When AIM Was Our Facebook 395
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.'"
Comment removed (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Strange (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm really hoping that eventually something new will come along to knock out Facebook in turn, hopefully even something that will at least pretend to let me have a little privacy/anonymity. I can't say that that last hope is especially high however.
Re:why? (Score:5, Interesting)
While something as ordinary as being on AIM might at first appear trivial(and indeed might well be), things like this can have subtle but profound effects on society at large.
The best examples of this come from around the turn of the last century. Various mechanical and electrical devices changed people's lives in small but significant ways, for example, the lightbulb(or gas lamp), and the sewing machine.
In the last ten years, the mass uptake of the Internet is certainly a socially and culturally significant invention; and--shallow as they are--services like AIM played a part in familiarising people with, and forming their expectations of, this new medium.
Personally, I think contrasting AIM and Facebook is important as AIM was a more straightforward, simple application. Its simplicity allowed it to be widely used, but also encouraged people to explore other parts of the web as it matured. Facebook by contrast is an all singing, all dancing Walled Garden, whose stated objective is to keep people on its site, and its site alone, for as long as possible.
Thus, the experiences of new internet users now are profoundly different to those of new users even 10 years ago. Todays internet is less like a multi-way chatroom where you choose the topic of the conversation, and more like a one way television channel, where you can happen to post the odd message in your own little sandboxed corner.
There is a deeper shift going on in the web, and while they may not seem useful to engineering mind, only "intellectuals" of the philosophical and sociological variety are equipped to understand, analyse and explain this shift and its implications. If there are any of course.
Re:Strange (Score:5, Interesting)
There was no one technology in the nineties that dominated- many technologies achieved supremacy only to be replaced by a similar but different technology a year later.
IRC was never mainstream popular- its dominance was due to the tech-savvy adopting it, rather than because the masses used it. The masses wouldn't know what efnet or dalnet were, or how to find a good list or IRC servers for given networks. The tech-savvy also were the ones who adopted ICQ. The mainstream used AIM, Yahoo Pager, and later MSN Messenger, and that's why those took off- there was no number versus name, no obfuscated configuring or servers, it just required you to register for a username, then use that to log in.
Technology's success appears to be based on accessibility- Microsoft, and to an extent, Apple, see success because their OSes are preloaded so the average idiot user can unbox the new computer, plug it in, and just start playing. Linux doesn't enjoy that preloaded userbase, which explains why the various distributions still fit a niche market. This is also partially why during the antitrust suits against Microsoft, companies like AOL worked hard to get their main software and their other products like AIM preloaded as part of the agreement, and is also probably why Microsoft makes it damn difficult to get MSN Messenger to go away.
I'm guessing that accessibility is why Facebook is doing well at the moment. For awhile it was the place for college kids, which of course meant that high school kids wanted to be on. That drove demand, so when they opened it up to everyone, everyone tried it out, and finding everyone on, it was easy to get people to stay, at least for the moment. I'm sure that it'll change too, as they'll break something at an inopportune moment and a newer, "better" (and I use the term loosely) thing will come along and steal their userbase. That's what seems to always happen, after all.
Re:Strange (Score:4, Interesting)
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. .
Agreed.
This is how I have seen it in the Netherlands:
First half of the nineties: IRC, telnet talkers and such
From 1996-2000/1: ICQ and some lingering IRC.
From 2000/1-2006: MSN and some lingering ICQ and IRC
From 2006: Hyves, Facebook, mySpace, Skype and lingering MSN
Because of a large installed base, it seems to take an old "champion" a long time to really drop into disuse even if the majority of users flock to a new service, they maintain the old one for several years.
AIM: maybe in the USA where America was Online, not so much in the rest of the world.
Re:Strange (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
ICQ was definitely what I used for ages until too many people had AIM only. At that point I finally switched over to AIM. MSN messenger was always the one I never had. I think there were a few features that it didn't have. For that matter, ICQ had a lot of features that didn't make it into AIM until at least 10 years later, which was always annoying. I do agree that I used IRC a lot before/while I used ICQ. It seems the non-technical/geeks went to AIM first and completely skipped ICQ.
Re:Strange (Score:5, Interesting)
In 1997, when AIM was released as a standalone application, AOL already had 11% of the US population use their service at a time when only 22% of that same population was online. That means that at it's peak AIM had 50% (15m) of active American internet users using it. Now compare that to Facebook's recent estimate of about 45% (115m), despite the 100million more users Facebook has, a lot of that can be attributed to penetration of 'net users.)
Just because you didn't use it, doesn't mean it wasn't the clear cut winner in the US for communication standard.
Oh fuck off (Score:3, Interesting)
while you were all 'growing up with aim', rest of the world was growing up with ICQ. and i mean, the world. not a mere country.
i know you americans do not like being disturbed in your self-indulgence and being called out on your self-centeredness, but hey - someone has to do it, so you can integrate with the rest of the WORLD. yeah, you heard right - i said WORLD - there is a whole world out there in which a lot of things happen outside america.