They haven't really made any money from subscribers since like 97? I do not do a lot of research into the companies financials but noticed that two of the people I used to work with (marketing) who where in the targeted advertising business pushed for everyone they knew to communicate exclusively on AIM. I can't say that the three of us were well um saints, one of my partners was known to wear a lot of black as was thought to be dead by even his parents... refused to own a phone or sign contracts... had a nice house and paid well though. Also satisfied his legitimate clients with the click-through rates they were demanding... so I just have to wonder why he was so insistent on everything AOL... I didn't want to look a gift horse in the mouth and it wasn't like he was executing remote exploits in the known vulnerabilities (he worked in advertising not bnet herding or fraud or w/e). I dk just a question I wanted to get some feedback on. Thanks.

I am kinda lost here. You have some business partner that demands everyone use AIM? Maybe he hates google talk or MSN messenger or what ever it is called now. He probably has some logging program to log the conversations.

Well, now adays you can use clients like Pidgin which allow you to use many IM services (ICQ, AIM, Jabber/GoogleTalk/FaceBook Messenger, Yahoo, Gadu Gadu, QQ, IRC, etc) within just one client and allows you to log conversations.

Personally, if I had to choose "the best" I'd lean towards Jabber, tons of decentralized servers, allows you to use your own email address if your server allows it, etc. My second favorite would be AIM though, it's secure, you don't get spammed to high hell like you would ICQ, but that's about it.