Thoughts on AIM Shutting Down

I haven’t logged onto AOL Instant Messenger in a conventional way in some time. I’ve been keeping it logged in through a proxy.

Oath, the successor to AOL, announced that the platform will shut down for good on December 15th.

But today, I shut my instance down. Goodbye two decades of an online identity. Let’s just take a moment there to think about that. The friends and connections made on this service by not just me, but others. We may have moved on to other places, I may have lost touch with some, and migrated to new services with others, but I still think about them now and then.

You can usually find me on Hangouts…until they shut that down, or several alternative platforms.

 

David Shanske

My day job is in training for an airline. I also develop Indieweb WordPress plugins so that others can take control of their online identity.

6 Responses

  1. What makes it even more sad and painful is that it’s one of the first as well as the longest lived services I ever had an account on or used to communicate with others on the web. It’s just too bad they quit iterating on and improving it, though worse, its general feature set was still pretty rich given today’s tools.

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