SmarterChild was a bot that you would chat with in plain English (like Siri nowadays), or you could do things like ask it for weather reports or movie showtimes. a company that would go on to try and patent the very concept of chatbots, change their name a couple times, get bought by Microsoft, and never be heard from again. That would've been SmarterChild, a commercial chatbot created by ActiveBuddy, Inc. Janet Hall and Mark Donner are collaborating on this book about the history and impact of one of the Internet’s most iconic products. They are in the process of interviewing the key players from that era. If you haven’t been contacted yet, you are on our radar! But feel free to reach out to us proactively as well.First, the thing that got me interested in chatterbots in the first place. We think of AIM as a kind of phoenix rising from the ashes of what was AOL If you are a reader of business culture, technical innovation, or simply remember AIM fondly, we think you will be interested in what we have to say.Īs William Faulkner wrote: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Those of us who worked on AIM’s “creation” story have never forgotten the experience. We decided it was time to share that story, but also to reassess its legacy and ongoing influence on social media. ![]() ![]() In other words, AIM was a technical moonshot. Meanwhile, the engineers who designed and developed AIM during that turbulent year were passionate, dedicated, and exceptionally foresighted. Operating as a tight-knit unit on a mission, they pushed the technical boundaries of scalability, reliability, and operability, knowing from their own experiences the challenges of building a real-time communications system. They had learned the technical lessons the hard way and they used those lessons to drive innovations that resulted in several patented technologies, breakthroughs that were ahead of their time. Their passion drove them to envision building the communications fabric for the entire Internet, not just a product for AOL. Over twenty-five years ago, a cloistered group of engineers and a fervent product team at AOL launched AOL Instant Messenger (AIM), a product that continues to hold a nostalgic place in the hearts of many early Internet users. AIM served as a cultural touchstone during the emergence of the Internet as a mainstream communication medium. But its legacy goes beyond mere nostalgia. Six years after its “decommissioning” as a stand-alone product, AIM’s influence on today’s social media landscape is remarkable, if not universally acknowledged.įrom its ubiquitous real-time communications capability coupled with shorthand styles and emoticons to its status messages that enabled personal broadcasting to the ease of online self-expression, AIM profoundly changed the way we communicate with each other inspired a generation of technology visionaries and laid the groundwork for today’s social media culture.ĪIM was also a secret project within AOL. The story of how AIM “came to be” is one of a corporate battle royal over whether or not it should be offered as a free product on the Internet, potentially impacting AOL’s subscription business model negatively. Embedded in that battle was a debate over what the future of the consumer online world would look like. It is a story both amusing and dramatic. With permission to launch from the “powers that were” hanging in the balance, the product team worked doggedly to evangelize AIM within the company, pursuing every possible business justification, including a few somewhat “novel’ ideas, in a herculean effort to have the product “green lighted.”
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