Re:The Last Message Sent on AIM
by numair on Monday March 01, 2021 @09:00AM
(#26302803)
Imagine there was an AOL executive in charge of AIM, and that Mark Zuckerberg offered the guy hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of Facebook stock to hobble efforts to keep the platform relevant. Sounds like a totally crazy conspiracy theory, right? After all, it would have been totally obviously suspicious if someone made hundreds of millions of dollars by simply jumping from one middle-management role to another, right?
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Re:The Last Message Sent on AIM
by polynomial on Monday March 01, 2021 @09:36AM
(#26303114)
Even if those rumors are true (and no one has ever seen fit to publish them, so there's that) it wasn't just a single executive that killed AIM, it was multiple points of failure, including keeping it ad-free, which meant it pretty much existed outside AOL's revenue ecosystem, out on its own. And when Appelman & team released their open source version, that was akin to declaring a mutiny at anti-OSS AOL.
Products need internal champions, without which, it doesn't take a conspiracy to kill them, they will just atrophy on their own.
It's obviously been a long time so my memory could be faulty, but I distinctly remember ads in AIM and installing cracked versions of the client that removed the ads.
Yeah, in the last few years there was a big permanent ad at the footer of the contact list, plenty of ads in the web client and I think at one point there were sidebar ads in chat (that last one could have been msn)
Re:The Last Message Sent on AIM
by polynomial on Monday March 01, 2021 @10:44AM
(#26303839)
JTBC, I meant revenue generating ads, not ads for other AOL products.
Maybe they had no inventory in your region, or you're remembering an earlier time? It definitely had auctioned ads in 2014.