The bottom of the article links to the history (individual features) of other IM programs from that era as well like ICQ and Yahoo Messenger.
I can see why AIM would be mostly an American phenomenon, given it was initially a feature specific to AOL. ICQ…I like to say I’m 10 minutes too young to have used ICQ, everybody who has wistful memories of it were like the seniors when I was a freshman. Yahoo! was the other one; the perpetual alsoran.
