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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: 3, Informative) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Friday December 15 2017, @03:30PM (3 children)

    by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us (6553) on Friday December 15 2017, @03:30PM (#610311) Journal

    ICQ was a year earlier and was very popular in 1998

    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?

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 15 2017, @05:27PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 15 2017, @05:27PM (#610366)

    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)

    by TheRaven (270) on Sunday December 17 2017, @11:01AM (#610952) Journal
    I see them as very different things. CB Simulator was a forerunner of IRC: a group chat thing that can kind-of do individual chat in a crappy way. The main change for IM was focussing on one-on-one chats with the contact list as a key part of the UI. You could do groupchats over ICQ, but it was clunky. The natural way of using it was for one-on-one chats. IRC gave birth to things like Twitter. ICQ spawned things like WhatsApp. The technology may be similar, but the usage is very different.
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    • (Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Monday December 18 2017, @05:54PM

      by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us (6553) on Monday December 18 2017, @05:54PM (#611498) Journal

      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.

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