I had an email and lived outside the walled garden while all my friends partied inside.Įven now, there are features AIM figured out that nobody else has successfully replicated. But my parents wouldn't pay for AOL, no matter how often I made the financial case for our improved internet access and the emotional lift of that 'You've got mail!' clip.

It's easy to forget now, but for a brief moment at the turn of the century no internet company was cooler than AOL. Frankly the news is a long time coming: AIM's been a ghost town for a decade, long since replaced by Facebook and WhatsApp and Skype and Snapchat and an entire generation of social products that evidently nobody at AOL ever saw coming or understood how to compete with. All you need to know about me, between the ages of 12 and 17, you could find in my AIM chat logs.ĪOL-or Oath, or Verizon, or whatever the messy conglomerate of failed internet companies turned confusing advertising businesses is called now-announced today that it'll be shutting down AOL Instant Messenger for good on December 15, 2017. The best preservation of my middle- and high-school years doesn't exist in a yearbook or in a diary.

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