AOL Instant Messenger to Shut Down in December<br />“AIM tapped into new digital technologies and ignited a cultural shift,<br />but the way in which we communicate with each other has profoundly changed,” Michael Albers, vice president of communications product at Oath, the parent company of AOL, said in a statement on Friday.<br />“There are a lot of people who had milestone moments in their lives<br />that happened on AIM,” said Ms. Moss, who was once better known by the screen name sparklegurl27.<br />But at its height, AIM, as it was known, served as the social center for teenagers<br />and young adults, the scene of deeply resonant memories and the place where people learned how to interact online.<br />Those short messages were the basis of Ms. Moss’s parody account, which assumed<br />the character of a teenage girl whose parents were sometimes just THE WORST.<br />As important as clothing or the buttons on a backpack, picking just the right song lyrics or inspirational<br />quotes were among the most visible self-installed billboards of personal identity.<br />It was a place to pay tribute to the senior class or to friends — who were, without fail, the best friends in the whole world.<br />“Someone asked them out, or they got broken up with, or they got in a fight with a friend.”<br />And then there were the away messages and profiles.
