AIM will be discontinued today
help.aol.com
help.aol.com
Your data associated with AIM will be deleted after December 15, 2017.
Yes, you can manually save images and files to your computer until the morning of December 15, 2017.
Whatever you thought of AIM, it's stuff like this that makes you realize just how important software freedom is. Insane that there is just no way at all, without outright hacking the program (to the extent that hacking it is possible), to export your data, that you generated, and should by rights be yours to at the very least save (and not have to comb through potentially decades of chat history to export pictures and files one-by-one).
This is quickly becoming my least favorite corporate buzzword.
Edit: a word.
https://support.google.com/drive/answer/176692?co=GENIE.Plat...
How can no human see the data that Google has? Google is not a magical place where machines cannot be compromised.
>To my knowledge there has never been a hack of Google's data or any leak connecting any user's identity to PII.
The Snowden leaks say otherwise. http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/10/30/nsa_smile...
>This is ridiculous FUD, you're not compromising anybody's privacy by letting google drive do an OCR for you.
So it depends on your threat model. If you care about rogue Google employees or other actors with 0-day exploits, then putting information into the hands of Google is a risk.
For those who are concerned about the privacy and are mindful enough to care about the privacy of others, putting any information on anyone else's computer (like Google's servers) is a leak. You don't know what is being done with those data, intentionally or not. And that would be the case regardless of whether or not the software is free/libre---it's being sent across a network to a destination you do not control.
Of course, information is leaked all of the time. Depending on the software that you use, your (generally, not you specifically) address book on your phone might be available to numerous remote services, and that is directly parsable by third parties, and directly tied to you and your contacts. It's up to you to consider your threat model. mynewtb's threat model is different than yours.
When I was a teenager in middle school what almost feels like another lifetime ago, I used AIM.
I don't get how any reasonable framework can exist to say such detailed efforts at curating my identity must be pushed upon others?
You want a lifelong log of your discourse? Write it in a medium you control.
This is some hyper-active nationalist zeitgeist? You are not owed a say in any and every facet of life that touches you incidentally. It's never been the case "on the ground" in America.
A part of me can't wait to see the President whose entire life can be cherry-picked from various servers and datacenters.
If you save the snaps to your camera roll, then any app with photos permissions has access to them (along with any metadata). But that’s obvious.
1) The network is compromised.
2) Users have hostile intent.
3) (Cloud) storage is publicly visible.
So we can add porn preferences (Hi Senator Cruz!) to list of non-issues people use when choosing the leader of the free world!
Like a train crash in slow motion - good.
This is much more crazy the more you think about. Right now there are already thousands if not millions of kids who will never be able to get a higher up political position because of what they shared on social media.
Attitudes change. Sometimes profoundly. It can be quite disconcerting when it happens.
(Or when you realise you're living in the aftermath of some previous Great Shift.)
That said, the first messages from my wife to me still make me smile, and I'm sure that my responses that make me cringe would make her smile.
Sorry, couldn't resist ;)
There are privacy issues: do you disclose email addresses to establish identity?
Imagine exporting a Facebook group, it is incredibly hard to do.
As for my own data, Adium kept logs that I zipped up before I stopped using it. (And I have logs from "gaim" that predate using OSX/Adium.) I don't think it did pictures / files back when I used it, but I'd hope Adium would keep local copies of that too.
Is it my data? If it is, why are you deciding for me what happens to it?
It's a damn shame that an entire generation is growing up with their chat logs locked in the cloud.
I think the idea of ownership is interesting here. I don't disagree that you should own it but then wouldn't you need to pay for it? Or did you pay for it by letting them sell your data to third party vendors? In that case, yeah you paid for it. What about Hacker News? Can you export your conversations here? Should you be able to? Meh, sorry mid-day musings.
It was everywhere, and on MacOS it was integrated into the OS. For most people I knew, they had it set to join when they got on the computer. So it meant that you knew when your friends were at the computer, and you knew when you could have long "in the background" conversations with your friends.
It was just a different level of intimacy - I had so many longer and interesting, sometimes deep conversations through AIM (or through iMessage hooked up with AIM).
On a Mac at least, that's unlike anything we have now with facebook and Messenger.app. Now when you look at your buddy list, you have no idea whether they're at their computer or if they're busy or running around with their phone. I try to get my friends to join a Slack room with me, but we don't always have it started, or we're in a different Slack room. At any rate there just isn't that critical mass where you know someone is online and chattable.
Specifically, Messenger can show you an "online now" tab, indicating who is currently at least using Messenger or Facebook, and can even show you "Active now" versus "Active 30m ago".
The one thing I do miss are times when you could just find a random classmates username and message them. When you do this with text it can be a little more awkward if you don’t know each other.
Why do you need to know if a freind is only if you can text, iMessage or WhatsApp anyone in the world almost?
That's an interesting feature I think, but nothing is preventing that to be implemented on a new or current chat program. It would solve the distraction problem of always being available and online.
And part is because someone's status could give you insight into whether they'd like to talk or not before you sent a single message. Maybe some of the modern mobile-oriented systems still do that? I don't know; I don't have any friends that use them.
When messages have a lag in response, there's generally not as much excitement and before you know it, one person is preoccupied with something else.
I will never know if the glory of my AIM days was due to being a teenager or just being a part of online chat during that special window of its history.
WhatsApp group chat with my closest friends is definitely incredible, but a different experience.
RIP running man!
This could be read in more than one way. I agree it is sad.
Our ability to slog around drives full of data lets us gloss over this fact, but when we're dead, are our kids gonna keep slogging around our drives? Nah.
Better way to get permanence in your life is to do things that people will remember you for, if permanence is what you're after. Crowd-sourced in other people's memories.
"If your ancestor hadn't decided to dedicate X dollars (inflation adjusted Y dollars for current year) to this project you would have inherited calculateInheritant(tauntEmailRecipient, currentYear, familyTree, preferredCurrencyDenomination). PS - please reply to this email with contact information for any new descendants. If email is going out of style as a communication protocol, please reply with a program that, when executed, will take from standard in a filename that contains a message, and as a second parameter a contact address. Attached to this email you'll find a project spec describing this program more rigorously.
I much prefer the one window paradigm of IRC.
Version 5 kinda sucks.
And if that's not small enough, you can minimize it altogether and just get updates and controls via Notification Center.
[0] http://deadbeef.sourceforge.net/screenshots/0.6/screenshots....
It's what pushed a lot of users to use alternate clients or stick with old versions.
> Can I save my Buddy List?
> Unfortunately you are not able to save or export your Buddy List.
--
> What happens to my data?
> Your data associated with AIM will be deleted after December 15, 2017.
--
> Can I save my images and files?
> Yes, you can manually save images and files to your computer until the morning of December 15, 2017.
> (Instructions to manually open each chat then scroll through looking for images and files)
*Not sure if this was explicitly said or someone's joking claim during a past discussion of the shutdown.
Could you elaborate on this? I'm very interested to understand the challenges of downsizing a cloud service as I've never heard of that happening, and am surprised to hear it's difficult.
2. The code was written in 90s and 00s.
3. I wouldn't be surprised if AOL owns the hardware AIM is running on. Deploying on smaller servers would mean a complete system replacement, which always requires large amounts of regression testing.
4. Big services usually have more dependencies than small services. Each dependency adds complexity and costs.
It probably is as hard to down scale an old service as it is to upscale a new service. It's probably less hard to downscale a new service than upscale a new service.
Also, if your users are dwindling (and not paying) it's less important to give that software attention.
In contrast, I still have most what I grew up with. Disk images of my old computers, binaries of games and applications, fully usable in emulators. There's IRC -- while the networks I used then have died a long time ago IRC probably never dies. I still use IRC on some networks and interface some other chat services by using a proxy frontend that you can connect with an IRC client.
But most importantly, I can launch early computer games from my childhood. It's like having your old toys on a shelf at your parent's house. Not only I can still try out the game I never could finish (and observe that I still can't finish it because games in the 80's were often both stupid and ridiculously hard), but I can put my kids at the controls and tell them this is what their parent used to play at the same age. It's not just history and culture but an origin. This is where I came from. For a human being that is a very concrete, if not tangible, thing, and of value in itself. Now think that you can't fire up Instagram or Facebook or even Angry Birds in 2035 and tell someone hey this is how we shared pictures, messaged, and gamed back in the 10's.
Actually the linked article mentions this. Look for "Can I view and save my chat history?". It sounds like the checkbox I mentioned is enabled by default.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2Z2CklSxM0
Since everyone is sharing their AIM memories: When I was in college (1995-1998), AIM was the #1 way to flirt with people. Today the kids worry about whether they got a like or not.
Back then, you'd sit and stare at your buddy list waiting for that person you liked to come online so you could say something witty, and then stew with worry if they didn't respond but remained online.
Or you'd get a friend/another account to IM them to see if they'd really blocked you or not.
Browsing friends' creative AIM away messages were the precursor to that Snapchat status(?) feature I hear about.
In that case, it's a bit different. Snapchat (and Instagram) stories are a gallery of photos and videos that you upload, where the photos and videos are removed from the gallery after 24 hours. Essentially giving you a rolling 24 hour window into peoples lives.
I've become a big fan of instagram stories as a way of keeping up with what my friends are doing, since I've moved overseas. It feels a lot more appropriate than using something like a Facebook status to share what you're doing.
Ugh, really? That sounds like a lot of work. Pass.
Usually when I take a photo, I say "neat!", so I feel like Bender in Futurama (https://gph.is/1LilXnT)
Anyway, my point is they've made it quite seamless. Pull out phone, swipe for camera, maybe type some text, and hit the upload key.
Seriously though, it is amazing to look back on the utter dominance of AOL in the late 90s-early 00s, and it’s almost complete disappearance shortly afterward.
> We know there are so many loyal fans who have used AIM for decades; and we loved working and building the first chat app of its kind since 1997. Our focus will always be on providing the kind of innovative experiences consumers want. We’re more excited than ever to focus on building the next generation of iconic brands and life-changing products.
Corporate BS-speak at its best. Three sentences and 0% answering the question.
Wasn't ICQ the same kind of chat app?
I point this out because I think it's an interesting case of user-interface design influencing use, even though on the surface they're both "chat apps."
One of them was individual messages, but another allowed each party to see what the other was typing in real time.
Also, if one want to talk about chat histories one should not forget about IRC.
WHY?!
404. Quite clever, eh? I guess there was a lot more HTTP 404 errors back then.
---
Yes, I too remember my ICQ number but not the birthdays of... I PLEAD THE FIFTH YOUR HONOR!
I thought they were both instant messengers, just AIM was more popular in US and ICQ was more popular in Israel and Eastern Europe.
One distinct feature AIM had were the IRC-like chat rooms.
---
You may be confused WRT an ICQ "offline messaging" feature, which IIRC allowed one to send messages to offline contacts, who would see the message when they signed in.
---
Also in case you didn't know: ICQ is a (too lazy) of "I Seek You".
Everybody at aol stopped using it years ago for internal communication and switched to slack.
The team had also been cut down to a skeleton crew a long time ago and they stopped development on it.
The reason why they are killing it as opposed to letting it hang around for ever is that aol has been in a multi-year long process of moving everything to AWS and due to the way aim is architected, it would be a major development effort to make the move, and they just don't want to spend the money.
I'm going to guess the mail product will also face a similar end for similar reasons.
0: https://www.wsj.com/articles/verizon-to-buy-aol-for-4-4-bill... 1: https://help.aol.com/products/aol-mail-verizon
You're not dead. Just set to away
I will really miss the fad of `xXxXmYcOoLsCrEeNaMexXx`, and the cheesy-yet-charming profiles and away messages.
AIM, I sollute you farewell. Without you, I wouldn't have as many good memories of my teens, and I wouldn't have the nickname "tombert"
It gives me a “Those were the days...” moment.
I stopped when all my friends switched from Skype (which I used Trillian for) to Telegram, but I missed how compact Trillian was.
I'm using Pidgin, mostly out of nostalgia, but the default configuration basically can't connect to any mainstream messenger these days (Facebook, WhatsApp, Hangouts, Skype or Viber). Plus the UI is so dated, especially regarding emojis.
Before anyone asks, it's in C and I'm nowhere competent (or interested enough in gaining the required competency) to contribute.
With stuff like Pidgin you notice what mindshare really means. A "crappy" Electron based app is nicer to use than the "native" one. In the end, it's all about coders polishing code. No hours put in, no end result coming out.
> I'm using Pidgin, mostly out of nostalgia, but the default configuration basically can't connect to any mainstream messenger these days (Facebook, WhatsApp, Hangouts, Skype or Viber). Plus the UI is so dated, especially regarding emojis.
Pidgin supports Telegram and Facebook. Well, it did support Facebook, Facebook is constantly changing their API to prevent that.
Someone also wrote a WhatsApp backend.
WhatsApp forced GitHub to take down the code, and sued the dev.
In this modern world, open chat software is impossible.
Google, who was really the main chat in town at that point with gchat, had to either choose to extend XMPP some more or go closed. Closed starts to look really good when you realize that once you have a competitor with Apple's strength, market and lock-in, being open starts being a detriment, since anyone can write a client for your app for any platform, but you still can't support iMessage. Proprietary hangouts chats allow for Google to control where and how their chat platform is used.
What I'm wondering is how much of this I'm getting wrong because I'm not seeing the other forces at work. Anyone have counterpoints or corrections?
looking back, there certainly seems to be a correlation between the rise of Apple and the death of those kinds of programs. these days it seems like only products that target developers follow that model.
personally though, i think it was the transition to mobile that really did it. almost overnight people's expectations for UI design got way higher, and most of them don't really care about modularity or open source. they just want something that mostly works and looks designed. aesthetic appeal has never the strong point of OSS.
I use the Hangouts and Slack apps on my Android phone to read scrollback history for the time period when Pidgin is signed off, or to monitor channels in mostly read-only mode while away from my desk.
I find responding via swype infuriating and rarely worth the effort. It leads to very low information content since people use poor grammar and vocabulary when writing on a touch screen and having every third word randomly replaced with something else by the UX.
Thanks for the memories, AIM!
Conversations for Android is really good, and on iDevice ChatSecure works very well. Much better than what I expected. With filesharing and everthing. And then there's a bunch more that also work, but not of them at the same level of Quality.
Marketshare is super-low of course, but I like that it's possible to use an open protocol.
Decentralized, DHT-like, no phone numbers.
I've researched all others and Tox is the best choice ATM if you want YOUR data to belong to YOU.
It was one of the things that got me into computers. Although it doesn't directly affect my day to day as I no longer use AIM, it was the first place I registered my screen name that I still use everywhere. Yes, my screen name is just my name, but it has significance to me all the same.
I'm really nostalgic about AIM. I met a lot of really cool people on there, but its time is definitely passed. Luckily having used Pidgin for years will make the transition for gchat or something similar pretty seamless.
Still sad, though.
My friends and I just never saw a reason to move away from AIM. Everyone just decided to switch to things that were newer for novelty's sake, and transferred their friendships and conversations into non-private, non-free systems. Even Google, which at first used an open protocol, moved to a siloed system while adding nothing of much value (as evidenced by Google's low share of the messaging market). And now to talk to people I have to switch between Google, Skype, Apple, and Facebook, all of whom inter-compatible systems, all of whom reneged on their promises, and none of whom offer me any value whatsoever.
This is not a happy day for me.
On a side note, it would have been great if rather than discontinue AIM, they open sourced it and put it in the hands of the community. It feels somewhat wasteful to close the doors on such an iconic piece of software.
Man how things change.
4G basically means 'expect nothing' for me.
clearly the issue is product mismanagement rather than cultural shifts away from 'this type of service'
RIP
Pidgin was originally called "GAIM".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pidgin_(software)#Naming_dispu...
1. Hotmail.com
2. Half.com
3. AIM
4. ?
Rest easy old friends
Hotmail->Live->Outlook
Hotmail - young rebellious teenager with 2 MB of storage
Live - "experimenting" phase, "monopoly conviction? I do not recall!"
Outlook - Older YUP, approaching middle age, quite cynical, but still might change, albeit with reluctance and complete lack of enthusiasm
For a while hotmail was MSN hotmail and Windows Live Messenger was previously MSN messenger. Now MSN is just Microsoft's portal page.
“It’s like email, but faster”
Tdogg5388
Shows what age I was during peak of AIM.
I never used AIM... is ICQ still being used...
As for ICQ, last I knew a Russian company bought it from AOL and it is still operational.