The End of AIM

I recall using AOL Instant Messenger to talk to more than one person from this community back in the day. But like many older apps (or “programs” as we used to call them), I haven’t logged into AIM in years.

The end of an era…

Yup, I spent many years on AIM. And Yahoo Messenger, MSN, ICQ, Trillian… And now Skype.

Friendships forged in the fires of online messaging are never forgotten!

I’ve used all of those, along with less popular chat formats such as XMPP/Jabber and Google Talk. Good times.

These days I use WhatsApp and plain SMS via iMessage. I like the fact that these platforms are encrypted by default and blend quite well with your existing CardDAV contacts. We finally have a “buddy list” that works with multiple apps / networks…

For group discussion there’s Slack which works well for setting up multiple chat channels for a single team. It works quite well in practice.

Also, I forgot to mention Signal which is another great alternative, arguably the most transparent chat platform about privacy and security. Skype is pretty terrible when it comes to those things.

They even did a humorous tweet about AIM’s end:

I remember I used to have the AOL messenger name: Ash182 (Pokemon Related) and some guy out of nowhere started messaging me. He thought I was his girlfriend lol!!! Good times.

Reminds me of another IM Client I used for the longest time til it shut down a couple years ago, Xfire. I made tons of friends on the platform and as it was approaching a natural death, we moved onto Steam, and then Discord. Lots of good times had across that and various other chat clients I used to a lesser extent around the time. RIP, but I’m glad I can still keep contact with the people who matter.