‘Searching for SmarterChild’ Kickstarter
A Kickstarter campaign for 'Searching for SmarterChild', a documentary about the AOL Instant Messenger chatbot that once had 30 million users, is in its final week and still short of its funding goal.
Background
SmarterChild was a chatbot built by ActiveBuddy (later Colloquis) and launched on AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) in 2000. At its peak, it had roughly 30 million people on its AIM buddy list, making it one of the most widely used chatbots before the smartphone era. It could answer trivia, look up sports scores, tell jokes, and hold simple conversations — a precursor to Siri and modern AI assistants. AIM itself was the dominant instant messaging platform across the US from the late 1990s through the mid-2000s before being overtaken by social media and smartphones. This documentary is crowdfunding on Kickstarter, a platform where creators pitch projects and backers pledge money in exchange for rewards, only charged if the funding goal is met. The article's author, John Gruber, runs Daring Fireball, a long-running Apple-focused blog that frequently links to tech projects he finds interesting.