Frankly, the internet in 2014 kind of sucks.

While I don’t think that we need to go back to the days of the Prodigy internet message boards or the original America Online, I do think that as we’ve moved further down the path of “Social Media Life” we’ve actually removed much of the interaction that we used to have with our online friends. Even as close as 10 years ago I could log-on to the internet and have my Yahoo Messenger load up as well as my AOL Instant Messenger and immediately engage in any number of one-on-one conversations with both my “real life” friends and my internet friends. And the conversations weren’t useless or the type of silly drivel that you read on these humor websites. No, we were making connections and having real conversations. It was fun!

Today, everything seems to need to be filtered through a Facebook or other social media-like portal and I don’t like it. I want to be able to log-on and talk to the folks who originally made the internet fun for me. I also want to be able to pick these people’s brains in a more readily available manner than sending a message into a seemingly black social media hole. There’s no connection in that method of communication.

Unfortunately, though, I don’t think that we’re ever going to get back to that level of meaningful one-on-one interaction on the internet. I think we’re stuck in a mess that doesn’t allow people to grow real friendships through shared online interactions. And given the friends that I’ve made through these online interactions, I think that’s a real shame for future generations of internet users.

What happened to AIM? Could it be that the rise of social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace (with their built-in messaging systems) have rendered AIM, ICQ, and Yahoo! Messenger useless? Maybe the fact that text/picture messages and Blackberries are ubiquitous in today’s society also hinders AIM’s growth. Seems logical.

Granted, I understand that I first started using AIM over ten years ago (probably closer to 15 years ago) when I was a young teenager. Since I’m in my late 20’s these days, I guess that most of the people that I talked to on AIM are either now on my text message list or are a Facebook friend. It would appear that I don’t need AIM any more, actually, since I rarely sign on anyway.

And as I’ve written on JerseySmarts.com a few times already, I’ve been very interested in paring down the software that sits dormant on my laptop. In the last month I’ve removed a bunch of this unneeded software that has been taking up precious disk space. A week or two ago I uninstalled Google Chrome because I rarely used it (plus I’ve already become so accustomed to Mozilla Firefox) and earlier today I uninstalled Yahoo! Messenger since I haven’t used it in over a year. When looking around my computer, I found the old “AOL Instant Messenger” program which was replaced with AOL’s current AIM program…so I removed the old program since I hadn’t used it since the spring of 2006. Also, I purchased a discounted copy of Microsoft Office Ultimate 2007, which prompted me to uninstall OpenOffice.org from Sun Microsystems. Could AIM be next on the list of programs to be deleted? I’m not sure.

I think that I’d like to keep at least one of each of the major programs (one instant messenger program, one major non-Microsoft browser, one major office productivity suite, etc), so AIM may stay around on that fact alone. But the truth remains that even if the program does stay on my computer it’ll probably be a rarely used piece of software.

Isn’t it amazing how the internet and electronic communication have changed?