【Watch Power】

Long before we had umpteen different online profiles,Watch Power there was AIM.

In the heady days of 1997, when AOL Instant Messenger came into the world, there was nothing else like it. Conceived within the hallowed halls of AOL, AIM introduced a large swath of early internet consumers to an idea that would be seized on by any number of multi-billion-dollar companies: You, but online.

Twenty years later, there's still something about AIM. It came out just as average consumers were starting to get online en masse. And instead of presenting users with another random message board where one might converse with strangers, AIM was about connecting with IRL friends through your curated "buddy list" — an idea so singular, AOL even patented it.

Images from the patent for the buddy list. Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

It's hard to properly communicate how advanced this was for the time. This was when email was still new to most people. Text messaging was years away. Hell, cell phones were still a newfangled thing and Google was a year away from being founded.

I loved AIM. As a shy 13-year-old, AIM offered a way to keep up with people without having to actually talkto them. Before AIM, you had no choice — you either got on the phone, or you lost touch. AIM also served as a place to hang out and see who else was "around." It was socially casual in a way we'd never seen. And you could be yourself, because your AIM buddies were also your buddies offline, too. This was never a hive of anonymous souls; it was never about communicating with other random strangers as one might in chat rooms or on message boards.

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Then the game truly changed: AIM introduced user profiles and the custom "away" message, which let people automatically respond with a preset message even if they weren't online. Outside of the phone book, the average person in the late '90s didn't have much of a searchable presence, but away messages and profiles on AIM changed that overnight. Suddenly, everyone could know your favorite Our Lady Peace lyric, which served as a great stand-in when you weren't physically available to respond to a friend. But spiritually, you were always there.

Opening up this kind of communication – where someone with your screen name could talk to you basically no matter what — also meant creating one of the easiest ways to harass someone online. Well before Twitter would become known as a place slow to deal with trolls, AIM introduced warnings that could eventually result in getting someone booted off the service temporarily.

For a while, it seemed like AIM was rolling out new features every other week. It added the ability to do voice chats and file transfers (neither worked terribly well thanks to old-school dial up internet access, or early DSL speeds), and it even offered a text-message based feature for mobile phones (once mobile phones existed, anyhow). For all the features, even more were killed — RIP, Napster clone.

Despite AIM's rise in popularity, the AOL mothership never warmed up to it. The service technically still exists, but only as a shadow of itself.

I use at least a half dozen messaging platforms because that's the world we live in. I have some friends I talk to on Gchat, others I reach through iMessages, and there's even a few FB Messenger folks in there.

But once upon a time, everyone was on AIM and AIM was where everyone was. On its 20th birthday, let us give thanks to that little yellow man for building the bridge to social media and leading us into the era of Web 2.0.

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

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