AOL Instant Messenger

~ the obit ~

AOL Instant Messenger launched on May 16, 1997, originally as a feature inside the AOL desktop client and then as a standalone application. By the early 2000s it was the dominant instant messenger in North America, peaking at around 53 million users in 2006. On December 15, 2017, after twenty years of operation, AIM was shut down. Verizon, which had inherited it through the AOL buyout, decided it could no longer justify the maintenance cost.

North American millennials describe AIM the way Eastern Europeans describe MSN and Latin Americans describe ICQ: it was the messenger of their adolescence. The conversation that defined who they would marry probably happened on it. So did the breakups.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the rituals ~

The screen name. AIM screen names were a cultural artefact. Most teenagers chose them at 12 and were stuck with them through college: xXdarkangelXx, SoccerGrrl04, iLuvBlink182, RaverKid7. The screen names lived on into adulthood, on resumes (mistakenly), in old emails, and in the collective shame of a generation.

The buddy list. organized into groups: "school," "family," "people I'm avoiding," and "her." The "her" group was its own group. There was usually only one person in it. You knew when she was online.

The away message. The away message was AIM's killer feature. While you were "away," you displayed a message. The message could be: a song lyric (Dashboard Confessional was canonical), a movie quote, a sentence in parentheses describing your mood, or, frequently, a multi-line confession aimed at one specific person. People would refresh each other's away messages every five minutes for hours, looking for changes, looking for evidence.

The sub-profile. Beyond the away message, AIM also had a profile, accessible by clicking a person's name. The profile was longer, more deliberate. It contained quotes, friend shoutouts, "x's and o's," and the occasional ASCII heart. Looking at someone's profile required a click. The fact that you had clicked. AIM did not show you who looked, but you assumed they could tell, was the move.

The door slam. The sound when someone signed off. A heavy thud. It meant: they have decided this conversation is over. The door slam, deployed mid-argument, was a relationship-ending event in the high school metaverse. Hearing the door slam without a goodbye was worse.

~ cause of death ~

AIM died slowly, then suddenly. The slow part: smartphones. Once teenagers had texting on their phones in 2007-2009, AIM lost its grip on instant messaging culture. The sudden part: 2017, when AOL announced the shutdown. Verizon (which had bought AOL in 2015) had no use for it. The product had been on autopilot for years; the engineering team was tiny; the user base was nostalgic but not paying.

What killed AIM was that it was invented for a specific kind of computing, you, in your bedroom, at a desktop, after school, that no longer existed by the late 2000s. Every successor app assumed you were on a phone, in motion. AIM did not know how to be a phone app; the few tries (AIM for iPhone, AIM Express in browser) were halfhearted and clearly not where AOL's strategic energy was.

~ aftermath ~

The hyper-local social graph. Your AIM buddy list was, almost without exception, your school. There was no "people from work" or "podcast people I follow" or "twitter mutuals." Just kids you saw in homeroom every day. The intimacy of that buddy list has not been replicated by any modern social product.

The asymmetry between presence and content. On AIM you could see someone was online without knowing what they were doing. The away message was a cryptic broadcast. You could speculate. Modern messengers either show too much (typing indicators, last seen timestamps) or too little. AIM's level was perfect.

The door slam as social punctuation. There is no clear way to end a conversation on Discord, iMessage, WhatsApp. AIM gave you one: sign off. The exit was visible to the other party. There was no ambiguity. There was finality. It was, kind of the point.

~ what people said ~

"my screen name was xXSk8ergrlXx04. i held this account for nine years. when AIM shut down i felt my own teenager die for the second time.". a.r. 33

"i wrote my entire college essay as an aim away message first to see if anyone would react. nobody did. i submitted it anyway. got into michigan.". d.k. 36

"the night before my wedding my buddy list popped up in a dream. all 134 of them. all online. all green. i woke up and missed the year 2002 like a person."; m.l. 38