AIMless
Fare thee well, AOL Instant Messenger
Aside from web browsers, I’m not sure there’s a piece of software I have ever used more than AOL Instant Messenger (AIM). So with the news today that Aol (a company with 66% less capitalization these days — it’s a moniker joke, I swear!) is killing the service off, I find myself nostalgic.
I lived on AOL for much of my teenage life. And when the novelty of chat rooms, the gimmickry of keywords, and the utility of email lost allure, I stuck around to use instant messenger. Once I got to college with always-on broadband, the bloated AOL got the hook in favor of the svelte AIM. It was a layer that could live on top of everything else I was doing on my computer. This was the era before Facebook. AIM was the social layer of the internet.
The thought of the *door opening* sound — the sound AIM would make when a contact signed on — still makes me excited in ways that are on the wrong side of ridiculous.
It was also the first piece of software where the notion of “signing on” faded away. I was simply always on. And if I wasn’t, there was an away message up. Oh what I wouldn’t give to be able to be clever once again the way I used to be with those away messages. It was Twitter before Twitter. And actually, it was Twitter not only before Twitter went 280 but also before Twitter really even took advantage of 140. Remember the early days of Twitter when people would just post what they were doing? That was the AIM away message.¹
For most people anyway. Again, I was clever.
So clever, in fact, that I was always iterating on my AIM “Personal Profile”. Remember those? I do! It was like my blog before I blogged.²
And we all would “promote” and “demote” AIM contacts into different groups/lists at regular intervals, right?
Like most people, I had ridiculous AIM screen names (descended from my AOL screen names). My most-used one (naturally, I had many), even somehow made the jump into the “Web 2.0” era and beyond: ParisLemon.
Anyway, I’m going to miss AIM. I can’t even begin to calculate how many hours I spent on that service. And how much joy it brought me connecting with friends all hours of the night and eventually all hours of the day too as we all moved far away from each other.
I also miss the simplicity of the service.³ Obviously, Aol would have tried to cram “AIM Stories” into the product and into our faces these days, but back then, all that mattered was text. It was glorious. It was fast. It was instant!
And for a time, it was the internet, for me. *Door slamming shut*.
¹ I’m glad that Slack is at least trying to bring this concept back.
² And let’s not even get started about the strategic usage of avatars. I would switch mine up all the time — again this was the era before Facebook.
³ Speaking of, who wishes that Google Talk, in many ways the spiritual successor to AIM, would make a comeback as a dead-simple chat client? Forget Hangouts, let’s go retro. I have a post half-written about this…
