AIM Was Perfect, and Now It Will Die
A eulogy for the chatting service, which will shut down on December 15

“How did AIM work?” you ask. It was like GChat or iMessage, but you could only do it from a desktop computer. (Since we didn’t have smartphones back then, its desktop-delimitedness was self-explanatory.) You could set lengthy status messages with animated icons in them. And iconic alert noises played at certain actions: the door opening squeak when someone logged on, the door closing click when they logged off, the boodleoop for every new message.
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We made our first attempts, on AIM, of transfiguring our mysterious and unpredictable thoughts into lively and personable textual performances. We were witty and dramatic. We invented our online selves—we invented ourselves.
We got bored. Myspace and Xanga helped us set up temporary and ramshackle museums of our tastes. Then Facebook came along, with all the frisson of “only college students use it,” and we drifted there. Its pseudo-maturity and time-delayed interactions allured us. Our AIM status messages went to Facebook instead: It was where we mourned the end of the field-hockey season or the final showing of the winter musical. We posted photos of each other on Facebook and liked them and commented on them—but sometimes still chatted about them on AIM. We posed homework questions to each others’ walls. We posted subtweety openings as our Facebook status, hoping our crush would comment there instead. Eventually Facebook had its own chat product too, and it made more sense to use that, or Gchat, or to just text.
So now, on December 15, AIM will leave us forever. “AIM is signing off for the last time,” said the product team in a tweet on Friday. “Thanks to our buddies for making chat history with us!”
AIM showed us how to live online, for good and for ill. We all live our whole lives in text chains and group threads now. We plan every hangout, we send every news article, we proclaim every relationship in the river of text it taught us to sail. Honestly, that river has been a little scary lately. Instant messaging, once a special thrill, now sets the texture of our common life. But AIM taught us how to live online first. So AIM, my old buddy, don’t feel bad if you see us shedding a tear. We know what you have to do. For we’ll see you waving from such great heights—
“Come down now,” we’ll say.
But everything looks perfect from far away.
“Come down now,” but you’ll stay.
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Comment: nikobakos@gmail.com
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