared. And then you come to the massive list of
| chat and calling apps that Google has arbitrarily spun
| up, promoted, and then killed.
|
| But even if we go with the idea that regular people are
| unaware of Google's tendency, even subconsciously,
| there's also the fact that the way most products become
| popular is through a smaller subset of influencers. And
| tech influencers, almost necessarily, are almost
| certainly aware of googles tendencies.
| deaddodo wrote:
| > Google Play Music
|
| This one irritates me most. GPM was mature and
| required...what? Minimal maintenance at this point?
|
| But no, how about we completely rebuild a music service
| on top of YouTube, miss a bunch of minor simple features
| that every streaming service offers (you know, like save
| current playlist/radio as Playlist) and FORCE every user
| over to this far inferior service.
|
| At least with transitions like MOG->Beats->Apple Music,
| it made since as the entire corporate entity changed. But
| Google just...literally can't invest in anything that
| takes a small ounce of manpower to manage.
|
| At this point, OP is correct. The Google "curse" is well
| known and few people trust their whim-products, no matter
| their investment/marketing budget.
| echelon wrote:
| > Google Play Music
|
| The perfect music service and discovery engine. Axed for
| no cause.
|
| I don't like Spotify or Pandora, and I'm filled with
| seething hatred for Youtube Music. I keep trying to use
| it, but it's horrible and doesn't play what I want to
| listen to. How can you design an app that's so bad that
| it actively does what you don't want?
|
| YouTube Music plays _meme videos_ [1, 2] in my
| alternative music stream. And anime music I listened to
| ten years ago in the middle of my EDM. Seriously what the
| fuck, Google? I never asked to mix my YouTube viewing
| experience with my music tastes.
|
| For the first time in my life, I've stopped listening to
| music. I want to go back to managing my own highly
| curated playlists, but it's too much work to set up.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kxp8qPEwSXM
|
| [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jofNR_WkoCE
| dTal wrote:
| >For the first time in my life, I've stopped listening to
| music. I want to go back to managing my own highly
| curated playlists, but it's too much work to set up.
|
| I'm sorry, I'm sympathetic to your main point but this
| reads to me as... silly, to put it lightly. Google made
| you _give up on music_? You could do nothing but play CDs
| and still have _absurdly_ more access to music than
| anyone in history. Music has literally never been more
| abundant, discoverable, and obtainable than it is today.
| The technology to replay it has never sounded better for
| a given price, and never been more ubiquitous. Neither
| has the tech to _create_ it - there is an incredible
| Cambrian explosion of musical styles happening right now,
| as more people than ever before have access to studios
| and are using the internet to borrow and remix each other
| 's work in interesting ways. This is an _incredible_
| golden age for music. And you can 't be bothered because
| Google axed a product? Can't even be bothered to do it
| the old way?
| ddingus wrote:
| Force...
|
| Yeah, I am not going to use the new thing at all. Will go
| the same way the last new thing did.
|
| Repeat this a few times and users are seeking. I am.
| hobs wrote:
| This was the one digital service I was happy to pay
| google for and caused me a 100% ban on their consumer
| services going forward.
|
| Google music hadnt changed in a few years, so of course
| we need to get a promotion by destroying it and replacing
| it with something that might grow faster but definitely
| wont.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| Microsoft gets a lot of flak for their endless rebrands,
| but its not like they rewrote Lync from scratch when they
| renamed it to Skype for Business. Google seems to have
| adopted a similar marketing-driven rebrand culture
| ("Google Play is a confusing brand and right now consumer
| confidence is in the YouTube brand, we should move our
| media streaming holdings to the YouTube brand") but
| confusingly adopted it as yet another excuse to generally
| rewrite the apple pie from scratch instead of just
| renaming things that aren't broken.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > but confusingly adopted it as yet another excuse to
| generally rewrite the apple pie from scratch instead of
| just renaming things that aren't broken.
|
| I think that inverts history. The YT Music implementation
| and brand existed long before the decision to replace GPM
| with it. The branding decision followed most of the
| reimplementation, it didn't provide an excuse for it.
|
| Google has a strong tendency to have multiple parallel
| offerings in a field for a while before consolidating
| them (and, also, a history of botching the
| consolidation.)
| WorldMaker wrote:
| My impression from second and third hand sources was
| still that YT Music implementation and brand was after
| GPM was asked to "code freeze" and the team directed to
| other projects (including some to YTM). That the products
| stood side-by-side for so long is only further indictment
| on the rewrite-the-world approach that it took them so
| long to reach "feature parity" enough that they felt
| comfortable sunsetting GPM, well after the writing had
| been on the wall, the development ended, and the
| marketing decision to change brands had been handed down.
|
| The multiple parallel offerings thing is of course its
| own problem that seems to often indicate communications
| issues up/down the decision chains, but specifically with
| reference to GPM/YTM I heard it was more a symptom of a
| rewrite than one of those communication breakdowns.
| Though again, that's only from impressions I got from
| scuttlebutt I heard second and third hand.
| roywiggins wrote:
| My grandmother mourns Picasa and PicasaWeb _to this day_.
| ballenf wrote:
| My father was so proud of having uploaded all his music
| to Google Play. It was the single largest source of
| loyalty for him to Android over iPhone. With the iPhone's
| missing back button being second.
|
| And since Hangout chat used to be integrated with gmail,
| many a gmail user saw deprecation notices for ages now.
| And terribly unhelpful deprecation notices at that. They
| basically said something like "I'm going to stop working
| soon. You should do something about that."
| deaddodo wrote:
| To be fair, the music he uploaded does transfer to
| YouTube Music; but that doesn't help that it's a far
| inferior streaming platform.
| ssully wrote:
| I was surprised when my Dad, someone completely detached
| from the tech world, brought up Google's tendency to
| cancel stuff. He was a Google Music subscriber and still
| uses Chromecast Audio. Last year he tried buying another
| Audio device to discover it was discontinued, and then
| over the summer got notifications related to Music being
| cancelled. He was super disappointed!
|
| In January he started looking into getting some IoT
| cameras for his house (a doorbell and something for the
| backyard, nothing crazy). He was looking at Nest, but the
| moment I mentioned Nest is owned by Google, he stopped
| looking at their products.
|
| Cancelling products and services that people use and rely
| on leaves a bad taste in people's mouths. I used to
| excuse it, but in the last 5-6 years Google has done away
| with about 4-5 services that I used daily. It's honestly
| too much and I won't put the time into using their
| products anymore.
| abrookewood wrote:
| I honestly think that this attitude to shutting things
| down, plus their piss-poor customer service, is killing
| any chance that Google Cloud has of succeeding. I'm just
| not willing to invest any time into the Google ecosystem
| where there's a high chance that the service will be
| discontinued or I'll get locked out of my account.
| mjcohen wrote:
| We still use Picasa on Windows 7 & 10 and Mac OS X. It
| works easily on 10.13 (High Sierra) and with some
| annoyance on 10.14 (Mojave) (requires clicking 5 times on
| complaining popup when starting, then runs fine).
|
| A good incentive not to upgrade.
| soneca wrote:
| I see Google also axing small winners in order to have people
| working on big _bets_. Undermining and then axing Orkut and
| then trying to create Google+ never made sense to me. A lot
| of non-brazilians non-indians (that didn't use or even knew
| Orkut) defended the decision at the time, but I think history
| showed it was a bad bet.
| tinco wrote:
| For sure, I think directors simply didn't understand how
| online communities worked. Facebook must have been the
| first company to fully realise this, buying both Instagram
| and WhatsApp but not attempting to internalize their
| communities under the Facebook brand. It would've been pure
| capital destruction if they had done that.
|
| I'm pretty sure they're going to have to write off the
| whatsapp investment. At least Instagram has a viable
| standalone business model. They'll lose the Whatsapp
| userbase at the drop of a hat, and it's already hard to
| monetize to begin with.
| selestify wrote:
| As someone who doesn't understand either, how do online
| communities work?
| loopz wrote:
| You build something addictive and "social".
|
| Now how you sell user data is the Billion dollar
| question.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| In the US, Reader had a huge social community. It wasn't
| just Orkut that had a large existing social community they
| could have leveraged instead of alienated, but the folks in
| charge of Google+ did not understand (presumably because
| they weren't RSS readers, presumably because they weren't
| from the communities where Orkut became popular).
| ridaj wrote:
| I wouldn't romanticize Orkut. It wasn't that great and I
| think Facebook would've steamrolled it all the same, much
| as it did numerous other regional social networks around
| the world.
| soneca wrote:
| I think the causality is that it was not great because
| Google did not care about improving it. So it got stuck
| in time and then Facebook kept improving. Even a strategy
| of copying Facebook's innovations (like FB does in
| Instagram and WhatsApp) would an improvement.
|
| Of course we will never know, but I think that betting on
| Orkut would have a better chance of facing Facebook than
| starting from scratch with Google+
| mrfusion wrote:
| What's the story behind that? You're right, that's astounding.
| agumonkey wrote:
| Another point of surprise is that these things grew somehow
| organically. Nobody went onto AIM or MSN because it's gonna
| revolutionize anything, it was just a simple need, simple
| programs.. no biggie. They're gone and now it's replaced by
| things that try to be grandiose and keep changing every year
| (or die ala Google) because the big new model is not right and
| they have a new big idea to chase.
| xwolfi wrote:
| Well there is a big innovation in the business model,
| something MS missed, that the internet could be cheap on good
| phones and that chat apps could replace expensive SMSes. In
| fact, in France where SMS were free very early,whatsapp
| failed to pierce for much longer than elsewhere to a point
| the EU blamed our telecom companies from blocking innovation
| by being too cheap.
|
| MSN was a stupid senseless loss for a long while nonetheless,
| even in France, as Facebook took time to regrow the networks
| already made via MSN.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| >the EU blamed our telecom companies from blocking
| innovation by being too cheap.
|
| A source would be nice, but I completely believe it - and
| it's infuriating. "The government is so effective,
| capitalists have nothing to improve in order to line their
| pockets!"
|
| It's what the GOP wants to do to municipal broadband
| service in the US.
| brmgb wrote:
| > It was such a senseless destruction. People miss AIM, people
| miss MSN Messenger and just a couple years later it turned out
| instant messaging platforms were worth billions.
|
| > It's still insane to me these corporations shut down
| perfectly viable platforms that were still used by millions.
| The short sightedness and pettiness of these directors is
| something of legend, I hope there's a chapter about this in new
| management textbooks, but who knows.
|
| It's not short sightedness. It was perfectly reasonnable to
| close these plateforms (in so much as they were closed -
| Microsoft folded MSN into the Lync and Skype brands and rather
| successfully sold it to pro users). They were never going to
| make money with them as they were. You are just missing that
| modern instant messassing plateforms have little in common with
| AIM and MSN.
|
| If you look at what is valuable today, you have on one side
| WeChat and Whatsapp who took over the _mobile_ space and are
| extremely valuable in emerging countries where text messaging
| became the main point of entry for conducting business and
| mobile payments. On the other side, you have Slack which use is
| centered around chat rooms and collaboration rather than direct
| messaging and whose popularity grew mainly on the shifting
| habits of a generation used to communicate via text, habits
| taken on smartphones. Then again, Microsoft was quick to reuse
| the infrastructure they already had to launch Teams which is
| very successful.
|
| So, unless you could foresee the emergence of a mobile first
| world, it completely made sense to pivot these services towards
| paying customers.
| grumple wrote:
| It would not have been very difficult to pivot AIM into
| making money. First you add social media style profiles, then
| ads, then integrations, then feeds... none of this would have
| relied on mobile. Facebook didn't rely on mobile for many
| years after formation - the iPhone came out a couple of years
| after facebook did, and it took a few more years before
| smartphones saturated the market.
|
| Of course, it's easy to say this today having seen the
| result. But aol in particular was familiar with ad-driven
| business; they should have had the appropriate resources to
| anticipate the potential of their businesses.
| brmgb wrote:
| Facebook didn't have chat functionnalities until four years
| after it's started. AOL might have been able to enter the
| social network market at the time but the link with instant
| messaging was far from obvious then.
| Izkata wrote:
| Facebook chat seems to have been created in 2008, but I'm
| pretty sure AIM had chatrooms when I was in highschool,
| which would put it at pre-2006. Not exactly the same
| thing, but the foundation was already there - AIM already
| had user-made profiles as well.
| okprod wrote:
| Yea I used AOL chatrooms and then AIM chatrooms in the
| late 1990's into the 2000's. I liked that AIM allowed you
| to connect with strangers who may have had similar
| interests but were outside your network (unlike
| Facebook). A few people I met on AOL/AIM have become good
| friends IRL, and my cousin and a couple others I know met
| their future spouses on AIM.
| cmonagle wrote:
| It's worth noting that AIM did make several attempts to
| integrate social media features, admittedly a bit late (the
| same year Facebook launched Chat).
|
| https://mashable.com/2008/05/19/aim-bebo-integration/
| thesuitonym wrote:
| I believe AIM tried this more than once, and every time
| it was laughed out of the room. Nobody wanted it.
| user3939382 wrote:
| > You are just missing that modern instant messassing
| plateforms have little in common with AIM and MSN.
|
| I'm not sure I follow your reasoning. AIM could have created
| a great mobile app with new features a la whatsapp et al, a
| new OSCAR protocol that was backwards compatible, and had a
| huge base of mobile users.
|
| Hindsight is 20/20, but it sounds like you're saying that
| even with hindsight closing AIM was the right call.
| brmgb wrote:
| > Hindsight is 20/20, but it sounds like you're saying that
| even with hindsight closing AIM was the right call.
|
| It was the right call. AIM was losing money with no obvious
| way to monetize it. AOL was not in the same position than
| Microsoft was. They had little experience selling to pro
| customers and they were bleeding users to Google Talk and
| Facebook Messenger at the time.
|
| Even knowing that the mobile market would explose in
| popularity, it is far from obvious that AIM would have even
| been positionned to benefit from it. Google Talk was really
| popular then and notoriously failed to convert that into a
| leading position in the mobile market.
| bonaldi wrote:
| AIM was one of the very first apps on the iOS store --
| right out the gate. They could have sold it for $0.99 and
| seen how that went -- it went surprisingly well for
| WhatsApp, after all.
| trhway wrote:
| >they were bleeding users to Google Talk and Facebook
| Messenger at the time.
|
| it was basically explicit transfer of the core value -
| user graph - from AOL to FB which probably doubled or
| tripled the FB graph at the time. The "small deal" and
| the modest "linked" below are kind of euphemisms
| describing the full buddies list import and thus sucking
| AIM dry if i remember correctly:
|
| https://marker.medium.com/the-untold-history-of-
| facebooks-mo...
|
| "During his time there, AOL wound up doing a small deal
| with Facebook that linked AOL Instant Messenger to
| Facebook's website. But the biggest outcome of the deal
| was the connection Palihapitiya formed with Mark
| Zuckerberg."
|
| So the GP{3} saying "short sightedness and pettiness of
| these directors is something of legend" is very wrong. As
| you can see they played very long and successful game,
| just not the game you'd have expected them to play :)
| u801e wrote:
| And these messaging platforms did not require an exorbitant
| amount of computing resources to run. They were responsive to
| keyboard input (no signficant lag), and, as I recall, allowed
| one to keep a local log of messages sent and received.
| sombremesa wrote:
| Reminds me of the time I read about someone inheriting six
| figures worth of Apple shares from their grandparents (who had
| an excellent cost basis, of course) and immediately selling it
| all to 'diversify'.
|
| It's not always easy to understand the long term benefits of
| holding on to 'risky' positions, and conventional 'wisdom'
| often steers you away from it.
| raldi wrote:
| Wouldn't this be equivalent to someone who inherited six
| figures in cash and failed to immediately use all of it to
| purchase Apple shares?
| tinco wrote:
| This is the opposite, the big companies closed their
| messaging platforms because they wanted to shed low
| performing departments and consolidate, instead of
| maintaining them and keep attempting to make them florish
| which would be a form of diversification.
| raldi wrote:
| Right. And the analogy also fails because buying Apple
| shares is as easy as selling them; what makes the
| destruction of all the original IM platforms so dumb is
| that it's a one-way move. Once you shut one down, there's
| no Ctrl-Z.
| roland35 wrote:
| I think that was the correct call - hindsight is always
| easier to identify great stocks! In 2010, before I believed
| in index funds, I had an extra $1k and I was debating to put
| it in AAPL or this new thing I heard of called bitcoin. I
| ended up buying apple, and sold it after it doubled thinking
| I did great... Certainly not a bad outcome but it just goes
| to show how hard it is to predict anything.
| culopatin wrote:
| I'm still pissed that MSN Messenger died but the hot garbage of
| Skype continued. I wish the pick for in org chat was MSN and
| not Skype. Back in 2004 we had chat history, now MS had to come
| up with the behemoth of Teams to provide that feature.
|
| All we needed was msn on Android and iPhone with cloud backup
| of chats, that's if.
| brmgb wrote:
| Lync was MSN and was fairly popular and Skype for business
| was an evolution of the Lync client not the Skype client. So
| Microsoft did actually pick MSN. They just kept the stronger
| brand. Also it always had chat history.
|
| Teams is a different beast and a natural evolution. It's
| mostly centered around meetings and group chat which makes
| sense because that's what pro users actually want.
| mjcl wrote:
| Skype for Business / Lync was originally called Office
| Communicator and has always used SIP for client/server
| communications.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Don't worry, they ruined Skype too.
|
| It used to be great and the P2P nature of it meant that file
| transfer speed, call quality & reliability was down to your
| network connection, something that you _can_ control and fix
| should it be bad.
|
| The clients also used to be beautiful, both on Windows and
| Mac. They replaced both with an Electron abomination.
| causality0 wrote:
| Don't forget that if you accidentally merged your Microsoft
| account with your old Skype account you could lose all the
| contacts. I lost several gaming buddies that way when I
| didn't have alternate contact info.
| polynomial wrote:
| AIM shutdown on Dec 15, 2017. This doesn't seem all that short
| sighted to me. More like legally blind.
| etherwaste wrote:
| You can still use AIM classic through Aim Phoenix.
|
| http://iwarg.ddns.net/phoenix/index.php
| rglover wrote:
| This just reminded me of my first online girlfriend I met on AIM.
| I think I was 12-13 and I socially engineered an AT&T operator
| into letting me bill long-distance call charges directly to my
| parent's house by pretending to be a traveling salesman.
|
| It was an enlightening moment about the fragility of human-
| fronted systems. $1,200 later and a disconnected phone
| line...let's just say they weren't thrilled.
|
| I also got my parent's AOL account suspended in 1995 when I
| decided to repeat this
| (https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=115&v=Erl-Uk8-Xr4&feature=yo...)
| in the AOL kids chat.
|
| I really, really miss the early internet.
| CGamesPlay wrote:
| I was browsing through a backup of an old computer that ran
| Pidgin and had chat logging on. One of the last AIM messages I
| ever received went like this: Conversation at
| Mon Jan 15 01:16:36 2007 (01:16:36) Megan: omg it's ryan.
| (01:17:41) Megan: and then in time... (01:17:53) Megan:
| the friends faded away (01:18:14) Megan: and the instanst
| IMs that'd open were deleted (01:18:28) Megan: and
| responses never came (01:18:39) Megan: and then never
| even talked anymore (01:18:50) Megan: and then hadn't
| hung out in forever (01:19:02) Megan: ...but it was ok.
| (01:19:09) Megan: because that is life. (01:19:28) Megan:
| and she was thankful for the past they had, (01:19:38)
| Megan: even if there was no present. (02:31:57) Megan has
| signed off.
|
| (best read while playing Vangelis - Tears in Rain)
| voldacar wrote:
| beautiful!
| juststeve wrote:
| what year though?
| loeber wrote:
| > Conversation at Mon Jan 15 01:16:36 2007
|
| 2007.
| johnchristopher wrote:
| This puts some perspective on the Signal/Matrix/whatever with
| their persistent history and the number of comments around here
| about how it's unacceptable to lose messages and history while
| in fact we are sometimes guilty of missing on them from our own
| negligence.
|
| Connecting people is a great achievement of Internet. And it
| has been done many times.
| saberdancer wrote:
| Did you get back to Megan?
| volkl48 wrote:
| There is a little game/visual novel-esque thing called "Emily
| Is Away" you may enjoy.
|
| It's basically an AIM nostalgia trip, particularly if you were
| in high school/college during the mid 2000s as well.
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