AIM: AOL Instant Messenger Isn’t Dead … Yet

AOL Instant Messenger, better known as AIM, is alive and well — for now, at least.

Despite laying off nearly all its AIM developers Tuesday, AOL says it has no plans to kill off the 15-year old instant messaging service.

On Tuesday, The New York Times reported that AOL had cut the jobs of more than 40 employees in its West Coast offices. The Instant Messenger group was hit the hardest, with one former employee telling the Times that the department "now only consists of support staff."

This led to widespread speculation that AIM itself was going to be phased out.

We reached out to AOL for clarification. A spokesperson told us that the company was not killing the product, and that it planned to continue to support and evolve AIM.

Computerworld was given the same information.

Of course, without a development team — is this really true?

AOL Instant Messenger was born out of the Buddy List feature that was part of the AOL dial-up service. In 1997, AIM became a stand-alone service an allowed users to communicate with AOL and non-AOL users alike. In 1998, AOL acquired competitor ICQ and integrated some of those features into the app itself. AOL sold ICQ in 2010.

As recently as 2006, AIM still had a large presence in the social messaging space. Over the last five years however, the fortunes of the service have changed dramatically.

Gtalk, Facebook and Skype continue to take marketshare away from AIM. As a protocol, AIM is still supported by a wide-array of messaging apps (and it provides the basis for Apple's now deprecated iChat), but the service's glory days are long gone.

Part of the reason for AIM's downfall in popularity: its inability to open up and evolve. While third-party clients and add-ons for AIM have existed since the late 1990s, AOL often made working with its protocol and unlocking all of the various features more difficult than necessary.

While third-party clients reverse-engineered most aspects of the OSCAR protocol, AOL was long averse to working with third-party clients or alternative messaging apps. I still recall paying for various AIM add-ons in order to get increased functionality, only for AOL to break part of the protocol to try to prevent use of the service.

Still, third-parties such as Trillian and Pidgin continued to reverse-engineer the protocol and add support for additional messaging services. I would guess that most users who still communicate using AIM do so not through the official client — but via clients like iChat, Trillian, Adium or Meebo.

In 2008, AOL launched its Open AIM 2.0 initiative as a way to encourage increased third-party development around the service. The company has also added the ability for users to post directly to Facebook and Twitter. Last May, AIM and Gtalk became fully interoperable.

But by that time, the damage was already done. Instant messaging faced competition not just from other services such as GTalk and MSN, but from VoIP services such as Skype, SMS and MMS messages and the burgeoning social networks of Twitter and Facebook.

I remember talking to members of the AIM team at SXSW 2008. The team seemed truly shocked at just how quickly Skype, Facebook and Twitter were gaining steam in the chat space.

In November 2011, AOL released a redesigned AIM client with a stronger push towards social integration with other accounts and services. In my brief time using the app, it looked and felt more like a third-party AIM client of yesteryear rather than the original.

Despite its improved user interface, I switched back to Adium after only a few minutes with the app.

Without a team to continue to develop it, we're unsure what more can happen with the product. Perhaps AOL will consider fully open-sourcing the OSCAR protocol as a way to help protect interoperability in the future.

On a personal level, seeing AIM fade away is a bit sad. It was my first real social network — the way I conversed with friends in middle school, high school and college. To this day, I still have a number of AIM contacts (although this is more a result of having lots of friends who use iChat rather than allegiance to AIM) but most of my personal messaging takes place using Gtalk, Facebook and iMessage.

What do you think the future of AIM is? Let us know in the comments.