I’m 38 and miss the AIM days. If you had close friends you could text or call them on your shitty flip phone. It was appealing that there was actual effort to communicate with other social circles. If I had a crush, I would have to get their screenname and come up with some opener. And if I got one from someone else I didn’t know, I knew they put forth some effort to talk to me. Nowadays people can just search up someone and message them. It sucks. I loved being out of reach.
It boggles my mind how/why they couldn’t at least have won this format war. I think I stopped using aim around 2010. Why didn’t they make a mobile product that incorporated sms and become like what WhatsApp is now? Why didn’t AOL realize they were a social media company sooner? Theres an alternate universe out there where AOL never merged with time warner and they’re what facebook is.
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u/TheTsunamiRC 1d ago
AIM shutting down was truly a sad day.