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America Online Communications

AIM Has Been Resurrected. Kind Of. (vice.com) 54

Posted by msmash from the mixed-feelings dept.
AOL discontinued AIM, its 20-year-old iconic instant messaging service, last December, months after cutting third-party access to it. Now Motherboard reports a a small team of developers has resurrected it with a private server. From the report: The new chat service is called AIM Phoenix, and it works by running the messages through a private Dynamic DNS run by Wildman Productions, a non-profit group of hobbyist programers. This isn't a new AIM client, it literally uses the old software running on a new server, so it looks and feels exactly like AIM. It's simple to set up. First, you download an old version of AIM from the AIM Phoenix website, register for a new username, tweak the settings to reroute through Wildman Productions' server, and then open yourself up the nostalgic glory of Web 2.0. The old versions of AIM are touchy on new machines and I had to play with a few different versions before I got 5.0 working on my Windows 10 machine.
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AIM Has Been Resurrected. Kind Of. More

AIM Has Been Resurrected. Kind Of.

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  • Why use the AIM client? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by sleekware ( 1109351 ) on Tuesday June 26, 2018 @09:46AM (#56847602)
    https://pidgin.im/ [pidgin.im] still updated and supported

  • Web 2.0? Huh? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    AIM was not Web 2.0. AIM, ICQ and the likes existed as part of the web long before Web 2.0 was a term.

    Captcha: change

  • Unanswered question (Score:3)

    by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Tuesday June 26, 2018 @10:17AM (#56847730)

    Why would anyone want to do this?

    • I think there is a lot of people that would have a lot of found memories using AOL. maybe them would like to revive their experience in this platform.

      but i agree, it does not make a lot of sense.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by jythie ( 914043 )
      For the fun of doing it? Outside that, yeah, there is not much reason. I could kinda see it if it maintained the user's contact list so was just a drop in replacement to keep chatting with the same people, but if it can not do that I am not sure what purpose it serves.
  • Had they not totally Bjorked up Skype (and yes I use her name as a pejorative) there would be no need for any competitors, new or old.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Had they not totally Bjorked up Skype (and yes I use her name as a pejorative) there would be no need for any competitors, new or old.

      That is ridiculous. There is always a need for competitors. A product/company/thingy without competition becomes stagnant, regardless of how dope it is. That aside - there is no practical reason to resurrect AIM. Somebody did it because they could - not because MS did something stupid with Skype.

      • It would be interesting to find out why. There was never a point in history when there weren't superior solutions for anything aol made, including aim. AOL was never anything more or less than a platform that exploited ignorance of what the internet was to create the impression that its solution was the internet. We shouldn't forget the lessons learned when we overcome predators who attempt to cultivate ignorance and exploit it for control and profit but we've seriously broken something if we look back on t

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tepples ( 727027 )

      Wouldn't the use case for AIM, Skype, and Discord be equally served with an extension to the IRC protocol that lets a user choose to store chat history on the server?

  • And at least Jabber offers the possibility of TLS and a decent password hashing system that allows strong passwords without them getting truncated for validation and encoded using a weak crackable hash. So what's the draw of the AIM client today?

    • And at least Jabber offers the possibility of TLS and a decent password hashing system that allows strong passwords without them getting truncated for validation and encoded using a weak crackable hash. So what's the draw of the AIM client today?

      Nostalgia.

      Same reason anyone would want to play (original Atari) Pitfall ...

  • My biggest question is when will we resurrect the ICQ beta clients and MSN Messenger? Nothing takes me back to my college days more than the thought of hearing the ICQ sound from behind doors as I walked down the hall. Everyone was too lazy to get up and ask each other face-to-face if they were doing dinner.

  • AIM-54 Phoenix (Score:3)

    by jfdavis668 ( 1414919 ) on Tuesday June 26, 2018 @11:45AM (#56848330)
    When I saw the title, I thought it was referring to the AIM-54 Phoenix missile, used by the F-14 Fighter. With another Top Gun movie coming out, it was a possibility.

  • Reinventing the Wheel (Score:3)

    by DatbeDank ( 4580343 ) on Tuesday June 26, 2018 @02:02PM (#56849310)

    What I find hilarious is how Slack came about. It's the best example of recreating the wheel I can imagine. There is no reason AOL couldn't have made AIM into what Slack is today.

    And yet corporations pony up tons of cash for the privilege of using it when there are a ton of chat programs around that use the same thing.

    I need to start thinking like a fashion designer. What's old is new and what is new is old.

    Maybe I should resurrect PDAs again, oh wait they already did that with Tablets.

  • Wha? Why can't I reclaim my old username by requesting a confirmation link be sent to my AOL email account?

  • Eventually most people just switched to "Oh I don't use Aim/whatever anymore, talk to me on facebook!"

    Please no.

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