Should Trump’s Tweets Be Preserved for Posterity?
The demise of AIM raises an important question: How will the president’s tweets be saved if Twitter suffers the same fate?
If AOL Instant Messenger, aka AIM, can perish, then the same could happen to Twitter. And if Twitter dies, well, there goes the Trump Presidential Library.
AIM once ruled digital communication. It had 100 million users in 2001, when the entire internet population was 140 million. That means AIM was used by 71 percent of the people online in 2001. Today, Facebook is used by 2 billion of the 3.2 billion people online, or 62.5 percent. Clearly, Facebook is a piker by comparison.
That’s why AIM’s demise is so interesting. It is going nighty-night on December 15—a kind of tech euthanasia by its new owner, Verizon,
