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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 15 2017, @12:12PM (4 children)
Yes, one badly implemented. Like Facebook is a IRC badly implemented.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Friday December 15 2017, @12:30PM (2 children)
It's not so badly implemented really. Why do you say that?
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 15 2017, @05:08PM
The fonts are terrible.
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Sunday December 17 2017, @10:49AM
The big thing that something SoylentNews loses compared to many earlier systems is a clean separation between protocol and client. This was something that XHTML 2.0 and related technologies were supposed to fix. A web site would be a back end that provided XHTML and some metadata that described the structure of the document. There would also be some XSLT, JavaScript, or whatever that would provide a default render, but user agents (which might be browsers, or might be native apps tailored to a particular service) would be free to substitute their own presentation. This was undermined largely by Google via the HTML5 initiative, because the obvious thing to do as a custom user agent would be to render without ads.
NNTP evolved from BBS systems to give this kind of layering. You could access usenet newsgroups via the web (once the web had been invented), but you could also use one of dozens of different clients and the person running the server had no control over how your client rendered the content. A bunch of the latter BBSs also provided some form of structured representation, so you could write custom clients for them.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Friday December 15 2017, @05:18PM
It is not badly implemented. It also has a moderation system (inherited from Slashdot, of course) that produces a much better signal to noise ratio than any other place I can think of.
Washington DC delenda est.