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Comment by hprotagonist | Hacker News Reader

The day AIM died, I logged in one last time.

A friend of mine was actually online! So i IM'd him. I got a frantic phone call about 30 seconds later.

  "how did you DO that?!"
  
  "do what?"
  
  "you made my PHONE play the AIM BING noise!"
  
  "..."

He'd long ago wired SMS notifications into AIM, forgotten that he had done it a decade or more ago, and was deeply confused until we walked through the possibilities.

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I was on AIM the day it went offline. Ran into a person who was very important to me and my development. Reminisced for a couple hours.

They added me on Facebook. I was hopeful to keep in touch, but they've since disappeared off Facebook like a lot of my friends in the recent trend.

I was genuinely a little scared that i'd log in and see my high school girlfriend online.

I've found that it's difficult to keep in touch with a lot of people that I'd like to because Facebook chat is really the only widely used chat service at this point, and many of the people I'd like to talk with have decided that they don't want anything to do with Facebook.

Lost touch with quite a few past friends from that

facebook is in the uncanny valley of achieving its goal of universally connecting people but disconnecting people even more because it was so close to universally connecting people.

its like they succeeded and then totally fucked it up. greed just gobbled that engine up.

I'm in the same place from the opposite direction. I've refused to use Facebook from day one, and lost touch with a number of now-geographically distant friends for whom it is their primary mode of communication.

> because Facebook chat is really the only widely used chat service at this point

This is... well, if you consider WhatsApp and FB to be the same then not wrong, but as it stands they're still separated ecosystems and let me tell you, WhatsApp is huge. There's a number of competitors in China and other parts of west Asia that are probably even bigger. Anyway, WhatsApp is used for family, friends and non-work related / event based colleagues.

Then there's Slack, mostly for closed communities (due to their pricing models), which in my experience has improved communication and knowledge sharing within my company by a lot (consultancy company).

Third major chat pillar in my life at the moment is Discord, probably the leading chat platform for open communities and individuals. It's replaced IRC or Skype for a lot of people, especially the gaming community. Because they aim at open communities, I think they have the potential to outrun Slack in short order. If they want to compete they'll have to build a "professional" version that replaces the gaming landing page with something a bit more corporate.

Especially Discord will, in 10-20 years, trigger that nostalgia that people now feel about IRC, AOL, MSN or ICQ.

Man I didn't even remember that AIM is gone for good until now. I kind of got a pang of regret I didn't watch it go offline.

I idled until i was forcibly logged off. <door creaking sound>

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