Believe it or not, the answer is sitting under your proverbial nose! At least, it is if you're using the slick new Triton version of AIM. On the login window notice what you see just under the existing screen name:
You can see it, right? The "Get a Screen Name" link? Click on it! :-) (if you don't have that link, you should be able to request a screen name here too)
Now you'll see AOL's new screen name request form, which I'm going to show in three parts here. The first part asks you to specify your new screen name, new password, and a display name:
You'll probably have to dance for a while with AOL to get the screen name you want, though, because, well, there are zillions of 'em already taken.
Once you've filled that out, scroll down a bit and you'll see:
Now pay a bit of attention to the question and answer you specify because this is where a lot of people get their accounts hacked, in my opinion. Setting it to your pet's name and then realizing that everyone on your street, in your class, and at your church/temple knows your pet's name means that you have effectively invited dozens of other people to sneak into your account. Not good.
With any of these questions, think about whether you talk about that subject or not with friends or, worse, strangers. I suggest something vague like 'favorite book', but then invent a book title and perhaps jot it down in your diary or in a file on your computer that you can reference if necessary.
Once you've got that set to your liking, the third section is the anti-fraud captcha system and it looks like this:
These are pretty easy unless you have some color blindness or deficiency, in which case you might try reloading the page a few times since they have different color schemes, some of which might be a lot easier to decipher than others.
Once you've filled everything out, click on the "Submit" button.
Hopefully you won't get this common error:
As far as I can tell, the error doesn't mean that the screenname hasn't been created on the AOL servers, but it seems to be something else that's going on: when I went back and used a different possible screen name and pressed "Submit" again, it worked fine:
That's good! Now, to actually use your new screen name with the AIM Triton program, go back to the AIM login screen and type in your new screen name. This last step surprised me a bit because somehow I figured that it'd be a pop-up and would show me the new name, just as it does with the regular AOL login, but that wasn't the case.
So type in the new screen name, enter your new password, and you should be good to go with your new AIM identity.
Hope that helps you out!
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I want to make a screen name for myself