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posted by mrpg on Sunday October 08 2017, @03:17AM   Printer-friendly
from the makes-me-feel-old dept.

The Guardian (and likely everyone else) is reporting that AOL is killing off their instant messenger service. For those of us who never quite got the hang of IRC, AOL Messenger (not to mention MSN Messenger at the same time) was a truly fun way to chat with people we knew in an age before smart phones and SMS. And yes, my AOL screen name wound up becoming my default ID almost everywhere.

An article on AOL's website on Friday said AOL Instant Messenger will be discontinued on 15 December. The program will still function until then but after that, users won't be able to sign in and all data will be deleted. AOL says people with an aim.com email address will still be able to use it.

In a blogpost, a spokesman for AOL's parent company explained the platform's demise as the casualty of the evolving way people communicate.

"AIM tapped into new digital technologies and ignited a cultural shift, but the way in which we communicate with each other has profoundly changed," wrote Michael Albers, vice president of communications at Oath.

Launched in 1997, AOL Instant Messenger was at the forefront of what was called at the time the biggest trend in online communication since email.

I for one would happily trade in WhatsApp, Google Chat, and all of the others for a return to AOL Messenger.

Also at USA TODAY: RIP AIM: AOL Instant Messenger dies in December


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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Aiwendil on Sunday October 08 2017, @09:57PM

    by Aiwendil (531) on Sunday October 08 2017, @09:57PM (#578998) Journal

    BitTorrent has solved a lot of the questions you raise.

    No, not really, just have added another layer of abstraction.

    > How will you find the first Other
    > Dynamic ip
    Need a neutral connector protocol service. Yes, I know, still somewhat centralized.

    Not somewhat, that is a hard server requirement right there. (ICQ did a similar thing actually, it tried connect directly first to serverprovided ip and if that failed it went via servers)

    > How do you deliver a message to someone who is disconnected?
    Email has no problem with that, and can even be fairly decentralized with generous numbers of local servers holding mail for users.

    Yup, they solved it by using centralized servers :)
    So, the solution for this to get to P2P is to add more servers (which means more points that will be breached).

    > How do you keep it from becoming a spambot haven?
    Everyone has that problem, and there are many solutions of varying effectiveness, of course.

    So far havn't seen even a barely working solution in P2P setups (beyond obscurity).
    On non-p2 a simple flooding protection or looking for repeated checksums tends to do the job.

    > Latency/bandwidth
    Ought to be even lower latency and higher bandwidth with direct connections, and no laggy server in the middle.

    Up until someone decides to ddos you, or just ping flood you...
    But yeah, this point was a brainfart on my behalf.

    > How (without a hefty penalty in bandwidth or latency) do you keep yourself anonymous
    VPN

    VPN is a hefty latency (my ping times tend to be between 1.05 and 1.90ms on average to sites within my country - and yes, I notice the 145ms latency to soylentnews)

    > Messy protocol
    IP has multicasting. It's not used often, but it's in there.

    Ahh, the stuff that tends to be blocked at isp-level and route badly. :)

    Anyway, I think the answer to my question is not technical difficulties, it's financial.

    No, the issue is that the idea is trivial but the implementation hasn't been solved yet.

    Oh, I also forgot - how to best solve it when someone has multiple clients for the same id? (For instance I right now have skype open on six devices for the same account, one machine is purely to gather logs)

    (Quite frankly - so far modifying an ircd to share serverlists [with network id for each] would be a lot more useful. P2P servers makes more sense for ephermal stuff. Also could use pgp-signing to solve the irc-services problem that will arise)

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