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My impression of AOL was mixed. I never had it myself, but their dialup service either forced or heavily pushed their own browser, which encouraged the use of
by MiddleEndian 1y ago
My impression of AOL was mixed.
I never had it myself, but their dialup service either forced or heavily pushed their own browser, which encouraged the use of AOL keywords rather than URLs. Always thought of this as major negative and the start of heavy corporate control over the web. Seeing commercials list AOL keywords instead of their own websites annoyed me a lot, as did the transition to using myspace then facebook then twitter the instagram etc.
On the other hand, I liked AOL Instant Messenger a lot. It used XMPP so I could use other IM clients most of the time (namely Adium). On top of that, AOL Instant Messenger's Direct Connect feature was by far the easiest way to send files of any size* to your friends. Far more convenient than much of what exists today.
* Google suggests this limit may have been 4GB, but that was basically limitless in the 90s and early 2000s
- user3939382 1y agoAIM used their proprietary OSCAR protocol but there may have been a way to bridge it with XMPP.
- palmfacehn 1y agoBefore OSCAR there was TOC. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TOC_protocol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TOC_protocol
- MiddleEndian 1y agoI was under the impression that AIM, Yahoo Messenger, and MSN all used XMPP. It seems that AIM added support for it in 2008, but Adium (and the other multi-chat clients) were just doing some magic to make it work seamlessly.
- RHSeeger 1y agoAnd Trillian. I remember I had a pluging for Trillian that allowed me to write code to script it in Tcl. And then a plugin written in Tcl that allowed me to quicksearch my contacts. Good times.
- duskwuff 1y agoDefinitely not. AIM, YIM, and MSN all used their own proprietary protocols, and multi-client messengers like Adium contained implementations of those protocols. There was no messaging between services (except AIM <-> ICQ), and some of the services supported features the others didn't.
- hypercube33 1y agoMicrosoft figured out AIM and was able to cross message until they updated and broke it. I think that happened a few times
- MiddleEndian 1y agoSure there wasn't messaging between systems, but the point was I had friends on AIM, YIM, and MSN and I could use one program (with three accounts signed in) to message them all and not have to think about it. Adium would just aggregate them together, so I'd see "FirstName LastName" and it would message from the right service. But modern chat apps like FB Messenger, Google Chat (if it still exists?), etc. managed to successfully break all that, never worked reliably in Adium or Pidgin (if at all).
- Spooky23 1y agoIt’s the opposite, the web was the new disruptor and AOL served everyone AOL as a pre-web online service, which continued to be used by their legacy users for many years. Pre-Internet AOL was like Yahoo in the 2000s which aped it on the Internet. Sort of a hybrid syndication machine like a magazine/newspaper/tv hybrid. There was a few similar services, Prodigy was the one my family used. They basically did web commerce before the web. My dad even did banking. Prodigy was a joint venture between Sears and IBM and used an x.25 network behind the scenes powered by AS/400 iirc.