![]() Related Steve Case on the internet’s past and futureįormer AOL CEO Steve Case on the web’s ‘third wave’ Meanwhile, AOL itself was starting what would be its own long decline.īut like so many tech pioneers, AIM helped set the stage for the companies that would eventually surpass it, said Karen North, a professor of digital social media at the University of Southern California. His team tried to find ways to monetize the service, but advertising never really took off. “At the time, AOL’s revenue and business model depended on people subscribing.”Įven after AIM exploded, after everyone from Wall Street traders to 10th graders were using it, Appelman said AOL didn’t make AIM a priority. “There are very few people willing to say, ‘Oh, we should embrace this and toss all that old stuff that’s making us money,’” he said. Appelman said back then, offering a free messaging service, rather than a paid subscription, was considered less than a solid business idea. “We built this in secret, in development, telling no one,” he said.Īnd when AIM was introduced in 1997, it was with little fanfare and the company didn’t embrace the service. So, along with a small team, he started designing an instant messaging service. “I sort of put my thoughts on paper and said, ‘We need to do this as a stand-alone product for the internet,’” Appelman said. Appelman wanted to make it easier for AOL subscribers. ![]() But chatting on AOL back then was clunky and took a lot of effort. He was the guy behind the buddy list - you know, that thing that told people which of their friends were online. He helped invent it.īack in the ’90s, Appelman worked at AOL as a manger in development. You could say Appelman was one of AIM’s earliest adopters. He’s been logging into AIM to chat with his friends nearly every day for the past 20 years. In fact, most people probably think it died long ago. There aren’t many 20- and 30-something-year-olds who are still loyal to the service. It took all the way until December 2017 for the service to be officially shuttered, two years after Verizon bought AOL in 2015.Twenty years after its inception, AOL Instant Messenger will officially sign off on today. AIM never vanished - it just got consumed by newer giants. TIME explains that AOL stayed afloat by acquiring businesses, including the Huffington Post in 2011. MySpace launched in 2003, Facebook in 2004 (originally called TheFacebook), and AIM lost its mojo. From the high to the low, the corporate suit-wearer to the middle-schooler with questionable hygiene - AIM ruled them all.īut tech moves at a rapid pace. Plus, AIM let users circumvent websites, images, pop-ups, and so forth, and get right down to talking. Daily life and interactions started shifting from "irl" into a world of additional acronyms like "brb," "afk," "lol," etc., which along with emoticons - like the winking and smiling " -)" - formed the bedrock of the kind of digital, written expression folks nowadays take for granted. AIM - AOL's instant messenger service - had only hit the market a mere five years earlier in 1997 but instantly became a staple in internet users' households.
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