What is aol instant messenger

Compared to the way the rest of the world used the away message, we were so unimaginative. Bosco : Giving our users the option to type in whatever they wanted got a lot of traction. Kids in high school would spend all their time crafting nifty away messages. Crawford : I remember that the away message could be seen without actually sending an IM.

I had initially implemented an auto-respond away message. Then colleagues started complaining that they would type a long IM to somebody only to get an away message. They wanted to know the person was away before wasting time composing a message.

Harris : At first this had us worried. We had seen enough on message groups and bulletin boards to know that when you opened things up, you ran the risk of people abusing them. It can quickly reveals the darker side of human nature.

But we were blown away. Harris : Jim had a teenage son and I remember he came up with the buddy icon idea after asking him what he thought about AIM.

Crawford : My son was in high school at this point, and a big AIM user with his friends. He created the sounds we used: the new-IM-received sound, the buddy-came-online sound, etc. So I came up with the concept of an icon for each user. Bosco : Nowadays, it is easy for us to have a permanent placement on the internet: a Facebook profile; a Twitter profile; before that a blog profile. At the time, you had some Geocities-style things, but they were all very static. It was free to log in, and even if you stepped away from your computer, you could write whatever you wanted in an away message, up to a certain character limit.

We just did a poor job of marketing or packaging them. Harris : It is bittersweet to ask what else we could have done, with all that creativity, that energy.

Crawford : I am not a big Facebook user, and I have never tweeted. I do use text messages, and often think that AIM was a better product than what I find on phones.

If cell phones had been developed as smartphones from the beginning, I think AIM might have had a chance to be the standard on phones, but once dumb cell phones were in place, text messaging was grabbed by the cell companies. Whenever I see some messaging functionality in other programs, I think that either it looks just like AIM or that I could have written their interface better.

It is gratifying in a way, but also sad that nobody knows or cares that something I did 25 years ago still resonates in other products. Lazaro : I feel like every two weeks, Taylor Lorenz will come up with a piece talking about what the kids are doing now—using Instagram in ways you would never think of, or Google Docs, or AirDrop.

From a design and communications perspective, what is interesting for me is how quickly that text-based AIM away-message idea evolved when the iPhone came out. Telephone service in lower Manhattan was basically non-existent then, and we got in touch with both of them relatively quickly through AIM. That was when I realized AIM was more than just a neat little app, but an important piece of our communications infrastructure. Feature image via Buzzfeed. Dale is a London-based freelance writer covering TV, art, music, work, health, food and tech.

Design An oral history of the AIM away message by the people who were there 4 min read. Link copied to clipboard. Financial contributions from our readers are a critical part of supporting our resource-intensive work and help us keep our journalism free for all. Please consider making a contribution to Vox today to help us keep our work free for all. Cookie banner We use cookies and other tracking technologies to improve your browsing experience on our site, show personalized content and targeted ads, analyze site traffic, and understand where our audiences come from.

By choosing I Accept , you consent to our use of cookies and other tracking technologies. Saying goodbye to AIM, the instant messenger that changed how we communicate. Reddit Pocket Flipboard Email. Next Up In Culture. Delivered Fridays. Thanks for signing up! Check your inbox for a welcome email. Email required. By signing up, you agree to our Privacy Notice and European users agree to the data transfer policy.

For more newsletters, check out our newsletters page. The Latest. How a simple solution slashed child mortality in rural Kenyan villages By Dylan Matthews. AIM provided a space for discreet real-time interaction, with a layer of privacy not necessarily afforded by the home phone. Today, people might debate the proper balance between screentime and facetime in a society in which screens are seemingly everywhere. Yet communication research shows that screentime can complement rather than take away from facetime.

For instance, scholars such as sociologist Danah Boyd argue that these venues were and are still critical for teenagers, who used AIM as a private space to engage each other and explore their own identities. While certainly not the first form of social interaction online , AIM established for many people one of the most critical elements of online identity: the screen name. Through these screen names, the AIM space felt like a social one, populated with real people and personalities rather than cold screens and text.

In fact, many people still use their AIM screen name for other social media services, and many more became skilled at creating and maintaining more than one screen name.

Unlike face-to-face conversations, technologies such as AIM also allowed conversations to persist on-screen, both in the short term during the chat and in the long term as an archived chat.