All of us could probably name technologies that have been abandoned over the past couple of years, a decade or so, without much difficulty. As new crap comes out and we jump from bandwagon to bandwagon, most cool stuff that comes out is completely forgotten within a few years, until a post like this kicks the dirt back up and brings them back into the conversation.
I was playing Starcraft 2 with a stranger and it reminded me of my younger years of playing Starcraft 1. Only this time I was lagging because my computer sucked and couldn’t run SC2 very well, as opposed to a decade ago when it lagged because I was using dialup. Who here ever had a 28baud modem? Pretty sure a few of the older guys have.
Anyone remember Compuserve? It was just a small chunk of the web trend of 1995-2000 before broadband was available to even the most remote locations in the Louisiana swamp; the web trend of portals, where you “dialed in” and received a big list of channels to check out, before things like going straight to websites was a cool thing to do.
But I digress.
What I’ve realized over the past year is the complete abandonment of Instant Messaging. When I (we) first got an Internet connection, probably from a shitty company like AOL, the main selling point was email and instant messaging. While email is still in use for obvious reasons, IMing people seems to have died completely. The first thing it would do when you signed into any portal, be it AOL, Compuserve, NetZero, etc, was your buddy list would pop up (or you would open the standalone AIM client).
While this may still be standard practice for me, or maybe just a force of habit, the difference is simple: nobody is ever online. As it stands, I have 111 friends on my AIM list:
- 93 are completely offline
- 8 are available via AIM text message forwarding
- 4 away
- 3 idle
- 3 online and active (one not answering me back)
Facebook and other social networking and micro-conversations (like Twitter updates, wall posts, and post comments) have completely replaced online conversation. If I find something cool and want to share it instantly, no one is even there to receive it, and I could get it out in the open faster by just posting it on Facebook.
It’s a sad time, actually. I remember when I’d be juggling 10 ongoing conversations at a time, and doing nothing else. Now, to even reach somebody on AIM is a long shot. I’d be better off mailing them a letter.
Since writing the last two paragraphs, there is now only one person online. I don’t know why, but I actually miss the days of talking to people on AIM without it being a three second pointless conversation. I guess I just need to get with the times.
aim · instant messaging
Author comment by yeahforbes · April 26, 2010 at 7:43 am
I vividly remember the day that I decided to stop using AIM. I was a sophomore in college, sitting in my room watching conversation after conversation pop up with “hey” or “hi,” or if they were leet enough, maybe even “sup.” Hoping that they had something neat to share, or at least something to share — or hell, even needed free tech support or whatever other crap I could procrastinate on my assignments with — I would reply with “what’s up?” But every single time, or at least most of the time, the inevitable showed up on my screen: “nm.” Great. Just wonderful. Here I am, giving up my precious screen real estate for, well, nothing much.
That’s what it had come to be. A whole not of nothing. Right then and there, I realized that whenever my phone would ring, or even when a text would come through, never ever was it for nothing; instead, something. Preferring somethings over nothings, I whimsically decided that I was done with AIM. I promptly uninstalled it within mere seconds of signing off, after 98% uptime for the past who-knows-how-many years.
I cannot truthfully say that I have never looked back. I must admit that I’ve signed on perhaps 4 or 5 times since, but for a combined duration of about that many minutes. Just to see if anybody had an alert waiting for me due to not having any other contact info and wondering why I fell off the face of the earth. No such thing came, so that was it.
Then Gmail Chat weaseled its way into my life. Leave it to Google to assume you need a new service just because it exists. There are about 4 people that have ever messaged me through it, never for nothing, and always for something. Joey-0 and I have come to use it regularly because a webmail site is one of the few time wasters her boss considers unoffensive. The chat window is disguised very nicely among the email stuff.
And there you have it.
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