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: 2) by MostCynical on Friday December 15 2017, @10:33AM
1. Only relativiely wealthy, geeky early adopters had phones, and they called others on land lines ("I'm on my yacht"), then all the executives, then salesmen...
2. Not many people had phones, to start with:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/262950/global-mobile-subscriptions-since-1993/ [statista.com]
https://www.statista.com/statistics/289167/mobile-phone-penetration-in-the-uk/ [statista.com]
On-topic: I used ICQ. AIM seemed to have lots of pre-teens (ick! Roy Moore would have loved it)
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 15 2017, @10:46AM (9 children)
... I was halfway through bashing out a pompous, indignant reply to say that AIM certainly did not make instant messaging what it is today; ICQ did that.
Then I read it again, properly, and you're absolutely right. You said social media. AIM did indeed make social media what it is today.
An enormous, stinking toilet.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Arik on Friday December 15 2017, @11:19AM (8 children)
AIM was just a shitty ICQ rewrite, true, but ICQ was just a shitty imitation of IRC.
IRC was actually a major improvement on write(1). Those who forget it are condemned to use increasingly shitty rewrites.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday December 15 2017, @11:52AM (6 children)
Shall we move on a BBS, on USENET, or is the reincarnation as soylentnews.org good enough for yea?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by Arik on Friday December 15 2017, @12:02PM (5 children)
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(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.
(Score: 2) by ese002 on Friday December 15 2017, @08:48PM
IRC was inspired by Bitnet Relay [wikipedia.org], which was already quite popular in the mid-80's among those who had access to the right systems. (Generally, university IBM mainframes, though VAX/VMS was also supported).
(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]
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(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"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 15 2017, @01:47PM (1 child)
Why don't we start calling it what it really is?
(Score: 2) by Aiwendil on Friday December 15 2017, @02:07PM
Probably because the real psychopaths* would take offence ;)
(* = antisocial behaviour is clinical phrase for psychopathy)
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Friday December 15 2017, @05:02PM
AIM and ICQ were a big part of my early computing use. One of my good friends was one of those assholes who went around searching people's profiles to find someone to mess with. Found my friend and joke was on him, he was just as big an asshole. Turns out he lived in NYC as well so the two of them met up and hung out. I then met him a few months later and we all became good friends. Both of them joined the Army and served in Iraq and they were able to jump on AIM every now and then. One of them wound up leaving their AIM open and a random sergeant popped on and I chatted with him for about half an hour.
So long, AIM. Thanks for all the memories.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 15 2017, @07:33PM