8/7/2023 0 Comments Aim away messages liftYou’re constantly plugged into your phone and the one time you left home without it, you felt itchy all day. You think life should revolve around two things: happy hour and bottomless mimosas at brunch. You still think Facebook is an appropriate place for long, vague posts that beg the question, “Is everything okay?” But if someone asks, you’ll say, “I don’t really want to talk about it. guess its tru what they say, u never know who ur friends are until someone stabs u in the back! w/e” *Something passive aggressive about an unknown situation* You make fun of people who go to Coachella even though down deep, you’re dying to don a flower crown in the desert. You eventually made the transition to Tumblr, where you can still be found posting free verse poetry about fruit and your ex from five years ago. You definitely wrote the occasional fanfic on your secret LiveJournal. “Well if u wanted honesty, that’s all u had 2 say / I never want to let u down or have u go, it’s better off this way” *lyrics to a My Chemical Romance or Dashboard Confessional song* But as AIM marches toward its final resting place, on the Buddy List in the sky, and an entire generation Googles "how to download your AIM logs," just remember for a moment how great it was when everyone used the same messaging app, when it gave us everything we needed, and when logging on to the internet was a joyful moment rather than a bracing one.1. AIM outlived its usefulness a long time ago, ruined by apparent corporate in-fighting and the same lack of vision that doomed AOL as a whole. None of this is to say you should still be using AIM, or that AOL shouldn't be killing it. It's odd, too, that away messages have disappeared: in a world where we'd all like to be a little less connected, a way to say "I'm here but not really" couldn't be more useful. If someone was trolling you or being offensive on AIM, you had real power: a "warn" button that would actually slow down the internet connection of the person on the other side before eventually cutting them off. I had an email and lived outside the walled garden while all my friends partied inside.Įven now, there are features AIM figured out that nobody else has successfully replicated. But my parents wouldn't pay for AOL, no matter how often I made the financial case for our improved internet access and the emotional lift of that "You've got mail!" clip. It's easy to forget now, but for a brief moment at the turn of the century no internet company was cooler than AOL. Frankly the news is a long time coming: AIM's been a ghost town for a decade, long since replaced by Facebook and WhatsApp and Skype and Snapchat and an entire generation of social products that evidently nobody at AOL ever saw coming or understood how to compete with. All you need to know about me, between the ages of 12 and 17, you could find in my AIM chat logs.ĪOL-or Oath, or Verizon, or whatever the messy conglomerate of failed internet companies turned confusing advertising businesses is called now-announced today that it'll be shutting down AOL Instant Messenger for good on December 15, 2017. The best preservation of my middle- and high-school years doesn't exist in a yearbook or in a diary.
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