Thoughts on the death of AOL Instant Messenger:

In 5 minutes, part of the Internet is going to die. Most people born in the late 1970s and 1980s grew up as computer technology grew up, playing green-on-black monochrome educational games in elementary school and learning about the Internet in high school or early college. AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) was a big part of that. And soon it will be gone forever.

There's a certain poetry to the fact that AIM's last day is also the day the FCC killed Net Neutrality. The killing of AIM - which, for my generation, served as part of the de facto public communications infrastructure - is a poignant reminder of what happens when private for-profit entities are allowed to be the gatekeepers for everything we share and communicate. AIM's death is a sign of what's to come when Facebook can pay ISPs to make sure only Facebook is usable, and that personally-owned non-proprietary websites and blogs become almost non-starters.

We are facing a loss of shared culture that will make the science fiction copyright wars look minor by comparison. Save what you can, and don't trust anything valuable to server space you don't control.