Whatever happened to …

… AOL Instant Messenger (AIM)?

Confession time here.  I thought that it was gone.

Until I read this article this past week “AOL Instant Messenger is Going Away. What Are Your Alternatives?“, I thought that it was really long gone.

At least it was from my memory!

Before the 21st Century came along, it was how you could immediately communicated from desktop computer to desktop computer.

Who remembers the “Running Man”?  It would just as easily been called a “Running Person”.

Thanks, Hasan Diwan CC BY-ND 2.0 https://www.flickr.com/photos/hdiwan/130465138

AOL was pretty aggressive in the marketing of their services.  It seemed that every time you purchased a piece of software, it came with an AOL diskette and a trial of their service.

I do remember being at a friend’s desktop during a Messenger session where he was chatting back and forth with a friend.  I remember thinking, at the time, that this was really dumb.  Why don’t they just pick up the phone and talk to each other?  This concept will never catch on.  Boy, was I wrong!

Here’s an interesting tribute – AIMless – 500ish Words.

AIM wasn’t the only messenger application that came along.  MSN Messenger was a competitor in that same field.  Now, there’s a product that has indeed gone away.

But look at what remains.  Communication has changed so much.  It takes a very patient person who sends an email and then sits and waits for a response.  Now, we fire up whatever service we’re using (Hangouts, Facebook Messenger, Texting Application, …) and fire off a message.  No longer does our conversations have to be limited to sitting at a computer; the conversation can be continued with what ever device is handy – phone, tablet, computer, …

And, AIM is going to be a memory starting in mid-December.

So, your thoughts?

• Did you every use AIM as a messenger?
• Did you use any of the competing products like MSN Messenger?
• Today, there are so many ways to instantly send a message from one person to another.  Do you see a day when one of them will triumph over all the others?  Which one?
• What did you do with those AOL diskettes that you used to get?  Did you discard them or did you reformat them and place your own labels on them for you own use?
• Do you use AOL’s current services?  http://www.aol.ca

I hope that this takes you back like it did with me.

Please take a moment and share your thoughts by sending a reply below this post.

The complete collection of posts in this series is available here.

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