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Third-party applications allowed it to be used in 2002 for the Sidekick. Official mobile versions of AIM appeared as early as 2001 on Palm OS through the AOL application.
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This does not include other instant messaging software related to or developed by AOL, such as ICQ and iChat. At one time, the software had the largest share of the instant messaging market in North America, especially in the United States (with 52% of the total reported as of 2006 ). AIM was an outgrowth of "online messages" in the original platform written in PL/1 on a Stratus computer by Dave Brown.
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In May 1997, AIM was released unceremoniously as a stand-alone download for Microsoft Windows.

In June 2017, Verizon combined AOL and Yahoo into its subsidiary Oath Inc. In June 2015, AOL was acquired by Verizon Communications. Its fall has often been compared with other once-popular Internet services, such as Myspace. AIM's popularity declined as AOL subscribers started decreasing and steeply towards the 2010s, as Gmail's Google Talk, SMS, and Internet social networks, like Facebook gained popularity. Teens and college students were known to use the messenger's away message feature to keep in touch with friends, often frequently changing their away message throughout a day or leaving a message up with one's computer left on to inform buddies of their ongoings, location, parties, thoughts, or jokes.
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Then again, AOL went from being one of the largest tech companies in the world, with a market value of $224 billion and annual revenue of $9.5 billion in 2000, to a being a company that was sold for parts to a telephone company in 2015 for $4.4 billion.Microsoft Windows, Windows Mobile, macOS, Android, iOS, BlackBerry OS, Android TVĪIM ( AOL Instant Messenger) was an instant messaging and presence computer program created by AOL, which used the proprietary OSCAR instant messaging protocol and the TOC protocol to allow registered users to communicate in real time.ĪIM was popular by the late 1990s, in United States and other countries, and was the leading instant messaging application in that region into the following decade. That the program has existed so long after its heyday is surprising in and of itself. It was like Twitter before Twitter.ĪIM’s popularity started to decline when Gmail and others offered built-in chatting functions-and plummeted when smartphones took off. Some put up facts ( mom needs the computer), others put up song lyrics they identified with, and others put up messages to alert friends about the actions of other friends. Users could set away messages-perhaps when they finally relinquished the computer to someone else in the family-which became a whole separate way of communicating on the app.


Users could chat with friends privately or in public chatrooms, which was probably the first experience many had interacting with strangers on the internet. It was released as a standalone chat program that any Windows user could download in 1997, and AIM took off. There would have been no inspiration for services like WhatsApp, Twitter, or Facebook without these predecessors: The people that built these networks grew up when AIM was the primary method of internet communication for the first generation that had connected computers from a young age.ĪIM had started out as a built-in chat function in the AOL Desktop, the combined web browser/media player for dial-up customers of America Online (of which there are still 2 million customers in 2017, somehow). Services like AIM, and others, such as MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, and ICQ, laid the groundwork for the messaging apps and social networks we now all use.
