AOL officially shuts down its AOL Instant Messenger (AIM), the iconic chat service which was launched in 1997 and was popular in the year 2000s.
Having announced the news back in October 2017, AIM is seen as a long-running instant messenger service that was once the first online experience for many people on the internet.
AOL acknowledges that people in the modern internet communicate in many new ways. With the likes of WhatsApp, Facebook, Messenger and others, desktop messaging has been replaced to apps on mobiles. AIM can never compete.
Michael Albers, VP of Communications Product at Oath (Verizon subsidiary which owns both AOL and Yahoo!), said that he understands how important AIM was to many people.
AIM started the trend of screenname and people curating messages carefully, managing and organizing buddy lists. It was in the late 1990’s when the world had never seen anything like it.
It was around 2011 when AIM started to rapidly lose popularity, partly due to the Gmail and its built-in real-name Google Chat instant messenger integration. Around that time, many people also started to use SMS text messaging, and later social media networks.
In June 2011, AIM market share collapsed to less than 1 percent, and it was in 2012 that AIM started to lay off its development staffs.
