AOL Slashes Staff at AIM Unit

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According to the New York Times, AOL has cut forty people from its AIM unit, leaving no one left but support staff.

AOL notified more than 40 employees from its West Coast offices that they would be out of jobs by the end of the month. More cuts are scheduled in the coming weeks across AOL, according to a number of executives, who spoke anonymously because they were not authorized to speak on the matter, and former executives. The layoffs are expected to include more than 100 AOL employees.
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I think the real surprise here is that it took forty people who were not service people to maintain AIM.

Really? And such little innovation from it?

Good luck to those who are let go. I hope they find work quick. The management should be ashamed for wasting so much talent.
 
Yeah yeah yeah, cue all the AOL jokes. Sure, nowadays I don't see much use in using them, but back in the day before the internet existed I would connect to local BBSs at 9600BPS and play the text based games, then connect to AOL and wow, pictures, graphics, a mouse interface.

A friend gave my father an ISDN modem, and at the time we didn't know what that was. All we knew was supposedly it could do 128Kbps, but yet when I tried to use it all it would do is connect at 14.4Kbps. Looking back I guess it had a dial up modem fallback.

Ahh, the old days of dialup.
 
Noooo.... I love AIM. Everything since then is a step backwards. AIM can have dedicated and secure single or group chats, text, video, and it can share pictures and files. Heck, I've transferred 12GBof files to a roommate in under 5 minutes with it via a switch. If you think there's really no innovation from AIM, I'd like to see what's better. :(
 
Mad Cat said:
Noooo.... I love AIM. Everything since then is a step backwards. AIM can have dedicated and secure single or group chats, text, video, and it can share pictures and files. Heck, I've transferred 12GBof files to a roommate in under 5 minutes with it via a switch. If you think there's really no innovation from AIM, I'd like to see what's better. :(
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Why use AIM for this instead of \\pcname\share lol

I find it strange that they have more than 40 people working on AIM, no including server admins, huh
 
It would be best if that worthless service just died, and made paupers of it's creators.
 
Mad Cat said:
Noooo.... I love AIM. Everything since then is a step backwards. AIM can have dedicated and secure single or group chats, text, video, and it can share pictures and files. Heck, I've transferred 12GBof files to a roommate in under 5 minutes with it via a switch. If you think there's really no innovation from AIM, I'd like to see what's better. :(
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Wow, come to think of it... back in the day, AIM gave me the ability to easily talk to pretty much everyone I knew online, share pictures and video chat with them instantly, and directly send them files..... Has anything else really come along to replicate this kind of functionality? I can't think of anything..... these days its usually a pain in the ass to directly send someone a very large file online
 
I'm surprised they have any users left at all. I lost a screen name I had owned for thirteen years simply for the fact that some FBI special agent (Michael P French -- have at it!) contacted AOL, saying I was threatening someone, and so they disabled my account.

I'm not particularly certain how you can threaten someone whom you have not contacted for three years using the service, but what do I know? I'm simply a reality-addled sense-maker. Yes, this really happened. It is because AOL decided to post user's screen names and profile/status information publicly available on their web site, without users' permission, for no real reason, and overzealous old-timer government employees are still desperately clamoring to remain relevant in an age their pitifully ineffectual minds simply cannot abstract adequately enough to comprehend.
 
brucedeluxe169 said:
Wow, come to think of it... back in the day, AIM gave me the ability to easily talk to pretty much everyone I knew online, share pictures and video chat with them instantly, and directly send them files..... Has anything else really come along to replicate this kind of functionality? I can't think of anything..... these days its usually a pain in the ass to directly send someone a very large file online
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I used to use MSN messenger, you could dump files into a folder and whoever you were talking to could access all the files in that folder or something like that. It was years ago, but that's how a friend and I shared CS files.
 
I know you could share files via MSN, but the thing I liked about AIM was that for its time,an overwhelming majority of the people I knew online used it, and so, nobody had to install any new apps, or sign up for any new service, it was all there, ready to go....

Damn
 
brucedeluxe169 said:
I know you could share files via MSN, but the thing I liked about AIM was that for its time,an overwhelming majority of the people I knew online used it, and so, nobody had to install any new apps, or sign up for any new service, it was all there, ready to go....

Damn
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True, and fair's fair, I did use AIM before MSN. I just got tired of all the moron's I knew on AIM so I moved.
 
Vicinity said:
I used to use MSN messenger, you could dump files into a folder and whoever you were talking to could access all the files in that folder or something like that. It was years ago, but that's how a friend and I shared CS files.
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You could do that with AIM as well. It was very underused since a lot of us were still on 56.6ks unless at a college dorm and Napster was alive and well so you didn't need it all that bad anyway. I only knew one person back then that actually used the feature.
 
It feels like 20 years ago since I last used AIM. Didn't know it still was being worked on.
 
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