One of my friends decided to send the following to me through AOHell Instant Messenger. I’m assuming this got started on April Fool’s Day. I would like to prove to her that it is false, but it’s not on Snopes yet…can anyone help, please?
~ monica
It sounds like the following, debunked on Snopes, only in a different form.
Hotmail Hokum
Don’t Kill the Messenger!
I haven’t seen that particular one before, but it’s extremely obviously a hoax.
I grow weary of that message. I’ve received it 7 times, and my (admittedly vitriolic) responses have included everything from porcupines with distended rectums, to jackhammers, rusty nails, and wrenches (don’t ask). I’ll just send those links to everyone who sends me that. Thank you. Thank you so much.
AIM is what keeps AOL alive. They’d never do something like that.
Thank you. My friend will be duly sent these sites. I appreciate it.
“devise??”
how about a logical argument as well? Non-active members use exactly 0 bandwidth so that point is moot. Now, saving their aimlist to AOL’s servers take a few bytes. I just saved mine of 200 sn’s to desktop(with all those extra options that AOL doesn’t save for you.) it takes a whooping 6.29 kilobytes. 1024kbx1024 = = 1048576kb = 1 gigabyte. 1048576/6.29 = 166705.2464. so… by my calculations a SINGLE gigabyte of storage(all they really need to keep INACTIVE members) will hold 166,705 inactive users. Theres about 15 million users total. By my calculations it’d take 89 gigs to store ALL the user’s data. Whup de fricking do. Your friend is trying to tell you that AOL can’t afford an extra 100 dollar harddrive. (oversimplified of course)
How is that? AIM is free…And I thought all the ads were from AOL itself.
WAG: This way AOL users have people to talk to whom aren’t on AOL. It’d be damn boring being able to only talk to AOL users.
The ads aren’t all from AOL; my AIM window has an ad for eBay on it right now. (I’m not an AOL member.)
AIM has ads? Heh…guess I did pretty well at configuring it for my workgroup as we don’t see ads, news flashes, stock tickers or any other junk.
But seriously, AOL is developing a corporate messaging solution. Last I saw, it was unimaginatively named Enterprise AIM. It’s going to be a for-fee system. In exchange for said fee, the system will be ad-free, more reliable (read: high availability) and will archive all messages. This is an important thing for bankers, stock brokers and anyone else conducting business transactions through a messaging system that needs to be concerend with SEC compliance.
In other words, they’ve taken something that they’ve been giving away (250 million users as of last October) for free and adapted it to a sellable version so they can make some more money.
For now, my workgroup is staying with the free, unarchived version.
There’s a program called MyIM that removed the ads. I’m sure a search will find it, cuz I’ll be damned if I can remember the link directly to the creator’s site. It also allows you to do other smooth things such as run multiple instances of AIM.
Or you could run trillian, the greatest IM client ever.
Notice how the AIM logo is becoming the new AOL logo? (As seen in the recent “AOL for Broadband” commercials.)
AIM is something AOL controls that continues to be popular, unlike their other content, which is mostly all available from internet sources.