Yes.

It's a fact of life nowadays: you start coming up with usernames before you are mature enough to come up with usernames that aren't completely stupid and totally embarassing years down the line. I did it. You did it. It's both something to be ashamed of, but nothing to be ashamed of being ashamed of. It's time to…

No one likes spam. And no one should! Which is why the reported uptick in AIM spammers—thanks again for pulling support, Aol—be so frustrating. But it doesn't have to be. Why not have a little fun?

A great collective whine is currently echoing across the interent as people find themselves locked out of their AIM accounts. It turns out getting customer support with a decade (plus!) old AIM account after AOL abandoned it is tricky.

Multiple outlets reported yesterday that AOL was potentially planning to kill off its AIM messaging platform. Today, the company has responded with a strongly-stated, albeit off-the-record, "Nuh-uh, not us."

For anyone inside the generation for which AOL was synonymous with the internet, and AIM was prerequisite to any social life at all, some pretty sad news: AOL just sacked its IM team. The old king of chat is paraplegic.

A long time ago, when people dialed (as in telephones) into Unix machines in some closet or college campus, they used a command called "w" to see who was also on the machine.

AIM has risen like Lazarus. And don't think this will be a haphazard update either. AIM has been reimagined from the ground up. As an AIM user since its earliest days, this is the first revamp/update that's excited me in quite sometime.

There's nothing better than showing up to work, signing into AIM, and engaging with a sexy stranger, right? Those are the principles America was founded on! But how to know if you're talking to a heartless chatbot? Make 'em laugh!

You're working. A chat window pops open. It's your mom. "How are you today?" Another window fires; your roommate. "Bro, check this video!" Oh, here's one from your boss, he wants to know if you've seen his pen. Goodbye, productivity.

Before Twitter was public, it was just an AIM hack on Jack Dorsey's pager.

After bowing down to Google Talk this week, AIM is effectively dead. Most buddy lists are ghost towns. Chatters fled to Google, Skype and Facebook for their conversational needs. But at its pinnacle, AIM was something singular and amazing.

On Monday we reported on AIM's kind-of-sort-of-secret new video chat site. As of today, it's official, and it's just the beginning of a new direction for the hoary chat service.

So, AIM, the bloated bygone beast, has actually spawned a pretty terrific little blossom. Although only for DOUBLE SECRET PROBATION INTERNAL AOL USE at the moment, "AV by AIM" is great. Ad hoc video chat, decent quality, free, zero setup.

Meebo, the king of iPhone messaging apps, just got a new update bringing fast app switching and support for the iPhone 4's Retina Display. And it's still free! So go chat with someone already. [iTunes]

Today, Facebook is having an emergency meeting to discuss their site's privacy problem. But these instant messages, supposedly sent by CEO Mark Zuckerberg in Facebook's early days, suggest that user privacy may have always been an afterthought.

Everyone eventually trades up from the AIM app to IM+ or BeeJive or Meebo, but the free AIM app for the iPad actually looks decent.