A Decade of Chatter

The year 1997 marked the introduction of a tiny little instant messenger called AIM.  Ask anyone who came of age in America during the turn of the century: this was the beginning of an online generation.

Before the introduction of chat engines such as AIM, children would run home and pick up the phone to call their friends – online chatting changed this forever.  In my personal opinion it is the chat world that opened the doors for online interactions on mega-sites such as Myspace, Xanga, Facebook and Twitter.

From early on AIM allowed users to post brief profiles linked to their user names, places where they could describe themselves, post favorite quotes or write shout outs to friends.  These profiles were the first step toward an online culture that would take America by storm.  As soon as AIM took off, corporations such as Yahoo, MSN and Google followed suit, fully aware that online communication was the way of the future.  As soon as users could begin forming online identities, sites like Myspace, Friendster and Xanga began to take off.  As the years went by it didn’t take long for these sites to begin incorporating chats, photo albums and walls on which users could post.  These were all baby steps toward what we know as social media today.

These other companies were merely testing the waters of what was to come in the 21st Century, but no one could have imagined the storm that Facebook would begin.

Once Facebook entered the scene all other interfaces quickly plateaued, and once Facebook added a chat function – well, the world was his (Zuckerberg’s, I mean).  The funny thing is how the culture of online chatting has remained steady.  Sure, the mode of doing so has changed, but think about what you’re doing every time you update your status: posting a statement and waiting for a reply.  Status updates became such a part of our online culture that Twitter emerged as one giant status site.  Now users are communicating in posts containing less than 140 characters, waiting patiently for someone to reply, re-post, or rebuff.  Are these brief posts much different from the tentative messages sent to seventh grade crushes via AIM?

Humans are social animals by nature, and with technology increasing on a daily basis we find ourselves with more and more outlets in which to be social.  Basic communication via chat services such as AIM lit a fire beneath Americans, a fire that raised demand for more and more social media.  Today clients such as Jabber and Tweetdeck profit because they consolidate some of the numerous ways in which we communicate with one another, ways that date back to the advent of instant messaging in the late nineties.

Beginning in 1997 and harpooning into 2011 social media has evolved from the early throws of instant messages.  We now get notifications instantly sent to our phones when someone comments on our Facebook wall, and we reply just as quickly.  Every Tweet is matched with a reply or a re-post, every upload warrants a comment.  We are a messaging nation that is constantly exploring new ways to communicate, I cannot even begin to imagine what will happen in the next ten years.