sometimes my brain reminds me of a thing i haven't thought of in years. i don't know what spurs it, but my brain goes "hey, remember this thing from 2005" and then i just have to deal with the fact that this was sitting in a cluster of neurons in my brain somewhere
today's random memory: AOL Instant Messenger Buddy Info
One clarification, after digging way too deep into this: The main thing I remembered were AIM subprofiles. At first I wanted to compare AIM profiles to cohost posts, but how you interact with them is much different.
For those who are now more confused about what I'm going off about: You know how Discord has a little bio panel like this?
Imagine that About Me section was a bit more customizable. You're probably envisioning exactly this:
A/S/L: Argon/Selenium/Lithium
Also not a real ScreenName, although I suppose that's a moot point now. I did set up a modified instance of a private OSCAR server to get this screenshot. Eventually™ I'll submit a PR for getting Buddy Info to show up.
Anyway, what do you put here... Hobbies: computer networks, anime, perchance a sport? idk
honestly, I'm impressed you guessed the text too.
This is already far more customizable than most platforms, but there are still some limitations. For example, your profile isn't controlled by a full WYSIWYG editor as much as a watered-down WordPad. You can add hyperlinks, but they'll just open in your default browser. And, you're stuck with a character limit. I can't find an official amount, but from what I've read it's around 1024 characters.
But what if you could do more? What if you could load full webpages in that space, just by copy/pasting some text?
Well, here's the thing: it's not really HTML. You might be fooled by thinking this is HTML:
<HTML>
<BODY BGCOLOR=000000 TEXT=FFFFFF LINK=41D6D6>
<A HREF="http://example.com/">Click me!</A>
</BODY>
</HTML>
Which, okay, it sorta is. But to AIM, this is AOLRTF, and it's far more limited than HTML. Many standard HTML tags, like <H1> to <H6>, <SPAN>, and <FORM> aren't parsed in any capacity, instead appearing as plaintext. This is what's happening when you create your Buddy Info in the editor, but you're not able to directly touch the source code.
Since it's basically just HTML, you could write the source code in Notepad and put it somewhere on the web, right? Except if you click a link, it opens in a new browser window. Your friends could still see it, but we can be even cooler and have the page appear in the Buddy Info window.
To do that, you can use a neat little trick: setting the TARGET attribute of your link tags. The target attribute lets you change the behavior of the link: _blank opens in a new window/tab, _parent opens in the parent context[1], and _self opens in the current window. Since AIM auto-opens all links in a new browser window, we can safely assume it's using _blank as the target, so we can just use _self!
With this, we can link to any HTTP page and render the content (as long as it's AOLRTF) in the Buddy Info window:
And that's how we end up with subprofiles. Or rather, the service most people used: SubProfile.
You could have a guestbook, "Sub-Polls," "Sub-Quizzes" (personality quizzes), and little server-side web trinkets like a "Random Quote" feed. The trinkets were usually provided by a service named IMTools, which was run by the same group named Webgreed—which on first glance feels like another rabbit hole in itself. While you could easily make your own subprofile outside of the SubProfile service with a bit of HTML knowledge (and people did!), it was a bit harder to get hosting, bandwidth, and server-side functionality for free in 2001-2005.
And that's why subprofiles are fascinating to me. They were around before MySpace, in a time when chat platforms were about as "in one place" as you'd get. Instead of having to be linked a friend's website, one would just happen to see it when they look at their buddy's profile. Even without subprofiles, AIM profiles remind me of sites like carrd from today, where you can have a customizable place to show who you are, or what you're working on, or even those song lyrics from that new album you got from f.y.e. bandcamp.
[1] Does anybody still use _parent and _top? Last I remember, they correspond to stuff like framesets and those JavaScript "pop-up remote" navbars.
