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5 years ago, aol still used aim internally for everything that people use slack for today. Group chats, bots, notifications for builds, etc, etc. Then graduall

5 years ago, aol still used aim internally for everything that people use slack for today. Group chats, bots, notifications for builds, etc, etc. Then gradually individual teams picked up slack and within maybe 18 months, we went from 100% aim to a gigantic corporate slack team. That was the end of AIM, I think. Aol and yahoo both use gmail internally so I suspect they’re going to shitcan their email services eventually, too. I think it’s remarkable how badly aol fumbled the ball on AIM twice — first by not turning it into a social network, and second by not turning it into enterprise chat. All it would have taken was some investment instead of continuously laying off everyone that worked on it.

snarf21 9y ago
It is hard to move the ball forward when you reorg every year and have minor layoffs almost every year to keep OIBDA moving in the right direction so the execs get larger bonuses. So many people were in self preservation mode with no interest in anything that was "risky" and might put their bonus at risk. Similar things happened with how they managed MapQuest. Also, if you think they missed a chance on AIM, it is nothing compared to what they missed on email. They could easily have made aol mail free and still kept charging for the client. Ted Leonsis admitted at a meeting once that this was his largest regret.
- sgift 9y ago
  > It is hard to move the ball forward when you reorg every year and have minor layoffs almost every year to keep OIBDA moving in the right direction so the execs get larger bonuses. Is there a an established term for this already? If not I'd like to call it stock market disease due to the usual reason for it.
  - chiefalchemist 9y ago
    Wall Streetitis?
  - amptorn 9y ago
    "Capitalism"
    - Ibethewalrus 9y ago
      Capitalism will eat itself
  - azernik 9y ago
    Quarterly Capitalism.
  - wallace_f 9y ago
    Executive compensation often comes in the form of equity, but are there cases where execs are obligated to hold the equity over a long time horizon? Say 10-20 years? That seems it would align incentives better for everyone, no?
    - JauntTrooper 9y ago
      There are some. Exxon's performance shares vest 50% over 5 years and 50% in retirement, with a 10 year minimum. One of the problems with this approach is in order to get executives to forgo their compensation for that many years you often have to pay them more, which gets into pay magnitude concerns. Norway's sovereign wealth fund Norges is starting to encourage companies to adopt very long term time horizons for equity awards and to move away from the specific, complex performance-vesting plans most US companies rely on today, though most institutional investors and companies are skeptical of that approach.
      - wallace_f 9y ago
        >One of the problems with this approach is in order to get executives to forgo their compensation for that many years you often have to pay them more, which gets into pay magnitude concerns. That is logical; however afaik there is almost no data to indicate magnitude of CEO pay is an indicator of company performance. I would bet you that long-horizon-tied CEO compensation would be correlated, though.
- menerva 9y ago
  so isn't this capitalism working as it should? they literally killed their own golden goose with stupidity. why shouldn't others disrupt corrupt crap business?
  - jtmarl1n 9y ago
    He isn't saying others shouldn't come along to replace them. Only that the AOL people realized their mistakes too late.
    - snarf21 9y ago
      Mostly this, or that they didn't even really care. It was all about preservation and riding out the gravy train.
  - SapphireSun 9y ago
    It's a strange feature of an economic system where the incentives require that successful participants blow themselves up. It requires that new=good and old=bad.
    - ImSkeptical 9y ago
      It's not required that successful businesses blow themselves up, but if they do make poor choices, they will suffer, and perhaps pay with their existence, for those choices.
      - chiefalchemist 9y ago
        It's not required. But just the same it should always be a what-if possibility. I'd say the poor choices come from a tunnel vision approach to those decisions. Ultimately, in the context ans scope they are made, they are probably great decisions. However, reality is more far reaching.
    - abakker 9y ago
      In technology especially, inertia is a liability. Not really surprising that most tech companies don't make it that long. What is more surprising is that our attachment to institutions includes for-profit businesses. Really, we should, as customers/consumers, just go with the best service, but culturally we can't help but think that something is lost when an old, useless company goes away.
brogrammernot 9y ago
That’s fascinating that you guys ended up choosing Slack. I’m surprised because it seems like with the infrastructure already setup, AOL could’ve built an internal enterprise MVP and got a real leg-up on the rest of the competition. Missed opportunity for sure.
- empath75 9y ago
  They more or less stopped development on aim like 5-6 years ago.
- zeveb 9y ago
  Or gone with a free alternative like Mattermost & added the necessary bells & whistles. Mattermost today is extremely competitive with Slack.
  - dmpk2k 9y ago
    If Mattermost is competitive with Slack, that's a serious indictment against Slack. Mattermost's clients are awful. Just awful. The phone apps are effectively unusable (incredibly buggy and suck down battery like no tomorrow), and the desktop electron app is a complete hog. It doesn't even handle its faux tabs properly (takes half a second to switch, and it resets the position to the end every time you change a tab, which is... dumb), and the scrollback handles high-volume channels very poorly (I have to click "Load more messages" at least 20x times every time I want to scroll back to the beginning of the day). Now imagine every time you switch tabs you have to click "Load more messages" a bunch of times to see earlier messages because it resets when you switched tabs. If this is the future of messaging, then holy shit. It's almost a parody.
    - throwanem 9y ago
      Mattermost is a pale, pale shadow of Slack. It's nowhere close to competitive and I doubt it ever will be.
  - skinnymuch 9y ago
    Mattermost idealistically might be competitive with Slack, but right now it isn't. Most people who only care about usability and features will choose Slack over Mattermost. Just use the apps for a couple days and the differences and issues between them are clear as day. I'd like Mattermost to succeed. But it needs to do a lot of catching up still.
mc32 9y ago
And to think corps used to use Zimbra for email, which at one point was owned by Yahoo!
- oraguy 9y ago
  The entire Oracle company still uses Zimbra for email.
  - 4ad 9y ago
    It’s the worst piece of software I ever used. Worst than Lotus notes, worse than Eclipse. It’s the only software that genuinely makes me angry.
tritium 9y ago
Is there a word for what one might refer to as "institutional/organizational burnout"? I feel like it's related to the age of leadership and trends in the current cult of personality du jour, and its interaction with promotion, branding and marketing. Shit happens, and the inertia of social groups is tough to steer over time, as sensibilities and fashions change, people get old, and graduating classes of the current generation ascend to power.
- jedberg 9y ago
  I have no data to back this up, but my gut tells me it happens a lot more at companies where the CEO isn't a founder, or doesn't have a high degree of ownership. When the CEO controls a lot of the stock, they seem to care a lot less about quarterly results, whereas when the CEO gets most of their money from bonuses tied to stock growth, that is when you see most of these games. If that's true, it seems the lesson here is to give your CEO a bunch of stock instead of a bonus based on stock performance?
  - fencepost 9y ago
    Just giving them stock or options doesn't really change things. Stock that vested over a 20 year period might be an incentive to look further down the line, but remember "look out for yourself first" and "be loyal to yourself not the company because the company isn't loyal to you?" All of that applies to CEOs as well.
    - mgkimsal 9y ago
      Was thinking similarly. It feels like the issue is still more 'control'. While CEOs ostensibly have a lot of control, not all do (or feel they do), and perhaps not all actually want it. If you had control enough to feel like you were pretty sure you weren't going to be ousted next quarter for a down quarter or even a down year, you'd be more inclined to make strategic decisions that might be hard to make, but necessary for growth.
  - drawkbox 9y ago
    I have no data to back this up, but my gut tells me it happens a lot more at companies where the CEO isn't a founder, or doesn't have a high degree of ownership. Agreed, once the original vision is gone something else takes its place and it is just a ghost of what it was. This goes hand in hand with the owners/founders being more focused on product development, engineering and innovation. Engineering and innovation are costly when marketing or bizdev/accounting/metrics runs your company which typically happens when the founder leaves. Engineering takes a back seat to decision making, marketing tries to pump revenue out of a product that may be successful not but is not being iterated or innovated on, or the next big thing is not worked on because the company is fat and happy until the grace from that innovation runs out. People join during times of success to latch on and cash out, when the hard work of innovating comes along, those people are gone. Companies like Amazon, Apple, Google win because they are willing to take innovative risks, engineering is not in the back seat but a driving force and they invest most of their profits back into more innovation, Amazon is probably the best out there at this. Microsoft used to be as well and is coming back a bit but they fell into the trap above when Ballmer took over for a while, more focused on revenues and metrics than the next big step which will always put the current players out of business, or missing a step, if they don't adapt.
praneshp 9y ago
> Aol and yahoo both use gmail internall You couldn't be more wrong about Yahoo, unless something changed in the last six months.
- tarentel 9y ago
  I quit, yahoo, in the last 6 months and they were definitely using gmail prior to that.
  - the_common_man 9y ago
    Which of the below do you mean: a) Employees of yahoo using gmail for personal purposes? b) Yahoo, the company, uses gmail c) @yahoo.com will be powered by gmail in the future as a white labeled product? (Each of the above is alarming in it's own way)
    - jkoll 9y ago
      It's clearly (b) from the context.
    - ams6110 9y ago
      I don't know about Yahoo, but in other organizations I've seen employees using gmail, for work, because it's more convenient than the corporate/enterprise email platform.
      - the_common_man 9y ago
        Sure but it's usually against corporate policy and reason to fire the person. This has happened in companies I have worked in the past. People take print outs and take them outside office. This is against company policy for confidential documents).
        foo101 9y ago
        What kind of companies are these? I have worked in a dozen companies so far and in not one of them using GMail for personal use was against the corporate policy.
rando444 9y ago
You just assume that AIM would be better as a "social network".. but not everyone wants that, some people just want simple chat. In fact many people think google's failure with gchat was trying to force people to use things they didn't want when all they really wanted was simple chat.
- hackinthebochs 9y ago
  The point is that AIM was a social network before the idea was even conceptualized. The concept of a friend activity feed existed on AIM in an ad hoc manner before it was hard coded into facebook/twitter/etc: it was standard to go down your list of friends and see who was doing what based on their status message. If someone at Aol had any foresight they could have been on the ground floor of the rise of social networks.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- skinnymuch 9y ago
  Aol was used as a simple social network. Checking people's statuses was common practice back in the day. As was changing it. Same with your away message. Also being able to see idled people was helpful. None of these features are available or used much in modern mobile messaging. Not sure if WhatsApp status messages (not their story feature) is actively used.
aczerepinski 9y ago
Sorry to reply with an off topic question but do you still work at AOL? If so, do you think there’s any chance AOL would consider allowing passwords longer than 16 characters? I only use AOL for junk/spam mail but even in that instance would prefer to use a strong password. When you see the “password too long” error message it’s easy to worry that the password is being stored plain text in some space constrained column.
- andybak 9y ago
  Unless you're using a very constrained character set then 16 characters is pretty strong in my books. What's your threat model?
  - dredmorbius 9y ago
    NIST guidelines are for a minimum length of 8 characters and a maximum length of no fewer than 64 characters. What is your basis for suggesting anything less than those guidelines is sufficient? https://pages.nist.gov/800-63-3/ https://pages.nist.gov/800-63-3/ https://qz.com/981941/the-us-standards-office-wants-to-do-away-with-periodic-password-changes/ https://qz.com/981941/the-us-standards-office-wants-to-do-aw...
    - th1nkdifferent 9y ago
      You should try plotting ease of recall vs the size of password. You will quickly realize there is a long tail beyond 16 characters.
      - _e 9y ago
        Diceware will solve that problem of easy recall + secure password: http://world.std.com/%7Ereinhold/diceware.html http://world.std.com/%7Ereinhold/diceware.html
      - Zarel 9y ago
        "correct horse battery staple" doesn't fit in 16 characters, and has has much better recall than basically all similarly-secure passwords that do. Longer passwords let you optimize passwords for ease of recall and security, rather than fitting in arbitrary requirements.
microcolonel 9y ago
> That was the end of AIM, I think. Aol and yahoo both use gmail internally so I suspect they’re going to shitcan their email services eventually, too. Man, that would be an absolute disaster. I have so many contacts who I can only through Yahoo and AOL email addresses. I guess I should reach out to all of them before they are disappeared. ;- )
- ghaff 9y ago
  I would assume any Yahoo service is vulnerable. I certainly wouldn’t expect major services like Mail to just go poof overnight, but my working assumption is that they could easily be gone over the next few years.
sireat 9y ago
That is somewhat shocking that yahoo uses gmail internally. What happened to eating your own dogfood?
visarga 9y ago
> Aol and yahoo both use gmail internally If I remember correctly, Yahoo used to have an email service.
ulfw 9y ago
And third by not mobilizing it. There is no reason Whatsapp would have won if AIM went mobile app, push notifications, done. They had a huge and passionate user base, were integrated into Apple iChat, you name it. They all blew it. Goes to show that big corps often have no clue how to deal with their offerings.
- rizwan 9y ago
  AIM did go mobile. It was in the iPhone App Store on day 1. Push notifications didn’t even exist back then. When push notifications were announced by Apple in June 2009 as part of iPhone OS 3.0, AIM was the “partner” they used to load-test it during WWDC. Source: I worked on AIM for iPhone. IMO AIM struggled because: - it was a highly tuned, specialized C backend, and it never migrated to something that could be improved easily. - backend technical challenges (as well as legal issues) made storing chat history very difficult - Hardly any info was collected about AIM screennames, so it was hard to build a social graph from it - AIM registration was the same as AOL signup, and that registration process was very cumbersome, imo. - Most AIM accounts had no email address associated with them, so it was impossible to do password resets, for all the locked up AIM screennames. As a client developer on AIM, it was hard to make a material improvement to AIM, though we certainly did try
skinnymuch 9y ago
No way. Yahoo uses gmail internally? Yahoo is still prominent enough in email, it would be pretty crazy for them to shut down their email service. I assumed aol would shift their email to yahoo. Or some sort of merger with Yahoo being the lead.
copperx 9y ago
> Aol and yahoo both use gmail internally Wait ... what? Who came up with the idea of hosting your email with your competitor?

snarf21 9y ago

It is hard to move the ball forward when you reorg every year and have minor layoffs almost every year to keep OIBDA moving in the right direction so the execs get larger bonuses. So many people were in self preservation mode with no interest in anything that was "risky" and might put their bonus at risk. Similar things happened with how they managed MapQuest. Also, if you think they missed a chance on AIM, it is nothing compared to what they missed on email. They could easily have made aol mail free and still kept charging for the client. Ted Leonsis admitted at a meeting once that this was his largest regret.

sgift 9y ago
> It is hard to move the ball forward when you reorg every year and have minor layoffs almost every year to keep OIBDA moving in the right direction so the execs get larger bonuses. Is there a an established term for this already? If not I'd like to call it stock market disease due to the usual reason for it.
- chiefalchemist 9y ago
  Wall Streetitis?
- amptorn 9y ago
  "Capitalism"
  - Ibethewalrus 9y ago
    Capitalism will eat itself
- azernik 9y ago
  Quarterly Capitalism.
- wallace_f 9y ago
  Executive compensation often comes in the form of equity, but are there cases where execs are obligated to hold the equity over a long time horizon? Say 10-20 years? That seems it would align incentives better for everyone, no?
  - JauntTrooper 9y ago
    There are some. Exxon's performance shares vest 50% over 5 years and 50% in retirement, with a 10 year minimum. One of the problems with this approach is in order to get executives to forgo their compensation for that many years you often have to pay them more, which gets into pay magnitude concerns. Norway's sovereign wealth fund Norges is starting to encourage companies to adopt very long term time horizons for equity awards and to move away from the specific, complex performance-vesting plans most US companies rely on today, though most institutional investors and companies are skeptical of that approach.
    - wallace_f 9y ago
      >One of the problems with this approach is in order to get executives to forgo their compensation for that many years you often have to pay them more, which gets into pay magnitude concerns. That is logical; however afaik there is almost no data to indicate magnitude of CEO pay is an indicator of company performance. I would bet you that long-horizon-tied CEO compensation would be correlated, though.
menerva 9y ago
so isn't this capitalism working as it should? they literally killed their own golden goose with stupidity. why shouldn't others disrupt corrupt crap business?
- jtmarl1n 9y ago
  He isn't saying others shouldn't come along to replace them. Only that the AOL people realized their mistakes too late.
  - snarf21 9y ago
    Mostly this, or that they didn't even really care. It was all about preservation and riding out the gravy train.
- SapphireSun 9y ago
  It's a strange feature of an economic system where the incentives require that successful participants blow themselves up. It requires that new=good and old=bad.
  - ImSkeptical 9y ago
    It's not required that successful businesses blow themselves up, but if they do make poor choices, they will suffer, and perhaps pay with their existence, for those choices.
    - chiefalchemist 9y ago
      It's not required. But just the same it should always be a what-if possibility. I'd say the poor choices come from a tunnel vision approach to those decisions. Ultimately, in the context ans scope they are made, they are probably great decisions. However, reality is more far reaching.
  - abakker 9y ago
    In technology especially, inertia is a liability. Not really surprising that most tech companies don't make it that long. What is more surprising is that our attachment to institutions includes for-profit businesses. Really, we should, as customers/consumers, just go with the best service, but culturally we can't help but think that something is lost when an old, useless company goes away.

brogrammernot 9y ago

That’s fascinating that you guys ended up choosing Slack. I’m surprised because it seems like with the infrastructure already setup, AOL could’ve built an internal enterprise MVP and got a real leg-up on the rest of the competition. Missed opportunity for sure.

empath75 9y ago
They more or less stopped development on aim like 5-6 years ago.
zeveb 9y ago
Or gone with a free alternative like Mattermost & added the necessary bells & whistles. Mattermost today is extremely competitive with Slack.
- dmpk2k 9y ago
  If Mattermost is competitive with Slack, that's a serious indictment against Slack. Mattermost's clients are awful. Just awful. The phone apps are effectively unusable (incredibly buggy and suck down battery like no tomorrow), and the desktop electron app is a complete hog. It doesn't even handle its faux tabs properly (takes half a second to switch, and it resets the position to the end every time you change a tab, which is... dumb), and the scrollback handles high-volume channels very poorly (I have to click "Load more messages" at least 20x times every time I want to scroll back to the beginning of the day). Now imagine every time you switch tabs you have to click "Load more messages" a bunch of times to see earlier messages because it resets when you switched tabs. If this is the future of messaging, then holy shit. It's almost a parody.
  - throwanem 9y ago
    Mattermost is a pale, pale shadow of Slack. It's nowhere close to competitive and I doubt it ever will be.
- skinnymuch 9y ago
  Mattermost idealistically might be competitive with Slack, but right now it isn't. Most people who only care about usability and features will choose Slack over Mattermost. Just use the apps for a couple days and the differences and issues between them are clear as day. I'd like Mattermost to succeed. But it needs to do a lot of catching up still.

mc32 9y ago

And to think corps used to use Zimbra for email, which at one point was owned by Yahoo!

oraguy 9y ago
The entire Oracle company still uses Zimbra for email.
- 4ad 9y ago
  It’s the worst piece of software I ever used. Worst than Lotus notes, worse than Eclipse. It’s the only software that genuinely makes me angry.

tritium 9y ago

Is there a word for what one might refer to as "institutional/organizational burnout"? I feel like it's related to the age of leadership and trends in the current cult of personality du jour, and its interaction with promotion, branding and marketing. Shit happens, and the inertia of social groups is tough to steer over time, as sensibilities and fashions change, people get old, and graduating classes of the current generation ascend to power.

jedberg 9y ago
I have no data to back this up, but my gut tells me it happens a lot more at companies where the CEO isn't a founder, or doesn't have a high degree of ownership. When the CEO controls a lot of the stock, they seem to care a lot less about quarterly results, whereas when the CEO gets most of their money from bonuses tied to stock growth, that is when you see most of these games. If that's true, it seems the lesson here is to give your CEO a bunch of stock instead of a bonus based on stock performance?
- fencepost 9y ago
  Just giving them stock or options doesn't really change things. Stock that vested over a 20 year period might be an incentive to look further down the line, but remember "look out for yourself first" and "be loyal to yourself not the company because the company isn't loyal to you?" All of that applies to CEOs as well.
  - mgkimsal 9y ago
    Was thinking similarly. It feels like the issue is still more 'control'. While CEOs ostensibly have a lot of control, not all do (or feel they do), and perhaps not all actually want it. If you had control enough to feel like you were pretty sure you weren't going to be ousted next quarter for a down quarter or even a down year, you'd be more inclined to make strategic decisions that might be hard to make, but necessary for growth.
- drawkbox 9y ago
  I have no data to back this up, but my gut tells me it happens a lot more at companies where the CEO isn't a founder, or doesn't have a high degree of ownership. Agreed, once the original vision is gone something else takes its place and it is just a ghost of what it was. This goes hand in hand with the owners/founders being more focused on product development, engineering and innovation. Engineering and innovation are costly when marketing or bizdev/accounting/metrics runs your company which typically happens when the founder leaves. Engineering takes a back seat to decision making, marketing tries to pump revenue out of a product that may be successful not but is not being iterated or innovated on, or the next big thing is not worked on because the company is fat and happy until the grace from that innovation runs out. People join during times of success to latch on and cash out, when the hard work of innovating comes along, those people are gone. Companies like Amazon, Apple, Google win because they are willing to take innovative risks, engineering is not in the back seat but a driving force and they invest most of their profits back into more innovation, Amazon is probably the best out there at this. Microsoft used to be as well and is coming back a bit but they fell into the trap above when Ballmer took over for a while, more focused on revenues and metrics than the next big step which will always put the current players out of business, or missing a step, if they don't adapt.

praneshp 9y ago

> Aol and yahoo both use gmail internall You couldn't be more wrong about Yahoo, unless something changed in the last six months.

tarentel 9y ago
I quit, yahoo, in the last 6 months and they were definitely using gmail prior to that.
- the_common_man 9y ago
  Which of the below do you mean: a) Employees of yahoo using gmail for personal purposes? b) Yahoo, the company, uses gmail c) @yahoo.com will be powered by gmail in the future as a white labeled product? (Each of the above is alarming in it's own way)
  - jkoll 9y ago
    It's clearly (b) from the context.
  - ams6110 9y ago
    I don't know about Yahoo, but in other organizations I've seen employees using gmail, for work, because it's more convenient than the corporate/enterprise email platform.
    - the_common_man 9y ago
      Sure but it's usually against corporate policy and reason to fire the person. This has happened in companies I have worked in the past. People take print outs and take them outside office. This is against company policy for confidential documents).
      - foo101 9y ago
        What kind of companies are these? I have worked in a dozen companies so far and in not one of them using GMail for personal use was against the corporate policy.

rando444 9y ago

You just assume that AIM would be better as a "social network".. but not everyone wants that, some people just want simple chat. In fact many people think google's failure with gchat was trying to force people to use things they didn't want when all they really wanted was simple chat.

hackinthebochs 9y ago
The point is that AIM was a social network before the idea was even conceptualized. The concept of a friend activity feed existed on AIM in an ad hoc manner before it was hard coded into facebook/twitter/etc: it was standard to go down your list of friends and see who was doing what based on their status message. If someone at Aol had any foresight they could have been on the ground floor of the rise of social networks.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
skinnymuch 9y ago
Aol was used as a simple social network. Checking people's statuses was common practice back in the day. As was changing it. Same with your away message. Also being able to see idled people was helpful. None of these features are available or used much in modern mobile messaging. Not sure if WhatsApp status messages (not their story feature) is actively used.

aczerepinski 9y ago

Sorry to reply with an off topic question but do you still work at AOL? If so, do you think there’s any chance AOL would consider allowing passwords longer than 16 characters? I only use AOL for junk/spam mail but even in that instance would prefer to use a strong password. When you see the “password too long” error message it’s easy to worry that the password is being stored plain text in some space constrained column.

andybak 9y ago
Unless you're using a very constrained character set then 16 characters is pretty strong in my books. What's your threat model?
- dredmorbius 9y ago
  NIST guidelines are for a minimum length of 8 characters and a maximum length of no fewer than 64 characters. What is your basis for suggesting anything less than those guidelines is sufficient? https://pages.nist.gov/800-63-3/ https://pages.nist.gov/800-63-3/ https://qz.com/981941/the-us-standards-office-wants-to-do-away-with-periodic-password-changes/ https://qz.com/981941/the-us-standards-office-wants-to-do-aw...
  - th1nkdifferent 9y ago
    You should try plotting ease of recall vs the size of password. You will quickly realize there is a long tail beyond 16 characters.
    - _e 9y ago
      Diceware will solve that problem of easy recall + secure password: http://world.std.com/%7Ereinhold/diceware.html http://world.std.com/%7Ereinhold/diceware.html
    - Zarel 9y ago
      "correct horse battery staple" doesn't fit in 16 characters, and has has much better recall than basically all similarly-secure passwords that do. Longer passwords let you optimize passwords for ease of recall and security, rather than fitting in arbitrary requirements.

microcolonel 9y ago

> That was the end of AIM, I think. Aol and yahoo both use gmail internally so I suspect they’re going to shitcan their email services eventually, too. Man, that would be an absolute disaster. I have so many contacts who I can only through Yahoo and AOL email addresses. I guess I should reach out to all of them before they are disappeared. ;- )

ghaff 9y ago
I would assume any Yahoo service is vulnerable. I certainly wouldn’t expect major services like Mail to just go poof overnight, but my working assumption is that they could easily be gone over the next few years.

sireat 9y ago

That is somewhat shocking that yahoo uses gmail internally. What happened to eating your own dogfood?

visarga 9y ago

> Aol and yahoo both use gmail internally If I remember correctly, Yahoo used to have an email service.

ulfw 9y ago

And third by not mobilizing it. There is no reason Whatsapp would have won if AIM went mobile app, push notifications, done. They had a huge and passionate user base, were integrated into Apple iChat, you name it. They all blew it. Goes to show that big corps often have no clue how to deal with their offerings.

rizwan 9y ago
AIM did go mobile. It was in the iPhone App Store on day 1. Push notifications didn’t even exist back then. When push notifications were announced by Apple in June 2009 as part of iPhone OS 3.0, AIM was the “partner” they used to load-test it during WWDC. Source: I worked on AIM for iPhone. IMO AIM struggled because: - it was a highly tuned, specialized C backend, and it never migrated to something that could be improved easily. - backend technical challenges (as well as legal issues) made storing chat history very difficult - Hardly any info was collected about AIM screennames, so it was hard to build a social graph from it - AIM registration was the same as AOL signup, and that registration process was very cumbersome, imo. - Most AIM accounts had no email address associated with them, so it was impossible to do password resets, for all the locked up AIM screennames. As a client developer on AIM, it was hard to make a material improvement to AIM, though we certainly did try

skinnymuch 9y ago

No way. Yahoo uses gmail internally? Yahoo is still prominent enough in email, it would be pretty crazy for them to shut down their email service. I assumed aol would shift their email to yahoo. Or some sort of merger with Yahoo being the lead.

copperx 9y ago

> Aol and yahoo both use gmail internally Wait ... what? Who came up with the idea of hosting your email with your competitor?