Conventional instant messaging on a computer was a huge part of growing and being a teenager in the 2000s. I probably used it for the first time when my family got our first computer in February 1999 and we each had our own AOL accounts. I was 8 years old at that time and seldom used it until I was about 12 and we got broadband. For pretty much all of junior high and high school AIM was always an integral way of communicating with friends, family, and classmates.

Making a new screenname was how people refreshed their identities and setting away messages was how they let everyone know what they were up to. We loved to fill out our buddy profiles and update our buddy icons, and everyone had a particular font format they liked to chat with. “BRB” and “g2g” were acronyms we used to let people know we were going offline in the days before we had our smartphones on us at all times. It was common to say hi to someone and start up a conversation as soon as you noticed them online because it was like a novelty to see someone else online at the same time as you in a “fancy seeing you here” sort of way. That mindset was more in my first few years on the internet when I was still a kid, so it might have had more to do with the way kids interact with each other than the actual novelty of the time.

I never knew anyone who used MSN until I made friends with a community online in 2007 who used it, so I downloaded it so I could talk to them. Eventually I was using it and talking to them more often than I was using AIM to talk to people I knew in the real world. At some point MSN became Windows Live Messenger and then eventually merged with Skype around 2013.

Somewhere between like 2008 and 2011 I noticed a rapid decline in the number of screennames active on my AIM “buddy list” who weren’t bots. Social media and texting were changing how we used the internet and how we communicated. In the early ‘10s we went “permanently online” with our smartphones and there was no longer any need, reason for, or novelty to chatting on the internet via computer. When I spilled on my laptop in November 2011 and had to get a new one I didn’t even bother downloading AIM because there was no one on it.

AIM officially went kaput in 2017, but I can’t even imagine how small the user base was by that point.

I first got on the internet in 1997. I started on lycos chat rooms.

1998 and 1999 there was a chat room run by the biggest ISP in northern Michigan, Freeway. I talked to and met a lot of local people, and dated a few. Occasionally they would have chat meets where a bunch of us would gather for an evening. Anybody could chat but it was really only us who knew about it. Next to everyone’s screen name was their IP address or some number that was pretty easy to tell if they were from around here or were regulars maybe under a different name. One girl logged in often from Minnesota and came to one of the meets, and someone I knew from Australia even logged in a few times. Every night at 3am they would clear the room history and everyone’s conversations disappeared. A popular song on the radio at the time was 3am by matchbox 20 and many of us would say it’s 3am I must be lonely. Anyway in 1999 an inappropriate relationship developed between 2 people in the room and the guy went away for 5 years. Shortly after that the room got shut down.

After that I went to IRC chat. That and a chat room on the dating site U-Date. ICQ was the new biggest thing, seeing people type in real time, but you needed a computer good enough to run it. Mine was not.

Then I was off chat for a few years being married. In 2003 I used AIM, MSN, and Yahoo. Yahoo was the last one I used, as late as 2015. Just for people I didn’t want to give my cell phone number to. I got my first cell phone in 2007. I can talk to people on text but I do miss a whole bunch of random people in a room and seeing who you might share interest with. I heard IRC is still popular and I’m thinking of trying it again.

MSN for me.

MSN! I made my account in 1999 and didn't stop using it until 2010/2011.

I also made a lot of friends through there. Me and my brother would sit on the computer together and go on the chat rooms. I also added a lot of people I knew across various gaming websites. But mainly it was people I knew IRL.

When I bought my smartphone in September 2010, one of the first apps I downloaded was some ad-hoc MSN app. It was nearly dead at that point though. There were only a handful of people online at a time at that point, and I could tell they left it on by accident and they were annoyed I was messaging them. :P

MSN for me.
I must had been MSN for me too, more modern messenger services came to my realisation after I signed up to FB in 2013.

I started using AOL Instant Messenger back in the late 90's and early 2000's.

I started using AOL Instant Messenger back in the late 90's and early 2000's.
Thank you for reminding me, I started off with AOL as my Internet Provider, but I only used the Messenger on it to play quizzes, then we got fed up with it for it was Always OffLine!

AIM for my area. However, you don’t have Yahoo Messenger listed. That was probably the 2nd most popular.

AIM for my area. However, you don’t have Yahoo Messenger listed. That was probably the 2nd most popular.


I almost forgot about Yahoo Instant Messenger when I used it during the early 2000's.

For me it was AIM in the late 2000’s. But MSN was also simultaneously popular with AIM. I joined AIM in 2006.

Depends when probably MSN and AOL.

Instant messaging was getting really popular in the mid to late 90s, even more so in the very early 2000s but has been around on since the early 80s from what I understand through Usenet and prodigy. Maybe not always as instant but 1 to 1 chatting was there based on some docs I’ve watched.

To me PC instant messaging was getting dated around 2009 onwards. Definitely by the smart phone era it seemed archaic.