So Long Old Friend

A couple of weeks ago I said goodbye to an old friend.  Leaving the AIM team where I spent 11 years working on so many different parts of a product that has over a billion registered users and millions of active users was bittersweet.  I am definitely going to miss the people I worked with the most, and I am going to miss all the great moments we celebrated together.

In 1999, I started on the AIM Windows team working on the user interface coding up buttons, the user preferences and making sure the client installed properly (though there was one time where my code accidentally deleted a QA Engineers HD, sorry John).  

By 2004, I moved to the core infrastructure team.  While it did not have the most elegant name, the team was responsible for writing the cross platform code that powered every real time messaging experience at AOL, ICQ and even Apple and Google.  I worked really hard with a bunch of great engineers in opening up this cross platform library so every developer who wanted to build on our network could.

When we opened AIM in 2006, it opened a whole new world to me, where I could work with developers and some really awesome partners.  I realized that I really enjoyed working with our partners and that it was important for the future of AIM to embrace our partners.  I also happened to build a very popular plugin called AIM MusicLink which allowed users to share with their communities what music they were listening to at that moment.

In the last 2 years, I have spent almost all my time leveraging my relationships with our partners like Apple (iChat), Google (GTalk), Facebook and Twitter into building a great experience into AIM.  Today we have AOL Lifestream, Facebook Chat in AIM and Google Talk in AIM.  So much credit goes to the design team and developers who delivered the final experiences today but I am proud of my contributions to the project.

Its off to new challenges, and I will share where I am going and what I will be doing in a later blog post.

8 thoughts on “So Long Old Friend

    • Sorry Dick you are going to have to get your info from someone else. It will definitely be different going to a building other than CC2, even though CC2 had gone through at least 3 different “renovations” in 11 years.

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