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.'"

Strange

[drolli]

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

Re:N00b....

[xystren]

Yeah... It's funny how old school becomes what us old pharts considered new. My old school online presence was a FidoNet address (1:340/17) back in the early eighties. I get tired of people thinking that online presence started when "information superhighway" became mainstream (I hated that term at the time, and still hate it now.)

Back in the good old days, we thought 300bps was lightening fast and we loved it god dammit!

Now get the hell off my lawn!

Yes Yes, we know you were on IRQ

[Anonymous Coward]

That isn't the point of this article.

Of course AIM didn't invent messaging. But AIM is what made it accessible to non-geeks.

I was watching movies on my computer 8 years ago, but Netflix lets my Mom do it. In the same way, I hand an IRQ account in 1992 (which did *not* make me a pioneer) but it wall all computer voodoo to my friends and relatives until AIM arrived in their physical mail a couple years later as part of their AOL cd.

Back when there were 2 types of netizens

[GodfatherofSoul]

AOLers...and those who ruthlessly teased AOLers. Back then, anyone with a "real" reason to be on the internet had serviceable IT skills (and at least one other account than their home access). AOLers were the drooling masses so to speak. They were a clueless and rare sight, like a coyote darting across the highway on your drive to work and our minds, just as oblivious to disaster.

But, that era birthed one of my favorite memes:

</AOL>

Article is correct

[tompaulco]

Just as I now shun having a facebook account, AIM was what I shunned back in the day.

Remember when talking to someone face-to-face

[digitaldc]

Remember when talking to someone face-to-face was our facebook?

Yeah, it was much better back then. No constant worrying about our collective statuses and what we did over the weekend that was fun to do in real life. We just got together and did things TOGETHER, in real life.
Life was much more enriching when you actually looked the person in the eye you were talking to, and had an actual CONVERSATION.

Re:Strange

[eln]

Not to interrupt the "I was online before you" dick waving that inevitably results from stories like this (and is in abundance in replies to your post), but the article is referring to the first time the general public experienced the social aspects of the Internet. Sure, nerds like us were using IRC and the talk command before that for real-time communication, but that was back in the era when the Internet was either completely unknown to the general public or was seen as something "those computer people" used.

AIM was the first messenger that was used by a significant number of "normal" people. It's like talking about the iPod as revolutionizing MP3 players: It wasn't the first by a long shot, but it was the first to be used by a large enough segment of the population to be relevant to the general public.

Maybe for people who thought AOL was the Internet

[SwedishChef]

Why is this on /.? For people who thought (like "Good Morning America") that AOL was synonymous with "Internet" it might be appropriate but for the rest of us (and the early adopters of Slashdot) it was IRC and ICQ. We laughed at AOL and most of us tried to get any friends off of it as quickly as possible. Some of us even started local ISPs just so they could actually get onto the Internet. This sort of article might be appropriate for the New Yorker or Wall Street Journal but for Slashdot it's drivel.

Re:Strange

[bhcompy]

ICQ and IRC. In the US. None of the geeks used AIM, that was for script kiddies and random people. And from there it was Trillian, so it didn't matter what you had.

Re:Strange

[ynp7]

My strong connections to the USA involve having been born here and lived here my entire life... and I don't remember AIM ever being a big deal...

How is this article even news? It's more like, "hey, remember that time I made make believe and pretended AOL was ever anywhere near as ubiquitous as Facebook?!?!"

Re:curious

[DeadCatX2]

I don't know about OP, but facebook scares the shit out of me. People don't respect privacy anymore. Remember when Blizzard's Real ID fiasco hit, and the various employee's family member's facebooks were scraped for personal information?

AIM wasn't so bad. You could make yourself invisible from people you didn't want to talk to. There was no way to google people's AIM information, you pretty much had to know their screen name first. There was no "wall" where everyone could read your conversations, it was pretty much all one-on-one private discussion.

But facebook encourages you to splatter your personal life on the Internet for Google to crawl and low-lifes like Aaron Barr to scrape.