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.
> 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).
IM didn't used to be like that because we didn't have clients on our phones. An "online" status meant that someone was sitting at their computer and happy to chat (or they'd have the client closed).
From memory AIM/MSN didn't even have offline messaging. If someone was offline, you either waited for them to be online, or you would contact them via email/txt/landline.
I remember AIM having the ability to forward messages to SMS when you were offline, and Pidgin had the ability to "pounce" someone, which would queue up a message to send them next time they logged on.
I almost never use IM on my phone, but nevertheless messaging is, and always was, async for me as well. From what I recall, it was like that back in ICQ days in late 90s already. And it was a very refreshing change from phone calls, where you had to either respond or ignore the call.
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).
The “asynchronous” chat apps are designed to basically be synchronous. And aggressively so.
That’s why you have that aggressive red notification badge with the number of unread messages that your brain requires you to get rid of. That’s why when someone sends you a message, the default is to aggressively slide a notification with the message no matter what you’re doing.
This makes perfect sense to me. I don't know what it is about talking on the phone, but it's an extremely anxiety inducing experience for me. I'm generally fine with people, but if I have a choice of walking down the street to talk with them in person or call them on the phone, I will make the walk every time.
Best I can figure out it stems from being verbally abused as a teenager when I had a job making cold calls. People are vicious on the phone in a way they never are in person. Some people seem to use strangers on the phone as an opportunity to safely vent whatever pent-up rage they have. And even though people are just as vicious online, it just doesn't have the same bite as it does when it's a human voice filled with rage.
> Best I can figure out it stems from being verbally abused as a teenager when I had a job making cold calls. People are vicious on the phone in a way they never are in person.
Or maybe people are vicious when they receive unsolicited spam calls.
The thing is that this makes it almost impossible to chat to people over text these days. If you try it, it's an infuriating experience where you wait several minutes for a reply every time. In the old days, you could actually have a text conversation with someone on MSN messenger.
yeah, for me treating im as asynchronous is redundant. that’s why we had email. aim was a phone call. but i also treat it asynchronous these days and might even step away from a conversation mid thought. i hate when i do it but it’s a very bad habit encouraged by the apps. ah well
I hate that it is asynchronous now. I liked it back before when you talked to someone who was online and you knew he was engaged in the conversation. Now all of that is gone. As you say "I'll just reply later"—I hate that.
When you saw someone on AIM, at least during dialup days, it meant you will get his/her attention. They were logged into engage in real-time conversation. You just don’t have that level of communication anymore. Most online conversations are asynchronous.
I really miss them too. I loved the fact that you had to organize with your friends to connect at the same time to to chat via MSN. I hate the fact that now I am reachable to wherever I am on my phone through Whatsapp. Of course, it has a lot of advantages, but the my nostalgic sides misses the point that I was able to receive messages only if I was on the computer (or if I left it turn it on with the monitor off, without my parents knowing it)
I feel like this was more due to how we used computers at the time rather than AIM itself. You can still set your status on most messaging platforms, but we're now always online and people assume you'll respond later if you're too busy.
Up until the early 2000's, most people were still getting online using a dial-up connection on a PC. That meant you had to make a conscious decision to get online and block off your phone line for other purposes. At least for me, the very fact that I was online meant that I wasn't busy and was open to chatting with my friends.
I wonder how much AIM cost to operate? Did it really need to shut down? Last I checked AOL was still operating and offering various free services. AIM certainly had a user base that might have continued and even grown.
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)
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
Even 10 years ago they've been very explicit about this strategy internally. Management talks about it as "putting more wood behind fewer arrows".
Its somewhat self reinforcing. I didn't try Google Inbox because I was sure it would be axed in a couple years anyway. (And I was right.) The more people make that same assumption, the fewer people try anything new from Google. And the worse any new products' metrics are - which in turn makes google axe more otherwise good products.
You may not be the target audience though, the target audience are probably people that aren't yet "bough into" the google ecosystem. So they are unaware of this axing policy. Anyone logging into chromium, using gmail and google calendar and an android device is already "theirs".
What they want is to increase the share of people that are in the MS ecosystem (and presumably also OSX ecosystem, but that's mostly a status signaling thing, so the strategy there is probably different).
You will be surprised how many people are indeed aware of Google’s axing policy, if not even consciously.
The reality is that so many of them have been burnt by Google. Picasa was an extremely popular photo management platform used by many. Google Play Music was extremely popular. Google Plus was not exactly popular but touched nearly every Google user, was highly promoted, and then disappeared. And then you come to the massive list of chat and calling apps that Google has arbitrarily spun up, promoted, and then killed.
But even if we go with the idea that regular people are unaware of Google’s tendency, even subconsciously, there’s also the fact that the way most products become popular is through a smaller subset of influencers. And tech influencers, almost necessarily, are almost certainly aware of googles tendencies.
This one irritates me most. GPM was mature and required...what? Minimal maintenance at this point?
But no, how about we completely rebuild a music service on top of YouTube, miss a bunch of minor simple features that every streaming service offers (you know, like save current playlist/radio as Playlist) and FORCE every user over to this far inferior service.
At least with transitions like MOG->Beats->Apple Music, it made since as the entire corporate entity changed. But Google just...literally can’t invest in anything that takes a small ounce of manpower to manage.
At this point, OP is correct. The Google “curse” is well known and few people trust their whim-products, no matter their investment/marketing budget.
The perfect music service and discovery engine. Axed for no cause.
I don't like Spotify or Pandora, and I'm filled with seething hatred for Youtube Music. I keep trying to use it, but it's horrible and doesn't play what I want to listen to. How can you design an app that's so bad that it actively does what you don't want?
YouTube Music plays meme videos [1, 2] in my alternative music stream. And anime music I listened to ten years ago in the middle of my EDM. Seriously what the fuck, Google? I never asked to mix my YouTube viewing experience with my music tastes.
For the first time in my life, I've stopped listening to music. I want to go back to managing my own highly curated playlists, but it's too much work to set up.
>For the first time in my life, I've stopped listening to music. I want to go back to managing my own highly curated playlists, but it's too much work to set up.
I'm sorry, I'm sympathetic to your main point but this reads to me as... silly, to put it lightly. Google made you give up on music? You could do nothing but play CDs and still have absurdly more access to music than anyone in history. Music has literally never been more abundant, discoverable, and obtainable than it is today. The technology to replay it has never sounded better for a given price, and never been more ubiquitous. Neither has the tech to create it - there is an incredible Cambrian explosion of musical styles happening right now, as more people than ever before have access to studios and are using the internet to borrow and remix each other's work in interesting ways. This is an incredible golden age for music. And you can't be bothered because Google axed a product? Can't even be bothered to do it the old way?
This was the one digital service I was happy to pay google for and caused me a 100% ban on their consumer services going forward.
Google music hadnt changed in a few years, so of course we need to get a promotion by destroying it and replacing it with something that might grow faster but definitely wont.
Microsoft gets a lot of flak for their endless rebrands, but its not like they rewrote Lync from scratch when they renamed it to Skype for Business. Google seems to have adopted a similar marketing-driven rebrand culture ("Google Play is a confusing brand and right now consumer confidence is in the YouTube brand, we should move our media streaming holdings to the YouTube brand") but confusingly adopted it as yet another excuse to generally rewrite the apple pie from scratch instead of just renaming things that aren't broken.
> but confusingly adopted it as yet another excuse to generally rewrite the apple pie from scratch instead of just renaming things that aren't broken.
I think that inverts history. The YT Music implementation and brand existed long before the decision to replace GPM with it. The branding decision followed most of the reimplementation, it didn't provide an excuse for it.
Google has a strong tendency to have multiple parallel offerings in a field for a while before consolidating them (and, also, a history of botching the consolidation.)
My impression from second and third hand sources was still that YT Music implementation and brand was after GPM was asked to "code freeze" and the team directed to other projects (including some to YTM). That the products stood side-by-side for so long is only further indictment on the rewrite-the-world approach that it took them so long to reach "feature parity" enough that they felt comfortable sunsetting GPM, well after the writing had been on the wall, the development ended, and the marketing decision to change brands had been handed down.
The multiple parallel offerings thing is of course its own problem that seems to often indicate communications issues up/down the decision chains, but specifically with reference to GPM/YTM I heard it was more a symptom of a rewrite than one of those communication breakdowns. Though again, that's only from impressions I got from scuttlebutt I heard second and third hand.
> But no, how about we completely rebuild a music service on top of YouTube, miss a bunch of minor simple features that every streaming service offers (you know, like save current playlist/radio as Playlist) and FORCE every user over to this far inferior service.
I still can't work out how I'm supposed to listen to an mp3 on my phone now. YT Music has a "Device Only" button which I thought was simple enough, but then it just refuses to actually play anything I select.
I was surprised when my Dad, someone completely detached from the tech world, brought up Google's tendency to cancel stuff. He was a Google Music subscriber and still uses Chromecast Audio. Last year he tried buying another Audio device to discover it was discontinued, and then over the summer got notifications related to Music being cancelled. He was super disappointed!
In January he started looking into getting some IoT cameras for his house (a doorbell and something for the backyard, nothing crazy). He was looking at Nest, but the moment I mentioned Nest is owned by Google, he stopped looking at their products.
Cancelling products and services that people use and rely on leaves a bad taste in people's mouths. I used to excuse it, but in the last 5-6 years Google has done away with about 4-5 services that I used daily. It's honestly too much and I won't put the time into using their products anymore.
My father was so proud of having uploaded all his music to Google Play. It was the single largest source of loyalty for him to Android over iPhone. With the iPhone's missing back button being second.
And since Hangout chat used to be integrated with gmail, many a gmail user saw deprecation notices for ages now. And terribly unhelpful deprecation notices at that. They basically said something like "I'm going to stop working soon. You should do something about that."
> tech influencers, almost necessarily, are almost certainly aware of googles tendencies.
This is huge, bigger than most acknowledge. Most people don't understand the tech and why should they?
"none of my nerd friends use it" vs "all of my nerd friends are on it" is a massive, massive signal about whether something is good or incredibly dangerous, dishonest and a foul trap. There's plenty of the latter about so we're talking about degrees of badness for most. The thinking resembles:
"I'm not super happy with any of this tech and definitely not something that my niece the computer-hacker and cousin the IT guy aren't using. I'll definitely draw a line there."
vs
"Have you heard about signal? It's whatsapp but no facebook tracking." From a family member, friend or acquaintance who you know knows more than you about this stuff.
I honestly think that this attitude to shutting things down, plus their piss-poor customer service, is killing any chance that Google Cloud has of succeeding. I'm just not willing to invest any time into the Google ecosystem where there's a high chance that the service will be discontinued or I'll get locked out of my account.
We still use Picasa on Windows 7 & 10 and Mac OS X. It works easily on 10.13 (High Sierra) and with some annoyance on 10.14 (Mojave) (requires clicking 5 times on complaining popup when starting, then runs fine).
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.
> stepping into unethical privacy breach territory
Given oath's laughable privacy policy, I'm not sure any stepping would be required.
Granted the shutdown came before the Verizon/Oath takeover, but somehow I doubt the decision came down to "we could make a lot of money off this, but it will require relaxation of privacy practices, so we'll just shut it down instead."
Too bad they didn't open source it. I'm sure most of the costs were in the employees required to operate and maintain the system. I am skeptical the infrastructure itself was that expensive, unless they were forced to keep it running on obsolete hardware. 90's tech is generally pretty light weight...
> unless they were forced to keep it running on obsolete hardware.
If you read blog posts and the like from people involved in those projects (MSN Messenger and AIM/ICQ, specifically); the companies would take advantage of protocol updates or other scheduled downtime to failover to newer hardware. So I doubt they were ever stuck on any “obsolete hardware”.
AOL launched around 1991 if I recall. I remember watching with great interest (I think I may have been in some kind of beta program) as it was obvious (at least to me at the time) that digital communications with a graphical UI was the future. (At the time in the US, there were a few commercial information services that were textual, General Electric Network Information Exchange and CompuServe were the big ones... followed by Prodigy which basically looked like teletext or a Bloomberg terminal for the home- it was clear that something better could be done, which ended up being AOL).
The original AOL client shipped for DOS with Digital Research's GEM widget kit, it wouldn't surprise me if they used additional DR hardware and software on the backend (VAX anyone?). When I worked on the AOL project, I would see e-mails from AOL ops (from AOL screen names, no less!) about how they would take scary and unique sounding things like "access rotors" down, so I suspect that given how early the launch was, the backend was extremely bespoke simply because they were making things up as they went along in order to launch a new and unique thing.
It wouldn't surprise me one bit to learn that it ran on VAX, HP3000, AS/400 or perhaps something even older and larger. You didn't hear about horizontal scaling nearly as much back then, most scaling consisted of "buy a bigger computer."
Digital Research (DRI), the creator of DR-DOS / GEM, was not at all related to Digital Equipment Corp (DEC), the producers of VAXen and the like, despite similar names.
I see Google also axing small winners in order to have people working on big bets. Undermining and then axing Orkut and then trying to create Google+ never made sense to me. A lot of non-brazilians non-indians (that didn’t use or even knew Orkut) defended the decision at the time, but I think history showed it was a bad bet.
I wouldn't romanticize Orkut. It wasn't that great and I think Facebook would've steamrolled it all the same, much as it did numerous other regional social networks around the world.
I think the causality is that it was not great because Google did not care about improving it. So it got stuck in time and then Facebook kept improving. Even a strategy of copying Facebook’s innovations (like FB does in Instagram and WhatsApp) would an improvement.
Of course we will never know, but I think that betting on Orkut would have a better chance of facing Facebook than starting from scratch with Google+
For sure, I think directors simply didn't understand how online communities worked. Facebook must have been the first company to fully realise this, buying both Instagram and WhatsApp but not attempting to internalize their communities under the Facebook brand. It would've been pure capital destruction if they had done that.
I'm pretty sure they're going to have to write off the whatsapp investment. At least Instagram has a viable standalone business model. They'll lose the Whatsapp userbase at the drop of a hat, and it's already hard to monetize to begin with.
In the US, Reader had a huge social community. It wasn't just Orkut that had a large existing social community they could have leveraged instead of alienated, but the folks in charge of Google+ did not understand (presumably because they weren't RSS readers, presumably because they weren't from the communities where Orkut became popular).
> 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.
It's not short sightedness. It was perfectly reasonnable to close these plateforms (in so much as they were closed - Microsoft folded MSN into the Lync and Skype brands and rather successfully sold it to pro users). They were never going to make money with them as they were. You are just missing that modern instant messassing plateforms have little in common with AIM and MSN.
If you look at what is valuable today, you have on one side WeChat and Whatsapp who took over the mobile space and are extremely valuable in emerging countries where text messaging became the main point of entry for conducting business and mobile payments. On the other side, you have Slack which use is centered around chat rooms and collaboration rather than direct messaging and whose popularity grew mainly on the shifting habits of a generation used to communicate via text, habits taken on smartphones. Then again, Microsoft was quick to reuse the infrastructure they already had to launch Teams which is very successful.
So, unless you could foresee the emergence of a mobile first world, it completely made sense to pivot these services towards paying customers.
> You are just missing that modern instant messassing plateforms have little in common with AIM and MSN.
I'm not sure I follow your reasoning. AIM could have created a great mobile app with new features a la whatsapp et al, a new OSCAR protocol that was backwards compatible, and had a huge base of mobile users.
Hindsight is 20/20, but it sounds like you're saying that even with hindsight closing AIM was the right call.
> Hindsight is 20/20, but it sounds like you're saying that even with hindsight closing AIM was the right call.
It was the right call. AIM was losing money with no obvious way to monetize it. AOL was not in the same position than Microsoft was. They had little experience selling to pro customers and they were bleeding users to Google Talk and Facebook Messenger at the time.
Even knowing that the mobile market would explose in popularity, it is far from obvious that AIM would have even been positionned to benefit from it. Google Talk was really popular then and notoriously failed to convert that into a leading position in the mobile market.
AIM was one of the very first apps on the iOS store — right out the gate. They could have sold it for $0.99 and seen how that went — it went surprisingly well for WhatsApp, after all.
>they were bleeding users to Google Talk and Facebook Messenger at the time.
it was basically explicit transfer of the core value - user graph - from AOL to FB which probably doubled or tripled the FB graph at the time. The "small deal" and the modest "linked" below are kind of euphemisms describing the full buddies list import and thus sucking AIM dry if i remember correctly:
"During his time there, AOL wound up doing a small deal with Facebook that linked AOL Instant Messenger to Facebook’s website. But the biggest outcome of the deal was the connection Palihapitiya formed with Mark Zuckerberg."
So the GP{3} saying "short sightedness and pettiness of these directors is something of legend" is very wrong. As you can see they played very long and successful game, just not the game you'd have expected them to play :)
It would not have been very difficult to pivot AIM into making money. First you add social media style profiles, then ads, then integrations, then feeds... none of this would have relied on mobile. Facebook didn't rely on mobile for many years after formation - the iPhone came out a couple of years after facebook did, and it took a few more years before smartphones saturated the market.
Of course, it's easy to say this today having seen the result. But aol in particular was familiar with ad-driven business; they should have had the appropriate resources to anticipate the potential of their businesses.
Facebook didn't have chat functionnalities until four years after it's started. AOL might have been able to enter the social network market at the time but the link with instant messaging was far from obvious then.
Facebook chat seems to have been created in 2008, but I'm pretty sure AIM had chatrooms when I was in highschool, which would put it at pre-2006. Not exactly the same thing, but the foundation was already there - AIM already had user-made profiles as well.
Yea I used AOL chatrooms and then AIM chatrooms in the late 1990's into the 2000's. I liked that AIM allowed you to connect with strangers who may have had similar interests but were outside your network (unlike Facebook). A few people I met on AOL/AIM have become good friends IRL, and my cousin and a couple others I know met their future spouses on AIM.
Another point of surprise is that these things grew somehow organically. Nobody went onto AIM or MSN because it's gonna revolutionize anything, it was just a simple need, simple programs.. no biggie. They're gone and now it's replaced by things that try to be grandiose and keep changing every year (or die ala Google) because the big new model is not right and they have a new big idea to chase.
Well there is a big innovation in the business model, something MS missed, that the internet could be cheap on good phones and that chat apps could replace expensive SMSes. In fact, in France where SMS were free very early,whatsapp failed to pierce for much longer than elsewhere to a point the EU blamed our telecom companies from blocking innovation by being too cheap.
MSN was a stupid senseless loss for a long while nonetheless, even in France, as Facebook took time to regrow the networks already made via MSN.
>the EU blamed our telecom companies from blocking innovation by being too cheap.
A source would be nice, but I completely believe it - and it's infuriating. "The government is so effective, capitalists have nothing to improve in order to line their pockets!"
It's what the GOP wants to do to municipal broadband service in the US.
I’m still pissed that MSN Messenger died but the hot garbage of Skype continued. I wish the pick for in org chat was MSN and not Skype. Back in 2004 we had chat history, now MS had to come up with the behemoth of Teams to provide that feature.
All we needed was msn on Android and iPhone with cloud backup of chats, that’s if.
It used to be great and the P2P nature of it meant that file transfer speed, call quality & reliability was down to your network connection, something that you can control and fix should it be bad.
The clients also used to be beautiful, both on Windows and Mac. They replaced both with an Electron abomination.
Don't forget that if you accidentally merged your Microsoft account with your old Skype account you could lose all the contacts. I lost several gaming buddies that way when I didn't have alternate contact info.
Lync was MSN and was fairly popular and Skype for business was an evolution of the Lync client not the Skype client. So Microsoft did actually pick MSN. They just kept the stronger brand. Also it always had chat history.
Teams is a different beast and a natural evolution. It's mostly centered around meetings and group chat which makes sense because that's what pro users actually want.
Agreed. AOL in particular pioneered stuff like E2E encryption, etc. imo, the early 2000s platforms like AIM, Yahoo, MSN were the pinnacle of the technology, and successors are all worse in material ways.
Today, iMessage is probably the best single messaging platform, which is pitiful because it has key design and UX flaws.
I think in the case of AIM, it existed by virtue of and thrived under corporate neglect. The others withered as the complimentary services withered (Yahoo) or the corporate strategies shifted in inscrutable ways (Microsoft, Google). It was a weird scenario where MS and Goog behaved similarly... Microsoft with their mysterious purchase and subsequent neglect of Skype and Google with their drunken monkey product management process.
What are your UX flaws with iMessage? The reason why I like it is because it’s got good UX (except when a message doesn’t send for no reason), but if there’s something I’m missing out on in other messenger apps...
You can message 100% of all smartphone users, it magically delivers as SMS. Also supports group chats with regular SMS users. Also supports MMS with them.
Given this pretty graceful degradation, what do you mean by not being able to message 85% of smartphone users?
I'm more or less OK with the idea of Apple not developing for other platforms. However, they are actively hostile to anyone who has offered and tried to get interop working on other platforms, which is really a shame.
You really can call SMS a 'graceful degradation' while keeping a straight face? I call it intentionally crippling communication capabilities. Also, just say no to walled gardens.
How about non-smartphone, non-Mac users? Every other messaging app I can think of has a desktop client (even if it's a crappy one that requires linking to your phone, like WhatsApp).
Are you really suggesting that SMS fallback is a good enough way to message people in 2021? How about sending them a video? Location? Voice message? MMS? Does this crap ever work?? (In my country it doesn't work between operators and costs €.5 for one message)
(not the OP) two big UX gripes I have with iMessage:
1) For some reason, photos take forever to be received (and sometimes are not received at all) when I send them to certain people. Best I can tell is they're using older devices and/or are in poor reception.
This + I can't send a photo with a message attached means that I'll send the photo, then a message with context, but the person never receives the photo so it's confusing.
2) There is no clear way to dismiss messages from the list of conversations without deleting them. It makes it hard to find conversations later when I have to scroll through a bunch of stuff I don't care about, but may want to search later.
They failed to monetise them. Most chat clients were placing ads to try and generate revenue but I doubt they ever made money from it. From what I remember of the blogs at the time, such as Martin Fowler's stuff on Yahoo! Messenger, the infrastructure was far from cheap, and the protocols were really insecure, too.
I think Facebook was hoovering up a shitton of the messenger traffic very quickly, too, and the traffic on AIM/MSN/etc was dominated by crappy bots sending phishing links.
All in all it wasn't a happy place and I doubt many actually missed them. This is the first link I've personally seen about the nostalgia of IM anyway.
A lot of ads and not very much ongoing development.
I'm not sure "until the day it was shut down" is totally correct though. AOL were moving from their own data centers to AWS at that stage and AIM was one of the last apps left in, so I find it hard to believe that AIM would still have shown green near the end if the data center costs were spread across the services using them (we didn't have a chargeback model in those days).
I think the decision (I worked at AOL at the time, but far from AIM) to shut it down came down to:
1. There was no dedicated dev team
2. Consequently the tech was old and not up to then modern security practices
3. Even aside from security, it used a lot of in-house tech that other more actively maintained products like mail had migrated from and newer products never used.
4. Lots of the software it used like OS versions were going EOL
5. It needed an AWS migration as the data center was shutting down.
6. It didn't fit with the strategic direction (which was to use revenue from legacy but shrinking businesses like dialup/search/mail to pivot to owned content as a USP/headline piece for the adtech business)
So someone had to make a cost/benefit analysis of shutting it down versus investing enough to bring it up to speed and that's before you even consider the user facing improvements that would have been needed to reclaim market share from Facebook and Skype.
Also number 1 for the user facing improvements would have been "less ads, less intrusive ads" which also would have hurt revenue.
I miss how anyone with a packet sniffer could pull entire AIM messages out of the air. Just filter by port number and you could read them like a live chat window. I demonstrated this to a class while at law school. Scared the heck out of everyone who had been using it to pass answers to people when they were called on. (Failure to give a reasonable answer would impact your grade very quickly.)
Reminds me of the time I read about someone inheriting six figures worth of Apple shares from their grandparents (who had an excellent cost basis, of course) and immediately selling it all to 'diversify'.
It's not always easy to understand the long term benefits of holding on to 'risky' positions, and conventional 'wisdom' often steers you away from it.
This is the opposite, the big companies closed their messaging platforms because they wanted to shed low performing departments and consolidate, instead of maintaining them and keep attempting to make them florish which would be a form of diversification.
Right. And the analogy also fails because buying Apple shares is as easy as selling them; what makes the destruction of all the original IM platforms so dumb is that it's a one-way move. Once you shut one down, there's no Ctrl-Z.
I think that was the correct call - hindsight is always easier to identify great stocks! In 2010, before I believed in index funds, I had an extra $1k and I was debating to put it in AAPL or this new thing I heard of called bitcoin. I ended up buying apple, and sold it after it doubled thinking I did great... Certainly not a bad outcome but it just goes to show how hard it is to predict anything.
On the contrary, social media and messaging platforms live on trend popularity alone. Features or bulk accounts ever created are mostly meaningless. MySpace stopped mattering once everyone moved to Facebook. These aren't driven by technology, they're driven solely by popularity.
Once people move on, you might as well shut it down.
And lost users every time. Also, you've merged a lot of unrelated products.
MSN was folded into Skype after they bought Skype, a separate company. Lync, a corporate offering with no commonality with MSN, got rebranded Skype for Business, despite no actual relation or compatibility with Skype. Teams has nothing in common with either of the previously described product lines, though Microsoft is going to sunset SfB and push everyone over to Teams, given the success of that product.
Renaming Lync as Skype for Business is actually the only "rebrand" Microsoft did here, and it did nothing to actually increase adoption of that platform, considering Microsoft chose to dump it less than five years later.
Maybe they couldn't monetize it, maybe it was losing to a competitor with no idea on how to reverse the trend.
Often you see things people think are worth billions. And when they try to capitalize on it, in the end it becomes less than worthless. Just look at how many startups Google bought just to kill the product shortly after, especially when it comes to social networking things. Maybe these managers took the right decision by saying "we are not good at that, we didn't find a way to sell it, let's kill it and invest our resources where we are good at instead of letting it become a burden". In the real world, you actually have to figure out the "???" before "profit".
It was a golden age of instant messaging. You could talk to anybody on any network because multiprotocol clients just worked. I basically gave up on instant messaging because every company now digs deeper and deeper moats around their network.
At least here the move to MSN to Facebook was largely driven by the move to monetise it more. More ads, more features which existed to give them places to show ads (I seem to remember it opening a today screen with news feeds at one point, think they did a twitter style thing with status updates too? Or was that imo?). The pull factor was everyone was on Facebook but the monetisation changes were a big push factor too
And these messaging platforms did not require an exorbitant amount of computing resources to run. They were responsive to keyboard input (no signficant lag), and, as I recall, allowed one to keep a local log of messages sent and received.
Generally speaking, they were shut down because they were designed in a way that they were centrally controlled by one entity which had the ability to shut them down, just like that.
Imagine there was an AOL executive in charge of AIM, and that Mark Zuckerberg offered the guy hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of Facebook stock to hobble efforts to keep the platform relevant. Sounds like a totally crazy conspiracy theory, right? After all, it would have been totally obviously suspicious if someone made hundreds of millions of dollars by simply jumping from one middle-management role to another, right?
Even if those rumors are true (and no one has ever seen fit to publish them, so there's that) it wasn't just a single executive that killed AIM, it was multiple points of failure, including keeping it ad-free, which meant it pretty much existed outside AOL's revenue ecosystem, out on its own. And when Appelman & team released their open source version, that was akin to declaring a mutiny at anti-OSS AOL.
Products need internal champions, without which, it doesn't take a conspiracy to kill them, they will just atrophy on their own.
It's obviously been a long time so my memory could be faulty, but I distinctly remember ads in AIM and installing cracked versions of the client that removed the ads.
Yeah, in the last few years there was a big permanent ad at the footer of the contact list, plenty of ads in the web client and I think at one point there were sidebar ads in chat (that last one could have been msn)
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.
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...
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.
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.
> 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.
I recall having MSN on a symbian smartphone just before iPhones even existed. Really cool and all, but I could only communicate to a handful of people with it. SMS was the de-facto only way, always 1-1 and charged per message. Internet 2g/3g was being pushed for low prices (10 EUR/month for unlimited use) but there wasn't really a mass market yet. I could tether my laptop to my phone abut that was really something exceptional, but most people were like "who needs internet on a phone?" Had too look it up, this was just 14 years ago.
Then about 6? years ago almost overnight everyone (including mom) had a smartphone with Whatsapp and SMS/MMS was a thing of the past.
AIM truly became useless. Everyone got phones and texted instead of using computers. AIM was popular before every person had a mobile phone. It wasn’t really AIMs fault. Mobile phones came out and they were too slow to have a decent application. For a few years phones didn’t have the ability at all to download applications. In that span of time AIM was completely replaced by texting. They may have been starting from zero again by the time iPhone and Android popularized app downloads.
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.
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.
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".
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.
> 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!)
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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..
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.