AIM Will Shut Down After 20 Years
AIM tapped into new digital technologies and ignited a cultural shift, but the way in which we communicate with each other has profoundly changed. As a result we’ve made the decision that we will be discontinuing AIM effective December 15, 2017.
Jacob Kastrenakes (via Hacker News):
AOL cut off access to AIM from third-party chat clients back in March, hinting at this eventual shutdown. It’s hard to imagine that many people are still using AIM, so that change, nor this upcoming shutdown, are likely to make a huge difference.
AIM was one of the first and most successful instant messengers, widely used in the late ’90s and even throughout the 2000s.
I think it’s remarkable how badly aol fumbled the ball on AIM twice — first by not turning it into a social network, and second by not turning it into enterprise chat.
I didn’t use AIM much because I found it too distracting. Clearly the world has moved on, but it’s sad that replacements such as iMessage and Slack are less functional than AIM in certain ways and don’t have the rich ecosystem of third-party clients.
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There was a time when an AIM client was online and logged in 100% of the time on every single computer I owned. It was the main way I communicated with my friends.
