Tag Archives: AIM

As Karl Marx Said…

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“The more sophisticated the machine, the more barbaric the worker.”

I had one of those ”Aha moments” last week. I was at an airport and went through security. I had an iPod with Bose headphones; a cell phone; a Treo to do AOL email; a Kindle to read; and a Sony laptop with wireless modem. I had five chargers with me. When I checked into my hotel room, I ended up using three different sockets to recharge my devices. My briefcase weighs a ton. My doctor believes this is how I got tennis elbow from carrying my bag with my left arm.

I now have to check my three offices for voicemail messages; my Caps account for email; my AOL account for email; my Facebook account for email; I get messages on AIM and on Facebook; and I get messages on my cell phone.

What have we done to ourselves? :-)

Signs

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You know you have been online too long when:

  • You can’t add anyone new to your AOL address book. The pre-set limit is 5,000 and I have reached it. This morning I had to go into my address book and delete a bunch of names.
  • You reach 5,000 friends on Facebook. I bet I will reach that number in less than a year as I am already closing in on 3,000 “friends”. I made a mistake in that I add friends with the criterion that we have at least five mutual friends in common. Well, guess what? As the denominator gets bigger, the chances of our network being interconnected increases geometrically. Hence, I have lots of friends now on Facebook.
  • You are still in the top 5 percent of connected individuals on AIM Fight even though your friends are getting older and aren’t as connected as much and use Facebook messaging more and more and AIM less and less.

Reminds Me of Issues Around Opening AIM to Interoperability

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Check out this article. Same issues, same optics and same concerns.

In hindsight, what would have been different for the industry had we opened AIM to interoperate with other IM services? Would AOL have been better served?  How about consumers? Probably so on both counts.

I believe that open is better than closed; supersetting is better than individual efforts; and nothing bad can happen if you do the right thing for a customer. I hope Facebook lives and learns and is listening for those who don’t learn from history will be doomed to repeat it.