Today, December 15th, 2017, marks a pretty dark day for the internet – no, we aren’t talking about Net Neutrality here (although I’m about to get into that, check ahead a few articles,) I’m talking about the death Aol Instant Messenger, or AIM, which had its servers shut down today.
I had covered this when it was announced a few months ago, but it still was kind of a surprise when I saw YouTube user Druaga1 upload a video of him saying bye to his friends list; a list which had no one active.
Indeed, that’s the reason why AIM is now dead – no one uses it anymore. It’s all about Twitter, Kik, Facebook, Discord, Skype.. pretty much any other option. Hell, ICQ is still active, and when’s the last time you ever really heard anyone talk about it? Hell, how many people have you ever known who actually used it? It’s funny to think, it has stayed somehow more viable and more useful to its operators than AIM which was for many many years the way everyone online chatted.
I mentioned before that I had fond memories of using AIM, and that it was actually quite an important piece of my early time on the internet – I was late to really getting online, and even then, used AOL dial up until honestly a decade ago! Naturally, I was in AOL chats quite often, and when I finally left AOL I took a secondary name with me for AIM usage. I had actually begun using it while I was on the dial up service, but had stopped using the normal client, and instead was on the simple dial-up manager that let you easily log in and use Internet Explorer and the like for browsing. Let’s just say I wasn’t as computer savvy then as I am now.
Anyway, AIM was, as an extension of AOL, pretty damned useful and as time went on and people moved to broadband, it stayed the defacto for instant messaging online. I remember over the years having wonderful chats with tons of friends online. Local friends too, for sure, but it was equally awesome to get to chat with people from web forums. Hell, some of those random people are still good friends. Others not so much, but that’s life.
It was also cool to have that level of anonymity about it – you could still be your online self, it wasn’t tied to your real name like Facebook or until a few years ago Google+ and the like.
I remember friends who would seriously custom-craft amazing away message art, would pick just the perfect icon, and also save every single chat log until their system had serious slowdown. No joke, one girl I knew in high school had about half of her hard drive (which was rather small, I won’t lie) dedicated to AIM chat logs. She was on it pretty much all the time. It was how us late 90’s early 2000’s internet using younger people really did the whole social thing before “social media” existed.
Now, of course, things are different. AIM ran for 20 years. 1997-2017. A pretty good time considering how many other websites and services came and went during that span. AOL is a dying brand, certainly, but its legacy, even in just AIM, still echos in how some of us slightly older people do use the internet, and chat. At the very least, its a fond memory of how the web used to be.
Thanks for the memories AIM. You did most things right, it’s just the internet that changed.
By the way, as for that Druaga1 video…