Another piece of the retro Internet is dead. AOL’s free instant messaging service, called AIM, is shutting down its servers on December 15, 2017, 20 years after it launched…and about ten years after it was last relevant.
If you grew up in the United States, AIM is a nostalgic brand for you.
You might want to log in one last time, but it won’t be easy: AOL has seemingly scrubbed all download links for the program from the Internet. If you try to download from official sources, you’ll see this message instead:
You can find older versions elsewhere, but none of them work, meaning if you want to log in one last time, you’ll have to check the web-based AIM.com. I did, and found exactly one friend using it.
We talked for an hour or so; it was nice. But it was honestly surprising that anyone was logged on at all.
Which is odd, because at AIM’s peak, the service dominated the US instant messaging market, with tens of millions of active users—impressive for the dial-up age. That was 15 years ago, but in 2017, messaging is a big deal. WhatsApp is worth $1.5 billion, and has more or less the same functionality AIM had 20 years ago on a phone. Amazon has reportedly tried to purchase Slack for $9 billion. Considering Verizon bought AOL, wholesale, for $4.4 billion, it’s easy to imagine AIM could have been built into something worthwhile, if only AOL had some vision. They didn’t.
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