It’s Time To Kill AIM And Pay SMS
Generally speaking, I have a variety of chat programs open at any given time on a variety of platforms. At home in the evening, I usually have my media server (which doubles as an internet terminal) on, as well as my MacBook Pro. The chances are that there is a GMail window open on either the server or the Mac. Additionally, I have iChat almost always running on the Mac. On top of that, on my iPhone, I’m usually running BeeJive. As a result, I usually get a few error messages associated, not with not knowing how to run a computer, but with running too many instances. The biggest offender is AIM (AOL Instant Messenger), which, as anyone with multiple GMail instances open knows, bugs the user with alerts that there are multiple AIM instances running.
AIM is a classic piece of Nineties tech. It launched in 1997 and quickly became the dominant chat program, displacing ICQ (pronounced “I Seek You”). AIM would link to your AOL Buddy List, meaning that if all you wanted to do was IM people, you didn’t have to run AOL. Several features were added over the years (file sending, photo sending) but, honestly, except for less than a half-dozen new features and a long-delayed UI updating, AIM now looks like AIM then. iChat within a year of its 2003 launch, was touting AIM compatibility. At the end of 2007, ten years after AIM’s launch, Google was touting AIM compatibility in Google Talk. And open-source programs like Adium and Gaim also have AIM compatibility. The question is why?
AIM is stale. Compatibility is sketchy at best with the frequent inability to file send between AIM clients (file-sending between iChat and AIM is a crap-shoot). But most irksome is the chronic notifications of multiple instances. In 1997, a household probably had one computer and that computer was connected to the internet via either 2-wire or 4-wire telephone cable on a 56k baud connection. Now, more than a decade later, a household may have upwards of a half-dozen connections to the web when you factor in mobile phones. Discouraging multiple instances is a dead concept on a dead platform made by a dead company. And yet AIM is a zombie of the internet. It should be dead and it won’t die.
Texting is a product of the Nineties, as in it began in 1990 and slowly grew throughout the decade. Twenty years after its birth, it is the most widely used mobile data service worldwide. And yet it is still constrained to 160 characters. Now, we have mobile chat clients on our smartphones. The iPhone has BeeJive (if you haven’t installed BeeJive, do it; it’s worth the $10). Android, not requiring app-store approval, also has a variety of chat programs; so does BlackBerry. Texting, it seems, is no longer all that relevant. In a smartphone world, it’s dead tech. We’re still using only 160 characters and, most of all, we’re being charged through the nose for the privilege of it.
And in a cruel instance of gouging the customer, AT&T is now requiring people with certain phones to also have a text plan too. This is simply absurd. It’s bad enough that customers get gouged when it comes to texting (the actual cost is negligible). But to force dead tech on customers, that’s egregious.
It’s time for these zombies to be put down. To AOL – either actually overhaul the AIM protocol or sell it to someone who will. I’m sure that Google would be happy to take it and your Buddy Lists off your cold, dead hands. And to AT&T (and it’s evil step-sister Verizon), start giving away texting for free to people with smartphones with unlimited data plans. I know there are unlimited texting plans that you can buy but a smartphone shouldn’t need an SMS plan.
