Now you wouldn’t use the term, but pre-9/11, we used to say it wasn’t a project, it was a crusade. In the beginning it had been a huge source of happiness and pride. And after leaving AOL in 2002, I co-founded a startup with other ex-AOLers and AIM was no longer something I gave much thought to. When I came back from to take over Barry Appelman’s old job, Eric Bosco had AIM well enough in hand, and I had other fish to fry. “Online chat was the thing that, until it came around, no one knew they needed, but once they started using it…it became impossible to live without.”ĭavid Lippke, SVP Systems Infrastructure AOL: Frankly until Eric Bosco contacted me about this interview, I was unaware that the away messages had ever emerged, mostly because after I stopped working on AIM, I moved on to advertising systems. I sought out Appelman and five of the developers and designers who worked with him to discuss how instant messaging changed the online landscape, how AIM changed their lives, and how the away message is still taking them all by surprise. It was the first real tool you had to signal your presence online: the original status update, the proto-tweet, and the stated inspiration for Facebook’s status feature.
It might have started out as something purely functional-a live out-of-office, if you will-but the away message was much more than that. AOL Instant Messenger was where it all started.įor most of those bloggers, listicle writers, and other tribute account holders mourning AIM’s passing, the one feature that mostly neatly summed up what had made AIM so special was the away message.įrom “afk”, “g2g bye” and “brb mom needs comp” to those missives so painstakingly crafted with ascii art, SpongeBob-style random-case tExT, Taking Back Sunday lyrics, the away message was a game changer. Online chat was the thing that, until it came around, no one knew they needed, but once they started using it, as AIM creator Barry Appelman told CRN, it became impossible to live without. Just 14 years prior, as Bush and Kerry headed to the polls, Facebook took its first steps, and the iPhone was but a twinkle in Steve Jobs’s eye, the IT weekly CRN reported that AIM counted 36 million worldwide users. Of course, it wasn’t just the end of a year: it was the end of an era. Thank you to all our users! #AIMemories /V09Fl7EPMx “If you’re old enough to remember the days of AOL Instant Messenger,” wrote Lex Gabrielle for Pizzabubble, “God Bless because they were the best.” “AIM is dead”, tweeted “To hell with 2017.”Īll good things come to an end. “RIP AIM”, “AIM is ded”, “FML”: the internet raged in authentic early-aughts chatspeak. It was like they were graduating high school all over again. When AOL announced it was retiring its seminal, 20-year-old chat service two years ago, a thousand ageing #2000teens shook their heads.
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