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Did AOL really win in the end though? My youth was in the late 90s and 2000s and I don’t know a single soul that used AOL, ICQ, or Yahoo. I imagine all of them
by jorvi 3y ago
Did AOL really win in the end though?
My youth was in the late 90s and 2000s and I don’t know a single soul that used AOL, ICQ, or Yahoo. I imagine all of them must have been hoping for the reverse at that point, access to MSN.
- hattmall 3y agoEverybody was on all three for me. That being AIM and ICQ then later MSN. I don't remember much Yahoo messenger usage, just gaming on Yahoo, but everyone was on ICQ.
- chankstein38 3y agoYeah, what? I grew up (in the same era) using AIM and Yahoo, ICQ was a little before my prime. Everyone I talk to about those days used them as well. MSN was fine but AIM and Yahoo were where it was at for the bulk of my early years of instant messaging with friends. At one point a friend even made me an AIM account because I was using MSN and they wanted to chat with me but didn't want to do it through MSN. Obviously just 1 anecdote but I just wanted to share that my experience and your experience were dramatically different.
- jorvi 3y agoPerhaps it’s geographically correlated, I’m from The Netherlands, which would be West+Central Europe in terms of cultural zeitgeist. Would map neatly to the iMessage / WhatsApp divide too, if for different reasons.
- ftmch 3y agoAlso from NL, was using ICQ at first then everyone switched to MSN. I do remember using AIM a little bit to chat with some Americans. This was the late 90's.
- IshKebab 3y agoLike today, it was highly regional. The talk about Beeper Mini sounds ridiculous in the UK because literally nobody uses iMessage. IIRC AIM was popular in America and MSN was popular in Europe.
- clwg 3y agoBack then the networks weren't so locked down to the clients, so it wasn't as big of an issue to have friends on various networks either. I have to call out IRC too. I definitely look back on those as the "good old days" of chat.
- stavros 3y agoEspecially with software like Miranda IM or Trillian, you didn't have to care which network your friends were on, you just had the one client.
- chankstein38 3y agoI definitely miss IRC too
- grishka 3y ago> ICQ was a little before my prime Huh? Most people associating ICQ with the 90s is so strange to me. In Russia we used ICQ so much it pretty much became synonymous with the concept of instant messaging itself. That was in the late 00s. Skype was also prominent. Then everyone gradually switched to VKontakte, when they introduced instant messaging and group chats, and then Telegram. At no point did we even try to get into AIM, Yahoo, or MSN. Fun fact about our ICQ use: almost no one used the crappy official client. For most people it was QIP or Miranda.
- chankstein38 3y agoYeah honestly I wondered if my timeline was accurate when writing this. I just recall it being mentioned and people talking about ICQ numbers and never personally having one and thinking "Nah I've got AIM and Yahoo and MSN I'm good"
- manmal 3y agoMy friends were all on ICQ and MSN, ca 2001-2007 was when I heavily used those.
- doublerabbit 3y agoY!M was used by niches as is Telegram to Discord, I found. Unless you actually sign up you tend not to find anyone using it. But when you do, it all appears out of nowhere. Same as when you buy a car and suddenly everyone has the same colour/model. I used Y!M for NeoPets stuff when I was 14, and MSN for school but never ICQ or AIM. Those time's were specially magical.
- aflag 3y agoIn the US everyone used AIM, in Brazil everyone used MSN. Never met anyone using yahoo. ICQ was big before that (mid-90s).
- nerdix 3y agoYou must have been very young in the 90s because AOL dominated the late 90s. And it carried over into the early 00s with AIM even as people started to drop AOL as an ISP. MSN was more of mid-00s thing. The 90s were all AOL though. I knew people who used ICQ (it was definitely more of a nerd thing) and Yahoo Messenger too.