alt Hacker NewsAOL instant messenger was bigger in USA, it was so big that AOL remained a major chat service even into the broadband years (though AIM clearly was under decline by that point)
My 90s and early 00s social circle was AIM, Yahoo Games, and Neopets.
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Nah ICQ was pre AIM. AIM was popular with some people but ICQ was king for a while.
AIM was filled with script kiddies using spam to "hack" people's computers. It just crashed the app when they spammed you.
Then stuff like trillium came out which meant you didn't have to use AIM's awful client.
> even into the broadband years
I suspect part of that is because not everyone had broadband. I was still on dialup years after broadband ISPs were widely available.
AIM was not around when I was using ICQ. Like, it literally didn’t exist.
Once it did my local social circle used it. Gaming stuff stayed on IRC and ICQ.
yes, I used AIM from 1999 until whenever it was shutdown (2017?) At several companies, we used AIM for what many use Slack for today. We even coordinated prod deployments in a private AIM chat room!
I had AIM, ICQ, and a few others. Pidgin (originally GAIM) let you send and receive on all the services from one app, which was very handy.