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It's the year 2000, I'm just about eight years old, and it's my first day on AOL Instant Messenger. My fingers move clumsily across the plastic keyboard as I try to type fast enough to keep up with two cousins who are already seasoned AIM pros, sending me rapid-fire missives of excitement in our little online chat room. I'm in Boston and they're in New York, but "omg we can talk all the time!!!!"
We weren't alone in our excitement. First released in 1997, AIM was a popular way for millions of people to communicate throughout the late 1990s and early 2000s, and it helped form Internet culture and communication as we know them today. It's where so many of us became fluent in LOL-ing and emoticons, and caught the itch to stay in constant contact with others no matter where we are.
But in the two decades since its launch, AIM's popularity has dwindled in favor of mobile-focused platforms for communicating, like Facebook, Instagram, and Slack. At its peak in 2001, AIM had 36 million active users; as of this summer, it had just 500,000 unique visitors a month. And so, in early October, Verizon-owned Oath (which comprises AIM's creator, AOL, and Yahoo) announced that on December 15 it would take this giant of the early Internet offline.
A better question is, why did it take 20 years for chat and texting to catch on?
(Score: 5, Interesting) by TheRaven on Friday December 15 2017, @10:49AM (7 children)
Part of the problem with IM was fragmentation. I had friends who used ICQ / AIM, friends who used MSN, and a few who used YIM (though most of those also used one of the others).
Around 2001, I started using Jabber (later standardised as XMPP), which had server-side transports for ICQ / AIM and MSN. This felt like a better solution than multi-protocol clients, because the interoperability logic was in a single place and clients didn't need upgrading every time someone made an incompatible change to one of the proprietary protocols. Google Talk and Facebook Messenger both use XMPP, but Facebook doesn't federate (so you can only talk to other Facebook users) and Google keeps breaking federation.
The thing that killed Jabber as a useful platform was the lack of a solid reference implementation. They did a good job on the server side, but there was no reference client library. This was a problem because XMPP is a simple core protocol (I've implemented it twice, in different languages) but has a whole load of extensions. Even something as fundamental as file transfer had a bunch of different (incompatible), competing extension protocols and it was rare for two clients to implement the same thing.
There are a few newer decentralised alternatives that I'm following: GNU Ring and Tox. Ring has a really crappy unstable client, and it's GPLv3, so will never run on iOS and puts off a lot of contributors. Tox looks a bit better, but hasn't yet managed to solve the problem of multiple clients connecting to the same account in a decentralised system that offers end-to-end encryption (not surprising - it's a really hard problem!). The thing that Tox is doing really well is having a single reference implementation of the protocol in a library. There are multiple clients, but they aren't all reinventing the wheel to get the protocol working, they're just adding different UIs. This may not be great for security (monocultures mean that a remotely exploitable vulnerability could easily traverse the entire network and compromise every client), but it's far better for initial adoption. If it takes off, hopefully more people will reimplement the protocol and we'll get diversity, but that's only useful once the network has reached critical mass.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 15 2017, @03:00PM
> ICQ was a year earlier and was very popular in 1998
Eh-oh!
(Score: 3, Informative) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Friday December 15 2017, @03:30PM (3 children)
And CB simulator was on CompuServe in 1980. Granted that was group-chatting and not individual, but *that's* the event I would use as the seminal moment of Internet culture and communication.
So, why did it take *40* years for chat to catch on, if you're going to play with numbers?
This sig for rent.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 15 2017, @05:27PM
Because nobody had a modem or a home computer in 1940.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by TheRaven on Sunday December 17 2017, @11:01AM (1 child)
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Monday December 18 2017, @05:54PM
True that CB Sim was more group and IRC was closer to AIM. But for real-time communication on a network, however you count it, there are better genesis events or revolutionary protocols than AIM to pick from. For that angle this sounds to me like revisionism trying to generate some added nostalgia.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 2) by Taibhsear on Friday December 15 2017, @03:30PM (1 child)
That's precisely why I used Trillian back in the day. Kind of wish they had something like that today for people who don't want Facebook accounts or their thieving privacy nightmare of a chat app.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 16 2017, @12:17AM
Munroe has an infographic that lays it out.
https://m.xkcd.com/1810/#comic [xkcd.com]
https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1810:_Chat_Systems [explainxkcd.com]
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