I sought out Appelman and five of the developers and designers who worked with him to discuss how instant messaging changed the online landscape, how AIM changed their lives, and how the away message is still taking them all by surprise. It was the first real tool you had to signal your presence online: the original status update, the proto-tweet, and the stated inspiration for Facebook’s status feature. It might have started out as something purely functional-a live out-of-office, if you will-but the away message was much more than that. AOL Instant Messenger was where it all started.įor most of those bloggers, listicle writers, and other tribute account holders mourning AIM’s passing, the one feature that mostly neatly summed up what had made AIM so special was the away message.įrom “afk”, “g2g bye” and “brb mom needs comp” to those missives so painstakingly crafted with ascii art, SpongeBob-style random-case tExT, Taking Back Sunday lyrics, the away message was a game changer. Online chat was the thing that, until it came around, no one knew they needed, but once they started using it, as AIM creator Barry Appelman told CRN, it became impossible to live without. Just 14 years prior, as Bush and Kerry headed to the polls, Facebook took its first steps, and the iPhone was but a twinkle in Steve Jobs’s eye, the IT weekly CRN reported that AIM counted 36 million worldwide users. Of course, it wasn’t just the end of a year: it was the end of an era. Thank you to all our users! #AIMemories /V09Fl7EPMx “If you’re old enough to remember the days of AOL Instant Messenger,” wrote Lex Gabrielle for Pizzabubble, “God Bless because they were the best.” “AIM is dead”, tweeted “To hell with 2017.”Īll good things come to an end. “RIP AIM”, “AIM is ded”, “FML”: the internet raged in authentic early-aughts chatspeak. It was like they were graduating high school all over again. There are about 180 million registered users of the AIM service, including consumers and business users.When AOL announced it was retiring its seminal, 20-year-old chat service two years ago, a thousand ageing #2000teens shook their heads. "I think if they can do that, they win."ĪIM is the world's most popular IM client, delivering more than 1.5 billion instant messages each day, according to the company. "AOL's first job is to convert the companies that have been informal users to get them to be paying customers," Mahowald said. "But they still have to see how the market reacts. "AOL has done its due diligence preparing the product," he said. Robert Mahowald, an analyst at IDC in Framingham, Mass., said that one challenge AOL will face is getting IT decision-makers to believe a system that still uses the consumer version of AIM will do the job for them. By the time IT departments are ready to look into EAS next year, he said, encryption features will be incorporated, making it a compelling product to investigate. But that probably won't be a problem, because many businesses won't have the money in their end-of-year budgets to deploy it now anyway. "It doesn't have all the features yet," he said. in Black Diamond, Wash., called the business version of AIM "a pretty significant development," because AOL is the leader in the consumer IM marketplace. Michael Osterman, an analyst at Osterman Research Inc. The new services and features, with the exception of the encryption capabilities, are available now. However, it's expected to cost about $34 to $40 per seat. in Mountain View, Calif., is also working with AOL to integrate encryption capabilities by next year.ĪOL hasn't publicized pricing for EAS, since it will depend on variables such as the size of the deployment.
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