Preserving the tiny pictures that made the internet personal.
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Browse 103 preserved Balloon AIM buddy icons gathered from 63 source collections. This automatically maintained collection currently includes 77 animated icons and 103 icons with searchable visual descriptions.
A language of tiny pictures
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.
Read the short historyRecovered from the early web
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.
How the archive works