and even years after AOL had its market share siphoned off by ISPs like Earthlink, those users continued to use AOL Instant Messenger (AIM). I didn’t retire my handle until the late 2000s.

In Russia ICQ played the same role for an IM (it's the same OSCAR protocol), but it (I think owned by AOL too) killed itself by trying to lose alternative clients.

I used the official one for Windows only, but it was a more civilized age, and what they were breaking included clients for Java phones (it was not so rare to hear the ICQ notification sound in public transport), clients like QIP, Miranda, Trillian which were used by many people, clients for Linux and so on.

Then everybody moved on to Skype. It happened very fast, in a couple of months my buddy list went mostly red from mostly green.