Here’s the start of a group chat with a couple of my best friends: ![]() They don’t exactly make me swell with pride, but they do at least highlight the comforting persistence of immaturity. Later, when I did have friends, we had conversations that are, of course, wincingly embarrassing a decade-plus later. In middle school, when I didn’t have a lot of friends, I was tempted to create fake friends with fake initials and reference the crazy nights we’d never had: “HEY AzK RAR and EL AMB GOC BWP AND JMA AHE BMF GCE and the rest of the TANGERINE CREW!!!! REMEMBER: DON’T EAT ALL THE CHOCOLATE!!!!! IF WE GET SEPERATED MEET AT THE TENTACLES!!! AND DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES MESS WITH JADE’S MOM’S WASHING MACHINE!!!!!!!!!! LOL” When I think about AIM, most of my memories have to do with early-adolescent growing pains, with exclusion and belonging. You could gossip or flirt or make plans to see a movie. Instant messaging was no longer a novelty, but a daily activity. We were too young for anything untoward to happen at that point, but there was a powerful thrill to the idea that, at the end of the other line, there was a Girl We Didn’t Know.īy the time I was 12, we all had AIM, and we mostly used it to talk with real-life friends. I’d sit at my keyboard or look over a friend’s shoulder while we made stupid jokes in the Kid’s Zone or whatever it was called, trying to convince “girls” (i.e., men in windowless vans) to join us in a private IM chat session. My earliest online-chat experiences were in elementary school, in the O.K. AIM just doesn’t have much of a niche anymore. Most of today’s popular chat programs-Facebook Messenger and Google Chat-are seamlessly integrated into bigger and more useful services. You might ask, so what? Granted, AIM is a bit of a relic. ![]() The company is claiming that the 15-year-old chat service isn’t going anywhere, but the tech blogs know better. The New York Times reported earlier this week that AOL had eviscerated its instant-messaging unit, laying off all of its developers, leaving behind only support staff. I went back to visit them because of the recent announcement that AIM is on its last legs. And while it’s embarrassing to admit, after more than a decade, after an endless procession of new computers and graduations and job changes and moves up and down the I-95 corridor, my old AIM chat logs are still there, socked away in a random folder deep in the recesses of my hard drive. I am speaking, of course, of my old AOL Instant Messenger handle.
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