AIM Away Messages
The cryptic, ever-changing status you left up for your buddy list to decode — song lyrics aimed at nobody in particular, inside jokes, coded hints about your mood and your crush. AIM away messages were half diary entry, half performance art, and everyone was reading.
AOL Instant Messenger launched in May 1997, and the away message arrived with it — a deceptively simple feature that became a teenage art form. During AIM's peak years, roughly 1999 to 2005, teens and college students changed their away messages throughout the day or left the computer on with one up, telling the buddy list where they were, what they thought, and — through carefully chosen song lyrics — how they felt about people who would never be named.
The away message was read as closely as it was written. Signing on meant checking your crush's away message, decoding a best friend's inside joke, monitoring who was actually out and who was just pretending to be. By 2006, AIM held 52% of the North American instant-messaging market, which meant the away message was, for a while, the default social status update — the profile bio and the story before either existed.
Texting and social feeds eventually absorbed the ritual, and AIM itself was discontinued on December 15, 2017. The Running Man logo — designed by JoRoan Lazaro for the first 1997 release — signed off with it.
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