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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: 3, Informative) by looorg on Friday December 15 2017, @01:43PM (2 children)
I wonder if this is very American-centric, I don't recall AIM being very popular over here in Euroland in the late '90s. The AOL part might explain it. That said ICQ was quite popular at one time. Then there was all the various little sites etc that did "Social Media" before Facebook, people in general seem to forget that yes there was actually various "community" sites etc before Facebook was around. Then most of them just got annihilated by Facebook.
This is almost like reading one of them Gartner reports on tech issues and how they proclaim the death of UNIX and EMAIL and what else there is. Wonder how long it will be for them to re-invent EMAIL or perhaps they'll just call it Really-Long-Messages or something instead. But it didn't take 20 years for chatting and texting to catch on, it was one of the core functions way way waaaaay back. It was just all in text and without a flashy graphical user interface, on the other hand nothing had a flashy gui back in the days, we had at best ASCII interfaces and we liked it!
(Score: 2) by Aiwendil on Friday December 15 2017, @02:05PM
Yes, and then they came and ruined it with the ANSI-interfaces, viva mode 02h :)
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Friday December 15 2017, @05:08PM
AIM was huge, because it was AOL. AOL was a monstrosity of a dial-up ISP. The same people who love(d) the Yahoo Search page, loved AOL.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"