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posted by Fnord666 on Friday December 15 2017, @10:12AM   Printer-friendly
from the for-better-or-for-worse dept.

Chat is dead. Long live chat!

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?


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 15 2017, @01:47PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 15 2017, @01:47PM (#610272)

    Why don't we start calling it what it really is?

  • (Score: 2) by Aiwendil on Friday December 15 2017, @02:07PM

    by Aiwendil (531) on Friday December 15 2017, @02:07PM (#610280) Journal

    Probably because the real psychopaths* would take offence ;)

    (* = antisocial behaviour is clinical phrase for psychopathy)