Laying the Ground Work: How AIM Shaped Real-Time Communication

Picture it: it’s the early 2000; cell phones aren’t that common and your parents yell at you for taking over the landline. Enter AOL Instant Messenger or AIM, the easy way to talk to your friends whenever. Whether it be your best friend from school, cousins in a different state or the person you had a crush on, but couldn’t quite work up the courage to talk to in person. Either way, you probably spent a lot of your free time chatting away on AIM and who can blame you?

Thought up by Barry Appelman, Eric Bosco, Jerry Harris and other developers as a way for real time communication in 1997, AIM was a little different than the usual offerings from AOL. For starters, it was free which wasn’t that common for the time. The real-time communication that many people longed for at the time, allowed the users to keep up-to-date with people that they usually spent weeks or months trying to get in contact with. Up until then, forms of communication consisted of phone calls, emails or, wait for it, handwritten letters.

Another thing that set AIM apart from just regular old email, was its ability to allow the users to express their personalities through a computer screen (Bowman). It introduced the use of a screenname which allowed the user to give a personality through a name. It continued through to your choice in buddy icon and away messages. I myself went through probably four or five different screennames and I remember spending so much time looking for the perfect icon and away message ideas. The perfect away message sometimes was the most exciting thing about AIM to me; how can I impress my friends with the witty messages?

At it’s peak, AIM users made up 52 percent of the online instant messaging market (Panko). With the rise of other social media platforms, however, more users abandoned the messaging platform for newer resources. With the creation of Friendster and MySpace, we were able to share more through posts that friends can view and interact with. As quickly as AIM came to popularity, it fell just as fast.

AIM introduced the concept of instant communication that carried on throughout the growth of the age of social media (Skylar). It laid out the foundation for future instant messaging platforms and text messaging from cell phone to cell phone. The format it used in the late 90s/early 2000s is still seen in adaptations today in the likes of Facebook Messenger, Google Hangout and Slack. The idea of a “screenname” is used throughout social media platforms through a handle on Twitter, Instagram and TikTok, as well the use of direct messaging on these platforms.

Sources:
Panko, Ben. “The Sharp Rise and Steep Descent of AOL Instant Messenger.” Smithsonian.com, Smithsonian Institution, 6 Oct. 2017, www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/pioneering-aol-instant-messenger-end-180965152/#:~:text=AIM, as it was often,the platform for Mashable in.

Bowman, Nicholas. “AOL Instant Messenger Taught Us How To Communicate in the Modern World.” Smithsonian.com, Smithsonian Institution, 11 Dec. 2017, www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/aol-instant-messenger-taught-us-how-to-communicate-in-modern-world-180967484/.

Sklar, Julia. “AOL Instant Messenger Made Social Media What It Is Today.” MIT Technology Review, MIT Technology Review, 2 Apr. 2020, www.technologyreview.com/2017/12/14/67582/aol-instant-messenger-made-social-media-what-it-is-today/.

Image Sources:
Wenerd, Brandon. “Hilarious New Instagram Account Imagines What It’d Be Like If People Still Had AIM Away Messages In 2017.” BroBible, 9 Aug. 2017, brobible.com/culture/article/modern-away-aim-messages/.

“AOL Instant Messenger : AOL : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming.” Internet Archive, 1 Jan. 1997, archive.org/details/aim21.