According to a news report by the New York Times‘ “Bits” blog, AOL has slashed the team for its long-time instant messaging program, AIM.
Nick Bilton reported that a former AOL employee told him that “nearly all of the West Coast tech team has been killed,” effectively ending the upcoming development for the software.
In the age of Facebook chat, Google Chat and Skype, AIM is a bloated, decrepit dinosaur that tries to install too much crap into your browser. Its death is long overdue, to be honest.
But at the same time, I feel like my generation owes it a debt of gratitude — particularly because I know that many of my longest friendships wouldn’t exist had I not been able to connect with those people using AIM to talk outside of class (yes, I’m of the generation of kids who didn’t go outside, lay off me).
And I’m pretty sure that NBC’s To Catch a Predator would have had to work twice as hard to snag the same number of potential pedophiles had AIM chat rooms not been around.
So my fellow Millennials, let’s take the time to pour one out for AIM — may its alert tones ring in our hearts forevermore.
This article appears in Mar 8-14, 2012.
Oh yes, NBC’s catchy “To Catch a Predator” and the OMG demise of AIM as breathlessly reported by Tucson Weekly. My, what a cosmopolitan and on-the-leading-edge culture we have in the Grand Canyon State.
No matter this:
Native American Women Denied Plan B After Rape
http://open.salon.com/blog/heather_michon/…
I still use AIM daily, both the video chat and instant message.. sad, really dont want to lose it.
Red Star: One day I hope to figure your patterns out. As for the story, it’s definitely worth looking into. Thanks for the link.
Kathy: I don’t think you have to worry about losing it any time soon. From what I’ve read, AOL is slashing the development team and keeping the support staff. As long as enough people are using it, they’re likely to keep the servers online.
So it’s just AIM thats going away and not AOL messenger(the paid one)?
I hope theyre going to move everyone’s “buddy list” to another client software so we dont lose our friends.
Jdmendez:
Thats not exactly true. They will need a development team to keep going because everytime Microsoft, Apple, Unix makes a change in their operating system it’s the development team that makes the changes to keep the program(in this case AIM) continue to be functional or else it either wont work or cause problems with the operating system.
CC: From the Times updated story: “A former AOL employee said the group was ‘eviscerated and now only consists of support staff.'”
I’m sure they’re going to keep some dev staff on, but not enough for any real, major upgrades. It’s looking to me that AIM is going completely by the wayside.