When AIM Was Our Facebook

Hugh Pickens writes "Gizmodo reports that there was a stretch of time in the 90s and early 00s when AOL was a social requisite. 'Everyone had an AIM handle,' write Adrian Covert and Sam Biddle. 'You didn't have to worry about who used what. Saying "what's your screenname" was tantamount to asking for someone's number — everyone owned it, everyone used it, it was simple, and it worked.' When we all finally got broadband, it was always on and your friends were always right there on your buddy list, around the clock. AIM was the first time that it felt like we had presences online, making it normal, for the first time ever, to make public what you were doing. 'Growing up with AIM, it became more than just a program we used. It turned into a culture all its own—long before we realized we'd been living it.'"

"Everyone"?

[grub]

there was a stretch of time in the 90s and early 00s when AOL was a social requisite. "Everyone had an AIM handle

Bullshit. I bet the authors thought AOL invented Usenet in Sept. 1993 as well.

AIM also used an "open" standard...sound familiar?

[The O Rly Factor]

AIM was powered by a server and protocol called OSCAR: the Open System for Communication in Realtime. Ironically, this protocol was about as closed and proprietary as you can get, and required reverse engineering over a span of years before AOL released TOC (Talk to Oscar) and TOC2 to developers.

Didn't Facebook just recently call their datacenter architecture "open" too?...

Re:Strange

[xaxa]

He must have lived in a parallel universe. In the 90s it was IRC.

It probably depends what country and what age you were. In the 90s for teenagers in Britain, it was ICQ, then MSN Messenger (released 1999), with the latter being much more popular. "What's your email?" meant "What's your MSN messenger ID?". I visited some distant teenage relatives in the USA several times around this time, and remember being as surprised that they didn't know what MSN Messenger was as they were that I didn't have AIM.

Re:Strange

[gr8_phk]

Yeah, and for me it was newsgroups. And for others it was IRC, email and even older things. What actually ruined the newsgroups was the influx of AOL users asking high-school homework questions on sci.math for example ( all the really smart guys then left ). Of course the first big wave of the masses think the tools they used at the time were the first.

Re:Strange

[uglyduckling]

No. ICQ was the first messenger that was used by a significant number of "normal" people, globally speaking. AIM was an almost exclusively US phenomenon. ICQ predates AIM by over a year, and on a global scale was more popular than AIM until bought by, and integrated into, AOL.

Re:Strange

[The Dawn Of Time]

Yeah, crazy how this American website talks about American stuff, isn't it?