500,000+ AOL Instant Messenger Buddy Icons All at Once
I needed a couple of AOL Instant Messenger buddy icons for a project, and then that turned into a project and before you know it I was trying to scrape every single buddy icon off the internet. I have slightly over 500,000 of them live, browseable, and downloadable with a single click on my new totally non-commercial project site buddyiconarchive.com I think that I am perhaps 20% of the way to my goal of having a "complete" collection of all the buddy icons that ever appeared on the internet, a rough estimate based on the counts advertised by various period aggregators. I am looking to trade…
500,000+ AOL Instant Messenger Buddy Icons All at Once launched on August 28, 2026 with 8 votes, #1,241 of 23,274 launches that month and more than 75% of that year's launches.
What it does
Browse and download preserved AIM buddy icons with searchable descriptions, source history, technical metadata, and original image files.
It started with a game that needed a few authentic AIM icons. Then I had 1,000. Then 10,000. At some point, I had a buddy icon problem. You have scrolled past 1,024 buddy icons, so I have some suspicions. My blog is where the other shiny digressions end up. A picture barely 50 pixels wide, sitting beside an AIM screen name, could announce a mood, a fandom, an inside joke, or who someone wanted to be that day. Buddy icons survive in old directories, fan sites, downloadable packs, and web archives. The archive preserves the original files, groups known copies, and records where each one was found. A picture barely 50 pixels wide, sitting beside an AIM screen name, could announce a mood, a…from buddyiconarchive.com
In the maker’s words, at launch
I needed a couple of AOL Instant Messenger buddy icons for a project, and then that turned into a project and before you know it I was trying to scrape every single buddy icon off the internet. I have slightly over 500,000 of them live, browseable, and downloadable with a single click on my new totally non-commercial…
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