As of December 15, 2017, AOL Instant Messenger products and services will be shut down and will no longer work.If you are an AOL member, AOL products and services^aEUR< ^aEUR
Many Americans have memories of AOL Instant Messenger I’m sure – probably memories of talking to your crush late at night, or planning evenings out drinking with friends. Here in The Netherlands we used MSN Messenger – I have those same memories, just from a different client. AOL, ICQ and MSN have long been replaced by WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and iMessage, but I’m sure teens of today still use them for the same thing.
My first thought was: this is the end of an era. My second thought was: wait, AIM was still running? My third thought was, AOL still exists as software at all?
I do have a lot of memories of AIM, but oddly enough, I had just as many friends who used MSN and even some Yahoo. I think there was one person I chatted with that used ICQ and insisted they wouldn’t use anything else, but eventually I got rid of ICQ (though I still remember my ICQ number).
And yes, all these have mostly been replaced and yet… we still have to have three messaging apps on our devices to keep in touch with everyone. Oh how far we’ve come?
Aol reader is the best online rss reader. Sadly it is shutting down on january 3rd.
Ever since Google Reader shut down I am on Newsblur. How was Aol reader the best?
Unlimited rss sources (without any payment required), good highlighting, multiple themes, fast loadtimes, could use your regular google account for login, worked equally well on mobile devices as with computers. And best of all it was completely free of charge.
MSN was predominant in Europe, or if not that ICQ.
I’ve still not gotten over MSN being shut down, that is, I’ve not been using any IM system since and I’m at a loss as what to use — the new stuff has too much of an agenda. I miss the simple days of 1:1 chat and not this ‘social’ element every company is pushing. I think I shall have to sail to the East into the land of IRC where all grognards eventually end up.
The irony of these ^aEURoedead^aEUR systems is that there is nothing the ^aEURoenew^aEUR chat apps can do that these old ones couldn^aEURTMt. MSN could even screen share and allow remote control! I can^aEURTMt think of a single feature that has actually been gained. Anyone?
Trying to remember what happened.
What replaced AIM?
Doesn’t help that I left civilized society when AIM was king, and came back and found it a wasteland. Was that when people just started texting? Or was Google Chat a thing?
When it comes to IM, I think people usually just gravitate to whatever most of their friends/family use. In my case, that’s Facebook Messenger. But I’ve probably used most of them over the years – Yahoo, AIM, ICQ, MSN, IRC, etc.
Edited 2017-12-16 15:27 UTC
Understood. I just couldn’t remember what people moved to after AIM. After consulting some of my friends, they confirmed my guess of google chat/ texting.
From there, I we kind of stopped Instant messaging. Texting occasionally, FB messanger occasionally. Still google hangouts every now and then.
Its kind of fragmented and random, but with more facebook becoming a larger part.
The…gag…FB Messenger. IDK how many times I’ve told friends “Sorry but if you want to talk to me send me an email, not loading that battery sucking spyware onto my smartphone”.
Ya know that is what I miss about the old days…everyone didn’t have some nasty hidden agenda. We had programs (not APPS, you can stick your apps where the sun doesn’t shine) and they did one thing and WE were in 100% control. If you wanted to use it you launched it, when you were done you shut it down, easy peasy.
Nowadays you have to practically have a phone stinger to insure that hidden data isn’t being siphoned off any mobile device you use and you have to watch your router like a hawk just to make sure some company you could trust yesterday hasn’t turned nasty today (see Mozilla pushing ad plug ins, Forecastfox turning evil, etc) because everything wants to run in the background and nobody can be trusted.
I have always prefered irc
https://xkcd.com/1782/
Please explain why i get downvoted for this sentiment?
AIM never really appealed to me. As an American, in the past, I mostly used MSN and GTalk before. Then Discord came around and now I just don’t really use anything else.
I used IRC occasionally but it’s kinda like telling someone to use emacs or VIM then customize it to make it useful instead of just using like, nano, or, Notepad++, or something, lol.
I still use GTalk
(or Hangouts, as it is called now I think…); helps that all my friends also use it. Its original win32 client has IMHO the best UI of any IM app I’ve seen …sadly it never offered videocalls, and it’s abandoned for some time now.
I still miss what became AOL messenger, it was much better before AOL bought it. It was called Pow Wow messenger by a company called Tribal Voice, unfortunately AOL bought the rights to it and for me, it killed it. It was the most advanced messenger software at the time and fun to use, I probably still have the installer on a old hard drive somewhere. Ah memories!
or maybe we were just early adopters: there simply was no MSN from 96 to 99 … Microsoft was late in the game … again.
AOL was kind of a closed ecosystem back than, so nobody I knew used this messenger … to overcome this, AOL bought ICQ in 98 … and what could have been the standard until today, went downhill as everything AOL touched.
Last I’ve heard, ICQ was still the standard in Russia/CIS.
In Poland, after initial spike of ICQ popularity at the end of the 90s, a local clone, GaduGadu, took over the market for many years (it helped that it could send free SMS to polish mobile phone numbers, in fact that’s how the app started and evolved into IM), before losing users, I believe, to Skype or Facebook Messenger…
Edited 2017-12-17 00:05 UTC
Yes I heard of that. There where also clients for more exotic Platforms like my beloved Amiga.
Edited 2017-12-17 18:05 UTC
AIM really wasn’t anything new when it rolled out. mIRC and ICQ were dominant over AIM for as long as I remember. Wasn’t nettalk already built into Win95? AIM couldn’t even dominate that until Microsoft killed it. And then we had web-based sites like Talkcity. Funny how AIM outlived so many of its replacements.
AIM always had instant recognition with its logo. AOL spent quite the money on AIM in its ad campaigns. Although it’s easy to identify, in my opinion it was never dominant. It was never an enigma like usenet.
Don’t forget about Snapchat, Skype and the slew of other country specific ones ( I can’t remember at the moment).
The international ones are usually the ones that are missed the most, but ICQ was… meh. A lot of people during that time ventured into the more international IRC and message boards, however, I can see how many people that were not that tech savvy would stick to the more popular one in USA.
Trillian. But, then, I don’t remember to which services I connected it!