I wrote about Yahoo Messenger being killed off last year and the pain it caused the oil trading markets in the US (https://www.ctrmcenter.com/blog/oil-traders-panic-not-prices-yahoo-messenger-going-away/). At the time of that writing, August 2016, it was rumored that AOL Instant Messenger (AIM), the system that gas traders had adopted years ago to communicate across the markets was next in line…well, it’s happened. Come the stroke of midnight tonight, AIM is no more. Certainly, its less-than-sudden demise will cause less consternation than that caused when Yahoo IM closed shop, as most gas trading folks had seen the end coming long ago and had already moved on to ICE IM. Nonetheless, its passing does mark a bit of a technology milestone in the energy trading markets. Its really not much of a surprise that AIM is going (gone)…its user base has been dwindling for years, particularly since the launch of Facebook Messenger and its now sister company Whatsapp. With most social users migrating to these systems tied to the evil F-book empire, there were so few users left on AIM to make it worthwhile. Though current user counts are difficult to come by, in 2015 AIM had less than 2 million users, while Facebook has
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