Comment by kunai | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kunai | Hacker News Reader

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My parents up until 2010 did not switch to a high-speed ISP and continued to use AOL dialup until 2008, which is when they switched to NetZero which was marginally faster but far cheaper.

In some ways, perhaps dial-up is a better proposition than DSL or cable due to its slowness. It does discourage distraction and waste of time on the net, and since I don't browse YouTube and use

  links2 -g

to browse the web, perhaps it isn't such a bad idea. Although, I would have to go to Starbucks whenever I wanted to download a new Linux distro. ;)

As for email, I still do use an AOL email address. I use it for Facebook and AIM, but I use my Hotmail (now "Outlook") for personal email and inquiries.

But AIM. Can't live without it.

If AOL calls it quits on AIM, I will probably shed a few tears. There is nothing like AIM left. Facebook is locked-down and doesn't support buddy lists, MSN is dead, Skype is proprietary and forces you to use its own client, and nobody I know has a Google Talk account and my IM client doesn't support it, even though I've tried to set it up as a Jabber/XMPP account.

> There is nothing like AIM left.

In addition to the practical merits you've listed, nothing else sips bandwidth quite like AIM. Despite being the champion of open-source communication, XMPP is fairly awful on low-bandwidth, high-latency links. AIM, partially as a product of the era in which it was engineered, doesn't care a bit.

On the contrary I found the internet more addictive on dial up. You waited so long for a webpage to load that the reward/payoff of finally getting what you wanted made you want to do it again. Along came broadband and an hours worth of browsing probably dropped to 15 minutes. Especially if you're looking for something very specific that involves lots of searching and narrowing your search based on information from other results.

> Facebook is locked-down

Facebook Chat has a Jabber interface.

Among my social group, everyone now uses Facebook Chat, iMessages, or Google Talk. I think I only have one or two people still on AIM. I think the problem with AIM is the lack of a default mobile client. Everyone's phone has Facebook installed, or comes with either iMessages or Google Talk. Nobody bothers to install an AIM client (I'm not even sure if there's an official one, and if it supports Push notifications)

Except for, y'know, AOL's AIM client.

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/aim-free-edition/id281704574...

(not that I've ever used it, mind you. Just wanted to make it clear that it existed)

That's really interesting, our social networks are very different: Basically no one I know uses AIM anymore (In highschool it was the only thing) but as I started playing games with others I used MSN, QQ, ICQ, IIRC, but now most of my friends are college grads and have gmail accounts so gchat/gtalk is it. It's kind of sad to log into AIM and no one be there, it's like a graveyard.

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