22 ms·

The Last Message Sent on AIM

409 points by luu 6y ago

mjevans 6y ago
This is why it's important, as a group, to roll your server. Own the infrastructure of communication and discourse. To utilize open standards for which you or anyone else can create and run their own server, or client. Protocols should also evolve, or have organized successors over time. If you do provide backward compatibility, please do the best reasonable effort at making backward features work.
- gkoberger 6y ago
  I feel like someone stopping maintenance of a private server is way more likely than the most popular chat client at the time shutting down eventually. In your mind, who in 2017 was still using AIM, blissfully unaware of the shutdown, only to be met with an error page and the loss of their friends forever? I'm sure most people are like me... over a decade ago, my AIM friends mostly migrated to text messages (and a few to FB Messenger), and any impending doom of those two protocols will be long-preceded by us having already gone somewhere else.
  - berkes 6y ago
    > like someone stopping maintenance of a private server is way more likely But the chance that thousands of someones all stop maintainance of their private servers (at the same time) is way more unlikely.
    - robjan 6y ago
      It's still inconvenient. The inconvenience ranges from slightly annoying to "I have lost all my messages and now have to find all of my friends/family/colleagues contact details again somehow".
  - garbagetime 6y ago
    I think GP was suggesting each person runs their own computer. So, >someone stopping maintenance of a private server Would only mean that that specific person was unreachable. Everyone else could carry on like nothing had happened.
  - jlkuester7 6y ago
    > I feel like someone stopping maintenance of a private server is way more likely than the most popular chat client at the time shutting down eventually. I have been hosting my own Matrix homeserver and my 4+ years of service life seems to be longer than 80% of Google services... :) (Admittedly I am just joking with this apples-to-oranges comparison, but sometimes it sure does feel like major corporations are trending towards shorter and shorter service lifetimes for their offerings... and this is coming from someone who rode the Google+ train all the way to the last station!)
  - sp332 6y ago
    But the server would be less likely to shut down while there are poeple actively invested in it. With a smaller group, the maintainers can be held more accountable.
- comeonseriously 6y ago
  > Protocols should also evolve... This is why something like Delta Chat is a good thing. Almost everyone has email, so evolving email to include chat is a good thing. Also, it takes chat away from single entities.
  - toast0 6y ago
    > Almost everyone has email This is certainly not the case. A lot of people whose first and only internet enabled device is a smartphone don't end up creating an email.
    - twobitshifter 6y ago
      Isn’t an email necessary for a smartphone? I know apple requires one and will create it for you if you don’t have it. On Android, do you need a google account with email?
      - toast0 6y ago
        You don't need to login to Google to use an Android. Only if you want to use Google Play. Either way, you don't need to personally login with your own account. Often, whoever is setting up the phone (tech aware relative or phone store sales rep) for them will login with their account. For android phones, sometimes the people setting it up will just install customer selected apks from a usb drive; whatever version they happen to have, and when (if) those versions expire, come back to the store to update.
    - comeonseriously 6y ago
      > This is certainly not the case. A lot of people whose first and only internet enabled device is a smartphone don't end up creating an email Would like to see the stats on this.
toast0 6y ago
The shutdown of AIM makes me sad, but I had maybe one holdout contact left (who I still speak with, but on other services). I'm sure there's all sort of business lessons we could learn here. Among them that an early lead doesn't always lead to lasting success. AIM federated with Apple iChat, Facebook Messenger, and Google Talk, as well as ICQ after they purchased it over the years, but that didn't turn into anything lasting either. It's probably my bias from working at WhatsApp; but I don't think they did a great job working with mobile, and that combined with lack of support from management killed them when smartphones took over the mobile market. They did have some support for AIM on feature phones, but I think it was all based on SMS, which was costly, and I don't know if they had made a compelling Android app (wikipedia says they did have an Android app; but who knows if it was good); I never ran iOS, so I don't know if their iPhone app was any good, but I never heard from friends with iPhones that they were using it, so I'm guessing not so great.
- lotsofpulp 6y ago
  WhatsApp offered two things for my social graph: 1) got rid of usernames/passwords. This was a surprisingly high barrier for non tech literate people to pass, and WhatsApp made it dead simple for them to download from app store, install, and start chatting with their contacts. 2) SMS verification eliminated spam And the timing was perfect. Data plans and smartphones were just coming into the fore, and WhatsApp popped in as an alternative to the extremely inferior MMS option, and gave people a free way to communicate across borders. I also remember having trouble sharing contacts prior to WhatsApp, and after WhatsApp, it didn't matter what mobileOS the other person was using, I could just send a contact, and they would be able to add it to theirs. Same with location. And the picture/video sharing was way nicer early on also, albeit heavily compressed, it just worked.
  - iso1631 6y ago
    > And the timing was perfect. Data plans and smartphones were just coming into the fore, and WhatsApp popped in as an alternative to the extremely inferior MMS option, and gave people a free way to communicate across borders. The creator of whatsapp built it to help with his globetrotting - so he could set a message saying what timezone he was in so people didn't expect an immediate response. Easy cheap/free method of facilitating cross-border communications was at the heart of whatsapp from the start.
dan_m2k 6y ago
A nice little slice of internet history. True is the lesson that scale doesn’t represent success. I wonder how many of the current tech companies will learn the same lesson, or have we reached a period of maturity where products that don’t contribute to the bottom line aren’t allowed to linger like this did?
- nly 6y ago
  Did MSN Messenger make money for Microsoft before they bought Skype? Brand awareness for "MSN" just from MSN Messenger alone must have been massive. I'd be surprised today if half of your average kids using WhatsApp have even heard of Bing or Office 365. Hell, if it wasn't for Xbox Live the same could probably be said for that
  - nly 6y ago
    I mean the same could be said for the 'Live' brand
  - dan_m2k 6y ago
    No idea, but I bet the brand equity created for the MSN brand via MSN messenger was indeed huge across a boatload of international markets. Seems like a huge amount of wasted traction and momentum for the generation that grew up on MSN messenger, and now might be making purchase decisions where that traction could've been leveraged. It's what any other (non tech) brands do very successfully. I saw someone repost something from msn.com the other day, and was genuinely surprised to see it was still live. But, the way that the brand was migrated MSN Messenger -> Windows Live Messenger -> Bing (?) -> etc etc was a shitshow and made death a sweet relief for it.
mrweasel 6y ago
Normally I happy to shutdown services or delete code, less stuff, less stuff to maintain, but something as dear as AIM might be harder. It’s always a little sad to think of something like “the last message sent”, but there’s also someone, somewhere, with the last commit to the AIM server code. Writing the final AIM server bugfix cannot have been cheerful work, I mean want was the point, the developer most likely knew that the service would shutdown.
- avh02 6y ago
  One of the first products i worked on was put in to "maintenance" mode for most of my tenure at the same company (we were disbanded and moved to different teams). I wanted to be the one to shut it down (we knew it was not successful, and i was the last remaining team member) - but the one day i was on sick leave somebody not associated with it was asked to do it. I was slightly annoyed, but was happier to see it go than to be bothered by somebody else taking it out. We still celebrated though.
etherwaste 6y ago
You can still use AIM classic through Aim Phoenix. http://iwarg.ddns.net/phoenix/index.php http://iwarg.ddns.net/phoenix/index.php
CGamesPlay 6y ago
I was browsing through a backup of an old computer that ran Pidgin and had chat logging on. One of the last AIM messages I ever received went like this: Conversation at Mon Jan 15 01:16:36 2007 (01:16:36) Megan: omg it's ryan. (01:17:41) Megan: and then in time... (01:17:53) Megan: the friends faded away (01:18:14) Megan: and the instanst IMs that'd open were deleted (01:18:28) Megan: and responses never came (01:18:39) Megan: and then never even talked anymore (01:18:50) Megan: and then hadn't hung out in forever (01:19:02) Megan: ...but it was ok. (01:19:09) Megan: because that is life. (01:19:28) Megan: and she was thankful for the past they had, (01:19:38) Megan: even if there was no present. (02:31:57) Megan has signed off. (best read while playing Vangelis - Tears in Rain)
- juststeve 6y ago
  what year though?
  - loeber 6y ago
    > Conversation at Mon Jan 15 01:16:36 2007 2007.
- saberdancer 6y ago
  Did you get back to Megan?
- johnchristopher 6y ago
  This puts some perspective on the Signal/Matrix/whatever with their persistent history and the number of comments around here about how it's unacceptable to lose messages and history while in fact we are sometimes guilty of missing on them from our own negligence. Connecting people is a great achievement of Internet. And it has been done many times.
- voldacar 6y ago
  beautiful!
- volkl48 6y ago
marban 6y ago
Just recently found that ICQ is still alive or back for what's it worth but after digging around I could still log in with my 5 digit UIN. Nice.
Aeolun 6y ago
But did it arrive?!
juststeve 6y ago
pour one out for AIM
spike021 6y ago
I really miss AIM. It was the way you knew friends were available to chat. It was much closer to in-person conversation than most media we use nowadays. It's not uncommon for someone to {iMessage, SMS, FB Message, IG Message, etc.} me while I'm otherwise busy. Then, I need to find a second to let them know of this (unless I either totally drop the ball or consciously decide to not reply). I also need to let them know I'll be free to chat after work, at lunch time, etc. With AIM, you just logged in and set whether you were available, idle, away, or invisible. Friends knew whether they would disturb you or not. Not only that but it was pretty much the singular form of instant communication that almost everybody used. Now I have people I reply to on multiple platforms such that we'll even branch off in separate conversations per platform, I only talk to on X, Y, or Z platform, etc. I'm not one to <Old man yells at cloud> typically but this is one aspect of social media that I think we've lost over the past decade and it really sucks.
- elcomet 6y ago
  > Then, I need to find a second to let them know of this (unless I either totally drop the ball or consciously decide to not reply). This seems strange to me. I view IM as asynchronous. If someone messages me while I'm busy, I'll just reply later. And I don't expect people to answer immediatly. No need to sync to chat together (of course if we're both available we can chat in sync).
  - spike021 6y ago
    Honestly that's my point (and perhaps I should have been more clear about it). I think in hindsight I vastly prefer synchronous chat- which is why I pointed out in the beginning that AIM was the closest online communication to in-person communication. With asynchronous communication you do need to be much more proactive in how you handle your 'threads'. As I mentioned before, you need to remember or decide to reply _eventually_. It's also possible that in the meantime your thread (basically 1:1 communication with a person) will fork off (i.e. you share a tweet with someone in Twitter while simultaneously having an asynchronous conversation about some other topic in iMessages).
tinco 6y ago
It was such a senseless destruction. People miss AIM, people miss MSN Messenger and just a couple years later it turned out instant messaging platforms were worth billions. It's still insane to me these corporations shut down perfectly viable platforms that were still used by millions. The short sightedness and pettiness of these directors is something of legend, I hope there's a chapter about this in new management textbooks, but who knows. Anyone got a good explanation why it made sense to shut down these services?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- ThePhysicist 6y ago
  I think it's as you said, corporations didn't recognize the economic value of chat platforms back then. I think they were mostly focused on "Web 2.0" stuff so they probably tried putting all of their resources into that. You often see companies axe perfectly good business units just because they have a slightly lower margin or contribution to overall revenue, as they think putting the people from those units into the "cash cow" units will be better for the profit line (and it often is). We can see Google doing this over and over: They actually create a lot of nice products that could be profitable on their own, but since the main Google products are just making much more money per employee it still makes sense for them to axe the small "winning products" and have almost everyone work on the big winners.
  - a-dub 6y ago
    I think AIM is a little different... It was born out of the original AOL dial-up walled garden service where they built a bridge to the Internet where people could download standalone clients and communicate with themselves and old school AOL subscribers. I don't know the internals, but I do know that much of the original AOL backend existed at least through the early 2000s which provided the instant messenger and authentication services [0]. It wouldn't surprise me if they were shutting down all of that infrastructure which I'm sure had a non-trivial cost to operate. I think the thing to keep in mind is that running centralized backend infrastructure (ie; store and forward, user state, directory) for an instant messaging service is not cheap and if the platform is open and allows for user supplied clients, there's almost zero direct monetization opportunity without stepping into unethical privacy breach territory. That means they're relegated to just pushing a brand, and it seems like a very expensive way to do that. Moreover, AOL transitioned in its later years into a digital journalism company, and as far as I know AOL itself as a consumer brand disappeared. [0] Worked on a whitebox set top box browser platform (ala Android) in the early 00s specifically with AOL as a client. Amusingly, the big feature they were trying to push was onscreen chatrooms for people who were watching the same thing live, which I guess if you think about it may have led to ways to monetize chat.
disillusioned 6y ago
I used AIM to create what had to be one of the earlier live-blogging proofs of concept. It supported live-blogging from my Nokia 3390 dumb phone by virtue of its AIM client (which was literally just an interface to AIM over SMS). I coupled that with a custom plugin on Trillian (Astra?) to post to an API (API is generous, it was literally just a PHP script that knew to listen for a certain URL variable) which would post to the database, and update the page live. I even gave my friend a different prefix, and then we set up a dueling live-blog screen as we went on the same trip together: me on the left column, him on the right, timestamped, both of us contributing to this blog without easily being able to see the other's posts, since the phone itself didn't have any web capabilities. I dug into the old database, which I still have banging around somewhere here, and sure enough, the first entry was January of 2005.
barry27 6y ago
i always thought it was _Groucho_ Marx who said that line about fools. Goes to show what I know about the Marx brothers, I guess.
at_a_remove 6y ago
I recall Yahoo Chat finally shutting down in December of 2012. In a sense, you could see it coming: the messaging protocols were a mess, no real attempt had been made against the spambots, the property was poorly managed during that phase where Yahoo was attempting to date anyone, everyone, in order to fix their lives. First they killed the user-made rooms, due to some senseless pedo-panic, then some special interest rooms, and finally the service itself, even as some put-upon employee named "Robin" had to write various upbeat missives about Yahoo improving the service on the Yahoo Messenger Chat blog. You see, they had done one thing really right in the beginning with their chat rooms -- they made a series of location-based rooms, first by continent, then country, then (for the US) state and even occasionally city. So many people either want to talk about what is going on where they live or just talk to locals that this was a great success. And yet ... destroyed. It was indicative of what I had often heard about the company, that there were some brilliant engineers with some great insights, and also that there were just metric tons of business people businessing very hard and capable of driving absolutely anything into the ground because of their inability to leave well enough alone. It is a little amazing to me that all of these corporations just decided to shutter messaging and chat rooms in lockstep. And I suppose one did it, so they all had to or fall behind something or another.
pmob241 6y ago
Very nice
oneweekwonder 6y ago
While not AIM, MSN or ICQ. I was surprised that QQ got its own song from a punk rock band in southern africa in 2003[0]. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0UhZJ_Tca0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0UhZJ_Tca0
lwhi 6y ago
This makes me think of ICQ .. whatever happened to that?
- bombcar 6y ago
  Seems it got sold into Russia where it’s still being used. https://icq.com/mobile/en#ios https://icq.com/mobile/en#ios
  - techrat 6y ago
    With caveats. While my UID and password still work, I am unable to change my (horrendously insecure, attackable) password without first providing a phone number. Given that ICQ's ownership and cooperation with governments both raise questions, I don't think I'm going to be offering up any further information just to preserve a piece of my internet history.
    - sn_master 6y ago
      there are as many throwaway phone number sites now as the throwaway email ones..
      - techrat 6y ago
        That enables whoever gets the number next to access my account. I'm not fond of leaving irrevocable details that aren't mine on an account that is.
        sn_master 6y ago
        you can't detach the number after changing the password?
dmingod666 6y ago
I have fond memories of the ICQ sound.. hell even mIRC was mind-blowing the first time I saw it... Really? You can talk to strangers in other countries in real time... Wow..
- jugg1es 6y ago
  That is exactly what got me into computers in the first place - real time conversations with people across the world on AOL. Blew my little mind.
k__ 6y ago
Where(or when?) was AIM a big thing? I only knew like 4 people personally who used it. Most people used IRC, MSN, and ICQ, back in the days.
- icedchai 6y ago
  AIM was big in the late 90’s to early 2000’s. I still had 2 people I talked to on it through 2015 or so.
- egorfine 6y ago
  Depends on the culture. For instance, it wasn't used at all in the ex-USSR back in the day.
- betterunix2 6y ago
  Growing up in NYC, AIM was how I communicated with all my friends. It was very popular at the turn of the century (of the 21st century).
- swozey 6y ago
  AIM was all my IRL friends, I met a few people from IRC over my 15+ years on it but ICQ and IRC were "internet friends" to me. AIM was huge when I was in middle/hs in the late 90/2000s.
- twobitshifter 6y ago
  In the US 2002 or so everyone of my friends was on AIM
- kalleboo 6y ago
  AIM dominated in the US. Living in Europe, we were on ICQ to start with in like 1996, then IRC, and starting in like 2001 everyone coming online seemed to adopt MSN instead (I guess due to being preinstalled in Win XP?). But at the same time all my U.S. friends were on AIM.
mhd 6y ago
"@GrimReaper: A/S/L?"
pts_ 6y ago
Yahoo Messenger was my jam so much so that I wanted to be printed on my epitaph "You have been disconnected."
gnrlst 6y ago
I remember the first time I saw my friend use AIM. It was similar to the first time I saw another friend play GTA III. Both times, we were all huddled together, trying to make sense of this mind-boggingly new experience. I miss that sense of wonder.
- after_care 6y ago
  Childhood is fantastic.
cbanek 6y ago
I remember being at work when we turned off Xbox 1 support for LIVE. We had one last Xbox console and we watched it start to be able to not connect. The end of an era.
allan_s 6y ago
They should have use > This is Our Last Cry Before Our Eternal Silence https://infostory.com/2012/01/31/this-is-our-last-cry-before-our-eternal-silence/ https://infostory.com/2012/01/31/this-is-our-last-cry-before...
swiley 6y ago
Do not invest in proprietary services. This is why.
werber 6y ago
I remember my use of AIM fading through college. It being used through the message app on Mac made the experience of it going away pretty seemless. I use my text messages through essentially the same application, so in a way it still feels current
rglover 6y ago
This just reminded me of my first online girlfriend I met on AIM. I think I was 12-13 and I socially engineered an AT&T operator into letting me bill long-distance call charges directly to my parent's house by pretending to be a traveling salesman. It was an enlightening moment about the fragility of human-fronted systems. $1,200 later and a disconnected phone line...let's just say they weren't thrilled. I also got my parent's AOL account suspended in 1995 when I decided to repeat this (https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=115&v=Erl-Uk8-Xr4&feature=youtu.be https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=115&v=Erl-Uk8-Xr4&feature=yo...) in the AOL kids chat. I really, really miss the early internet.
FauxDemure 6y ago
Very fun. AIM was a huge part of my high school existence. I was absent from AIM for several years, but then my first job out of school (2009) used it as the official chat service. Eventually the corporate overlords brought in a series of other sanctioned chat tools, but most of us kept AIM going to have a backchannel we knew wasn't monitored.
waspight 6y ago
Is there any good documentary out there to relive the msn messenger era? I mean the internet as it was 2005 was pretty different. Miss it.
twobitshifter 6y ago
AIM was actually a proto-social network. You had your buddy list and friends group, and a profile you could fill out. Your away message could be used as your status or to tweet your mood.
tppiotrowski 6y ago
One interesting (but probably creepy by todays standards) feature of AIM was that you could put %s anywhere in your profile and AIM would replace it with the screen name of whoever was looking at your profile. An example would be: %s is my best friend! -> angelc408 is my best friend! This also worked on links you added to your profile so you could make custom links that would send the user's name to your server to make a simple guest book. <a href="http://buddytracker.us/?user=%s">Sign http://buddytracker.us/?user=%s">Sign my guestbook</a> I was a sophomore in college when I made a simple guest book service that blew up to over 3 million users in a year. I contemplated dropping out of college my junior year and making it into something more than 20 lines of PHP with a MySQL database. In the end I stayed in school and AIM removed profiles from the desktop client a year later. Dodged a bullet there...

409 points by luu 6y ago

This is why it's important, as a group, to roll your server. Own the infrastructure of communication and discourse. To utilize open standards for which you or anyone else can create and run their own server, or client. Protocols should also evolve, or have organized successors over time. If you do provide backward compatibility, please do the best reasonable effort at making backward features work.

gkoberger 6y ago
I feel like someone stopping maintenance of a private server is way more likely than the most popular chat client at the time shutting down eventually. In your mind, who in 2017 was still using AIM, blissfully unaware of the shutdown, only to be met with an error page and the loss of their friends forever? I'm sure most people are like me... over a decade ago, my AIM friends mostly migrated to text messages (and a few to FB Messenger), and any impending doom of those two protocols will be long-preceded by us having already gone somewhere else.
- berkes 6y ago
  > like someone stopping maintenance of a private server is way more likely But the chance that thousands of someones all stop maintainance of their private servers (at the same time) is way more unlikely.
  - robjan 6y ago
    It's still inconvenient. The inconvenience ranges from slightly annoying to "I have lost all my messages and now have to find all of my friends/family/colleagues contact details again somehow".
- garbagetime 6y ago
  I think GP was suggesting each person runs their own computer. So, >someone stopping maintenance of a private server Would only mean that that specific person was unreachable. Everyone else could carry on like nothing had happened.
- jlkuester7 6y ago
  > I feel like someone stopping maintenance of a private server is way more likely than the most popular chat client at the time shutting down eventually. I have been hosting my own Matrix homeserver and my 4+ years of service life seems to be longer than 80% of Google services... :) (Admittedly I am just joking with this apples-to-oranges comparison, but sometimes it sure does feel like major corporations are trending towards shorter and shorter service lifetimes for their offerings... and this is coming from someone who rode the Google+ train all the way to the last station!)
- sp332 6y ago
  But the server would be less likely to shut down while there are poeple actively invested in it. With a smaller group, the maintainers can be held more accountable.
comeonseriously 6y ago
> Protocols should also evolve... This is why something like Delta Chat is a good thing. Almost everyone has email, so evolving email to include chat is a good thing. Also, it takes chat away from single entities.
- toast0 6y ago
  > Almost everyone has email This is certainly not the case. A lot of people whose first and only internet enabled device is a smartphone don't end up creating an email.
  - twobitshifter 6y ago
    Isn’t an email necessary for a smartphone? I know apple requires one and will create it for you if you don’t have it. On Android, do you need a google account with email?
    - toast0 6y ago
      You don't need to login to Google to use an Android. Only if you want to use Google Play. Either way, you don't need to personally login with your own account. Often, whoever is setting up the phone (tech aware relative or phone store sales rep) for them will login with their account. For android phones, sometimes the people setting it up will just install customer selected apks from a usb drive; whatever version they happen to have, and when (if) those versions expire, come back to the store to update.
  - comeonseriously 6y ago
    > This is certainly not the case. A lot of people whose first and only internet enabled device is a smartphone don't end up creating an email Would like to see the stats on this.

toast0 6y ago

The shutdown of AIM makes me sad, but I had maybe one holdout contact left (who I still speak with, but on other services). I'm sure there's all sort of business lessons we could learn here. Among them that an early lead doesn't always lead to lasting success. AIM federated with Apple iChat, Facebook Messenger, and Google Talk, as well as ICQ after they purchased it over the years, but that didn't turn into anything lasting either. It's probably my bias from working at WhatsApp; but I don't think they did a great job working with mobile, and that combined with lack of support from management killed them when smartphones took over the mobile market. They did have some support for AIM on feature phones, but I think it was all based on SMS, which was costly, and I don't know if they had made a compelling Android app (wikipedia says they did have an Android app; but who knows if it was good); I never ran iOS, so I don't know if their iPhone app was any good, but I never heard from friends with iPhones that they were using it, so I'm guessing not so great.

lotsofpulp 6y ago
WhatsApp offered two things for my social graph: 1) got rid of usernames/passwords. This was a surprisingly high barrier for non tech literate people to pass, and WhatsApp made it dead simple for them to download from app store, install, and start chatting with their contacts. 2) SMS verification eliminated spam And the timing was perfect. Data plans and smartphones were just coming into the fore, and WhatsApp popped in as an alternative to the extremely inferior MMS option, and gave people a free way to communicate across borders. I also remember having trouble sharing contacts prior to WhatsApp, and after WhatsApp, it didn't matter what mobileOS the other person was using, I could just send a contact, and they would be able to add it to theirs. Same with location. And the picture/video sharing was way nicer early on also, albeit heavily compressed, it just worked.
- iso1631 6y ago
  > And the timing was perfect. Data plans and smartphones were just coming into the fore, and WhatsApp popped in as an alternative to the extremely inferior MMS option, and gave people a free way to communicate across borders. The creator of whatsapp built it to help with his globetrotting - so he could set a message saying what timezone he was in so people didn't expect an immediate response. Easy cheap/free method of facilitating cross-border communications was at the heart of whatsapp from the start.

dan_m2k 6y ago

A nice little slice of internet history. True is the lesson that scale doesn’t represent success. I wonder how many of the current tech companies will learn the same lesson, or have we reached a period of maturity where products that don’t contribute to the bottom line aren’t allowed to linger like this did?

nly 6y ago
Did MSN Messenger make money for Microsoft before they bought Skype? Brand awareness for "MSN" just from MSN Messenger alone must have been massive. I'd be surprised today if half of your average kids using WhatsApp have even heard of Bing or Office 365. Hell, if it wasn't for Xbox Live the same could probably be said for that
- nly 6y ago
  I mean the same could be said for the 'Live' brand
- dan_m2k 6y ago
  No idea, but I bet the brand equity created for the MSN brand via MSN messenger was indeed huge across a boatload of international markets. Seems like a huge amount of wasted traction and momentum for the generation that grew up on MSN messenger, and now might be making purchase decisions where that traction could've been leveraged. It's what any other (non tech) brands do very successfully. I saw someone repost something from msn.com the other day, and was genuinely surprised to see it was still live. But, the way that the brand was migrated MSN Messenger -> Windows Live Messenger -> Bing (?) -> etc etc was a shitshow and made death a sweet relief for it.

mrweasel 6y ago

Normally I happy to shutdown services or delete code, less stuff, less stuff to maintain, but something as dear as AIM might be harder. It’s always a little sad to think of something like “the last message sent”, but there’s also someone, somewhere, with the last commit to the AIM server code. Writing the final AIM server bugfix cannot have been cheerful work, I mean want was the point, the developer most likely knew that the service would shutdown.

avh02 6y ago
One of the first products i worked on was put in to "maintenance" mode for most of my tenure at the same company (we were disbanded and moved to different teams). I wanted to be the one to shut it down (we knew it was not successful, and i was the last remaining team member) - but the one day i was on sick leave somebody not associated with it was asked to do it. I was slightly annoyed, but was happier to see it go than to be bothered by somebody else taking it out. We still celebrated though.

etherwaste 6y ago

You can still use AIM classic through Aim Phoenix. http://iwarg.ddns.net/phoenix/index.php http://iwarg.ddns.net/phoenix/index.php

CGamesPlay 6y ago

I was browsing through a backup of an old computer that ran Pidgin and had chat logging on. One of the last AIM messages I ever received went like this: Conversation at Mon Jan 15 01:16:36 2007 (01:16:36) Megan: omg it's ryan. (01:17:41) Megan: and then in time... (01:17:53) Megan: the friends faded away (01:18:14) Megan: and the instanst IMs that'd open were deleted (01:18:28) Megan: and responses never came (01:18:39) Megan: and then never even talked anymore (01:18:50) Megan: and then hadn't hung out in forever (01:19:02) Megan: ...but it was ok. (01:19:09) Megan: because that is life. (01:19:28) Megan: and she was thankful for the past they had, (01:19:38) Megan: even if there was no present. (02:31:57) Megan has signed off. (best read while playing Vangelis - Tears in Rain)

juststeve 6y ago
what year though?
- loeber 6y ago
  > Conversation at Mon Jan 15 01:16:36 2007 2007.
saberdancer 6y ago
Did you get back to Megan?
johnchristopher 6y ago
This puts some perspective on the Signal/Matrix/whatever with their persistent history and the number of comments around here about how it's unacceptable to lose messages and history while in fact we are sometimes guilty of missing on them from our own negligence. Connecting people is a great achievement of Internet. And it has been done many times.
voldacar 6y ago
beautiful!
volkl48 6y ago

marban 6y ago

Just recently found that ICQ is still alive or back for what's it worth but after digging around I could still log in with my 5 digit UIN. Nice.

Aeolun 6y ago

But did it arrive?!

juststeve 6y ago

pour one out for AIM

spike021 6y ago

I really miss AIM. It was the way you knew friends were available to chat. It was much closer to in-person conversation than most media we use nowadays. It's not uncommon for someone to {iMessage, SMS, FB Message, IG Message, etc.} me while I'm otherwise busy. Then, I need to find a second to let them know of this (unless I either totally drop the ball or consciously decide to not reply). I also need to let them know I'll be free to chat after work, at lunch time, etc. With AIM, you just logged in and set whether you were available, idle, away, or invisible. Friends knew whether they would disturb you or not. Not only that but it was pretty much the singular form of instant communication that almost everybody used. Now I have people I reply to on multiple platforms such that we'll even branch off in separate conversations per platform, I only talk to on X, Y, or Z platform, etc. I'm not one to <Old man yells at cloud> typically but this is one aspect of social media that I think we've lost over the past decade and it really sucks.

elcomet 6y ago
> Then, I need to find a second to let them know of this (unless I either totally drop the ball or consciously decide to not reply). This seems strange to me. I view IM as asynchronous. If someone messages me while I'm busy, I'll just reply later. And I don't expect people to answer immediatly. No need to sync to chat together (of course if we're both available we can chat in sync).
- spike021 6y ago
  Honestly that's my point (and perhaps I should have been more clear about it). I think in hindsight I vastly prefer synchronous chat- which is why I pointed out in the beginning that AIM was the closest online communication to in-person communication. With asynchronous communication you do need to be much more proactive in how you handle your 'threads'. As I mentioned before, you need to remember or decide to reply _eventually_. It's also possible that in the meantime your thread (basically 1:1 communication with a person) will fork off (i.e. you share a tweet with someone in Twitter while simultaneously having an asynchronous conversation about some other topic in iMessages).

tinco 6y ago

It was such a senseless destruction. People miss AIM, people miss MSN Messenger and just a couple years later it turned out instant messaging platforms were worth billions. It's still insane to me these corporations shut down perfectly viable platforms that were still used by millions. The short sightedness and pettiness of these directors is something of legend, I hope there's a chapter about this in new management textbooks, but who knows. Anyone got a good explanation why it made sense to shut down these services?

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
ThePhysicist 6y ago
I think it's as you said, corporations didn't recognize the economic value of chat platforms back then. I think they were mostly focused on "Web 2.0" stuff so they probably tried putting all of their resources into that. You often see companies axe perfectly good business units just because they have a slightly lower margin or contribution to overall revenue, as they think putting the people from those units into the "cash cow" units will be better for the profit line (and it often is). We can see Google doing this over and over: They actually create a lot of nice products that could be profitable on their own, but since the main Google products are just making much more money per employee it still makes sense for them to axe the small "winning products" and have almost everyone work on the big winners.
- a-dub 6y ago
  I think AIM is a little different... It was born out of the original AOL dial-up walled garden service where they built a bridge to the Internet where people could download standalone clients and communicate with themselves and old school AOL subscribers. I don't know the internals, but I do know that much of the original AOL backend existed at least through the early 2000s which provided the instant messenger and authentication services [0]. It wouldn't surprise me if they were shutting down all of that infrastructure which I'm sure had a non-trivial cost to operate. I think the thing to keep in mind is that running centralized backend infrastructure (ie; store and forward, user state, directory) for an instant messaging service is not cheap and if the platform is open and allows for user supplied clients, there's almost zero direct monetization opportunity without stepping into unethical privacy breach territory. That means they're relegated to just pushing a brand, and it seems like a very expensive way to do that. Moreover, AOL transitioned in its later years into a digital journalism company, and as far as I know AOL itself as a consumer brand disappeared. [0] Worked on a whitebox set top box browser platform (ala Android) in the early 00s specifically with AOL as a client. Amusingly, the big feature they were trying to push was onscreen chatrooms for people who were watching the same thing live, which I guess if you think about it may have led to ways to monetize chat.

disillusioned 6y ago

I used AIM to create what had to be one of the earlier live-blogging proofs of concept. It supported live-blogging from my Nokia 3390 dumb phone by virtue of its AIM client (which was literally just an interface to AIM over SMS). I coupled that with a custom plugin on Trillian (Astra?) to post to an API (API is generous, it was literally just a PHP script that knew to listen for a certain URL variable) which would post to the database, and update the page live. I even gave my friend a different prefix, and then we set up a dueling live-blog screen as we went on the same trip together: me on the left column, him on the right, timestamped, both of us contributing to this blog without easily being able to see the other's posts, since the phone itself didn't have any web capabilities. I dug into the old database, which I still have banging around somewhere here, and sure enough, the first entry was January of 2005.

barry27 6y ago

i always thought it was _Groucho_ Marx who said that line about fools. Goes to show what I know about the Marx brothers, I guess.

at_a_remove 6y ago

I recall Yahoo Chat finally shutting down in December of 2012. In a sense, you could see it coming: the messaging protocols were a mess, no real attempt had been made against the spambots, the property was poorly managed during that phase where Yahoo was attempting to date anyone, everyone, in order to fix their lives. First they killed the user-made rooms, due to some senseless pedo-panic, then some special interest rooms, and finally the service itself, even as some put-upon employee named "Robin" had to write various upbeat missives about Yahoo improving the service on the Yahoo Messenger Chat blog. You see, they had done one thing really right in the beginning with their chat rooms -- they made a series of location-based rooms, first by continent, then country, then (for the US) state and even occasionally city. So many people either want to talk about what is going on where they live or just talk to locals that this was a great success. And yet ... destroyed. It was indicative of what I had often heard about the company, that there were some brilliant engineers with some great insights, and also that there were just metric tons of business people businessing very hard and capable of driving absolutely anything into the ground because of their inability to leave well enough alone. It is a little amazing to me that all of these corporations just decided to shutter messaging and chat rooms in lockstep. And I suppose one did it, so they all had to or fall behind something or another.

pmob241 6y ago

Very nice

oneweekwonder 6y ago

While not AIM, MSN or ICQ. I was surprised that QQ got its own song from a punk rock band in southern africa in 2003[0]. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0UhZJ_Tca0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0UhZJ_Tca0

lwhi 6y ago

This makes me think of ICQ .. whatever happened to that?

bombcar 6y ago
Seems it got sold into Russia where it’s still being used. https://icq.com/mobile/en#ios https://icq.com/mobile/en#ios
- techrat 6y ago
  With caveats. While my UID and password still work, I am unable to change my (horrendously insecure, attackable) password without first providing a phone number. Given that ICQ's ownership and cooperation with governments both raise questions, I don't think I'm going to be offering up any further information just to preserve a piece of my internet history.
  - sn_master 6y ago
    there are as many throwaway phone number sites now as the throwaway email ones..
    - techrat 6y ago
      That enables whoever gets the number next to access my account. I'm not fond of leaving irrevocable details that aren't mine on an account that is.
      - sn_master 6y ago
        you can't detach the number after changing the password?

dmingod666 6y ago

I have fond memories of the ICQ sound.. hell even mIRC was mind-blowing the first time I saw it... Really? You can talk to strangers in other countries in real time... Wow..

jugg1es 6y ago
That is exactly what got me into computers in the first place - real time conversations with people across the world on AOL. Blew my little mind.

k__ 6y ago

Where(or when?) was AIM a big thing? I only knew like 4 people personally who used it. Most people used IRC, MSN, and ICQ, back in the days.

icedchai 6y ago
AIM was big in the late 90’s to early 2000’s. I still had 2 people I talked to on it through 2015 or so.
egorfine 6y ago
Depends on the culture. For instance, it wasn't used at all in the ex-USSR back in the day.
betterunix2 6y ago
Growing up in NYC, AIM was how I communicated with all my friends. It was very popular at the turn of the century (of the 21st century).
swozey 6y ago
AIM was all my IRL friends, I met a few people from IRC over my 15+ years on it but ICQ and IRC were "internet friends" to me. AIM was huge when I was in middle/hs in the late 90/2000s.
twobitshifter 6y ago
In the US 2002 or so everyone of my friends was on AIM
kalleboo 6y ago
AIM dominated in the US. Living in Europe, we were on ICQ to start with in like 1996, then IRC, and starting in like 2001 everyone coming online seemed to adopt MSN instead (I guess due to being preinstalled in Win XP?). But at the same time all my U.S. friends were on AIM.

mhd 6y ago

"@GrimReaper: A/S/L?"

pts_ 6y ago

Yahoo Messenger was my jam so much so that I wanted to be printed on my epitaph "You have been disconnected."

gnrlst 6y ago

I remember the first time I saw my friend use AIM. It was similar to the first time I saw another friend play GTA III. Both times, we were all huddled together, trying to make sense of this mind-boggingly new experience. I miss that sense of wonder.

after_care 6y ago
Childhood is fantastic.

cbanek 6y ago

I remember being at work when we turned off Xbox 1 support for LIVE. We had one last Xbox console and we watched it start to be able to not connect. The end of an era.

allan_s 6y ago

They should have use > This is Our Last Cry Before Our Eternal Silence https://infostory.com/2012/01/31/this-is-our-last-cry-before-our-eternal-silence/ https://infostory.com/2012/01/31/this-is-our-last-cry-before...

swiley 6y ago

Do not invest in proprietary services. This is why.

werber 6y ago

I remember my use of AIM fading through college. It being used through the message app on Mac made the experience of it going away pretty seemless. I use my text messages through essentially the same application, so in a way it still feels current

rglover 6y ago

This just reminded me of my first online girlfriend I met on AIM. I think I was 12-13 and I socially engineered an AT&T operator into letting me bill long-distance call charges directly to my parent's house by pretending to be a traveling salesman. It was an enlightening moment about the fragility of human-fronted systems. $1,200 later and a disconnected phone line...let's just say they weren't thrilled. I also got my parent's AOL account suspended in 1995 when I decided to repeat this (https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=115&v=Erl-Uk8-Xr4&feature=youtu.be https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=115&v=Erl-Uk8-Xr4&feature=yo...) in the AOL kids chat. I really, really miss the early internet.

FauxDemure 6y ago

Very fun. AIM was a huge part of my high school existence. I was absent from AIM for several years, but then my first job out of school (2009) used it as the official chat service. Eventually the corporate overlords brought in a series of other sanctioned chat tools, but most of us kept AIM going to have a backchannel we knew wasn't monitored.

waspight 6y ago

Is there any good documentary out there to relive the msn messenger era? I mean the internet as it was 2005 was pretty different. Miss it.

twobitshifter 6y ago

AIM was actually a proto-social network. You had your buddy list and friends group, and a profile you could fill out. Your away message could be used as your status or to tweet your mood.

tppiotrowski 6y ago

One interesting (but probably creepy by todays standards) feature of AIM was that you could put %s anywhere in your profile and AIM would replace it with the screen name of whoever was looking at your profile. An example would be: %s is my best friend! -> angelc408 is my best friend! This also worked on links you added to your profile so you could make custom links that would send the user's name to your server to make a simple guest book. <a href="http://buddytracker.us/?user=%s">Sign http://buddytracker.us/?user=%s">Sign my guestbook</a> I was a sophomore in college when I made a simple guest book service that blew up to over 3 million users in a year. I contemplated dropping out of college my junior year and making it into something more than 20 lines of PHP with a MySQL database. In the end I stayed in school and AIM removed profiles from the desktop client a year later. Dodged a bullet there...