AIM: Away message

In the mid-1990s, if you were online, you were almost certainly using America online. AOL was the internet for lots and lots of people. But within AOL, there was this tiny team that almost nobody wanted to exist, that was building an app that might someday bring the best part of AOL outside the walled garden. From The Verge and Vox Media, this is Version History, a show about the best and worst and strangest and most important products in tech history. Today, we're talking, of course, about AOL Instant Messenger. When you run a business, you want the right tools. Enter Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world, from household names to brands just getting started, With hundreds of ready-to-use templates, Shopify helps you build a beautiful online store to match your brand's style. So if you're ready to sell, you're ready for Shopify. Turn your big business idea into... With Shopify on your side. Sign up for your one euro per month trial and start selling today at shopify.nl. Go to shopify.nl. That's shopify.nl. Power your business with the platform trusted by millions today. All right, we're back. Let's talk about the most important technology in 13-year-old David Pierce's life, AOL Instant Messenger. V song is here. Hi, V. Hello. And with us remotely, Kyle Chayka. Hi, Kyle. Hey. Thank you for doing this with us. I've brought you both here because you've both covered AIM a lot. You've both expressed how deeply you miss AIM a lot. And I think you're also both right in that sweet spot of people to whom AIM was very important, but maybe for slightly different reasons. We're going to get into a lot of this, but the very first thing we need to talk about is I need to know both of your AOL screen names. This is the only thing I care about. V, I know you had several. I have three. At various points. I have three. Walk us through the chronology here. So I believe I got AOL, my first AOL screen name, either third or fourth grade, and it was... Oh, so you were like AOL, AOL. I was AOL, AOL, And it was Spice72440 at the height of the Spice Girls. Posh Spice was named Victoria and she was the first cool non-villain Victoria like me. So I latched on hard. And then, you know, fast forward a few years, I'm watching Toonami on Cartoon Network and I love Gundam Wing and Hiro Yui. So my second one becomes Hiro Yui 414 because my birthday is April 14th. And then my last one was Psycho Tanooki. A tanuki is a raccoon dog in Japanese culture, and saiko means the best, so I was the best raccoon dog. There you go. Okay, I love it. Kyle, were you as all over the face? I think I only had two, but it's so deeply embarrassing, so I'm just going to dive right into it. I think my first one was my name, so it's just Kei Chaka with some symbols on it. But then I decided that it would be really cool to take the name of a thief character from a fantasy series that I was obsessed with as a kid. And so that was a character named Silk, embarrassingly. And then I added one five, five, five, five to the end of it. One, five. That's a lot of fives. It's a lot of fives, but where that came from was the MMORPG I was playing at the time called Ragnarok, Ragnarok Online. And there were a lot of Thai players on Ragnarok. And in Thai, the five key is like the symbol for ha, the sound ha. So five, five, five, five was like ha, ha, ha, ha. And so everyone in the game would just like spam five all the time. And so I matched those two together. That was my screen name. and it has followed me through the rest of my life. That's pretty good. I like that. So you both have much better stories than I do. Mine is I was an AIM kid, not an AOL kid. So when I got onto AIM, a bunch of my friends already had screen names. And so what I did is like a deeply self-conscious, whatever, 13 year old, was go look at all of my friends' screen names and just copy it. And what's funny is I realized in prepping for this, I remember like a shocking number of my friends' AIM screen names. Like I could probably just sit here and list you the 15 screen names that I interacted with the most, which is nuts. But anyway, the thing that a bunch of my friends did was have like a word and then two numbers both repeating once. So I had like my best friend growing up was he was Jamman2288. Why? Don't know. Because he liked Jambands. Apparently. And then there was one of my friends was Kayaker Kid and then he had numbers after it. Everyone had numbers after that. Being a 13-year-old with no imagination or interests, I was Dave P. 3355. The numbers meant nothing. And I just picked the least interesting possible. And this is still a screen name I use all over the internet. It was like a very business, like I made a very professional screen name for AIM. And I hate that about myself. You know, maybe you were just ahead of the curve because I think that's what we all do now as adults. because we can't use our fun handles for emails that you're talking to someone over Verizon. You're like, yes, my screen name is, let me spell it out for you because it's in Japanese from my middle school anime era. It's very upsetting. It is upsetting. But just before we really dig into this, I mean it sincerely when I say AIM was central to my life for a long period of time. Was it as big a deal for both of you? That's where all my social life happened outside of like, you know, vague booking before like vague Facebook statuses were like aim away statuses where you're just zeroing in. And it's like, I'm going to put in this incubus lyric and hope that my crush notices and asks me about it. That's kind of like what aim was for me. It was like a bat signal. Like you quote the lyrics, the Blink-182, the Dave Matthews band, whatever. You choose when to turn on and off the away message. Like it was a real emotional communication system, I think. It really was. And there were so many nuances to it that I think kind of don't exist in a lot of ways now. Like I think there are a lot of things in Snapchat that have similar kind of games you can play and little things that you do and don't do in ways that you do stuff. But there's really nothing in my life, certainly, that I think about on as many levels as I thought about my AIM experience back in the day. But okay, let's rewind way back and start the AIM story from the beginning. And I think the way we have to do that is to start by talking about AOL in the 90s. So this is AOL, America Online, goes public in 1992. This is like the early days of the internet, the early days of anyone being online. This is when the dot-com boom is really starting. And in mid-1995, it had two and a half million users. It had twice that a year later and is like on its way to just being the internet for lots and lots of people. Like these numbers sound super small, but I found a thing that said the whole addressable internet market in 1995 was estimated to be 10 million people. That was the internet in 1995. So a fifth of the people were on AIM at any given time. Somewhere between, yeah, somewhere in the range of like 20 to 50% of people who use the internet use AOL. Like that's nuts. A fun fact I learned in prep, by the way, was that AOL was originally called Quantum Computer Services, Inc. And I have a hard time imagining that Quantum Computer Services, Inc. Messenger hits the same way that AIM does over time. This is also like peak disk in the mail AOL. We have a disk sitting here in front of us that promises 500 hours of free AOL service. The numbers were much less than 500 hours in the 90s. But this was like a huge, huge thing. And the important thing about AOL was that it was a complete walled garden. It was like one whole thought about the internet. It was a lot of content bundled together for a single monthly price. It was, it was a, they even compared themselves to cable TV, right? It was cable TV for the internet. All the stuff you want, all for one monthly price. And I found a really great Wired story from around this time that I'm just going to read you a quote from just to give you a sense of the scope of AOL. It said, AOL is about pop culture, not pocket protectors. Shrewd alliances with partners ranging from the American Association of Retired Persons to MTV have made AOL the service for every man. You want information, in quotes, like a derogatory way? Fine, check out CompuServe. But if you want to swap opinions on Medicare cuts or hang out with Courtney Love online, AOL is the place to go. Oh my God. I do remember all those channels, like the games channel, the kids channel. You know, that was the internet at that point. I lived in the games and the kids channels, but I can't for the life of me remember the games. I just know I lived there. Oh, yeah. And there were like they would do a thing where they would have a celebrity. Like Courtney Love is one example. They had lots of celebrities come and just like hang out on AOL for a day, which is like an insane thing to think about now. Is that not just like the OnlyFans chat? Oh, no. Yeah. It's like, oh, what if they were like, oh, Olivia Rodrigo is going to be on Twitter today. He's like, what on earth are you talking about? But this is what it was. And at the time, the competition was who else can build these big bundles of services, right? So Microsoft was this huge looming competitor. This is Microsoft like pre-antitrust, pre-all of the stuff that was going to compete with Microsoft. Peak of its powers, Windows, Bill Gates, Microsoft. They were building a thing called the Microsoft Network and bundling it with Windows 95. And AOL was really worried that this was going to crush AOL because it was just going to be there on your computer when you got it. But we were at this moment where it was like, okay, if you can make it easy for people to get online, you can send them not on the internet, but to your services. And that's all the content, all the community, all the places to hang out. That's going to be where the money is and the success really is. And at the same time, there were these other instant messaging products that were starting to grow fast. ICQ was probably the biggest sort of mainstream one right before AOL and AIM took off. I use mainstream in like the least mainstream kind of way. I remember these alternatives to like like it was kind of said something about you which one you were on Yeah, like I see your ADM or all these different Clicks at school. I went to nerd schools and like all I was on aim Oh my god, you're so basic before basic was the word that we use is like the real fun is on ICQ And I was like, okay, whatever bye. Yeah, what's up of its day? It's just so much cooler when we when we told people we were doing this episode We heard from a lot of people who were like, you better mention ICQ. And it's like, oh, I know who the nerds are now. We love you nerds, to be clear. But anyway, so these things are starting to grow. There's a bunch of them around. But there was also this understanding that like, OK, we think I am is going to be a big deal. Like this seems like it's going to be a place people want to be. It's going to be a meaningful part of online connection. But there aren't likely to be a lot of winners here because like we weren't talking about network effects at that point. But it was the same sort of thing. Right. It's like you're going to be where your friends are. And if we can pull kind of a critical mass of people and your friends into one place, that thing is going to win because it's where your friends are. And this is like a huge advantage that AOL has at this moment is it has centralized that in a pretty unique way. So that's kind of the backdrop to this story. And the AIM story really starts in about 1994. And there's this AOL employee whose name is Barry Appelman. And he builds a system for AOL itself that shows which of your AOL friends are online. So before this, if you wanted to see who was online, you had to go and individually search for each person you knew to see if they were online and you could chat with them. And Barry is like, well, what if there was just a list of all of your buddies that showed whether they were online? And Barry, our smart friend, decides to call this thing the buddy list. And he gets a patent for it. And the idea you can see in these drawings is, A, these things just look like AOL chat, right? It's just a simple messaging window. But it's just a list of your friends and whether they're online or not. And this ends up being, like, revolutionary, right? Like, this is a real-time status indicator for the internet, which, like, in most ways did not exist for most people until now. Was this, like, the cardinal sin of the internet, though? Like, being able to tell when someone else is online. So, okay, this is actually one of my favorite big picture questions about AIM, where it's like you could argue that AIM was sort of a good thing that we should get back to. But you could also argue that as soon as I knew when you were on the internet, everything immediately started to fall apart. There's just like so much I'm feeling right now looking at the buddy list. Right. Just how I used to organize my buddy list, how I would categorize friends and just going through puberty on AIM, just staring at the name of the person you want to like IM you and just going like, do I message them first? What do I say? And just staring at it. And then they sign off and you're like brokenhearted for no reason. Well, do you remember you had to play games about when you would and wouldn't sign on? Because if you didn't want somebody to see that you were online, but you wanted to check to see if they were online. And like just the shenanigans that this requires because you didn't have control over whether you showed up online or not. And this was the door sound, right? There's the slamming door sound when someone logged off. Okay, wait, let's just do this now. I was going to play this game with you in a minute, but let's just do this now. We're going to play a game called What Aim Sound Is That? I just have a few of them for you. And they're going to make you feel just a large number of feelings. All right, let's do, I believe I have five or six of these for you. I'm going to play the sound and you're going to tell me what the sound represents. You ready? Oh, they're on. Getting online. That's correct. That's the login. You got a message. Or... Close. Oh, I... Oh, it's so... This is the conversation start noise. This is the first message from somebody is that noise. And then... You sent a message. Almost. that's the you've received a message so okay here just to give this one away here's the opposite that's you've sent a message sent received it goes up out and down I am ratatouille into that moment of just like a 40 minute conversation I had with my bestie where we were just sending the same like unamused emoji back and forth for 40 minutes just trying to see who would like Oh God, it's taking me back. All right, I have just a couple more. That's the getting offline. This I think may be the greatest sound in the history of the internet. It's perfect. It explains itself immediately. I love it so much For me nothing did it quite like the sign sound The door slamming Just nothing like it And you haven even gotten a chance to message them yet You waiting and waiting and waiting Or you message them and immediately that sound happens. Oh, devastating. That's happened to me before. Devastating. So Barry Appelman makes this buddy list patent and just kind of ships it. Just like puts it onto AOL. A thing that is really important to understand about AOL at the time is it is this massively successful, relatively small and as far as I can tell essentially anarchist company like nobody is paying attention to anybody you can essentially build something and ship it to the finished product it is just a bunch of people doing things and this is to some extent like a leadership failure but also to some extent like just the culture of the company at this point this stuff is so new and it's moving so fast that engineers kind of up and down the stack have permission to just make and ship things. And make and ship things becomes kind of the ethos of AIM over time in a really interesting way. So he ships the buddy list to AOL. It immediately becomes a huge hit. This is like a big part of the sort of AOL experience for lots of people after that. And then a couple of years after that, there's this little skunk work scheme inside of AOL that starts working on a version of the messaging chat app that explicitly works outside of AOL, the walled garden. Their thesis was basically like this thing really matters. We think this is actually maybe the stickiest thing about AOL. Can we use it to bring more people into the fold? Like can this be the sort of gateway drug into the rest of AOL? Maybe if the chat thing happens, you're going to want more services. You're going to want to be part of this. The theory kind of makes sense. It absolutely is proven wrong by where this story goes, but you can sort of see the theory at the time and they start building a thing that ends up being called AOL Instant Messenger, right? So they build this app. It's just a few people for a few weeks just kind of building this thing out. And their big idea was we want to build a chat system that can handle 5 million simultaneous users, right? So they have a sense, again, this is at a moment when like 5 million people is a reasonably large portion of the internet. And they're like, we think this is going to be huge. We want to put it in front of more people. They show it to executives and executives hate it. Like immediately the reaction within the AOL leadership is like, why on earth would we take our best, most popular feature that everyone logs onto and uses all day, every day and just give it to everybody. So they shut it down. They say, no, you can't do this. And they ship it anyway. This is what I mean by the AOL culture. They were like, they were told we don't care about this. We're not going to do this. And what this team does instead is they just put it on an FTP server that AOL owns, which is just a list of AOL files. And ordinarily, you could you could do something like that. And it would probably be unnoticed except for like a very small number of people. And like I think what they were probably hoping for is this thing sort of trickles out and people start to use it. And we have this new messenger and it's very exciting. But AOL is AOL. And one way to track AOL at the time was to keep track of its FTP servers. Like that was a way people kept tabs on what AOL was up to. And so there were a bunch of people watching. Like the power users are aware of what's going on in this FTP server. And the minute it goes up, there's not even a download page on AOL's website for AOL Instant Messenger. It's just a file on a server. The night it goes up, 900 people simultaneously start using it. This is the immediate number. 900 people download it and start chatting on AOL and Messenger. And somehow, the part of this story that makes the least sense to me is at no point does anyone ever show up and kill this project. Like over and over, there are people who in theory had the power. Like Steve Case, the CEO of AOL, could have just walked in and been like, you're all fired. We're shutting this down. But they didn't do that. They just sort of let this project go. And I think AOL, I guess, had bigger fish to fry or just didn't care or whatever. But they start fighting two fights simultaneously, right? One is to keep up with the growth of this thing, which takes off basically immediately because anything AOL did, especially outside of the walled garden, was obviously big news. So this becomes a thing pretty quickly. And then internally, there's this small team of people basically trying to make sure that the AIM team is either not noticed or by some miracle allowed to keep working. And I found this great quote from Eric Bosco, who was part of that team. He said, my biggest job as a manager was to keep AIM alive internally because every single executive vice president wanted to shut it down and kill it. They could not understand the concept of giving away for free something that was of real value to the paying subscriber base. It was always AIM versus AOL. They hated us. And yet, they didn't kill it. None of this makes any sense to me. But anyway, here's where we are. So AIM starts to come out, starts to grow, and there start to be a few things that really make it take off. I have a list here of when I look back what I think were like the things that made AIM special and different. But I'm curious what the two of you think. Like individual features that you're like this made it special at the time. Obviously, the buddy list is thing number one, right? That was like fun fact the very first web page that existed for aim was aol.com slash buddy list which is just a sign of how they understood this thing. But like when you guys think about the sort of features of aim that made it different from whatever we had tried before what immediately comes to mind. Wallpapers. Okay. Yeah. So like one of my friends was like obsessed with lobsters. so she just had a lobster like wallpaper I think and a lobster emoji that she would send to all of her friends as soon as she got online so it would be the lobster emoji and then the word lobster and like because she would say this in real life too so it's just peak kid so when I think of I have a lot of questions about this Fred but okay she's a doctor now aren't they all you know what I mean she's a doctor now very smart about to have a kid and she would just go online and like everyone would know because she'd be like lobster and we would just send lobster like ascii emojis back and forth the ascii emoji i feel like it's it's all about the customization like you express yourself through your away message and the emojis used and you know it felt like a way to put your personality online for the first time the kirby dance so do you want know fun fact about this by the way there's a lot of things about aim that are built because of the constraint of no one else at the company cared about it so that aim team had this idea of like you should have a profile page right this is like you should be able to sort of click on something and go to their aim profile this is again another way to get people into the aol walled garden they're like okay people will chat and then they'll want to learn more about each other and they'll go to their aol profile the aol team says absolutely not not going to do this so they build it into the app. So the fact that you could open up that little separate window that would show their profile and their away message, they didn't want to build it like that. They just had no other place they could put it. And they started doing a bunch of stuff, again, inside of the app because they weren't allowed to do it outside of the app. And so by sort of pushing this thing further and further away from AOL, AOL actually took away all of the advantages that it might have brought AOL over time. So it's like more self-contains. I remember it feeling like that, like you could just be within AIM and not have to go elsewhere, not go into the wider internet. Like your whole experience was right there. Yeah, that's exactly right. They had an idea that sort of would have looked like Facebook profiles, I think is kind of the way I think about it now that it's like you would have been able to chat with somebody and then click out to their profile. And imagine if that's like AOL.com slash their screen name, that becomes like a powerful way into AOL. And they just, they just didn't want to do it. They were just, they were just out. But what this all meant was the AIM team could just keep shipping stuff without approval. And so they couldn't even update the download page on AOL.com. So they started to make the app update in place rather than having to like all kinds of stuff that is like AIM became its own world because AOL wouldn't let it do anything with AOL, which winds up being like the worst decision AOL could have possibly made. but anyway so i think the the only other thing i would add is i think and we talked about this a little bit is i think the the online status indicators were a really big deal here and the like the way that it felt real time in a way that very few other chat systems had was a big deal um it also had the running man logo um which was just the greatest logo of all time that has nothing to do with anything i just love it very much it kind of reminds me of my favorite internet phrase ever which is afk yeah i'm like you would put in afk away from keyboard to your away message or you know chat to someone to say that i am going offline like i am away from the internet because i have to i don't know do my homework or talk to my parents because the internet was like a was like a thing in the middle of the house that you had to go to right this is like this is the thing people forget is like it was the internet was a was a place in in your home that you had to go and sit down and take away from somebody else. And like, I wanted to be on aim, but my sister had to do homework and my dad had to do work. So I couldn't be online anymore. So you have to tell your friends, don't message me or else my parents will read it. Like this is unfathomable in today's world, but this is, this is what it was like. So we all had to learn how to deal with that. Did you ever do the, um, I think, what was it? POS, the parent over shoulder, like my parents in the room don't say anything crazy. Oh no. I remember doing that. No, I didn't do that. My dad was very keen on all of us having like our separate ways into the internet. So he had his computer and sometimes I had to use his computer. And at that point I was like, on dad's computer. But like once I got my own laptop, that ruined everything for my mental health. Yeah, that's fair. In perpetuity. So, okay. So the thing that was most surprising to me about this moment in AIM is the first group of people it took off with was companies. It became this huge business hit because all of these businesses were starting to come online and email worked but was too slow. And they suddenly built this tool that would let me talk to people on the Internet in something like real time. So it became a huge hit inside of companies and immediately starts this whole like cultural kerfuffle. And Kyle, this is kind of what you were talking about earlier. there are all these stories from like the 90s, like when this is first starting to come out where it's like, maybe it's a bad thing that we all know when everyone else is online and we can all chat to each other in real time and we're developing expectations that the other person will get back to me just as fast. And like, again, this is stuff we're reckoning with now, 30 years later. Slack is the same thing. Exactly. So are you telling me that because of AIM, I now have Slack? Yes, in a super real way. Cool. Very, goddammit. Like using emoji to signal your status is what, 20 plus years old now? Yeah. Or no, 30 almost, I guess. To that end, the away message was actually a corporate creation because people started demanding away to be like, I need to let people know that I'm not here. Like, this is driving me crazy. I technically am online, but I'm not here. How do I tell people I'm away from my computer? and they built the away message for people at work, which is like insane to, you know, teenage me who just wanted to use this to like flirt with girls. But that's what it was. So it becomes this work tool and AOL briefly looks at this and goes, okay, there's something here. Let's try and make money off of it. And so tries to like, they partnered with Netscape to put Netscape, they built a product that was called Netscape's AOL Instant Messenger. That's great. That's catchy. Rolls right off the tongue. Built into the Netscape Navigator browser, they had some ideas about like, okay, maybe there is a real corporate product here. But none of that stuff ever really went anywhere because AOL's cash cow was the like culture thing. And that was all they actually cared about. So meanwhile, the AOL team, the AIM team inside of AOL just keeps shipping and making stuff. This thing starts growing. It grows really, really fast. They start adding tons of features. It had voice chat really early on. You could send each other files really early on. It had chatbots. So this thing launches in 1997, right? And by 2001, AIM has many, many, many millions of users. I've seen numbers as high as 100 million users. I've seen numbers as high as 60 million users, like somewhere in that range. And again, this is a moment where like people are just coming online in droves, right? Like the sort of total addressable market of the internet is expanding super, super fast at this point. But AIM is just eating that market share. Like people were coming online in many ways to use AIM to talk to their friends. Like it becomes the gateway to the internet for a lot of people in a really real way. And as it does, competition starts to show up super fast. Yahoo launches Yahoo Messenger. Microsoft launches a messenger that, you know, probably some people use by accident. I'm kidding. MSN was huge at the time. We were all using it. It was the like formative experience for people. and then AIM starts to die because AOL turns around and finally decides to kill it. And we're going to get to what happened. But first, let's take a quick break. We'll be right back. Hey, Kara Swisher here. I want to let you know that Vox Media is returning to South by Southwest in Austin for live tapings of your favorite podcasts. Join us from March 13th through the 15th for live tapings of Today Explained, Teffy Talks, Prof G Markets, And of course, your two favorite podcasts, Pivot and On with Kara Swisher. The stage will also feature sessions from Brene Brown and Adam Grant, Marquez Brownlee, Keith Lee, Vivian Tu, and Robin Arzon. It's all part of the Vox Media podcast stage at South by Southwest, presented by Odoo. Visit voxmedia.com slash SXSW to pre-register and get your special discount on your innovation badge. that's voxmedia.com slash sxsw to register really you should register we sell out and we hope to see you there all right we're back i have terrible news for both of you a was about to try and kill aim so 2001 peak of aim's powers we're all using aim aim is very important kyle is just sitting at his family's computer just aiming away all day every day this is what i assume absolutely okay Who is your number one AIM friend? Let's call them out right now. Who did you talk to the most? Oh, man. A friend of mine named Parker, who was equally as online as I was at that time, which was not a cool time to be super online. But she would build websites and stuff, and so we chatted a lot. All right. Shout out to Parker. Love this. All right. So again, 2001, AIM is huge. 2002, AOL starts laying off the AIM team. there was a brief period where this thing was so big that AOL is like, okay, we going to do ads on this thing because that a business we can do Right There was one moment where it was like we can take our sort of core competency which is advertising on the internet and pull it into AIM They tried to do it it just didn work And for a bunch of reasons, right? Like people have tried to do ads in chat many times since, and it turns out it's just a kind of gross experience. People don't like it. Advertisers don't like it because it's like, imagine what we're talking about in AIM, and you're just gonna put like your pizza ads next to it. Like people just don't want that. So this thing starts to go away. The corporate version of it that AOL builds doesn't really go anywhere because AIM exists and people are happy to use AIM as it exists. A fun fact I learned again about the constraints breeding interesting things. Do you remember that when you would open up AIM, you had to sometimes select which port it would use to connect? No. There was like a brief, Kyle's nodding. So AOL, there were like a lot of technical limitations to the Internet at this point. And one thing that AIM built for itself was basically it would automatically hunt for a port to use in order to be able to be used. And they did this because companies didn't like all of the time that was being wasted on AIM and all the sensitive data that was being shared in AIM. So they started trying to block AIM. But the AIM team built essentially a thing that would just hunt for an open port in your network until it found one. And so it made AIM essentially unblockable and unkillable inside of companies. such a pirate ship it really was I kind of love their vibes that's just yeah it really was but so in 2002 the AIM team is about 100 people which is like nothing the company this always reminds me of is WhatsApp which is like WhatsApp took over the world with like 40 engineers AIM did essentially the same thing with about 100 people but then in 2002 AOL starts to lay this team off kind of bit by bit year after year this is also the moment where like a new generation of stuff starts to come up. Kyle, you've kind of written about this transition in your own life, so I'm curious how you think about what was happening right around that time, because this is like the beginning of social networking, it's the beginning of text messaging, like all this stuff that would be the new way we communicate was just starting to happen as AOL is just starting to kill AIM. Totally. It's like AIM created I have to take a break for a second because I always grew up saying AIM. Oh, interesting. It was never AIM. I do think both are correct. I have heard people say AIM and I have no problem with it. It was like a tomato, tomato, you know, soda pop thing, AIM versus AIM. So I just naturally say AIM. But anyway, AIM like evolved this whole culture of like real time messaging and statuses and ASCII emojis and stuff. And then I feel like that just bled everywhere else, particularly among teenagers, like as we got phones that could do SMS text messages. and we got on to places like MySpace where you could also sort your friends and express yourself in a much more multimedia way. But I think like it lost that kind of intimacy. Like AIM was about just connecting to those few handfuls of people who are right around you. And that like scaled up so much that all of a sudden we were exposed to the wider internet and could like, I don't know, reach a lot more strangers a lot more directly. Yeah. Yeah. It does seem like I was trying to remember this and I think my friend group went pretty straight from from AIM to texting. And then it wasn't really until like Facebook messaging became a big thing that we switched. Like I think a lot of people in this era sort of switched to Gchat and like we use Gchat some. But the thing on Gchat was like if you had my email address, you could you could message me. And we didn't have the sort of two way buddy list authentication thing that it was like that was like a feature of AIM that was weird for a long time. You could message anybody, but then they started to have more restrictions on it. One fun thing about AIM, by the way, one of the great features that everybody should continue to do is you could warn somebody on AIM. Do you guys remember this? If somebody was harassing you or you wanted to just stop them for whatever reason, there was a warn button. And if you warned them enough times, it would actually start to slow down their internet connection. Wow. Do you remember this? This is one of the great features of all time. It would actually start to throttle their connection to the service and eventually kick them off. So, like, the penalty for being bad on AIM was that eventually you would get kicked off of it by the internet. That rules. This is like PVP. like warfare online. Seriously. I should have used that against Duo Maxwell some sort of number that the weird harasser I had because I had a Gundam Wings screen name. Jesus like. All right. But so anyway so at this point this is really there's not that much more AIM story left. Right. AIM sticks around for 15 more years but in more or less irrelevancy. Right. Like they eventually ship AIM for mobile. They ship an AIM app that's trying to do web stuff kind of like Gchat was back in the day. They ship AIM pages, which is essentially MySpace profiles. But at this point, there's kind of nothing. It's just the cache is gone, right? Everybody has moved on to other services and other systems and other products. And AIM just kind of dwindles all the way into 2012. There are people still working on it at the company. But by 2012, they sort of rip out the last of the staff. And all that's left is like a support staff. No one is left actually building AOL Instant Messenger. and then in December of 2017 it goes offline for real and this was one of the funniest moments for me on the internet where no one had talked about AIM for 10 years and then all of a sudden they announced that AIM is going offline and everybody's like well A, that makes perfect sense. I kind of thought AIM had gone offline a long time ago but B oh my god the number of feelings this is making me feel we now need to talk about it so like I think all three of us wrote stories about the end of AIM and how sad it made us. It was also the era of tech blogging too. It was. It really was. A different internet that had rewarded all of us for being more online than our friends. Very much so. That was the seeds of our early success was being too obsessed with away messages. Yeah. So, Kyle, we've talked a little bit about the influence of it because I think there is a lot of AIM vibes still in the internet that we use. How do you look at it? Like where do you see AIM in the internet we're still on? DMs. Yeah. Like Instagram DMs are a really close, like at least emotional equivalent to AIM at this point. It's like where you actually talk to people you know and you might have like more in-depth or intimate conversations. That definitely feels like one place. And texting. I mean, to me, group chat culture, like friends thread culture is kind of underrated just as an influence and a force in the world. And that's a huge part of AIM. Like, that's where we learn to talk to each other in that way and, like, have group conversations and reply to each other and all of that stuff. One of my favorite things about the internet is I firmly believe you can still tell who grew up on AIM based on the length of messages that they send. Like, if you were on AIM, the unofficial rule of AIM was one thought per message, right? That it was like if you typed a multi-sentence AIM message, you were absolutely out of your mind. Like that was a cry for help in ways that I'm not even prepared to litigate now. So it was basically one clause per message. And there are now people who still type like that in Slack, which in a professional setting is like unhinged. But it's like it's what we do because this is how we learned how to type and talk on the Internet. It's a stream of consciousness. Right. Anytime you are going to punctuate, what you do instead is hit enter. Yeah. No, I am so guilty of that. I am the guiltiest of that. And, you know, I've had people be like, could you just type out your whole thought? And I'm like, no. But if you're a little older and your formative experience was like early days of email when everything was much slower and much more asynchronous, you learned how to write longer things. But, you know, that's also infuriating as someone who has grown up on AIM because I just see them typing forever. And I'm like, I don't have any clue what it is that you're typing. Is it good? Is it bad? I just hit enter so I can have the... So, yeah. So, one fun thing that I found about AIM and its legacy is I was trying to figure out, like, how much of the sort of next generation of services came directly from people's experience on AIM. And the answer turns out to be tons of it. Like, here's Jack Dorsey on Joe Rogan's podcast talking about the inspirations for Twitter. We got more of our roots from AOL Instant Messenger and ICQ. ICQ. Because it was, you know, you remember the status message where you said, like, I'm in a meeting or I'm listening to this music or I'm watching a movie right now. That was the inspiration. And what we took from that was being able to, like, if you could do that from anywhere, not bound to a desk, but you could do that from anywhere. And you could do it from your phone and you could just be roaming around and say, you know, I'm at Joe Rogan's studio right now. That is cool. I don't need my computer. I'm not bound to this, chained to this desk. I can do it from anywhere. I think Jack Dorsey may have fundamentally underestimated how big a change that would turn out to be. The other thing he said, and this is to your point, Kyle, earlier, is that they wanted to do it in public, right? Like, not only can you do it from anywhere, but everyone can see your away message. And he was like, this will be a good thing. Deeply debatable. There was also Mark Zuckerberg in 2017. Here's a post he wrote. He said, my friends and I spent a lot of time curating our online identities. We spent hours finding quotes for our AIM profiles that expressed how we felt and we picked just the right font and color for our messages to signal what we wanted about ourselves. I built a tool that let me send messages with the letters fading between any colors I wanted. It was simple, but it was fun to build and it made my messages look different. He talked a lot about how inspirational he found AIM, but then again said the same thing about like I wanted this to be more customizable and more public in front of other people. And that I don't think anybody understood how big a shift that thing was going to be at the time. I mean, the Facebook status was another great container of emotional expressiveness. That kind of took up where the message left off. And then when they resurfaced the memories and there was obviously that shift from your name is and then the status. And then now you look back on the time machine stuff and you're like, this makes no sense grammatically based on what statuses are now. Yes. All right. So we need to take a break. And Kyle, you need to go. But I just have one more question for you before we let you get out of here. Do you think we miss AIM or do we miss like that era of simpler times on the internet? The nostalgia for our teenage years. To some extent, those two things are kind of inextricable, right? But like when we look back at AIM, is it AIM or is it like what it was like to be that age at that time on the internet? No, I have a newfound respect for just AIM itself. Like this kind of limited one-to-one communication mechanism. I think people are still trying to reinvent that over and over and over again, including Jack Dorsey. And we're trying to like rebuild that culture of just talking to our friends online. And we go through like cycles of we want to talk to tons of people. We want to talk to very few people and back and forth. So, yeah, I kind of feel like if you could do it again now, it would still be really popular and cool if you could get that uptake and expressiveness into it. Vee, what do you think? Yeah, I think the whole everywhere all the time, like the slackness of it really gives me anxiety. But I miss AIM because it was a time and a place after school. It was like 3 to 5 p.m. really, you know, like that was a time and a place. It was people. There was like a specific culture to it. There was deciphering away messages. There was there was a feeling to it that didn't feel corporate. so maybe a little bit of nostalgia for that time in my life but that was an awkward ass anxiety ridden time of my life too i just think aim made it more um less lonely and more fun and i miss my friends in the philippines whose names i don't remember because it's been 20 years that was a good time yeah yeah i i agree and there are a bunch of little things i think kyle like you're saying about aim in particular that it just got right like why in god's name do we not have away messages in in every messaging app that exists right like even apple has sort of added the thing you can see at the bottom where it's like so and so has notifications silenced yeah and it's like that's that's a step towards the right thing but like customize it yeah like we should have that kind of control i should be able to tell you why i don't want your messages right now i should be able to put hands down by dashboard confessional in that message and instagram added that to stories There's like tiny little bits of text that you can see in the DM window or whatever. So we're just chasing the dream. All right, Kyle, thank you for joining us. Yeah, this is so fun. Memory land. We're going to take a break and then we're going to come back. We're going to do the version history questions. We'll be right back. All right, we're back. V, it's just you and me now. We're going to do the version history questions. These are the eight questions we ask about every product we cover. The first one is where does AIM fit on the time matrix? The time matrix is idea versus time. Right idea, right time. Wrong idea, wrong time. Or somewhere in between. We got four quadrants. Where does it belong? So I think aim is just very clearly the right idea at the right time for me. I'm honestly with you. I think it is like the top right corner. I think if you're AOL, it is the wrongest possible idea at the right time. You know what I mean? Yeah, no, for sure. You can make a non-crazy argument that AIM's success is a big part of what killed AOL. No, it definitely is. Because instead of luring people into the walled garden, it actually pulled them out of it. Pulled you out. No, I was actually thinking about that earlier in the episode just because it's like at the time where things shifted, because I could have AIM and my buddy list still, I didn't need to be in AOL anymore because AOL was starting to be lame. But I think for our purposes, I don't care about AOLs. corporate it was the right idea at the right time given everything we knew before and after even if you move it like a few years up or a few years back it doesn't hit the same way it was the right thing at the right time it was exact the exact moment yeah it's like the universe was like now is the era of aim okay question number two was aim peak anything yes it was peak romance it was peak puberty it was certainly peak puberty for it was for a whole generation of people actually i got my first ever uh significant other through aim whoa that was my first romance whatever tell us everything so peak v peak it was my peak first valentine's because my crush at the time i am'd me and was like hey what's your homeroom and i was like oh my homeroom 7s no seriously what the room and i was like oh it this room he like what your favorite flower and I was like oh this this thing I was like cool I don know what happening I was very dumb I was gonna say that's not like a stealthy exchange no it was not stealthy but I was very dumb because like it was peak emotional damage is what it was because my middle school crush one time was like so there's a thing and I think you're cute door slamming noise and I was like what was he was he telling the truth what's happening and then denied it the next thing and there's no chat history so i was like did that motherfucker gaslight that's rough so you know was it their friend that did that and then signed like that's tough that's tough so it was peak emotional damage it was peak romance it was peak um friend drama it was peak puberty it was peak puberty it was peak puberty it was peak away message for sure peak away message nobody has ever done away messages as well before or since Yeah, no, peak buddy list, peak status, just peak everything. Peak usage of song lyrics to communicate emotions? Peak usage of song lyrics. That is the most I've ever- Peak dashboard confessional, for sure. Peak incubus. Something corporate. Good Charlotte. Peak, peak, peak. This was like right at the moment where like deeply angsty punk rock music was everywhere. And those two things needed each other. It's a perfect symbiosis. I have never thought about song lyrics quite as hard ever since because I don't have to put it in an away message. Yeah. All right. Question number three. This is actually, I think, a fun one for this particular episode. If you could time travel back and take over AIM yourself, could you make it more successful? I don't think I could. No? Okay. I have a couple of ideas about how I think it could have made AIM more successful. Again, if I'm AOL, the clear answer is embrace AIM. Yes. Make it the gateway drug into AOL and suddenly you have something. But I think there's a world in which AIM could have figured out mobile way faster. Because, again, part of me is like, you know, it's an unfair thing to expect them to do. But also, like, turn of the century, it was, like, pretty clear phones were going to be a thing. Yeah. Right? And, like, BlackBerry starts poking at BBM. Like, Google Talk and all this stuff doesn't come for a few more years. But like the signs were there enough that if they had wanted to push for we want to make this a thing you can do everywhere. They could have done it. You could have. The other option I would give you, and this is a story we haven't really gotten into, is AIM was built on this protocol called OSCAR, which was, it's an acronym. But it doesn't really matter what it was. But the idea was it was an actual sort of documented protocol with an SDK. and so one of the things that AIM had going for it was that you could use lots of other apps to talk to your AIM friends, right? This is like Trillion was big, Pigeon was big. There were a lot of ways to like- I haven't thought of Pigeon in forever. Oh my God, yeah. And one of the things that those apps let you do was chat to people across messaging apps, right? So you could use Trillion was the one that I used to have like your MSN friends and your AIM friends and other services all in one place and that became very powerful. The AIM team gets in this big protracted fight with these other things. They were okay with the third-party apps that let you talk to your AIM friends. But one way that Microsoft bootstrapped MSN Messenger was by just reverse engineering AIM so that you could talk to your AIM friends through MSN. And AIM did not like this because they wanted you to use AIM. I think there's a world in which AIM could have essentially positioned itself as like a semi-open messaging protocol, which wouldn't have been crazy, right? Because this is a team of renegades inside of a company. Like they're clearly not spending their time worrying about the giant business here. But there is like, if you think of AIM as like not an app they were trying to build, but like as an infrastructure, it could have been something. That could have been something for sure. Like, and if you take that and somehow combine it with the mobile, we could still be using AIM today. And there's a way to make that solve a lot of the messaging problems we eventually got. Because what we got, right, is there was, it was Oscar and then there was this other protocol called XMPP. And everybody just stopped using those, right? Because they weren't powerful enough. They didn't have enough features. And so, like, Facebook goes off and builds its own messaging universe. Google goes off and builds its own messaging universe. WhatsApp builds its own universe. Slack builds its own universe. Like, we don't have. Now we have too many apps. We have way too many apps. And we don't have any kind of, like, common infrastructure for messaging. and the fact that there isn't just an IM protocol on the internet is dumb and bad. Yeah, it's bad. And if I'm running the AIM team, it's like we're going down, we're all getting fired. We are going to open source this fool. I'm with you now. That I think would have made it way more successful and would have solved the fact that I have like 14 chat apps on my phone. Yeah, it's a real like layoffs are coming tomorrow. Let's give this to everybody and be heroes. You know what I mean? Like that's the speech I'm giving to the team on the way out. Yeah. Yeah. It would have been great. Get that time machine, David. Fix my chat situation. We could all still be hearing the door noise every time our friends come offline. All right. Question number four. Will the youth ever make it cool again? No. It's dead. It's just dead. I think that's right. It's just dead dead. It's on the millennials to make it cool again and bring it back and revive it. Not the youth. The youth don't care. They're just tick tocking. Yeah, I don't, I think in a weird way, the idea of having like a single place I talk to my friends is like so far gone that now it's like if you're, I think Snapchat is probably the closest thing now in terms of like if you're, if you're 14, where do you talk to your friends? I think the answer is like overwhelmingly Snapchat. Or it depends on what country you're in even. Because here I think it's Snapchat, but in Korea everyone's on KakaoTalk and it's just like this one super app where everything lives and it's just your whole life in one app. Right, and that's like WeChat in China. There are a bunch of examples of that. I think it's so fragmented that the youth just don't know what it was like to be in one place at the same time. The internet's just too big for it now. It's too big. It's way too big. And now that's why we have cursed things like TikTok. I will say if we can find a way to make it cool to have CD-ROMs that let you get on the internet I don't know how we do that but it feels great. I miss having 400 AOL CDs in my mailbox. Yeah what if the internet just randomly showed up in your mailbox every once in a while? Like let's get back to that. You know what I mean? And then when you run out of hours oh no no more internet. I think we need that. I think we do. This is what I'm saying. Alright question number five. This one I have a very clear answer to. What feature of AIM should every current messaging app have? The door closing noise. It's actually a good idea. I think we need to traumatize a whole new generation of them talking to their crush, them saying something, and then, or you messaging them, and then the door noise. So that you can just, like, hear, see that, and then go, turn around, and you're in your head, and just sadness. I think every teenager needs to go through that. It'll build character. I agree with that. You message your friend, and they immediately go offline. Immediately go offline. Everyone should know how horrible that feels. Yeah. Yeah, because now the thing is like you send a text message and you get the red message and you don't get a reply back. That's the equivalent. It's not nearly as dramatic as the door closing in your face. No. Okay, but to that point, actually, there are two that I would do. One is the away message. Like I sincerely believe everything needs an away message that is just it just pops up and is like, I'm not here. But the other thing, and this is kind of a spin on what you were just saying, is I think you need to be able to go offline in such a way that makes messages undeliverable. Like I should make it so not that I get a bunch of texts from you when I come back, but that you can't message me because I'm not here. Right. There is this thing like even now, like if you sign off of Slack, I can still Slack you. Yes. You won't see it. You won't get notifications. But the messages will be there waiting for you when you come back. We know as the wearables reviewer, even if I sign off here, it's coming here. I mean, true. It's coming somewhere. But like we've lost this idea to just be like, you actually can't communicate with me because I'm not here. Yeah. If I turn off my phone, I'm going to get a bunch of your text messages when. But if I was offline on AIM, you couldn't message me. No, no. That needs to come back. Do you know how great that is? That needs to come back. We both have to agree that we are going to talk in order for us to talk. And if I'm not here, you can't just shout things through my window. Like I'm not here. And I think we need more tools like that. I think so too. Not just to stack stuff up for when we get back, but to say, if you want to talk to me, talk to me when I get back. I'm not here. I think that would be better for everyone's mental health. So yes, bring that back. Not just status messages, but let me sign off. Yeah, I'm not here right now. Bye-bye. Yeah. Silencing notifications does not solve that problem. It doesn't work. Yeah. All right. Now we have three more questions. These are the Version History Hall of Fame criteria questions. and in order to get in, any product has to pass all three of these questions. Question number one, did this product do something truly new? Yes, because before we had email and email was slow and email was revolutionary. There are a bunch of ICQ fans who just started screaming at you. I will just say. That's fine. They screamed at me 20, 30 years ago. They can scream at me now. That was not an ICQ girl, but everybody I knew was on AIM. So it did do something truly new in the sense. was ICQ playing door slamming noises? Sure wasn't. No. Was it ruining my mental health as a teenager? No. Was it fostering romance? No. Did ICQ inspire Mark Zuckerberg to think about song lyrics that he was going to put into things? No. Did ICQ lead to the cursedness that was social media right now? No. So I think AIM did new things. So I was originally going to argue that it didn't because there were messaging apps before. But I think the thing I've realized in this conversation is that there's something to the whole thought of AIM that made it different. Because it wasn't just a chat app, right? The profiles were really important. The away messages were really important. The buddy list system was really important. And without that particular combination of things, you do just get like a every other messaging app kind of messaging app forums and chat right there were lots of ways to type words to another person but aim was like a social experience it was a social network in a very real way it's the precursor to how we do social networks now like friend lists like arguably friend lists came from buddy lists oh yeah we just changed it to the word friend and the concept of friending someone online that's you used to just have to go to like a chat forum or a channel or whatnot and now you have a personalized friend list that's yours and the cultivation of that is just like a thing that you think about and crazy it's like this cultural social construct so I think that yeah that's new I think for the internet at that point in time I think you're right yeah I yeah I'm I'm I'm good with it question number two was it either remarkably good or remarkably bad remarkably good was it no but it was like was it a good product or was it just exactly the thing that we needed do you know what i mean exactly the thing that we needed and i argue that it makes it good because if it was remarkably bad we would be talking about it in a different way not with this like i'm back into this period of my life and i'm thinking of it through this nostalgia filter like i i feel like you only feel that way about things that make you, I don't know, just long for a period of time. Like I don't long for bad things in my life. You know, like I don't go back, oh yeah, I remember the time where everything went to hell and I was losing weight because this dipshit stomped all over my heart. I don't think you long for those times, but you go and I look back and I have such an incredible love and fondness for AIM, so much so that I wrote an essay called I Miss AIM. So yeah, I think it was good. remarkably good yeah i'm torn lob stop like these are fundamental things in my life i mean that's that's fair that is hard to argue with yeah i think there's a there's a much more complex version of this about aol as a whole i think you could really struggle to make a case that aol was ever remarkably good as a whole no uh but this thing was free it was pretty reliable it was pretty fast it did the damn job. To your point, you could warn people and throttle their internet. Speaking of features, I'd like to add, I would like to be able to shut off other people's internet connections. Yes, please. For bad behavior. You need to touch grass. We can just change it from the warn to the touch grass button. Yeah. There you go. This is bad news because this thing is about to get into the Hall of Fame. This is the easiest one. Criteria number three, did it have a lasting impact? Yes. Yes, it did. It did. I think this is the this is the clearest one to me. I mean, obviously, we've been waxing poetic about puberty and all of these times in our lives that it like lives rent free in your head. So, of course, it had a lasting impact. It has a whole chapter in the history of instant messaging. So, yeah, I mean, I think truly like Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg answer that question. Right. Like none of the rest of this happens the way that it did if it were not for the whole generation growing up on him. The yellow running man. It just was. All right. You talked me into it. Thank you. The Hall of Fame, I worry we're going to end up just putting all the things we liked when we were 13 into the Hall of Fame. So we're going to have to try not to do that. Is that so bad? But I liked this so much when I was 13. I loved that. This was my whole life when I was that age. You know, so many of my fundamental, like, core personality memories come from AIM. Like, it's just forever. I will forever miss it. All right. I will forever miss AIM. Well, Aime, welcome to the Version History Hall of Fame. Thank you again to Vee and Kyle for being here. And thank you, as always, for watching and listening. If you want to support this and all of the stuff that we're doing, the best thing you can do is subscribe to The Verge. Theverge.com, it's a good website. Subscribe. You can get all of our podcasts ad-free and lots of other good stuff. Subscribe to The Verge. We're doing our best. We will be back with more Version History very soon. We'll see you next time. Version History is a production of The Verge and the Vox Media Podcast Network. The show is produced by Victoria Barrios, River Branson, Eric Gomez, Owen Grove, Brandon Kiefer, Travis Larchuk, Andrew Marino, and Alex Barkin. Our editorial director is Kevin McShane. Studio support from Matthew Hefford. Our theme music is composed by Brandon McFarland. Be sure to follow the Virgin History podcast feed to get all of our new episodes as soon as they arrive. And to support everything that we do here at The Verge and get access to ad-free podcasts, including this one, subscribe to The Verge. you