AOL Instant Messenger

» see aim.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

AIM launched on 16 may 1997, originally as a feature inside the AOL desktop client and later as a standalone program you could install without an AOL subscription. by the early 2000s it was the dominant instant messenger in north america. it peaked at around 53 million users in 2006. AOL turned it off on 15 december 2017 after twenty years.

AIM never really took off in turkey. MSN was the dominant messenger here from about 2002 onwards. i had a couple of american pen-pals i talked to on AIM around 2003 to 2005, and that was basically it for me. so this is mostly a US story, with a few specific things i remember from the international edges.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the screen name ~

the most distinctive thing about AIM was the screen name. it was your identity, and you usually picked it at twelve, and you were stuck with it through college and sometimes longer. famous bad screen names from the era: xXdarkangelXx, SoccerGrrl04, iLuvBlink182, RaverKid7. these names ended up on resumes by accident in the late 2000s. there is an entire genre of "my embarrassing AIM screen name" stories from americans my age.

the screen names were not federated like email. you could not have the same name on multiple messengers. so people picked an AIM screen name for AIM, an ICQ number for ICQ, a Yahoo ID for Yahoo. by 2003 a teenager in north america had identities on three or four messengers and had to update each contact list separately.

~ the away message ~

the away message is the cultural artifact AIM is most remembered for. when you were "away" from your computer, you displayed a message. people in your buddy list could see it. they would refresh each other's away messages every five minutes, looking for changes.

the messages themselves were a whole genre. song lyrics, especially Dashboard Confessional. movie quotes. cryptic single sentences in parentheses about your mood. multi-line confessions written for one specific person who you knew was reading. it was passive-aggressive social broadcast at small scale, before twitter existed to do it at large scale.

~ the door slam ~

the iconic AIM sound was the door slam. it played when somebody signed off. a heavy thud. it meant: i have ended the conversation. for teenagers, the door slam mid-argument was a relationship-altering event. hearing the door slam without a goodbye was worse, because you did not know if it was technical or intentional.

this combined with the buddy list to create a specific kind of social anxiety. you knew when someone was online. you knew when they signed off. you knew when they were "away" with a message that might or might not be about you. modern messengers either show way too much information (typing indicators, last seen timestamps, read receipts) or way too little. AIM's level of information was the precise level that made everything feel high-stakes.

~ how it died ~

AIM died slowly, then suddenly. the slow part was the smartphone. once american teenagers had texting on their phones in 2007 to 2009, AIM lost its grip on instant messaging culture. SMS became the default. then iMessage. then facebook messenger. AIM kept shipping but the audience drained out year by year.

the sudden part was 2017. AOL had been bought by Verizon in 2015. Verizon had no use for AIM. the engineering team had been small for years. the user base was nostalgic but not paying. on 6 october 2017, AOL announced AIM would shut down. the last day was 15 december 2017. people logged on for one final conversation with old friends. the running yellow guy was retired.

~ what remains ~

AIM is one of those messengers that defined a specific moment for a specific country and then disappeared with the moment. for americans my age, AIM was high school. the screen name was your first online identity. the away message was your first public broadcast medium. the door slam was your first heartbreak.

the parts that did not transfer to whatsapp or imessage are the parts AIM is missed for. the friction. the away message system was deliberately strange and that strangeness produced creative use. modern messengers are too clean. you cannot leave a song lyric as your status that everyone sees, because there is no status anyone reads. that whole texture is gone.

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