AOL IM shutting down December 15

[GoodBytes]

If you are in your late 20's or later, you probably know about AOL Instant Messenger.  It was a popular program for PCs as a way to communicate with friends and family in the late 90's, to quickly be dethroned by the superior ICQ (which got dethroned by MSN Messenger, then with Skype, then what we have now in terms of Instant Messaging programs). AOL was particularly popular in the US, as it came bundled and promoted by the US based dial-up -internet service provider AOL (American OnLine).

 

The mascot/logo of the AOL IM was the yellow running man:

 

And if you recall, back in Windows 9x days, the program looked like this in its early days:

 

               

 

Today, Oath, owner of AOL, announces that its instant messaging, after 20 years of service, will be terminated.

 

Ars reports:

f you still have an AOL Instant Messenger account, now might be a good time to start saying your goodbyes. In ten weeks—the morning of December 15th to be precise—AIM will be shut down. The writing has been on the wall for some time—in March, AIM stopped supporting MD5 authentication, cutting off many third-party IM clients (like Adium) from accessing the service.

Now the plan is to disable all AIM services other than @aim.com e-mail addresses, according to a help page. Any images, attachments, or transcripts need to be saved before then because everything is being deleted.

Quote

f you still have an AOL Instant Messenger account, now might be a good time to start saying your goodbyes. In ten weeks—the morning of December 15th to be precise—AIM will be shut down. The writing has been on the wall for some time—in March, AIM stopped supporting MD5 authentication, cutting off many third-party IM clients (like Adium) from accessing the service.

Now the plan is to disable all AIM services other than @aim.com e-mail addresses, according to a help page. Any images, attachments, or transcripts need to be saved before then because everything is being deleted.

 

Source: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/10/kthxbai-aol-instant-messenger-is-being-turned-off-on-december-15th/

 

Do you know anyone who uses this service?

[NvidiaIntelAMDLoveTriangle]

Never used it, don't care, should've happen a long time ago.

[Nowak]

So a day after Skype gets buried, AOL announces it's shutting down AIM.

 

Huh.

[NumLock21]

The must have IM back in the days before Google even existed. No AIM than you were  a nobody.

[GoodBytes]

33 minutes ago, Daring said:

So a day after Skype gets buried, AOL announces it's shutting down AIM.

 

Huh.

huh? Skype is alive and well. Do you mean Skype for Business (aka: Lync)? That one is a totally different network, protocol, works completely differently. It was Lync, and Microsoft just renamed it to Skype for Business to confuse people in bringing the image of Skype to Lync.

[Nowak]

Just now, GoodBytes said:

huih? Skype is alive and well

There's no more reason to use it.

[PlayStation 2]

I'm honestly shocked that it's only taking AOL this year to basically dismantle.

[AnonymousGuy]

1 hour ago, Daring said:

There's no more reason to use it.

I get annoyed that it seems like there's always a "new" chat app that everyone is moving to.  AIM, Hangouts, Viber, Skype, Whatsapp, Discord, FB.  Fucks sake can we just get a standard and stick with it for more than a year?

[GoodBytes]

48 minutes ago, AnonymousGuy said:

I get annoyed that it seems like there's always a "new" chat app that everyone is moving to.  AIM, Hangouts, Viber, Skype, Whatsapp, Discord, FB.  Fucks sake can we just get a standard and stick with it for more than a year?

Fully agree. A flavor of the month.

I used to enjoy Trillian. A multiple IM into one IM software. Sadly, several, now popular, IMs don't make their protocol open or closed it up, killing these kind of software.

 

Personally, I find that Skype does a great job. Although, its biggest mistake is that it needs an account, while platform like Whatsapp uses the users phone number, making it more convenient to get started and share contact info without sharing ones e-mail. Personally, I enjoy sending and receiving SMS through Skype via my phone. It is nice to be able to type SMS with a keyboard. And it works even on a work computer as Skype is built-in with Windows 10. To me that is a killer feature. Downside is that the App on all its platform needs some work. I hope the new platform, while bringing new issues, bring 1 core platform for all other platforms, reducing team splitting, and with the hope that soon, everything will be more polished.

[jasonvp]

2 hours ago, GoodBytes said:

It was a popular program for PCs as a way to communicate with friends and family in the late 90's, to quickly be dethroned by the superior ICQ (which got dethroned by MSN Messenger, then with Skype, then what we have now in terms of Instant Messaging programs).

 

Your timeline of "what was dethroned by..." is... uh... off.  ICQ didn't dethrone AIM.  AOL bought ICQ and eventually buried it.  (I know, I was there at the time).  AIM kept chugging along happily.  MSN didn't dethrone anyone.  It was laughed at by us at AOL, and then it basically just sorta... died.  Microsoft knew they'd bitten off WAY more than they could chew and gave up on it.

 

What "dethroned" AIM was time.  Most folks just stopped using instant messages for the most part.

 

Quote

The writing has been on the wall for some time—in March, AIM stopped supporting MD5 authentication, cutting off many third-party IM clients (like Adium) from accessing the service.

Certain clients were cut off.  Adium wasn't one of them.  I'm still logged into AIM right now w/my Adium client.  Pidgin (same source base) also works.  Trillian, however, does not (AFAIK)

 

[Guest]

47 minutes ago, AnonymousGuy said:

I get annoyed that it seems like there's always a "new" chat app that everyone is moving to.  AIM, Hangouts, Viber, Skype, Whatsapp, Discord, FB.  Fucks sake can we just get a standard and stick with it for more than a year?

I'm glad my circle usually sticks with one for a while. Skype from 2011 - 2016, just moved last year to discord, with Skype as a last resort for screen sharing (Basically inefficient and simple streaming for us). Now there is less reason for us to ever resort back to Skype, especially since it isn't as lean on system resources as Discord. Doubt we will be moving for a few years unless discord makes very bad choices.

[GoodBytes]

25 minutes ago, jasonvp said:

Your timeline of "what was dethroned by..." is... uh... off.  ICQ didn't dethrone AIM.  AOL bought ICQ and eventually buried it.  (I know, I was there at the time).  AIM kept chugging along happily.  MSN didn't dethrone anyone.  It was laughed at by us at AOL, and then it basically just sorta... died.  Microsoft knew they'd bitten off WAY more than they could chew and gave up on it.

AOL bought ICQ when ICQ was dying in popularity. But I think ones perspective depends on ones region and age group. For me MSN Messenger was HUGE when it came. People loved passing their e-mails to share contact info, as you shared something that was easy to remember, and also ones e-mail. ICQ, as opposed to MSN, had a very long number. Lucky if you were the early ones, sucky if you were late to the party where you number was like 20 digits long (exaggeration)

 

Quote

What "dethroned" AIM was time.  Most folks just stopped using instant messages for the most part.

That is not true. IM is massive. Looking at Snapchat, Whatsapp, Viber, Telegraph (mostly Russia if I a not mistaken),  Facebook Messenger, Skype and lots more indicates this. And that is excluding IM in the work space with things like Slack, Microsoft Team, Yammer, and more.

 

[vanished]

3 hours ago, Daring said:

So a day after Skype gets buried, AOL announces it's shutting down AIM.

 

Huh.

Skype must have internally ran on AOL, they just didn't officially say it to hide the secrets.  That would have explained a lot of the issues

 

/s

[Teddy07]

3 hours ago, Daring said:

So a day after Skype gets buried

 

wtf you talking about?

I love skype

[Nowak]

1 minute ago, Teddy07 said:

wtf you talking about?

I love skype

Discord has video chat and screensharing now. There's no more reason to use that bloated piece of shit called Skype.

[Mr.Meerkat]

2 hours ago, Daring said:

There's no more reason to use it.

Huh? How is skype dead? All I see is discord adding a couple of new features which skype already have...

[Teddy07]

3 minutes ago, Daring said:

Discord has video chat and screensharing now. There's no more reason to use that bloated piece of shit called Skype.

I use it daily to write my sister when she is on her pc. I ask her if she has discord. I'm not up to date with all that stuff

[Nowak]

1 minute ago, Mr.Meerkat said:

Huh? How is skype dead? All I see is discord adding a couple of new features which skype already have...

It's a figure of speech. It's not dead dead, but there's no reason to use it when the competition offers better solutions.

[chilicheeseburger]

Never used AIM, but I was an avid user of both ICQ and MSN Messenger back in the day. Good times.

[ARikozuM]

I can't... believe... AIM still exists. My childhood is a lie...

[Skiiwee29]

RIP. I remember using this a lot with gaming buddies back in the late 90s and early 00's over stuff like Yahoo messenger and MSN Messenger. 

[DeScruff]

6 hours ago, AnonymousGuy said:

I get annoyed that it seems like there's always a "new" chat app that everyone is moving to.  AIM, Hangouts, Viber, Skype, Whatsapp, Discord, FB.  Fucks sake can we just get a standard and stick with it for more than a year?

"Flavor of the month" is more of a mobile thing if you ask me. - I still cannot understand Whatsapp, or Snapchat, and the millions of other messaging apps.
Desktop seems to have: Skype, Discord... and Social media website related things. (do those count?.. Ive seriously never seen anyone seriously use Hang outs other then the 'techy' people who had to get on Google+)

Personally my group of friends and a lot of other groups dropped skype due to constant issues with group calls (people getting dropped when other joined, some people unable to enter the call, Videochats dropping when X amount of people enter the call, exc) These weren't issues that suddenly popped up ether, we've had them for years, and it seems like Skype was never going to fix them. - I also recall at some point reinstalling older versions of Skype because Skype actually took away a feature we used?)
Also Skype was never really good when it comes to being part of multiple groups, or extremely large groups (Think 50+ members)

Discord has been rising these past 2 years because of these skype issues, and it seems to be designed with the idea of having large groups of people all at once, and people being part of multiple large groups. Personally I'm mostly part of 3 groups, one with I think 400 users? Another with ~75, and finally my close friends at 15. - Despite all this it feels much more manageable then Skype ever did...

Oh and being able to adjust people's volumes on an individual basis is what sold us on Discord. Seriously...
I cannot state how much it annoyed us that we ether have to ask eachother to adjust our own mic volumes, or live with the fact that 'John' was extremely loud and 'Jamie' was extremely quiet. - I don't understand why Skype never added this, but it was the biggest pain for years.
 

[Shreyas1]

F

[aisle9]

6 hours ago, GoodBytes said:

I used to enjoy Trillian. A multiple IM into one IM software. Sadly, several, now popular, IMs don't make their protocol open or closed it up, killing these kind of software.

I do miss Trillian. Used it up until 2007-ish, I want to say? I know I was still using AIM while I was in college and don't really remember using it at all after I graduated, which would put it right around the '07 timeframe.