Is it me? Am I less popular and connected? Is it AIM? Is it less used now because of social networking and texting? I don’t know.
What I do know is that when I fought a friend today on AIM Fight, I had about 440,000 connections and was ranked the 17,000th or so most connected individual on the network. I am still top 5 percent of all users, I am proud to say.
Five years ago, I would be ranked at over 1 million connections.Either my friends are dying off in record number; people have deleted me from their buddy lists; or AIM is losing simultaneous usage which is very sad to see.
Go to AIM Fight and duel me. I am Leonsis. Use your AIM screen name and take me on. Go for it! I think you could probably beat me now.
how would you do in a tweet brawl
I forgot to mention my score was a (pathetic) 939.
With a multi-protocol client like Pidgin or Meebo or Trillian (or Adium, etc), I really don’t have to know what network someone is on. I just click their name and chat… So I have no idea whether people are still using AIM to chat with me, because I don’t care. What drove me to the multi-protocol clients, and away from the native AIM client? At first it wasn’t the other protocols. It was the advertisements in AIM, some of which used AUDIO, which I found unacceptable.
Additionally, the population that started off being such heavy AIM users are now mostly 30 somethings who have sold out to the man… i.e., they are in corporate white-collar jobs. Most corporate networks specifically block AIM, or at the very least they use BlueCoat to eavesdrop on it. Hence, if they want to chat with their friends, they use GTalk, or Facebook (yuck), or just Meebo through an anonymizing proxy…
Any way you slice it, AIM has lost a large chunk of it’s utility and as a result – it’s market share. Back when it was the only game in town, I was an addict. Now I use AIM interchangeably with *goes and checks* YIM, GTalk/XMPP, MSN, ICQ, SameTime, and Blackberry Messenger.
I care more about communicating than about the medium on which I communicate.
The rise of gchat has caused AIM to lose hundreds of thousands of users. I still use both, but many of my friends now only use GChat. Hopet his helps Ted.
I recently downloaded AIM on my new laptop. I enjoy FB, but the chat service is slow and leaves a lot to be desired. My friends and I still jump onto AIM if we need to talk in length.
Ted,
You’re a great hockey owner. You will bring a Stanley Cup to Washington.
Heck, you’ll be the guy that gets Arenas out of DC. You’ll probably bring an NBA title to DC.
You should consider buying out Snyder and sending him outof town too.
But, you gotta realize that AOL was so 1990′s at best.
While I have never partaken in the AIM Fight, I can say that I too, have noticed the drop in AIM users, recently. I believe that with about 90% of the people I know using gchat from Google’s email service or the fact that like Joey has pointed out, Facebook so cleverly added the chat option, more and more people are using those options. For me, I prefer these other instant messaging chat options because they are already embedded into whatever website I am using, so there is no need to open up a new program. (That, and AIM does not come readily available on Mac computers, so I have taken to the Mac’s version, iChat.)
I also feel that perhaps Twitter is the latest substitute for instant messaging. Instead of talking to your friends and family in real-time in private connections, people have been taking social networking to the extreme. No longer are “private” conversation in. Now, the mass broadcasting of how you are feeling or what you are doing, is in vogue.
With this being said, the few rare times I have gone back to using IM, I have also found that many of my friends have also completely given up with it. Frequently I find that those left on my buddy list either are forever idle or away, or are people I haven’t talked to in ages, so starting up a conversation now, might seem random or strange.
Happy Birthday Ted!!!
And Elvis.
I used AIM heavily through 1999-2004 but like the other poster said, after FB, MySpace, Twitter, Skype, etc., etc. came out and 95% of individuals had a cell phone in this country, AIM lost it’s unique purpose for me. Getting in touch with others via the web isn’t what it used to be. In my experience, AOL members account for 2% or less of the internet/email users I am in contact with personally or professionally.
Ted,
I think the rise of Gmail has seriously cut into the number of people using AIM. Gchat is so convenient, and it has the somewhat added bonus of not making people feel like they are chatting since it is just there when they open their mail.
The only thing I currently use AIM for is to send in questions to the Caps Report.
Hi Ted,
I think it’s actually AIM. I can’t use it (or Facebook, for that matter) at work; a lot of workplaces block that sort of thing these days, and a lot of folks use other methods at home. Skype comes to mind – it has chat, and video chat, and allows you to make phone calls and talk face-to-face like a teleconference without charging fees… good stuff! Definitely, the “at work” firewalls have something to do with it, too…
~S
AIM’s days as the big kid on the instant messaging block are over, though I still use it. We use AIM to communicate in my company and it’s helpfully integrated into Trillian, Google Chat and other third party services.
I can’t believe that it was 10 years ago that, as a prospective college freshman, I preemptively registered the AIM usernames for each school I had applied to: BostonCollege04, Emory04, etc. Sure that is nerdy, but it’s also a testament to how ubiquitous the service was.
It started with simple SMS on phones … Mobile AIM was always lacking versus the PC versions and when the kids could just text directly that was all she wrote!
AIM has been dying off ever since it competed with Facebook. Facebook can become an instant messenger, but AIM cannot become a social networking site. Though I am a fan of their new branding attempt, especially the little’ blue cookie monster character I have seen around.
i have to agree with joey above……I havent even logged into my aim in almost a year. No offense Ted but I prefer Google Talk….
AIM Fight is an excellent name and Web page design for such people as gamers but why not make AIM Fight available in a few other wrappers? There are many influential enthusiasts who might be turned off by AIM Fight but might go for such a softer sell both in name and graphic presentation (Me Versus U, for example).
I think creating a base of people who view the IM platform as independent of any other social media, measure themselves against others, and take an active daily interest in how they stack up is a dog with plenty of hunt.
Actually,it seems to me gateway of the one thing you most need in IM, which is to be the one platform that people always think to boot up first. That’s no longer Microsoft Office for many.
What would seem a shame is ceding the IM market to such non-IM-centric offerings as Facebook, Skype, Twitter, and Google Wave. Simply, I do not think any of those entities are prepared to help people understand what could be accomplished through permission-based, follow-and-follow relationships, how much writing and reading could be eliminated through effective use of symbols on IM platforms, and the personal insight that could be gained by being able to run your own customized and real-time surveys of significant, anonymous sample groups.
I think AIM and most instant messengers have been made obsolete since the rise of social networking sites. People spend most of their time on Facebook, which has a messenger with it. I’ll admit that I got a new computer and decided not to install AIM since I never see anyone online.