★ AIM Nostalgia

Gizmodo Nails It:

And it was ubiquitous. There was a stretch of time in the 90s and early 00s when AOL was a social requisite. This was short lived, of course, but the AOL name remained powerful, and the screennames we accumulated from it stuck with us. AOL was a bloated horror creature of the internet—but AIM was graceful, and because of the former’s monopoly on the web, the seed was planted widely. Everyone had an AIM handle. You didn’t have to worry about who used what. Saying “what’s your screenname” was tantamount to asking for someone’s number—everyone owned it, everyone used it, it was simple, and it worked.

And when we all finally got broadband, it was always on. Your friends were always right there on your buddy list, around the clock. This was the first time that it felt like we hadpresences online—that our friends were out there in some sense, and easily accessible. We always knew what everyone else was doing. The away message preceded the status update (Zuckerberg was still a kid!), making it normal, for the first time ever, to make public what you were doing.

“homework, brb”
“working out”
“out! call me!”

Short, often misspelled, hardly pithy. But poignantly personal and beamed out into the internet void, AIM was what you were doing.

Twitter made sense to me because it was simply an extension of my AIM status. I updated it every hour on AIM. It was my “right now”. Now, I use Twitter for that.