Yesterday, AOL laid off a number of people (40, to be exact). During these cuts, the entire AIM (AOL Instant Messenger) team was let go. This caused many avid AIM fans a great deal of alarm. After all, AIM is one of the most popular messenger services on the planet, and living without this service would be a sad thing to many people. As talks of AIM disappearing from the planet circulated around the Internet, AOL responded quickly by stating that AIM would not disappear, though it’s unlikely that the messenger service will gain much more attention or lots of future updates given the fact that all those people working in the AIM department exist no more.

What does this mean for the thousands of people who use AIM daily? Well, nothing at the moment. You can keep on using AIM to your heart’s content and AOL promises not to shut it down (for now, at least). In fact, AIM is one of AOL’s most popular services, so it wouldn’t make too much sense for the company to abandon the messenger service completely. On the other hand, some people are actually surprised that AIM has lasted this long.

AIM’s Longevity

AIM has been around for many years now, but the simple messenger service still prove to be immensely popular around the world – even though services like Skype exist. What makes AIM so great? Perhaps it’s the simplicity of it all or perhaps its just because people who use AIM are so familiar with this messenger. Whatever it is, those who love AIM certainly don’t want it to go away, and that’s why the news that AOL has fired the whole AIM department is so disheartening. Frankly, this writer would be surprised if AOL doesn’t work on improving AIM as much as possible and as frequently as its competitors do. But AOL might take another route and this one isn’t so great.

It’s entirely possible to AOL might give up on support and updates for AIM. If this happens, of course, those who use AIM will likely become frustrated with the service if it does not perform properly and there is no existing support to help those who have problems using the services. AOL hasn’t said anything about nixing support or updates yet, but this might be inevitable as the company focuses on other ventures. Truth be told, time has not been kind to AOL, and the company has to cut somewhere. Right now, it looks like those cuts will be in AIM form.

Happening Right Now

What’s happening with the service right now? Well, nothing really. You can use AIM right now as you have been using it for how ever many years you have been working with the service. Later, down the road, you might see things changing over at AOL as far as AIM is concerned, but there’s nothing to fret about at the moment. Still, the fact that AOL has laid off so many people doesn’t provide a lot of hope for the company’s future.